How and why did seventeenth-century English Christian settlers in the Virginia Colony begin to see themselves as “white”? Following the steps of the author’s sixth great-grandfather, James Watkins, readers pass through the portal of the Jamestown Colony to early Virginia Colony history (from 1607 to 1705). The first kidnapped Africans arrived in 1619. While likened to indentured servants, they were not treated the same. Constructs of whiteness and race began to be knit into laws that established an altogether different kind of slavery in the U.S.: chattel slavery, a lifelong and inheritable status as property. By the end of the 1600s, Virginians no longer rationalized the enslavement of Africans based on their being “heathen,” i.e., non-Christian. The argument had needed to shift as Africans converted to Christianity. Kidnapped Africans were now distinguished not because of their tribal group, language, or religion but solely on the color of their skin. Settlers—across their varied nationalities and creeds—became “white,” a new group identity to differentiate them from those whose stolen labor they were depending on. The lust for free labor and increased social status began to gather up the distinct cultural identities of Scots and English and homogenizing them under a racial banner of whiteness.