John Punch (slave)

John Punch
Born	Unknown, but possibly Cameroon, Gabon, or Ivory Coast
Died	York County, Colony of Virginia

John Punch (fl. 1630s, living 1640) was an enslaved African who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century. In July 1640, the Virginia Governor's Council sentenced him to serve for the remainder of his life as punishment for running away to Maryland. In contrast, two European men who ran away with him were sentenced to longer indentures but not the permanent loss of their freedom. For this reason, historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.

In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper suggesting that John Punch was an eleventh-generation grandfather of President Barack Obama on his mother's side, on the basis of historic and genealogical research and Y-DNA analysis. Punch's descendants were known by the Bunch or Bunche surname. Punch is believed to be one of the paternal ancestors of the 20th-century American diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Africans were first brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. However, their status as slaves or indentured servants remains unclear. Philip S. Foner pointed out the differing perceptions held by historians saying,

Some historians believe that slavery may have existed from the very first arrival of the Negro in 1619, but others are of the opinion that the institution did not develop until the 1660s and that the status of the Negro until then was that of an indentured servant. Still others believe that the evidence is too sketchy to permit any definite conclusion either way.

...
Wikipedia