There are historical records of it being used just in general since before the US slave trade. It wasn’t used deliberately as a perjorative despite the meaning clearly being that they were not seen as humans. It was also sometimes used to mean anyone “not white.”
It gets fuzzy before then; there aren’t good records for that. But considering how Europeans saw themselves, I can’t imagine that it wasn’t used at all then too.
The definition of the word (a lazy black person) explicitly is about the denegation of black people; so I would assume always.
There are historical records of it being used just in general since before the US slave trade. It wasn’t used deliberately as a perjorative despite the meaning clearly being that they were not seen as humans. It was also sometimes used to mean anyone “not white.”
It gets fuzzy before then; there aren’t good records for that. But considering how Europeans saw themselves, I can’t imagine that it wasn’t used at all then too.