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The third indentured servitude contract, 1620-early 1700s: The company created a third form of indentured servitude in which immigrants transported at the company's expense from England to Virginia. The contracts of the immigrants were then sold outright to planters. These contracts bound the immigrants to labor for fixed terms of years.
Before the passing of the 1705 Virginia Slave Code Act, African Americans served as indentured servants. [citation needed] [clarification needed] This law, after being passed, transformed servitude into slavery, turning many African Americans from extended servitude to a bonded and forced lifetime commitment to slavery.
Servants, differentiated from slaves, had rights to safety, the receipt of food and goods at the end of their term of service, and to resolve legal issues first with a justice of the peace, then in court, if needed. [39] Virginia had a longer list of offenses that a black person could commit than any other southern colony.
The landowners on the islands would pay for a servant's passage and then provide the servant with food, clothes, shelter and instruction during the agreed term. The servant would then be required to work in the landowner's field for a term of bondage (usually four to seven years). Servants were not allowed to marry without the master's permission.
Virginia's slave codes were made in parallel to those in Barbados, with individual laws starting in 1667 and a comprehensive slave-code passed in 1705. [16] In 1667, the Virginia House of Burgesses enacted a law which did not recognize the conversion of African Americans to Christianity despite a baptism. In 1669, Virginia enacted "An act about ...
This, along with the increase in the amount of money required to bring (European) indentured servants to the colonies, contributed to the shift towards slavery in the colonies. Until 1699, an enslaved person was worth a headright of fifty acres. According to records, in the 1670s over 400 enslaved people were used as headrights in Virginia.
At the same time, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 led the planter class to worry about the prospective dangers of creating a large class of restless, landless, and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants). Wealthy Virginia and Maryland planters began to buy slaves in preference to indentured servants during the 1660s and ...
Beginning in the Virginia royal colony in 1662, colonial governments incorporated the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem into the laws of slavery, ruling that the children born in the colonies took the place or status of their mothers; therefore, children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as chattel, regardless of the status of ...