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A law making race-based slavery legal was passed in Virginia in 1661. [8] It allowed any free person the right to own slaves. [37] In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that said a child was born a slave if the mother was a slave, based on partus sequitur ventrem. Specifically, "all children borne in this country shall be held ...
The South Carolina slave-code served as the model for many other colonies in North America. [14] In 1755, the colony of Georgia adopted the South Carolina slave code. [15] 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]
Moreover, in the Upland South, some slaveholders freed their slaves after the Revolution through manumission. The population of free black men and free black women rose from less than 1% in 1780 to more than 10% in 1810, when 7.2% of Virginia's population was free black people, and 75% of Delaware's black population was free. [18]
The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 (formally entitled An act concerning Servants and Slaves), were a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia's House of Burgesses in 1705 regulating the interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia. The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of ...
As a result of the Elizabeth Key freedom suit (and similar challenges), in December 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a colonial law to clarify the status of children of women of Negro descent around "doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by an Englishmen upon a negro woman should be slave or free."
Since 1662 Virginia slave law held that children in the colony took the social status of their mother, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. Slavery for Indians in Virginia was prohibited after 1691 or 1705, depending on judicial interpretation.
In 1662, the Virginia Colony passed a law incorporating the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, ruling that children of enslaved mothers would be born into slavery, regardless of their father's race or status. [2] This contradicted English common law for English subjects, which based a child's status on that of the father.
During the late 17th century and early 18th century, harsh new slave codes limited the rights of African slaves and cut off their avenues to freedom. The first full-scale slave code in British North America was South Carolina's (1696), which was modeled on the colonial Barbados slave code of 1661. It was updated and expanded regularly ...