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The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 stated that people who were not Christians, or were black, mixed-race, or Native Americans would be classified as slaves (i.e., treated like personal property or chattel), and it was made illegal for white people to marry people of color. [39]
The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of slavery in Virginia, and served as the foundation of Virginia's slave legislation. [1] All servants from non-Christian lands became slaves. [2] There were forty one parts of this code each defining a different part and law surrounding the slavery in Virginia.
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 ...
Slave patrols: In the slave-dependent portions of North America, varying degrees of legal authority backed slave patrols by plantation owners and other free whites to ensure that enslaved people were not free to move about at night, and to generally enforce the restrictions on slaves.
They were still considered to be indentured servants, like the approximately 4000 white indentured people, since a slave law was not passed in the colony until 1661. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] At the turn of the century, an increase in the Atlantic slave trade enabled planters to purchase enslaved labor, in lieu of bonded labor (indentured servants and ...
Many slave owners at the time feared that a slave's conversion to Christianity could infringe on property rights as referring to chattel slavery, and slaves themselves hoped that Christianity might lead to their freedom. However, beginning in the 1660s the Virginia legislature repeatedly passed laws that confirmed that conversion to ...
There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history, but, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African, to life in servitude after he attempted to flee his service. [121] The two whites with whom he fled were sentenced only to an additional year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony. [ 122 ]
In his A Biographical History of Blacks in America since 1528 (1971), Toppin explains the importance of Punch's case in the legal history of Virginia: Thus, the black man, John Punch, became a slave unlike the two white indentured servants who merely had to serve a longer term. This was the first known case in Virginia involving slavery. [27]