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Slavery was supported through legal and cultural changes. Virginia is where the first enslaved blacks were imported to English colonies in North America, and slavery spread from there to the other colonies. [53] Large plantations became more prevalent, changing the culture of colonial Virginia that relied on them for its economic prosperity.
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.
However, beginning in the 1660s the Virginia legislature repeatedly passed laws that confirmed that conversion to Christianity did not change a slave's hereditary status. [ 6 ] Although slaves sought to gain freedom after converting to Christianity, slave-holders and colonial officials did not share the same opinion.
In Colonial America, a few German Quakers issued the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, which marked the beginning of the American abolitionist movement. Before the Revolutionary War , evangelical colonists were the primary advocates for the opposition to slavery and the slave trade, doing so on the basis of humanitarian ethics.
The Virginia Company still paid for the transportation costs of the laborers, but the laborers were no longer contracted to work exclusively for the company once they arrived. Instead, free planters in the colony would rent the new laborers from the company for a year at a fixed rate, in addition to covering their maintenance costs during that ...
Fort Monroe, where slaves were first brought to the U.S. colonies, served the Union in Confederate territory. Now a teacher uses it to bolster education of slavery.
A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved. [4] [5]
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]