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Although derived from the Barbadian Slave Code, Virginia Slave Laws were the immediate model for the other colonies (except Carolina, which was settled by Barbadian English planters) and therefore serve as the best model for understanding the development of slavery in Colonial America.
Additional laws regarding slavery of Africans were passed in the seventeenth century and codified into Virginia's first slave code in 1705. Over time, laws denied increasingly more of the rights of and opportunities for enslaved people, and supported the interests of slaveholders.
The Virginia Slave Code of 1705. As Virginia entered the new century, the legislature set out to make slavery law in a way it hadn’t before. The new law was the most detailed slave code the colony had produced yet, and would vastley strengthen the institution.
By the end of the 1670s, black slaves began to replace both white indentured servants and Indian slaves as Virginians’ primary source of labor. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 2: ...
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.
From the earliest days of the Virginia colony, laws governing the ownership of enslaved people were put in place to define the legal status of enslaved people and their enslavers and regulate interactions between them.
The word “purchase” and “owned” reveals that a system of de facto or customary slavery existed long before the first slave statue of 1661 appeared in the laws of the Virginia colony. De facto slavery is also seen increasingly in case law and in legal contracts.