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In 1658, Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African descent to bring a freedom suit in the Virginia colony. She sought recognition as a free woman of color, rather than being classified as a Negro and slave. Her natural father was an Englishman (and member of the House of Burgesses).
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.
James Blair, the commissary of the Virginia Colony, described the cause of rebellion as following in his letter to Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson: "There was a general rumor among them that they were to be set free. And when they saw nothing of it they grew angry and saucy, and met in the night time in great numbers, and talked of rising."
Robert Pleasants was also one of the founders of the short-lived Virginia Abolition Society, and served as its president in 1790. [10] The society disbanded after Virginia passed a law in 1798 forbidding abolitionists from sitting on juries in freedom suit cases. Meanwhile, Pleasants submitted numerous petitions to the Virginia state government ...
By an act of 1699, the colony ordered all free Black people deported, virtually defining slaves as all people of African descent who remained in the colony. [ 7 ] Most historians argue that John Punch , an African who was ordered indentured for life in 1640, should be considered the first documented slave in Virginia.
So many slaveholders in Virginia freed slaves between the 1780s and the 1800s, sometimes in their will and others during their lifetime, that the number of free blacks in Virginia rose from about 1,800 in 1782 to 30,466, or 7.2% of the total black population in 1810. [10] In the Upper South, more than 10% of blacks had been free by 1810.
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The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), by Capt. John Smith, one of the first histories of Virginia. The written history of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the 16th century, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples.