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Introduction. When the Virginia colony was founded in 1607, the majority of unfree laborers in the colony were indentured servants, men and women who signed a legal contract called an indenture that bound them to work for a certain individual for a certain number of years, in exchange for which they received room, board, and some type of ...
- Jamestown & Tobacco
- The First Africans & John Punch
- Early Slave Laws & Biblical Justification
- Later Slave Laws of The 1660’s
- Virginia Slave Laws of The Early 1700’s
- Conclusion
Jamestown was founded in 1607 and struggled to survive for the next three years. The original colonists had been hearing stories of the riches of the New World for years as Spain grew wealthy from their colonies in the West Indies and South and Central America. These colonists arrived in Virginia under the impression that they need do little more t...
The first Africans arrived in Virginia more or less by accident. In 1619, a Dutch ship in need of supplies docked at Jamestown and traded around 20 enslaved Africans to the governor Sir George Yeardley (l. 1587-1627) for necessary provisions. Yeardley is considered by some scholars as Virginia’s first slave owner but there is evidence that these fi...
By 1650, more Africans had been enslaved because there were not enough indentured servants to work the tobacco fields. Enslaved Native Americans knew the land and could easily run off to find freedom with other tribes, but Africans did not have that advantage and so, along with other considerations, became the slave of choice. By 1662, slaves outnu...
Once the Bible was invoked as justification, any law could be passed with impunity. By 1669 a law had been passed releasing any white master, mistress, or overseer from responsibility in killing a slave. Since slaves were considered property, it was reasoned, and no one would intentionally destroy one’s own property, killing a slave was considered ...
This law was enlarged upon in 1705 when the Virginia General Assembly declared that any servant who was not a Christian and who accompanied a white master into the country would be considered a slave. These people would be subject to the same laws that applied to slaves including a white colonist’s freedom to kill them for any reason as long as com...
As noted, Virginia borrowed their model from the English of Barbados who set the standard for the brutal slave policies which appealed to the colonists’ need for a sense of safety. The more restrictive the measures placed on the black population, the less chance there was of their ability to mount a major uprising. Even so, the white colonists of N...
- Joshua J. Mark
In the established English common law prior to the colonization of America, curtesy acquired some peculiar and counter-intuitive aspects. If the wife bore her heir by a first husband and later had a child by a second husband, the second husband’s curtesy could delay possession of the land by the child of the first husband.
Nov 19, 2015 · 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.
In the early common law, upon the marriage, the husband and wife became one person in law; that one person was the husband. The wife, for nearly all legal purposes, became upon her marriage a nonentity. The husband received all of her tangible personalty, as well as the right to her choses in action should he reduce them to possession during ...
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.
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When did slavery start in Virginia?
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How did the 1643 law change racial difference?
Did Virginia have a model for institutionalized slavery?
These three laws outline the way the Virginia Grand Assembly tied race to slavery in the 1600s. The 1643 law introduced the idea of legal racial difference by making the labor of all Black women, enslaved or free, a taxable commodity.
