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In 1662, the Virginia Colony passed a law that children in the colony were born with the social status of their mother, according to the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem. This meant that the children of slave women were born into slavery, even if their fathers were free, European, Christian, and white.
In 1628, a slave ship carried 100 people from Angola to be sold into slavery in Virginia, and consequently the number of Africans in the colony rose greatly. [ 8 ] [ 13 ] [ 15 ] The Atlantic slave trade had been in existence among Europeans before Africans landed in Virginia and according to custom, slavery was legal.
Black slave owners were relatively uncommon, however, as "of the two and a half million African Americans living in the United States in 1850, the vast majority [were] enslaved." [1] The phenomenon of black slave owners remains a controversial topic among proponents of Afrocentrism." [1]
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]
The most likely source of slaves was directly from the West Indies, rather than Africa, through the contacts the American colonists maintained with the European colonies in the region. [12] 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]
Moreover, in the Upland South, some slaveholders freed their slaves after the Revolution through manumission. The population of free black men and free black women rose from less than 1% in 1780 to more than 10% in 1810, when 7.2% of Virginia's population was free black people, and 75% of Delaware's black population was free. [18]
By 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant, John Punch, to slavery. [93] In 1656 Elizabeth Key won a suit for freedom based on her father's status as a free Englishman, his having baptized her as Christian in the Church of England , and the fact that he established a guardianship for her that was supposed to be a ...
During the American Revolutionary War, Harry Washington escaped from slavery in Virginia and served as a corporal in the Black Pioneers attached to a British artillery unit. After the war he was among Black Loyalists resettled by the British in Nova Scotia, where they were granted land. There Washington married Jenny, another freed American slave.