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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. The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of ...
The colonial law was in contrast to English common law of the time that prevailed in England. [i] Slavery created a racial caste associated with African descent regardless of a child's paternal ancestry. The principle became incorporated into state law when Virginia gained independence from Great Britain. [38]
Beginning in the Virginia royal colony in 1662, colonial governments incorporated the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem into the laws of slavery, ruling that the children born in the colonies took the place or status of their mothers; therefore, children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as chattel, regardless of the status of ...
In 1755, the colony of Georgia adopted the South Carolina slave code. [15] Virginia's slave codes were made in parallel to those in Barbados, with individual laws starting in 1667 and a comprehensive slave-code passed in 1705. [16]
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.
But from the beginning, in accordance with the custom of the Atlantic slave trade, most of this relatively small group, appear to have been treated as slaves, with "African" or "negro" becoming synonymous with "slave". [54] Virginia enacted laws concerning runaway slaves and 'negroes' in 1672. [55]
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 ...
Jackey Wright had sued for freedom from slavery for her and her two children based on her direct descent through her mother's line from generations of Indian women, as Indian slavery had been abolished in 1705 in the Virginia colony. [2] The justices of the Virginia Supreme Court noted that the Wrights appeared "white" or European, relying on a ...