1662: Black Enslavement Legalized
Big Idea
African men, women, and children fought against oppression as White colonists—who gained wealth and status from slavery—passed laws to enforce race-based enslavement.
What’s important to know?
Fears Realized: As English enslavers purchased more Africans from slave traders, fears of uprisings increased. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 confirmed these fears, prompting White leaders to further reinforce a hierarchy that favored even poor White laborers over Black people (enslaved or free).
Enslavement Enshrined in the Law: White plantation owners, reliant on the forced labor of Black people, enacted legislation to maintain the racial connection to enslavement, specifically by tying its inheritance through Black mothers.
Motherhood in Enslavement: Enslavement and the sale of human beings fractured many Black families. Black mothers and fathers fought for their children and their families.
1: Fears Realized
The Burning of Jamestown by Howard Pyle
Image Source: Wikipedia
When Bacon’s Rebellion broke out in 1676 (see African Resistance), the uprising of enslaved Africans against the White slave owners as well as the joining of forces between lower class White men and enslaved Black men created panic among the White landholders within Virginia. The joining of forces between lower class White and Black people could mean destruction for the upper White class. And so, aside from the economic advantage White slave owners gained through having enslavement legalized, by making it race-based they also formed a wedge between the lower classes.
Lower class White men now gained an elevated position above African men and thus gained perceived power (even if that power was merely performative). As historian Heather McGhee wrote, “The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class” (McGhee, 2021, 52).
After Bacon’s Rebellion White legislatures passed a series of laws that further divided White man from Black. Penalties were imposed on only Black rebels, not White. African slaves were restricted in their movements and required to carry a pass if they left a plantation. And to further reduce the chance for alliance between the classes, plantation owners agreed to import fewer White servants from England and more Africans from Africa. This way they could control the African population and reduce the risk of alliance-building.
The only reason colonists continued to import White slaves was to meet a British-required quota to “ensure the presence of enough armed white people to defend against slave rebellions” (p. 53). Even before the start of eighteenth century, White colonists had determined that race would become the defining factor dividing people within the colonies and strove to ensure that the Black race would be the one with no rights.
2: Enslavement Enshrined in Law
The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619
William Waller Hening, ed., (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 2:170
Image Source: Encyclopedia Virginia
Historian Jessica Millwad (2015) writes, “in 1662, the Virginia state legislature determined that racial chattel slavery would be a permanent, inheritable condition by asserting that the status of the child followed that of the mother” (p.15). By establishing the mother’s status as inheritable, slave owners ensured that all children born on their plantations or through their slaves would remain in slavery and perpetuate the condition. Slave owners had secured a free labor source for themselves, and they had increased profitability by no longer having to purchase slaves from the Atlantic slave traders.
Laws also departed from tradition to benefit slaveholders. Notably, this decision to trace status through the mother consciously broke with traditional English law. Instead, they adopted an old Roman principle of “partus sequitur ventrum” – which literally means “that which is brought forth follows the belly (womb).” According to an ancient Roman legal scholar, this principle was applied “among tame and domestic animals” and meant that “the [animals] brood [or offspring] belongs to the owner of the dam or mother” (Kendi, 2017, p. 41).
Virginia’s law (followed by other colonies) legally treated enslaved women as animals, such that the children of Black women were deemed the property of their owner. Laws continued to be adapted to meet the “needs” of the White plantation owner while African men and women held no legal standing and were denied the most basic of human rights.
Students
Want to know more? Watch this video to understand how White legislators strengthened laws forcing enslaved Africans to remain in a permanent state of forced bondage.
From Learning for Justice teaching videos
3: Motherhood in Enslavement
Enslaved women and mothers faced horrific circumstances. Because of the principle of “partus sequitur ventrum,” (which meant that the status of bondage was passed from mothers to their children) enslaved mothers faced an excruciating reality that the life-giving act of childbirth also meant sustaining enslavement for another generation. Millward noted that as a mother, “giving birth under slavery meant reconciling one’s own role as a reproducer of the slave system with the joys and heartbreaks associated with pregnancy” (Millward, 2015, p. 14).
Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1894.
Image Source: Wikipedia
While a White woman was legally forbidden from marrying a Black man, no laws governed White men’s sexual behavior towards Black women. Many masters raped their slaves at will and because enslaved women lacked any legal standing (or even considerations of basic humanity) rape was not considered applicable. Even if a woman was spared the horrors of sexual abuse by her master, enslaved women rarely could select their partner as they often were paired with another enslaved man to produce what the owner deemed the “best” offspring (Millward, 2015, p. 17).
Mothers often worked tirelessly to keep track of their children and formed the family anchor in an otherwise chaotic world. At times, they succeeded, but for some, their children became lost to an inhumane system rapidly spreading across the colonies.
Harriet Jacobs’ Fight for Her Children
Cover of Incidents in the Life of a Slaver Girl
Image Source: Documenting the American South
Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in North Carolina. The first woman who enslaved her also taught her to read and write. After escaping to New York in 1861 she wrote and published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself. In it she details the lengths that she and other enslaved mothers went to in order to keep their families together. Stephanie Li (2006) in describing the significance of Jacobs’ work notes, “Many female slaves were unable to keep their families together, yet by emphasizing the oppositional action inspired by maternal sentiment Jacobs presents motherhood as a force that resists slavery and its supporters” (p. 15).
Li described Jacobs’ work in this way: “She defines her life's work not simply as absolute devotion to her children, but as part of a concerted effort to defy slavery's abuses” (p. 16).
Harriet Jacobs’ story is only one of thousands of enslaved mothers — many of whom endured loss of multiple children in childbirth and childhood. For those mothers whose children did survive to adulthood, they lived under the constant threat of separation.
Understanding the inner lives of enslaved mothers is challenging given the lack of archival materials. As historian Sasha Turner (2017) wrote, “The work of maternal grief in slavery affirms the invisible suffering of the enslaved” (p. 245). In their ongoing fight for freedom, enslaved Americans not only fought for personal freedom but also for the opportunity to protect their right to maintain their family unit.
While this section has focused on the challenges faced by enslaved mothers, enslaved fathers faced equally challenging situations. As historian Marie Schwartz noted, “men and women cooperated as best they could to ensure the survival of children” (Hilde, 2017, p. 15).
Thank about It!
Black fatherhood and the “tangle of pathology.”
With the publication of Daniel P. Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action in 1965 an old theory surfaced about why Black families were more likely to be poor. Moynihan argued that the absence of strong Black fathers had created weak family units that led to the increase of crime and poverty. He wrote, “In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.” He further argued that the “fatherless matrifocal” family was to blame for this pathology. (Moynihan, 1965, Hilde, 2017, p. 10).
Playing into many existing stereotypes of Black men, this theory influenced scholarship on the Black family for many years. In 1977, Herbert Gutman published a groundbreaking book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. In this work he demonstrated that far from being absent fathers, Black men — enslaved and free — have been committed fathers and strong advocates for their families.
In 2017, Libra R. Hilde published Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century, which demonstrated the lengths enslaved fathers went to maintain relationships and support their children. She wrote,
Although enslaved children followed the legal status of their mothers, enslaved men, their families, and slave communities acknowledged fatherhood and imbued it with significance. The system might negate a father’s importance and efface his presence, but he, his children, and his community did not. Former slaves admired an array of traits in their fathers, traits that all came back to an ability to maintain their dignity in the face of oppression and a willingness to support others, whether that be the immediate family, neighborhood, or community. When former slaves evaluated their fathers, they praised caretakers and caretaking in various forms, and they criticized men who behaved like slaveholders, dominating others and abusing what little power they had within slavery.
The structural constraints of slavery placed two of the main attributes of American manhood at odds with one another. To be a man was to be a protector of self and kin, provider, husband and father. However, an enslaved man could not protect loved ones and hope to remain present in the life of his family. A man who defended self or others risked ending up dead or sold, and thus parted from family. Faced with this dilemma and unable to uphold rigid gender roles, enslaved people adapted. Men found alternate ways to shield loved ones that were invisible to slaveholders, such as nurturing their children’s sense of self-worth and humanity and offering protection in the form of spiritual counsel, but this hardly compensated for their circumscribed realm of action. Although enslaved men worked around slavery’s erasure of manhood, this did not erase the psychic trauma of men’s inability to defend self and kin. Former slaves did describe their fathers, and sometimes themselves, as emasculated. In their critique of slavery, abolitionist authors were more likely to explicitly make such arguments, whereas twentieth-century interviewees addressed the issue obliquely. Enslaved men understood how debilitating the institution of slavery was to their paternal role. However, while they realized their own limited power, they saw emasculation as external to and imposed upon them. Slavery weakened them, but they were not inherently weak.
When evaluating fatherhood, former slaves differentiated between those who had power and those who had honor. Depending on how African American men wielded the power available to them, their kin and communities judged them as honorable or dishonorable, moral or immoral (Hilde, 2017, p. 21).
As we explore the impacts of enslavement through U.S. history it will be important to keep in mind how stereotypes influence the way we perceive the past — and in this case, how we perceive Black men in the course of history.
Your Turn
How did the legalization of enslavement further reinforce views of superiority among White people? How did it help both poor Whites as well as wealthy Whites? How did this impact Black men, women, and children?
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The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Visit the Equal Justice Initiative’s website detailing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.
“How America Invented Race” - Season 1, Episode 1
Read:What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. By Ariela J. Gross. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Read: Duran, Beverly A., "Maternal Sacrifice and Resilience: The Legacy of Harriet Jacobs and Enslaved Black Motherhood" (2024). GLI MA in American History Student Works. 3. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/glihist/3
Read more about the Black family in Herbert G. G. Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (Knopf Doubleday, 1977).
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Download the Teaching Hard History Text-Dependent Questions Key Concept 1 to go along with Ibram Kendi’s video here.
“How Slavery Affected African American Families”: Lesson plan for teaching about the impact of enslavement on the African family.
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General Resources:
Read the St. Louis reparations committee report on how the long history of enslavement has impacted the Black community in St. Louis.
Books & Articles:
Shepard, E. H. (1870) The early history of St. Louis and Missouri. Saint Louis, Southwestern book and publishing company. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/rc01001412/.
Archives:
The State Historical Society of Missouri, lecture by Patricia Cleary: Making their Marks: Voice and Violence in Colonial St. Louis.
Museums & Parks:
Missouri History Museum: The Black Experience in STL
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Eaves, S. (2025). Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South. University of North Carolina Press.
Jacobs, H. (1861) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.
Kendi, I. X. and Blain, K. N. eds. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. One World Press.
Hartman, S. (2016). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Macmillan.
Nunley, T. Y. (2023). The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia. University of North Carolina Press.
Ramey Berry, D. (2017). The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press.
Turner, S. (2017). “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 232–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316962.
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Douglass, F. (1995, reprint). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Dover Publications.
Libra R. Hilde. (2020). Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities Over the Long Nineteenth Century. The University of North Carolina Press.
Djelid, A. (2021). Black Fatherhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Black Perspectives, AAIHS. https://www.aaihs.org/black-fatherhood-in-the-long-nineteenth-century/
Kendi, I. (2017). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books.
Li, S. (2006). Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Legacy, 23(1), 14–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684492
McGhee, H. 1674-1679: Bacon’s Rebellion. In Kendi, I. X. and Blain, K. N. eds. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. One World Press.
Millward, Jessica. (2014). Finding Charity’s Folk. The University of Georgia Press.
Moynihan, D. (1965). The Negro Family. U.S. Department of Labor.
Turner, S. (2017). “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 232–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316962.