Content Warning: This resource alludes to sexual assault.
The first enslaved Black people to be forcibly brought to the Virginia colony arrived in 1619. The population of enslaved people in the colony grew quickly in the following decades. Soon, some enslaved Black people had children with free white people, creating a generation of multiracial children who were not easily categorized as enslaved, free, or indentured. To put a stop to this status confusion, Virginia legislators passed laws codifying race-based slavery and passing enslavement from mother to child. The legislation specifically targeted women because it was difficult to prove who a child’s father was.
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. White wives, daughters, and servants of plantation owners did not count toward a plantation owner’s taxable people. The laws suggested that Black women labored in the fields and white women did not. In reality, white women often worked alongside their husbands and enslaved people, because all hands were needed to keep a plantation profitable. Many white women also worked in the fields as indentured servants. But this act encoded racial difference into law.
The 1662 law stated that children of enslaved women were automatically born enslaved. This was to clear up the confusion over what to do with the mixed-race children born as the result of sexual relations between white men and enslaved women. This law made it profitable for white men to get the women they enslaved pregnant. This was also the legal foundation of the infamous “one-drop” rule, which was enacted in the United States in the 1800s. This law determined that any person with African ancestry anywhere in their family tree was automatically a Black person. This practice persisted in parts of the United States well into the 1900s.
The 1691 law made interracial marriage illegal. It also set up severe punishments for white women who gave birth to the children of Black men. The Virginia Assembly hoped this would put an end to white women giving birth to free mixed-race children. The punishment of indentured servitude allowed the system to get more years of free labor out of any white woman who broke the law. Interracial marriage remained a crime in Virginia until the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
Act I, Laws of Virginia, March 1643 (Hening, Statutes at Large, 1: 242)
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Be it also enacted and confirmed that there be ten pounds of tobacco per poll and a bushel of corn per poll paid to the ministers within the several parishes of the colony for all tithable persons, that is to say, as well for all youths of sixteen years of age and upwards, as also for all negro women at the age of sixteen years.
Act XII, Laws of Virginia, December 1662 (Hening, Statutes at Large, 2: 170)
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Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother;
Act XVI, Laws of Virginia, April 1691 (Hening’s Statutes at Large, 3: 87)
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And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another,
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And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another,
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and be it further enacted, That if any English woman being free shall have a bastard child by any negro or mulatto, she pay the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, within one month after such bastard child shall be born, to the Church wardens of the parish where she shall be delivered of such child, and in default of such payment she shall be taken into the possession of the Church warders and disposed of for five years,
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and the said fine of fifteen pounds, or whatever the woman shall be disposed of for, shall be paid, one third part to their majesties for and towards the support of the government and the contingent charges thereof, and one other third part to the use of the parish where the offense is committed, and the other third part to the informer,
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and that such bastard child be bound out as a servant by the said Church wardens until he or she shall attain the age of thirty years,
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and in case such English woman that shall have such bastard child be a servant, she shall be sold by the said church wardens, (after her time is expired that she ought by law to serve her master) for five years, and the money she shall be sold for divided as is before appointed, and the child to serve as aforesaid.
Source: “Legislating Reproduction and Racial Difference,” in Women and the American Story, The New York Historical, 2018. View more from Women and the American Story on The New York Historical’s website.