How Slavery Became Racial and Hereditary

In the early 1600s Virginia ran on indentured servitude. Servants, white and Black, signed or were forced into contracts for a set term, then went free, and some early Black Virginians like Anthony Johnson even owned land and servants themselves. There was no fixed law yet saying Black people were enslaved for life. That changed as the colony leaned harder on tobacco and needed a permanent, controllable labor force that could never walk away. Starting in 1662, Virginia's legislature passed laws making a child's status follow the mother, so children born to enslaved women were enslaved for life, no matter who the father was. This reversed English custom, which followed the father, and it let white planters profit from children they themselves fathered with enslaved women while denying those children any claim to freedom.

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 accelerated this. Poor white servants and free farmers joined enslaved and free Black Virginians to attack the colonial government, furious at elite landowners and an unresponsive governor. That multiracial alliance terrified planters. Over the following decades they answered it two ways: shifting toward enslaved African labor, which could never finish a term and demand land, and passing laws that stripped rights from free Black Virginians while granting small privileges to poor whites purely for being white. Slave codes spread, banning interracial marriage, restricting Black gun ownership and assembly, and making manumission harder.

By 1705 Virginia's slave code bundled all this into one system: lifelong, inherited, race-based bondage with almost no path out. This is the hinge between period 2 and period 3, since the racial and legal architecture built here becomes the foundation plantation slavery runs on through the eighteenth century.