1662: Racial Chattel Slavery Ruled Permanent and Inheritable
Black woman from 19th Century Newspaper
As the African slave population increased, slave laws adapted to ensure the continuation of the institution. Historian Jessica Millwad (2015) wrote, “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 enslaved women 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.
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 the 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 Africans held no legal standing nor were afforded rights in this system.
Charity Folks, an enslaved woman from Annapolis, Maryland represents one of those women who bore children while enslaved. She spent her life working to purchase her own freedom and that of her children and grandchildren. Because of the principle of “partus sequitur ventrum,” enslaved mothers like Folks faced an excruciating reality that the beautiful act of giving life also meant sustaining slavery’s brutality for yet another generation. Historian Jessica 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).
Slaves working in Virginia in 1798.
Source: Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore
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 forced themselves upon 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 Black 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).
Frederick Douglas wisely observed that, “[s]lavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation” (Millward, 2015, p. 19). Black mothers, such as Charity Folks, often worked tirelessly to keep track of their children and be the family anchor in an otherwise chaotic world. At times, they succeeded, but for some their children were lost in the slave system stretching up and down the Atlantic coast.