Making Slavery Hereditary: Law, Labor, and Resistance
- Explain why Chesapeake planters shifted from indentured servitude to racial slavery
- Describe how colonial statutes constructed slavery as inheritable and racial
- Identify forms of enslaved resistance and their effects on colonial law
Slavery was built, not inherited
Nothing about seventeenth-century Virginia made lifelong hereditary racial slavery inevitable. Early Chesapeake labor was overwhelmingly indentured servitude: four to seven years of work in exchange for Atlantic passage, taken up mostly by poor young English men. Some of the first Africans in Virginia were treated as servants with terms that ended. Slavery as we know it — lifelong, inheritable, and defined by race — was assembled by colonial legislatures over roughly fifty years. Knowing that it was constructed by law is what lets you answer the exam's favorite Period 2 question: not "when did slavery start" but "why did it take this particular form here."
The economics: falling mortality and a labor squeeze
Two changes made enslaved labor more attractive to planters. First, Chesapeake mortality fell. When half of arrivals died before their indenture ended, a servant was the cheaper bet; once survival rates rose, buying a person for life became the better investment. Second, England's wages improved and its population growth slowed, shrinking the supply of servants willing to emigrate. Then came Bacon's Rebellion (1676), in which frontier settlers — including former servants and some free Black men — burned Jamestown after Governor Berkeley refused to authorize further war on Native peoples. The rebellion terrified the planter elite by showing that poor whites and poor Black men might combine against them. The elite's answer was to convert the labor force to enslaved Africans and to bind poor whites to them with legal privilege based on race.
The law: partus, race, and the slave codes
Virginia's statutes did the construction piece by piece. A 1662 act declared that a child's status followed the condition of the mother — the principle later called partus sequitur ventrem — which made slavery heritable and turned the sexual exploitation of enslaved women into a source of property for enslavers. A 1667 act held that baptism did not confer freedom, closing the Christian-conversion escape route. Later codes restricted movement, assembly, literacy, and testimony, and criminalized interracial marriage. Chattel slavery — a person as inheritable property, racially defined and for life — was the cumulative product of these statutes, and each one was passed because the previous arrangement had proved unstable for enslavers.
Briefly explain ONE way Bacon's Rebellion contributed to the expansion of racial slavery in the Chesapeake.
- 1.State what the rebellion revealed: poor white settlers and free Black men had joined together against the colonial elite.
- 2.Explain the elite's fear: a labor force of temporary servants who became landless free men was politically dangerous.
- 3.Give the response: planters shifted toward enslaved African labor, whose status was permanent, and extended legal privileges to poor whites on the basis of race to split the potential alliance.
The Virginia law of 1662 declaring that a child's status followed that of the mother was significant because it
A high-scoring Period 2 answer treats slavery as a process with causes — falling mortality, a shrinking servant supply, Bacon's Rebellion, then statute after statute. An answer that says slavery "existed" in the colonies describes; an answer that says why it hardened into a racial and hereditary system explains. Only the second earns the point.
Resistance, and what it produced
Enslaved people resisted continuously and in graduated forms: preserving West African languages, naming practices, kinship and religion; slowing work, breaking tools, feigning illness; running away, sometimes to maroon settlements or to Spanish Florida, which offered freedom to those who converted; and open revolt. The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina, in which roughly sixty enslaved people marched south toward Florida, was the largest colonial uprising. Its consequence is the point to remember: South Carolina answered with a harsher slave code restricting assembly, movement, and literacy, and taxed the further importation of enslaved people. Resistance was real and it was met with tightened control — a pattern that repeats through Period 4 and beyond.
The most direct consequence of the Stono Rebellion was
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