For this Assignment, answer the following questions in 2 paragraphs each. Base your answer on the information presented the Rise of the Racial Slavery lesson. (You may also include additional informat
Rise of Racial Slavery
Slavery existed throughout the Americas. Slavery in the northern colonies was less profitable, and so the number of slaves was relatively small, especially when compared with the Chesapeake region, the Carolinas, and the West Indies. Our focus here will be on the development of a slave society in Virginia over time and the creation of a slave society in South Carolina from the beginning of settlement.
Throughout this lesson, compare the rise of slavery in the Chesapeake region (Virginia and Maryland) to the Carolina Lowlands (South Carolina). Consider all of the material contained in this lesson when answering the following questions
What contributed to the division of white and black in America?
How did race relations change over time?
What role did servant and slave revolts/uprisings have on the law?
How did black slavery create "freedom" for whites? In other words, explain historian Edmund S. Morgan's association between American slavery and American freedom?
Read Chapter 3, parts I & II in American Yawp, included below:
Yawp, Chapter 3: I. Introduction
Whether they came as servants, enslaved laborers, free farmers, religious refugees, or powerful planters, the men and women of the American colonies created new worlds. Native Americans saw fledgling settlements grow into unstoppable beachheads of vast new populations that increasingly monopolized resources and remade the land into something else entirely. Meanwhile, as colonial societies developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fluid labor arrangements and racial categories solidified into the race-based, chattel slavery that increasingly defined the economy of the British Empire. The North American mainland originally occupied a small and marginal place in that broad empire, as even the output of its most prosperous colonies paled before the tremendous wealth of Caribbean sugar islands. And yet the colonial backwaters on the North American mainland, ignored by many imperial officials, were nevertheless deeply tied into these larger Atlantic networks. A new and increasingly complex Atlantic World connected the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Events across the ocean continued to influence the lives of American colonists. Civil war, religious conflict, and nation building transformed seventeenth-century Britain and remade societies on both sides of the ocean. At the same time, colonial settlements grew and matured, developing into powerful societies capable of warring against Native Americans and subduing internal upheaval. Patterns and systems established during the colonial era would continue to shape American society for centuries. And none, perhaps, would be as brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery.
Slavery and the Making of Race
After his arrival as a missionary in Charles Town, Carolina, in 1706, Reverend Francis Le Jau quickly grew disillusioned by the horrors of American slavery. He met enslaved Africans ravaged by the Middle Passage, Native Americans traveling south to enslave enemy villages, and colonists terrified of invasions from French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. Slavery and death surrounded him.
Le Jau’s strongest complaints were reserved for his own countrymen, the English. English traders encouraged wars with Native Americans in order to purchase and enslave captives, and planters justified the use of an enslaved workforce by claiming white servants were “good for nothing at all.” Although the minister thought otherwise and baptized and educated a substantial number of enslaved people, he was unable to overcome enslavers’ fears that Christian baptism would lead to slave emancipation. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_0_60"1
The 1660s marked a turning point for Black men and women in English colonies like Virginia in North America and Barbados in the West Indies. New laws gave legal sanction to the enslavement of people of African descent for life. [Note: the video below analyzes some of these 1660s laws.] The permanent deprivation of freedom and the separate legal status of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. Skin color became more than a superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and Black. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_1_60"2 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_1_60"
All seventeenth-century racial thought did not point directly toward modern classifications of racial hierarchy. Captain Thomas Phillips, master of a slave ship in 1694, did not justify his work with any such creed: “I can’t think there is any intrinsic value in one color more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so.” HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_2_60"3 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_2_60" For Phillips, the profitability of slavery was the only justification he needed.
Wars offered the most common means for colonists to acquire enslaved Native Americans.
Seventeenth-century European legal thought held that enslaving prisoners of war was not only legal but more merciful than killing the captives outright. After the Pequot War (1636–1637), Massachusetts Bay colonists sold hundreds of Native Americans into slavery in the West Indies. A few years later, Dutch colonists in New Netherland (New York and New Jersey) enslaved Algonquians during both Governor Kieft’s War (1641–1645) and the two Esopus Wars (1659–1663). The Dutch sent these war captives to English-settled Bermuda as well as Curaçao, a Dutch plantation colony in the southern Caribbean. An even larger number of enslaved Native Americans were captured during King Philip’s War (1675–1676), an uprising against the encroachments of the New England colonies. Hundreds of Native Americans were bound and shipped into slavery. The New England colonists also tried to send enslaved Native Americans to Barbados, but the Barbados Assembly refused to import them for fear they would encourage rebellion.
In the eighteenth century, wars in Florida, South Carolina, and the Mississippi Valley produced even more enslaved Native Americans. Some wars emerged from contests between Native Americans and colonists for land, while others were manufactured as pretenses for acquiring captives. Some were not wars at all but merely illegal raids performed by slave traders. Historians estimate that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were forced into slavery throughout the southern colonies between 1670 and 1715.4 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_3_60" While some of the enslaved Native Americans remained in the region, many were exported through Charles Town, South Carolina, to other ports in the British Atlantic—most likely to Barbados, Jamaica, and Bermuda. Many of the English colonists who wished to claim land in frontier territories were threatened by the violence inherent in the Native American slave trade. By the eighteenth century, colonial governments often discouraged the practice, although it never ceased entirely as long as slavery was, in general, a legal institution.
Enslaved Native Americans died quickly, mostly from disease, but others were murdered or died from starvation. The demands of growing plantation economies required a more reliable labor force, and the transatlantic slave trade provided such a workforce. European slavers transported millions of Africans across the ocean in a terrifying journey known as the Middle Passage. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano recalled the fearsomeness of the crew, the filth and gloom of the hold, the inadequate provisions allotted for the captives, and the desperation that drove some enslaved people to suicide. (Equiano claimed to have been born in Igboland in modern-day Nigeria, but he may have been born in colonial South Carolina, where he collected memories of the Middle Passage from African-born enslaved people.) In the same time period, Alexander Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, described the sufferings of enslaved Africans from shipboard infections and close quarters in the hold. Dysentery, known as “the bloody flux,” left captives lying in pools of excrement. Chained in small spaces in the hold, enslaved people could lose so much skin and flesh from chafing against metal and timber that their bones protruded. Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases like smallpox and conjunctivitis aboard slave ships. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_4_60"5 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_4_60"
“Middle” had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave ships, the Middle Passage was one leg in the maritime trade in sugar and other semifinished American goods, manufactured European commodities, and enslaved Africans. For the enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg of three distinct journeys from Africa to the Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to a coastal slave-trading factory, often a trek of hundreds of miles. Second—and middle—was an oceanic trip lasting from one to six months in a slaver. Third was acculturation (known as “seasoning”) and transportation to the American mine, plantation, or other location where enslaved people were forced to labor.
- Slave ships transported 11–12 million Africans to destinations in North and South America, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that any regulation was introduced. The Brookes print dates to after the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, but still shows enslaved Africans chained in rows using iron leg shackles. The slave ship Brookes was allowed to carry up to 454 enslaved people, allotting 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man; 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each woman, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child, but one slave trader alleged that before 1788, the ship carried as many as 609 enslaved Africans. Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788, 1789. HYPERLINK "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg"Wikimedia HYPERLINK "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg".
The impact of the Middle Passage on the cultures of the Americas remains evident today. Many foods associated with Africans, such as cassava, were originally imported to West Africa as part of the slave trade and were then adopted by African cooks before being brought to the Americas, where they are still consumed. West African rhythms and melodies live in new forms today in music as varied as religious spirituals and synthesized drumbeats. African influences appear in the basket making and language of the Gullah people on the Carolina coastal islands.
Recent estimates count between eleven and twelve million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with about two million deaths at sea as well as an additional several million dying in the trade’s overland African leg or during seasoning. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_5_60"6 Conditions in all three legs of the slave trade were horrible, but the first abolitionists focused especially on the abuses of the Middle Passage.
Southern European trading empires like the Catalans and Aragonese were brought into contact with a Levantine commerce in sugar and enslaved laborers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims who dominated
Mediterranean trade. Beginning in the 1440s, ship captains carried enslaved Africans to Portugal. These Africans were valued primarily as domestic servants, as peasants provided the primary agricultural labor force in Western Europe. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_6_60"7 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_6_60" European expansion into the Americas introduced both settlers and European authorities to a new situation—an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. Portuguese,
Dutch, and English ships became the conduits for Africans forced to America. The western coast of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and the west-central coast were the sources of African captives. Wars of expansion and raiding parties produced captives who could be sold in coastal factories. African slave traders bartered for European finished goods such as beads, cloth, rum, firearms, and metal wares.
- 2. The first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea and the oldest European building southern of the Sahara, Elmina Castle was established as a trade settlement by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The fort became one of the largest and most important markets for enslaved Africans along the Atlantic slave trade. “View of the castle of Elmina on the north-west side, seen from the river. Located on the gold coast in Guinea,” in Atlas Blaeu van der Hem, c. 1665–1668. HYPERLINK "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElMina_AtlasBlaeuvanderHem.jpg"Wikimedia HYPERLINK "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElMina_AtlasBlaeuvanderHem.jpg".
Slavers often landed in the British West Indies, where enslaved laborers were seasoned in places like Barbados. Charleston, South Carolina, became the leading entry point for the slave trade on the mainland. The founding of Charleston (“Charles Town” until the 1780s) in 1670 was viewed as a serious threat by the Spanish in neighboring Florida, who began construction of Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine as a response. In 1693 the Spanish king issued the Decree of Sanctuary, which granted freedom to enslaved people fleeing the English colonies if they converted to Catholicism and swore an oath of loyalty to Spain. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_7_60"8 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_7_60" The presence of Africans who bore arms and served in the Spanish militia testifies to the different conceptions of race among the English and Spanish in America.
About 450,000 Africans landed in British North America, a relatively small portion of the eleven to twelve million victims of the trade. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_8_60"9 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_8_60" As a proportion of the enslaved population, there were more enslaved women in North America than in other colonial enslaved populations. Enslaved African women also bore more children than their counterparts in the Caribbean or South America, facilitating the natural reproduction of enslaved people on the North American continent. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_9_60"10 A 1662 Virginia law stated that an enslaved woman’s children inherited the “condition” of their mother; other colonies soon passed similar statutes. HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_10_60"11 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_10_60" This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which all children born to enslaved women would be enslaved for life, whether the father was white or Black, enslaved or free.
- 3. - Map of slave brought to the Americas c 1701-1810 (UWEC). This does not account for all of the slaves forcibly brought to the Americas. Source: David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, 2010) available online through slavevoyages.org. Copyright protected. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/maps#introductory-
Most fundamentally, the emergence of modern notions of race was closely related to the colonization of the Americas and the slave trade. African slave traders lacked a firm category of race that might have led them to think that they were selling their own people, in much the same way that Native Americans did not view other Indigenous groups as part of the same “race.” Similarly, most English citizens felt no racial identification with the Irish or the even the Welsh. The modern idea of race as an inherited physical difference (most often skin color) that is used to support systems of oppression was new in the early modern Atlantic world.
In the early years of slavery, especially in the South, the distinction between indentured servants and enslaved people was initially unclear. In 1643, however, a law was passed in Virginia that made African women “tithable.” HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_11_60"12 HYPERLINK "http://www.americanyawp.com/text/03-british-north-america/#footnote_11_60" This, in effect, associated African women’s work with difficult agricultural labor. There was no similar tax levied on white women; the law was an attempt to distinguish white women from African women. The English ideal was to have enough hired hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did not have to partake in manual labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens, and kitchens. Of course, because of the labor shortage in early America, white women did participate in field labor. But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving of themselves as better than other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the West Africans arriving in slave ships to the colonies. For many white colonists, the association of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a further justification for the enslavement and subordination of Africans.
Ideas about the rule of the household were informed by legal and customary understandings of marriage and the home in England. A man was expected to hold “paternal dominion” over his household, which included his wife, children, servants, and enslaved laborers. In contrast, enslaved people were not legally masters of a household and were therefore subject to the authority of the white enslaver. Marriages between enslaved people were not recognized in colonial law. Some enslaved men and women married “abroad”; that is, they married individuals who were not owned by the same enslaver and did not live on the same plantation. These husbands and wives had to travel miles at a time, typically only once a week on Sundays, to visit their spouses. Legal or religious authority did not protect these marriages, and enslavers could refuse to let their enslaved laborers visit a spouse, or even sell an enslaved person to a new enslaver hundreds of miles away from their spouse and children. Within the patriarchal and exploitative colonial environment, enslaved men and women struggled to establish families and communities.
End of Yawp excerpt.
Virginia and South Carolina
Out of the colonies that would become the United States, the northern ones were societies with slaves, while the southern ones were slave societies. What is the difference? A slave society is only where a substantial part of the population is enslaved and the economy and culture (way of life) revolved around the institution of slavery. A society with slaves means that slavery does not make up the basis of its economy. There are other sectors of the economy that allow for more economic diversity. Slavery does not define the society the way it does in slave societies.
The two major slave societies during the colonial period are the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland) and the Carolina lowlands (South Carolina and to a lesser extent Georgia). Virginia and Maryland are part of the Upper South, while South Carolina and Georgia are part of the Lower South (later the Deep South). It is important to keep the differences between the two in mind as we move through the course. Even within the South, there were different interests depending on which part of the South.
The chart below helps to show how Virginia and South Carolina differed in how they became slave societies:
Let's look at each a little closer to see how slavery came to be increasingly defined in each over time.
Virginia:
Initially slavery was not defined by race in Virginia. As you read in Yawp, slavery in the Western world was traditionally justified based on capture in war or on religious differences. For example, a Christian could enslave a non-Christian, but not a fellow Christian. By the 1660s in Virginia, the Virginia Assembly enacted laws that made it clear that justification for slavery no longer required capture in war or on religious grounds. This does not mean that capture in war or religious difference was illegal, but that it was no longer seen as necessary. Race alone became the main justification. We can begin to see the shift in Virginia toward a more strict and clear definition of racial slavery. Why did this happen? White indentured servants stopped coming in large numbers. The situation in England had changed from the earlier period. And, there was less land opened to poor white people after they completed their indentures than they had been decades before. Poor white people started to settle elsewhere including the new Restoration colony (est. 1660s) of Pennsylvania, among other locations. The increasing number of poor whites (former servants) settled to the west of the eastern establishment within Virginia began to worry the elite policymakers. Those in power started to fear that poor whites and black people would join together to rebel against them. Therefore, they started to create a greater divide based on race. The 1660s laws show the policymakers (Virginia Assembly) defining slavery based on race. Watch the video lecture to see how to analyze the 1660s laws.
Throughout this course, you will be asked to analyze primary sources. Watch the lecture below to see how to analyze primary sources. Before watching the video, read the 1660s laws, available through Digital History, to familiarize yourself with the sources. This will make it easier to follow the lecture:"Virginia's Slave Laws." Digital History. 2014.
Here are the laws (the first two are discussed in the video lecture):
Document:
December 1662
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; and that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a Negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.
September 1667
Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptism, should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom; that diverse masters, freed from this doubt may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity by permitting children, through slaves, or those of greater growth if capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.
October 1669
Whereas the only law in force for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master, mistress, or overseer cannot be inflicted upon Negroes, nor the obstinacy of many of them be suppressed by other than violent means, be it enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly if any slave resists his master (or other by his master's order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accounted a felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to punish him) be acquitted from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice (which alone makes murder a felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate.
As you watch the video and analyze the laws above, consider the following:
How did race relations change over time in Virginia? How do the law support the claim that slavery became more define and clearly based on race by the 1660s and 1670s in Virginia, even though race relations had been more fluid before that time?
South Carolina:
Read: "The Southernmost Colonies: South Carolina and Georgia." Digital History. 2014. Included here:
South Carolina's proprietors envisioned establishing a feudal society in their land grant. They kept huge landed estates for themselves, and, with the assistance of the English philosopher John Locke, drew up a plan, known as the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which would have given them the power of feudal lords. The scheme called for a three-tiered hereditary nobility--consisting of "proprietors," "landgraves," and "caciques"--who would own forty percent of the colony's land and serve as a Council of Lords and recommend all laws to a parliament elected by small landowners. But like other feudal visions, this one failed. South Carolina's settlers rejected virtually all of this plan and immigrants refused to move to the region until it was replaced by a more democratic system of government.
Emigrants from Barbados played a decisive role in South Carolina's early settlement in 1679 and 1680, and brought black slaves with them. Within a decade, they had found a staple crop--rice--which they could raise with slave labor. The grain itself had probably come from West Africa and African slaves were already familiar with rice cultivation. The result was to transform South Carolina into the mainland society that bore the closest resemblance to the Caribbean. As early as 1708, slaves actually outnumbered whites and by 1730 there were twice as many slaves as whites in the colony. About a third of South Carolina's slaves during the early eighteenth century were Indians.
The rapid growth in the slave population raised the specter of slave revolt. In 1739, the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in colonial America, took place about twenty miles from Charleston. Led by a slave named Jemmy, the rebels burned seven plantations and killed approximately 20 whites as they headed for refuge in Spanish Florida. Within a day, however, the Stono rebels were captured and killed by the white militia.
North Carolina was also the scene of some of the most bitter Indian-white warfare. In 1711, after incidents in which whites had encroached on their land and kidnapped Indians as slaves, the Tuscaroras destroyed New Bern. Over the next two years, the colonial militia, assisted by the Yamassees, killed or enslaved a fifth of the Tuscaroras. Many survivors subsequently migrated to New York, where they became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, in 1715, the Yamassees, finding themselves increasingly in debt to white traders and merchants, allied themselves with the Creeks and attempted to destroy the colony. With help from the Cherokees, the colonial militia successfully repelled the offensive, largely ending Indian resistance to white expansion in the Carolinas.
Prior to the American Revolution, only one colony, Georgia, temporarily sought to prohibit slavery, because the founders did not want a workforce that would compete with the debtors they planned to transport from England. Settlers, however, illegally imported slaves into the colony, forcing the proprietors to abandon the idea of a slave-free colony.
Stono Rebellion: The following video examines the nature of slavery in South Carolina and how it change over time, particularly in response to the Stono Rebellion. One of the questions that scholars have sought to understand is how it came to be that poor white people supported racial slavery, even though they did not gain economically from the slave system. Indeed the slave system probably hindered their economic well being. The following video clip provides an answer to this question.
Watch:
Watch from minute 44 to the end of the documentary, available through the link below.
"Stono Rebellion" custom segment from Slavery and the Making of America. PBS, 2004. Available from Films on Demand. Closed captioning available.
Click on the button below to access the video:
Analyze Primary Source:
To help analyze the primary source below, study the summary of Maryland slave laws beginning in 1664 until the case in 1715. Note that the law at the time of a child's birth should be the one that regulates the terms of his or her freedom or enslavement.
1664:
The 1664 law included the following:
1. All "Negroes or other slaves," whether already in the Province, or to be importated later, were to serve "Durante Vita."
2. All children born of any black or other slave were to be "Slaves as their Fathers."
3. To discourage "dives freeborne English women" who, "forgettfull of their free Condicion and to the disgrace of our Nation", married slaves, thus inconveniencing courts and masters with legal debates over the status of the offspring, any free woman so marrying after the act's passage was to serve her husband's master during her husband's lifetime.
4. To further discourage such marriages, the children of matches contracted after the act's passage were to be "Slaves as their fathers were." The children of such marriages contracted before the act's passage were to serve their parents' masters until they reached the age of thirty-one.[
1681:
A 1681 law repealed the 1663 law and also included the following:
1. All "Negroes or other slaves," whether already in the Province, or to be importated later, were to serve "Durante Vita."
2. All children born of any black or other slave were to be "Slaves as their Fathers."
3. The 1681 law lamented the connivance of masters who exploited the terms of the earlier law and forced freeborn female indentured servants to marry slaves.
a) In such cases, the master was to pay a heavy fine, the female servant was to go free (if she had been forced)
b) the children born of such cases were free
1692:
The 1692 durante vita law was both a compromise between and a refinement of the 1664 and 1681 laws. As before, slaves and their children were to serve for life. But, the Assembly broadened and revised the miscegenation provisions. The revised provisions may be summarized as follows:
1. Any non-servant freeborn white woman who married a black man was to become a servant of her church parish for seven years. Her husband, if free, was to become a slave for the parish.
2. If the woman was a servant, she was to serve out her remaining time, with additions for time lost due to pregnancies, and then she was to become a servant to the parish for seven years, provided the match was not forced upon her by her master.
3. Children of mixed marriages were to be servants of the parish for twenty-one years.
4. If the miscegenating couple was not married, the woman was to suffer the seven-year penalty, the child was to serve for twenty-one years, but, the husband, if free, was only to serve for seven years instead of life.
5. The same penalties befalling a white woman as detailed above were to apply to any white man begetting any black woman with child.
6. Any master forcing a marriage was to forfeit 10,000 pounds of tobacco
1699:
Most of the 1692 law was still in effect, but the 1699 law changed two sections of it: "Mulatto" children were to serve for thirty-one years instead of twenty-one, and free blacks fathering "mulatto" children had their punishment reduced from life servitude to seven years.
Source: Chapter 3: Blackboard before the Law in Colonial Maryland, Maryland Archives, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5348/html/chap3.html
Rose Davis is sentenced to a life of slavery, 1715
Rose Davis was born to an indentured servant white woman and a Black man. Rose had been working as an indentured servant when she petitioned the court for her freedom. Instead, she was sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. Analyze her case, included below (primary source). Use the summary of the Maryland laws (historical context) to help you analyze the case. (Note: the law that was in effect at the time of Rose's birth is the one that the court could have been following, but such a rule was not absolute. Usually if a crime was no longer a crime or had a reduced sentences, then the more recent, lenient law would be in effect. Which law was in effect when Rose was born? Which law was in effect in 1715?)
August 1715
On the petition of Rose the mulatto daughter of Mary Davis of the province of Maryland against Mr. Henry Darnall about her freedom &c. It is ordered that notice be given Mr. William Diggs, attorney for the said Mr. Henry Darnall that the second Tuesday of November next.
8 November 1715
Rose a mulatto petition against Henry Darnall about her freedom consideration referred until next Court.
13 March 1715/6
Petition of Rose the mulatto daughter of Mary Davis of the province of Maryland now a servant of Mr. Henry Darnall of the County aforesaid. Hereby showeth that your petitioner being a Baptized mulatto descended by the mother of Christian race as appears from the evidence of her said mother on the other said handscribed the original whereafter she is ready to provide as well as other testimonies if need be to confirm the same and being arrived to the age of thirty one years the 11 August 1715 at in time she supposes the servitude imposed in such unhappy issue expires. She therefore humbly prays the benefit by Law allowed to those in her unhappy circumstances and that she may accordingly receive a free manumission from the said servitude which hanscribed evidence mentioned in the petition follows in the words vizt.
I Mary Davis the daughter of Richard Davis now dwelling in Mark Lane in the City of London in England where I was born and there now have dwelling a brother called John Davis, do give this Bible unto my son Thomas begotten in wedlock on my body by a negro called Dominggoe once a servant to Joseph Tilley of Hunting Creek in Calvert County where I was married to him the said negroe but now we both are dwelling with the right honorable the proprietor of this province of Maryland and my before said son Thomas was born on a plantation of my lords in Lyons Creek in Calvert County on the 14th day of March 1677 and was baptized by Mr. Wessley in the house of Mr. Richard. Massoms and James Thompson was godfather and Ann his wife was godmother. That is here inserted to satisfy any whom it may concern that my said son Thomas came from a Christian race by his mother and I the said Mary Davis above mentioned and named have also a Daughter by the same negro my husband aforesaid whose name is Rose. She was born in St. Maries County on a plantation called the Top of the Hill on the 11 August 1684 and baptized at Nottley Hall by Mr. Richard. Hebert Priest and Mr. Henry Wharton was the godfather and Rose Hebert now the wife of Thomas Nation was the godmother. That is above inserted that you may know she my said Daughter came of the Christian race by her mother a true copy take out of the aforesaid Bible.
Signed Mary Davis.
Given by said Mary to her son Thomas now in the possession and custody of the said Rose.
Court resolving to proceed this day 8 November 1715
Next Court: Mature deliberation … It is thereupon considered by the Justices that the said Rose the mulatto and person aforesaid serve during life as a slave and that her master Mr. Henry Darnall pay fees.
“Rose Davis against Henry Darnall, August 1715,” Anne Arundel County Court (Judgment Record) 08/1712—03/1715, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, Maryland, http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/AnneArundel.htm.
Available from the American Society of Genealogists.
https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/british-north-america/rose-davis-is-sentenced-to-a-life-of-slavery-1715/
