CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700

Beginning in the 1660s, legislators in Virginia and Maryland hammered out the legal definition of chattel slavery: the ownership of human beings as property. The institution of slavery — which would profoundly affect African Americans and shape much of American history — had been obsolete in England for centuries, and articulating its logic required lawmakers to reverse some of the most basic presumptions of English law. For example, in 1662 a Virginia statute declared, “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” This idea — that a child’s legal status derived from the mother, rather than the father — ran contrary to the patriarchal foundations of English law. The men who sat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses would not propose such a thing lightly. Why would they decide that the principle of patriarchal descent, which was so fundamental to their own worlds, was inappropriate for their slaves?

The question needed to be addressed, according to the statute’s preamble, since “doubts have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.” One such case involved Elizabeth Key, a woman whose father was a free Englishman and mother was an African slave. She petitioned for her freedom in 1656, based on her father’s status. Her lawyer was an Englishman named William Greensted. He not only took Key’s case, but he also fathered two of her children and, eventually, married her. Key won her case and her freedom from bondage. Elizabeth Key escaped her mother’s fate — a life in slavery — because her father and her husband were both free Englishmen. The 1662 statute aimed to close Key’s avenue to freedom.

The process by which the institution of chattel slavery was molded to the needs of colonial planters is just one example of the way Europeans adapted the principles they brought with them to the unfamiliar demands of their new surroundings. In the showdown between people like Elizabeth Key and William Greensted, on the one hand, and the members of Virginia’s House of Burgesses on the other, we see how people in disorienting circumstances — some in positions in power, others in various states of subjection to their social and political superiors — scrambled to make sense of their world and bend its rules to their advantage. Through countless contests of power and authority like this one, the outlines of a new world gradually began to emerge from the collision of cultures.

By 1700, three distinct types of colonies had developed in the Americas: the tribute colonies created in Mexico and Peru, which relied initially on the wealth and labor of indigenous peoples; plantation colonies, where sugar and other tropical and subtropical crops could be produced with bound labor; and neo-Europes, where colonists sought to replicate, or at least approximate, economies and social structures they knew at home.