When the flow of white indentured servants to the Virginia colony slowed at midcentury, tobacco planters imported Africans to fill their labor needs. Anxious to define the status of these new workers, in the 1660s Virginia legislators passed a series of slave-related laws, such as the 1662 legislation that defined slavery as an inherited position, thus ensuring the perpetual enslavement of Africans and therefore a steady supply of workers. The act differed significantly from English common law, in which legal status and inheritance passed through the father.
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.
Source: William W. Hening, ed.,The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York and Philadelphia, 1819–1823), 2:170.
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