Virginia Slave Laws, 1662 and 1667
As the demand for labor on tobacco farms increased in the mid-seventeenth century and the flow of white indentured servants to Virginia slowed, tobacco planters imported more Africans to fill their labor needs. In the 1660s Virginia legislators passed a series of laws to clarify the status of this new category of worker. Several were based on laws in effect in the West Indies, including the 1662 law that defined slavery as an inherited position.
[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 borne 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.
[1667]
WHEREAS some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made free; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome; that diverse masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament.
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 (Samuel Pleasants, 1810), 2:170, 260.
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