The Africans who waded into the brackish waters of Hampton Harbor, their very bodies traded as payment for “commodities” needed by the crews of the White Lion and the Treasurer, had already been baptized by blood and sorrow into the community of New World enslavement.
However, much of the legislation written in the decades after their arrival tells us there remained slim-chances, skin of the teeth opportunities, and loopholes to freedom and fellowship that had yet to be eradicated, obliterated, sealed-off. Because in the minds of some—not enough, and not just the enslaved—where we ended up, what we became, a country that determined humanity by one arbitrary trait, color, is not where we had to be.
In Virginia, the General Assembly set us upon this path with the 1662 law of Partus Sequitur Ventrum which states,
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.
Beyond the declaration that turns its back on centuries of English common law (by which children inherited their status from their fathers) in order to perpetuate generational enslavement, two things are of interest here: Among whom did those doubts arise? And, accepting the premise that Christian referred only to those immigrants from European countries as stated in the History Museum’s research, who were these Christians who had to be doubly fined to cure them of consorting with their Negro counterparts?
In 1667, further doubts arose as to whether those aforementioned children should be made free by baptism into Christianity. The resounding answer from the Virginia General Assembly was no. The ruling class, now, “freed from this doubt,” could welcome their slaves into the bosom of Christianity without fear of losing their valuable human property. This escape, used by Elizabeth Key Grinstead to sue for freedom in 1656, was effectively blocked.
There were, of course, other doubts and questions. In 1670, the Virginia Assembly was tasked with determining if “Indians or negroes manumitted, or otherwise free” could purchase “Christian servants?” No.
