<---Part 1: 1450-1750

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Timothy H. Breen on the introduction of the formal status of slavery in the Virginia colony

Q: How does the introduction of this kind of formal status of slavery based on race begin to affect even those living within some sort of common status, servant status, as poor people or as working people, in the Virginia colony?

A: The rise of formal, racially defined legal codes, in Virginia at least, is something that occurs towards the end of this of the 17th and into the early 18th century. No one will every precisely know what was the engine of racism in a ugly and debilitating way. But there are many factors. In the end of the 17th and early 18th century, there was a great infusion of new African workers, larger numbers than there had ever been before. In the last decade of the 17th century, it was possible to imagine that in a single year, the number of new Africans arriving would equal the total black population in the colony, or close to it. These were men and women that came directly from Africa, as opposed to other colonies in the New World. They did not have any English. They did have no sense of the world they were getting into. And they seemed to whites as very alien, foreign, unknowable. And in And in the language sense, they were unknowable. So these kinds of earlier runnings away, of doing politics together, of even having sex, the that was understood in Anthony Johnson's world because it was a shared language basis, there was a sense of property, that was that was divided in this later period by the, lain language divide that that tended to exacerbate the racial, divide.

As people lived longer as they did in the 18th century, it became necessary to put into law all kinds of stipulations about inheritance, of labor for life, of be of what it meant to be a slave. And the black population of Virginia began to reproduce itself somewhere around the turn of the century. When I say "reproduce itself", if no new Africans had arrived in Virginia, say, after the year 1700, the population still would have sustained itself, that that births Live births outnumbered deaths. That was not true for most of the 17th century. You need You needed new arrivals. So the sense of people living longer made, of course, problems of inheritance and taxes. All kinds of things became a put force on, the legal codes.

And in 1705, if memory serves, it was an extremely rigid racial code. To be black meant that you were a slave. To be white meant that you were free. Race became the basis of law and politics.

Timothy H. Breen

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Q: How does the introduction of this kind of formal status of slavery based on race begin to affect even those living within some sort of common status, servant status, as poor people or as working people, in the Virginia colony?
	A: The rise of formal, racially defined legal codes, in Virginia at least, is something that occurs towards the end of this of the 17th and into the early 18th century. No one will every precisely know what was the engine of racism in a ugly and debilitating way. But there are many factors. In the end of the 17th and early 18th century, there was a great infusion of new African workers, larger numbers than there had ever been before. In the last decade of the 17th century, it was possible to imagine that in a single year, the number of new Africans arriving would equal the total black population in the colony, or close to it. These were men and women that came directly from Africa, as opposed to other colonies in the New World. They did not have any English. They did have no sense of the world they were getting into. And they seemed to whites as very alien, foreign, unknowable. And in And in the language sense, they were unknowable. So these kinds of earlier runnings away, of doing politics together, of even having sex, the that was understood in Anthony Johnson's world because it was a shared language basis, there was a sense of property, that was that was divided in this later period by the, lain language divide that that tended to exacerbate the racial, divide. As people lived longer as they did in the 18th century, it became necessary to put into law all kinds of stipulations about inheritance, of labor for life, of be of what it meant to be a slave. And the black population of Virginia began to reproduce itself somewhere around the turn of the century. When I say "reproduce itself", if no new Africans had arrived in Virginia, say, after the year 1700, the population still would have sustained itself, that that births Live births outnumbered deaths. That was not true for most of the 17th century. You need You needed new arrivals. So the sense of people living longer made, of course, problems of inheritance and taxes. All kinds of things became a put force on, the legal codes. And in 1705, if memory serves, it was an extremely rigid racial code. To be black meant that you were a slave. To be white meant that you were free. Race became the basis of law and politics.
Timothy H. Breen
	previous \| next