Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

When the British crossed the Atlantic Ocean and claimed what they considered a new world, they arrived with their cultural norms intact. The negative relationships they constructed with coastal Native Americans exposed their long-held views of English superiority. Furthermore, that sense of entitlement or ethnocentrism also tainted their dealings with free and enslaved colonial blacks. An examination of Virginia’s earliest records reveals that before legislators recognized slavery as a legal institution, whites had various ways of marking blacks as a different class of people. The clerks who wrote in the census books identified blacks by name and race. There were no racial identities given for white settlers, only names. In several court cases where black and white individuals were convicted of committing the same crime, white judges sentenced blacks to harsher physical punishments. Gradually, blacks were identified in legal records using only their first names, as if their surnames were somehow irrelevant and unnecessary.

Masters marked black female slaves as being different from white female servants by assigning only black females to work in the tobacco fields. In small increments whites labeled blacks as second-rate and unusual in a negative way. As time passed, the social contact and sexual intimacy that was so ordinary between black and white laborers in the colony’s early years ended. Instead, sexual relationships between the races drew condemnation and social ostracism for whites and physical punishments for blacks. British ethnocentrism reached its legal pinnacle in Virginia in 1669 when the House of Burgesses declared no criminal charges would be filed against a master who killed a slave while administering punishment. Clearly, whites had decided that blacks were disposable commodities. All of the actions mentioned—certainly not a complete list—leave little doubt that most white colonials considered West Africans to be inferior creatures and structured the social norms of Virginia society to ensure white racial supremacy.

Thus, in the first half of the seventeenth century, whites consolidated their control over the lives of free and enslaved blacks. Blacks responded with determined will and crafted overt and covert means of resistance. Too often the success of their challenges was curbed by their limited access to political and economic power. Repeatedly, the steps taken by the colony’s legislators demonstrate their actions were responses to enslaved blacks who persisted in pressing for liberty. In 1656 Elizabeth Key petitioned the courts for her liberty on the ground that she had inherited the free status of her father. Key also let it be known that she was a Christian. Traditionally, English common law validated paternal hereditary claims and supported the enslavement of non-Christians who were identified as infidels. Elizabeth Key was not the only slave in the colony who thought being Christian offered an opportunity for freedom.

Conversion to Christianity was an open door to freedom that legislators decidedly closed and, in that process, continued their pattern of legally ensuring a sizable supply of inexpensive labor for tobacco production. Simultaneously, the act encouraged slaveholders to Christianize slaves while reaffirming the Crown’s intent to build Christian colonies. With the passage of the 1667 statute, Virginia’s burgesses reminded the colony’s slaveholding taxpayers that they were expected to contribute to more than just the fiscal support of the colonial Anglican Church, something they had done through taxes since 1624. The law regarding the baptism of slaves called for the “propagation” of new members. The act identified slaveholders as additional sources to share the responsibility for the religious training and conversion of black slaves. Slaveholders were expected to seed the growing colony with Christian laborers obedient to their masters