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

Impact

Prior to 1667, masters hesitated to convert their slaves, owing to the uncertainty concerning whether baptism altered a slave’s legal status. The ruling of the General Assembly finally cleared the ambiguity surrounding conversion. During the second half of the seventeenth century and forward, Anglican ministers continued to encourage masters to convert slaves, arguing that Christianity would make a slave humble, obedient, and less likely to dispute enslavement. The Church of England, like most Christian institutions at that time, found no contradiction between slavery and Christian principles. Once slave owners understood that conversion was not a threat and, at its best, might be a tool to strengthen their control over slaves, they encouraged slaves to convert. In addition, the ruling offered greater financial security to tobacco planters, in that it protected their investments. Every time colonial legislators passed a law that benefited a slave owner, they were encouraging the expansion of Virginia’s slave population.

For enslaved blacks the 1667 statute regarding conversion was yet one more obstacle Virginia legislators designed and implemented to preserve the colony’s supply of cheap labor. By the second half of the seventeenth century it was apparent to colonial blacks, both free and enslaved, that the political power in Virginia rested with the large landholders, who were also the lawmakers. The choices made by planters in the colony’s founding years to reject a diverse economy in favor of quick returns from the lone crop of tobacco set the stage for the birth of institutionalized slavery in Virginia. Through the remainder of the century the House of Burgesses continued to pass restrictive laws that marginalized West Africans and their African American descendants. Such laws must have been discouraging to enslaved blacks, but the laws failed to stop them from pursuing alternate avenues to freedom. Throughout Britain’s North American colonies, enslaved blacks continued to petition courts for their liberty while simultaneously resisting and refusing to assimilate into the inferior identities that were crafted for them by colonial whites. British ethnocentrism defined the roles that the historical actors would play in a drama full of human suffering and freedom struggles that did not end until the American Civil War.