Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother

Impact

For Anglo-Virginians, the statute represented economic pragmatism and implicit racism. In Virginia, tobacco was quite literally money, and larger crops represented larger incomes. In a period when prices had stagnated and then dropped, the only way to increase profits was to cultivate more of the cash crop. The leveling of tobacco prices coincided with a decline in the utility and availability of white indentured servants. Simultaneously, Virginians recognized that the declining mortality rates among new arrivals to the colony made holding servants bound for life more viable than purchasing an indentured servant who would serve for a limited period of years. Africans were the most vulnerable to being bound for life because they had no voice in the system that created the laws and because of their subservient role in extant Spanish and Portuguese models of labor exploitation. Once slavery for life became a reality, making it a legally inheritable status was the logical conclusion.

People in England had only a limited perception of what African slavery meant or entailed. Those who recognized it at all saw it as an exotic institution and perhaps as a necessary evil. The residents of other British colonies, particularly those in the West Indies, already engaged in similar practices, and their laws existed in a symbiotic relationship with those of Virginia.

For African Americans, whether enslaved or free, the passage of this statute represented the closure of one of the last loopholes that had permitted them and their offspring to escape the institution of slavery. The statute contained elements that would characterize Anglo-American slavery for the next two hundred years. It explicitly acknowledged slavery as an institution in Virginia, limited it to Africans and African Americans, and made it an inheritable condition.