time most of them for Five Years one
Irish man Servant who is a good
Barber and Wiggmaker, also Four
Or Five Likely Negro Boys
He knew his business dismayed his uncle. Betrayed his namesake. He had read The Selling of Joseph, of course; the old man had seen to that. But he had also read the rebuttal from Judge John Saffin. He had been comforted by the argument that hierarchies were necessary, that bondage was natural, that the enslavement of negroes was part of an orderly, divine world. He had been convinced of his own godliness by the idea that “Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks innate.”
He had made peace with what the province, with what his place in it, required. The doubts, the troubling idea that he was a man-stealer, a seller of his own brethren, had faded with each successful sale of a negro slave. Apprehension gave way to conviction. To self-assurance. To the unassailable belief that liberty required slavery. Capital was the real god of this new world, he thought. The future belonged to him; his uncle’s protest was already forgotten.
1704–1709
THE VIRGINIA SLAVE CODES
Kai Wright
It is hereby enacted, That all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country…shall be accounted and be slaves.
—Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 4
It’s a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality: my parents were adults before they could share bathrooms with white people; my grandmother was middle-aged before she could confidently enter a voting booth in Alabama. Yet these images fade easily into gentle sepia tones for me today. That’s because it’s safety, not wisdom, we’re after when we look backward. We picture ugly things at a comfortable distance.
But Americans distort the past in other ways, too. We see horrible people as exceptional, and their many accomplices as mere captives of their times. We tell ourselves we would contain such wickedness if it arose today, because now we know better. We’ve learned. In our illusory past, progress has come in decisive and irrevocable strokes.
I wonder if that’s how Mary and Anthony Johnson felt in 1652 when they petitioned the court for tax relief in Northampton County, Virginia. They had both been enslaved in their youth, but by midcentury they were free landowners, with four children and servants of their own. They were part of a small Black population that had been in Virginia since colonists arrived in Jamestown, and they must have been optimistic, though they would’ve seen a lot of change in their lives.
They would have witnessed a developing debate among white Christians about whether Africans were fully human and thus entitled to the protection of God’s love. They would have heard about each new law that came down from the legislature, as lawmakers tried to break up the colony’s multiracial class of indentured servants. The Johnsons probably would have felt the shift as the colony reordered its mixed servant class into two distinct racial castes. They surely would have felt the cultural and economic space for free or indentured Black people steadily shrinking, as law after law codified who could have sex with whom; who had the legal standing to appeal to the courts when wronged and who had none; who could work or buy or pray their way out of servitude and who couldn’t.
What would the Johnsons have thought about the future as this social reordering unfolded? Anthony and Mary did not live to see the Virginia General Assembly hand down the omnibus legislation that would define their heirs’ lives and the next century and a half of American life:
It is hereby enacted and declared, That baptism of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage; and that all children shall be bond or free, according to the condition of their mothers. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 36
Known colloquially as the “slave codes,” the 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves was an effort at finality. It put an end to decades of debating over how to make it clear that Virginia was a white man’s colony, one in which a white man’s colonial investment was secure, and one in which the law protected the white man’s right to enslave Black people. It became the model for all the British colonies in North America. One colony after another codified its racial caste systems and assured white planters that they could enslave increasing numbers of Black people.
What’s striking is the care that was taken to make it so. In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive tense. That’s just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia’s slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.
No master, mistress, or overseer of a family, shall knowingly permit any slave, not belonging to him or her, to be and remain upon his or her plantation, above four hours at any one time, without the leave of such slave’s master, mistress, or overseer, on penalty of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco to the informer. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 32
The slave codes of 1705 are among American history’s most striking evidence that our nation’s greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance. And in this case as in many others, white elites were incited to act by their fears.
Between 1680 and 1700, Virginia’s enslaved Black population increased from 3,000 to 16,380, driven by a decreasing flow of white indentured servants from England and the fact that Africans had better survival rates on the colony’s plantations. In the neighboring Carolinas, Black people were nearly a third of the population by 1672, a growth driven by the need for labor on the colony’s booming rice plantations.
These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form—which is why in 1705 Virginia’s legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.
All masters and owners of servants, shall find and provide for their servants, wholesome and competent diet, clothing, and lodging, by the discretion of the county court; and shall not, at any time, give immoderate correction; neither shall, at any time, whip a christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 7
Still, there were just too many Black people, and they did not accept bondage. In the years leading up to and surrounding the slave codes, Black defiance was widespread, with unrest stretching from the plantations themselves all the way back to West Africa’s Slave Coast. New York passed its own code in 1705, motivated in part by the size of its Black population.