Key Points, Enslaving Virginia

The “Enslaving Virginia” story line addresses the development and growth of a racially based slave system that profoundly affected the lives, fortunes, and values of blacks and whites.

Background

The institution of slavery marked both black and white society in eighteenth-century Virginia. Along with the racial attitudes and class structure that developed alongside it and served to legitimate a slave system based on skin color, slavery permeated all aspects of life in the colony.

Slavery Takes Root and Grows

The demand for labor in Europe’s New World possessions led to the forced migration of at least 11.5 million Africans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Approximately 600,000 were brought into British North America. Although slave laws were enacted piecemeal in seventeenth-century Virginia, they added up to an effective system of discrimination and exploitation.

A Racially Fractured Society Emerges

As the numbers of Africans in Virginia increased, the cultural differences that set them apart from Europeans and their unequal status and treatment created great divisions in Chesapeake society.

Racial Slavery Codified

Laws passed in the 1660s defined who was and was not to be enslaved, a designation that increasingly came to be attached exclusively to Africans. Over the next fifty years, still more laws restricted the movement of slaves, set harsh punishments for infractions against the system, and strengthened slaveholders’ rights to their human property.

Cracks in the System

Africans had little impact on altering formal institutions. Sometimes they could influence personal relationships with individual whites. Plantation slaves also had leeway to make choices in work groups and in local exchange networks.

The Strained World Blacks and Whites Made Together

Blacks and whites had a profound effect on one another’s lives and culture, however inadvertently. Their interaction colored everything from attitudes to ancestors.