History of slavery in Virginia

Slavery in Virginia dates to 1619, soon after the founding of Virginia as an English colony by the London Virginia Company. The company established a headright system to encourage colonists to transport indentured servants to the colony for labor; they received a certain amount of land for people whose passage they paid to Virginia.

Africans first appeared in Virginia in 1619, brought by English privateers from a Spanish slave ship they had intercepted. As the Africans were baptized Christians, they were treated as indentured servants. Some laws regarding slavery of Africans were passed in the seventeenth century and codified into Virginia's first slave code in 1705. Among laws affecting slaves was one of 1662, which said that children born in the colony would take the social status of their mothers, regardless of who their fathers were. This was in contrast to English common law of the time, and resulted in numerous generations of enslaved mixed-race children and adults, some of whom were majority white. Among the most notable were Sally Hemings and her siblings, fathered by planter John Wayles, and her four surviving children by Thomas Jefferson.

By 1650, there were about 300 Africans living in Virginia, about 1% of an estimated 30,000 population of people of English and European ancestry. They were not slaves but worked as indentured laborers, as did the approximately 4000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia. Many Africans had earned their freedom, and they were each granted 50 acres (200,000 m²) of land when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco or other crops. Although at a disadvantage in that they had to pay to have their newly acquired land surveyed in order to patent it, white indentured servants found themselves in the same predicament. Some black indentured servants patented and bought land after gaining freedom.

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