Tracing British West Indian Slavery Laws by Justine K. Collins

Author:Justine K. Collins [Collins, Justine K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Caribbean & West Indies, African American & Black, Law, Comparative, Jurisprudence, Legal History
ISBN: 9781000515671
Google: CkROEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-29T02:49:49+00:00

The Virginia and the Chesapeake slave codes

The Virginian slavery codes did not follow the other colonial examples of significantly copying the Barbadian Act. It did however, “contain one near identity and enough similarities to reveal broad reciprocal influences between Barbados and Virginia”.59 There existed considerable immigration history of both free peoples and the enslaved from Barbados to Virginia and Maryland, which is just one aspect of the relationship between the two colonies. Barbados’s trading, developed links and channels of communication, which enabled the migration of planters and elements of Barbadian slave laws into the Chesapeake.60 Indeed, Virginia’s Acting Governor of 1708, Edmund Jennings, stated to the Board of Trade that prior to 1680 “what negroes were brought to Virginia were imported generally from Barbados for it is very rare to have a Negro ship come to this Country directly from Africa”.61

59 April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia Intercontinental Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 155.

60 Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 452.

61 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America: The Border Colonies and Southern Colonies, Vol. IV (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington 1955) 88–89. K.G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1957) 359; R.R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System”, Southern Studies, XVI (1977) 366.

Moreover, even Maryland boasted of the influx of both Barbadian and Jamaican enslaved persons that greatly bolstered its slave population in the early eighteenth century. Early plungers within Maryland’s transition from servant to slave labour, were Barbadian planters. These migrants assisted the colony with two significant aspects of African enslavement. Firstly, in the 1680s, they provided their expertise on how to run a successful plantation within the slavery system. Secondly, during the second half of the 1700s, they relieved the shortage of labour through the supply of enslaved persons of African descent by importing them from Barbados.62

62 Demetri D. Debe & Russell R. Menard, “The Transition to African Slavery in Maryland: A Note on the Barbados Connection”, Slavery & Abolition, 32 (2011) 129–130.

The development of the Barbadian slave code sparked a dialogue amongst the English Atlantic world concerning how laws were to define and regulate slavery and race. Governor John Atkins hesitantly sent the initial draft of the Barbados code to the Lords of Trade in England for approval. Officials in London who were members of the Plantation Office approved of the content and the need for the legislation. They also found that the colonial legislators were justified in asserting that the enslaved were a “brutish sort of people and reckoned as goods and chattels in that Island”.63 Against this backdrop, all colonists needed to be creative when it came to defining and regulating Africans within the Americas, especially in light of defining them and their generations to come, as chattels. This accounts for the wider conversation in English Atlantic World concerning the legal definition of slavery and race within slave holding colonies.

63 T.N.A. Kew, C.O. 29/2/226 ‘Governor Atkins to the Lords of Trade’, January 31, 1677.

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