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Partus sequitur ventrem

The Modern Medea (1867), an illustration of Margaret Garner, an escaped enslaved African American who in 1856, about to be captured, killed her daughter, Mary, to ensure Mary was not returned to slavery

Partus sequitur ventrem (lit. 'that which is born follows the womb'; also partus) was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery.[1] The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.

The doctrine's most significant effect was placing into chattel slavery all children born to enslaved women. Partus sequitur ventrem soon spread from the colony of Virginia to all of the Thirteen Colonies. As a function of the political economy of chattel slavery in Colonial America, the legalism of partus sequitur ventrem exempted the biological father from relationship toward children he fathered with enslaved women, and gave all rights in the children to the slave-owner. The denial of paternity to enslaved children secured the slaveholder's right to profit from exploiting the labour of children engendered, bred, and born into slavery.[2] The doctrine also meant that multiracial children with white mothers were born free. Early generations of Free Negros in the American South were formed from unions between free working-class, usually mixed race women, and black men.[3]

Similar legal doctrines of inheritable slavery also derived from the civil law, operated in all the various European colonies in the Americas and Africa which were established by the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Dutch, and these doctrines often carried over after the colonies became independent.[4]

  1. ^ Lamb, Gregory M. (January 25, 2005). "The Peculiar Color of Racial Justice". The Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on August 2, 2016. Retrieved December 17, 2018.
  2. ^ Banks, Taunya (2008). "Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia". Akron Law Review. 41 (799).
  3. ^ Heinegg, Paul (1995–2005). "Free African Americans in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Maryland".
  4. ^ Miles H. Davidson (1997). Columbus Then and Now, a life re-examined. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. p. 417. ISBN 9780806129341.
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