's treatment of blacks, says Higginbotham, goes back to 1619, with the first purchase of 20 blacks as slaves (Higginbotham, 1978, p. 20). It is the first recorded sale of Africans to Europeans in the New World. Again, as Virginia went, so went the nation. While the sources suggest that the precise status of these blacks remains in question, later legal and political decisions made by government officials at the local, state and federal levels leaves no doubt whatsoever that the state increasingly saw blacks as inferior beings who did not deserve the legal protections afforded whites.
The first blacks arrived in 1619, but it was only in the 1660s "that the key item in the definition of their status--term of servitude--was clearly fixed in law" (Elkins, 1976, p. 38). In fact, blacks were already treated as slaves for life, but it was not until that time that slavery for the state and for the nation was legalized and defined.
All negroes or other slaves within the province, and all negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the province, shall serve durante vita; and all children born of any negro or other slave, shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives (Elkins, 1976, p. 40).
If there was any doubt about the complete power slaveholders had over their slaves, a 1669 statue removed it by declaring that any slaveholder who killed an escaping slave could not be charged with breaking any law (Higginbotham, 1978, p. 37).
The continued development of the institutionalization of slavery in Virginia from that point was inevitable, for after legalizing the murder of blacks by whites, there is little that can be excluded from the legalized evil and brutality.
One basis for this legalization was racism rooted in religious beliefs, beliefs which put the black on the bottom of the status hierarchy, below the Indian. In 1667, "the assembly made it clear that baptism would not alter a black man's ...