# Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 Formally **"An act concerning Servants and Slaves,"** passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1705. It gathered decades of scattered legislation into one statute and set the legal shape of racial slavery that the rest of British North America would follow. It is best read not as a beginning but as a **conclusion** — the settled answer to the problem that [[Bacon's Rebellion]] exposed in 1676: poor white and Black Virginians making common cause against the men who owned the colony. ## What the code did to Black Virginians - **Made enslavement hereditary and perpetual**, descending through the mother, with enslaved people defined as real property that could be willed, mortgaged, and seized for debt. - **Stripped property rights.** Horses, cattle, and hogs belonging to or marked by an enslaved person were seized by parish church wardens and sold for the benefit of the poor. - **Removed the penalty for killing.** Carrying forward the **1669 casual-killing act** — if a slave resisted correction "and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony" — on the reasoning that no one would destroy their own property out of malice. - **Barred Black Virginians from holding office, testifying against white people, and carrying arms without licence.** - **Made interracial marriage practically impossible.** A white person marrying a Black person faced fine and imprisonment; a minister performing such a marriage was fined **ten thousand pounds of tobacco**. A white servant woman bearing a mixed-race child owed a heavy fine or five additional years of service, and the child was bound out by church wardens **until the age of thirty-one**. ## What the same Assembly did for poor white Virginians The wedge had two edges, and this is the half that usually goes unmentioned: - Masters were **required to provide white servants** with adequate food, clothing, and lodging, and servants could sue over it. - The **length of white indentures was limited**. - **Freedom dues** — money, corn, and a musket — were mandated so a released servant could establish himself. - **Poll taxes for voting were reduced**, widening the white male franchise. A booming tobacco market did the rest. Within a generation, poorer white men could buy land, vote, and socialize upward with planters who had every reason to welcome them. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. Race here is visibly manufactured, on the record, for a stated purpose.** The vault's argument in [[Race as Social Construct]] usually has to be made analytically. Here it can be made documentarily: a legislature with a coalition problem wrote statutes that created two legal classes where one social class had existed, and the statutes survive. Theodore Allen's and Edmund Morgan's readings of this sequence are the canonical scholarly statements. **2. It is the origin of the herrenvolk bargain.** The arrangement — the bottom group is pushed down, the next group up is granted status and a small material stake, and the two are thereby made enemies — recurs throughout the vault: [[Jacksonian Democracy]]'s white-manhood franchise, [[Black Codes]] after emancipation, the [[Southern Strategy]]. 1705 is the template. **3. The protections for white servants are the part that gets erased.** Accounts that treat the slave codes purely as anti-Black legislation miss the simultaneous *pro-poor-white* legislation that gave the arrangement its durability. Coercion alone does not hold a coalition together for three centuries; a purchased stake does. **4. It set up the deprivation-then-blame loop.** Rights removed by statute became, in later argument, evidence of incapacity — the same circularity the vault documents in [[Anti-Literacy Laws]] and [[Literacy Tests]]. ## See Also - [[Bacon's Rebellion]] — the crisis this answered - [[Anti-Literacy Laws]] · [[Black Codes]] · [[Peculiar Institution]] - [[Race as Social Construct]] · [[White Supremacy]] · [[Americas Original Sin]] - [[Jacksonian Democracy]] · [[Southern Strategy]] — later versions of the same bargain ## Sources - Encyclopedia Virginia, primary document: "An act concerning Servants and Slaves" (1705) - Hening's *Statutes at Large*, Vol. III (1705 act); Vol. II (1669 casual-killing act, 20 October 1669) - Edmund S. Morgan, *American Slavery, American Freedom* (Norton, 1975) - Theodore W. Allen, *The Invention of the White Race*, Vol. II (Verso, 1997)