Partus Sequitur Ventrem: slavery made hereditary

In December 1662, Virginia's colonial assembly answered a question the law had left open: if a child was born to one enslaved and one free parent, was that child enslaved or free? English common law followed the father. Virginia chose the opposite. Its statute — known by the Latin partus sequitur ventrem, "that which is brought forth follows the womb" — declared that a child's status followed the mother.

The consequences were enormous. Slavery became hereditary: the child of an enslaved woman was enslaved for life, and so was her grandchild, without end. The institution no longer depended on the Atlantic trade to replenish itself — it could grow from within. And because status flowed from the mother regardless of who the father was, the law turned white enslavers' sexual coercion of enslaved women into a source of profit: every child born was another piece of inheritable property.

The act was shaped in part by the freedom suit of Elizabeth Key, a woman with an enslaved African mother and a free English father who won her freedom in 1656 by pointing to her father's status and her baptism. The 1662 law slammed that door shut for everyone after her. More than any single statute, partus sequitur ventrem is what made American slavery a self-reproducing, race-based property system — the legal hinge on which the whole institution turned.