1640s

Virginia's colonial assembly in 1643 classified African women as 'tithables' — taxable field laborers — while exempting English women from this classification. This distinction encoded racial difference into tax law, marking Black women as presumptively agricultural laborers regardless of their actual role. The law was an early step in constructing race-based legal categories that would underpin chattel slavery, treating Black women's bodies and labor as categorically different from and lesser than white women's.

Anthony Johnson, one of the original African arrivals of 1619 who had survived indenture and gained freedom, acquired a 250-acre land grant on Virginia's Eastern Shore in the late 1640s. He and his wife Mary built a successful farm, owned livestock, and even held indentures over other workers including a Black man named John Casor — demonstrating that in this early period, some Africans navigated the colonial system to achieve landownership. His success represented a brief window of Black economic agency that colonial law would systematically close.

The Dutch West India Company granted conditional freedom to eleven long-serving enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1644, including Paul d'Angola and others who had served since 1626. This 'half-freedom' allowed them to live and work independently but required annual tribute payments and labor when the Company demanded it. Their children remained enslaved. The arrangement illustrates the fluid, pre-codified nature of early colonial slavery — and also its fundamental coerciveness, as freedom remained contingent and partial.

A Virginia court sentences John Punch to servitude for life — an early legal step toward race-based slavery.

The Massachusetts Body of Liberties makes it the first English colony to give slavery legal sanction.