1661

Barbados enacted the first comprehensive English slave code in 1661, classifying enslaved Africans as real property, stripping them of all legal personhood, and authorizing extreme punishments for resistance including burning alive. The Barbados code became the template for slave codes across the English colonies — South Carolina's 1696 code was nearly a verbatim copy. Planters who migrated from Barbados to Carolina brought the code's framework with them, creating a legal continuity of extreme racial slavery from the Caribbean to the North American mainland.

Several colonies enacted anti-miscegenation laws in the 1660s prohibiting marriage and sexual relations between white colonists and Black people. Virginia's 1662 law (which established partus sequitur ventrem) was accompanied by penalties for interracial unions; Maryland's 1664 law imposed servitude on English women who married Black men and enslaved their children. These laws served to enforce racial hierarchy, protect white male property rights in enslaved women's bodies, and prevent the formation of mixed-race free communities that might challenge the racial basis of slavery.