1663

In 1663 in Gloucester County, Virginia, a planned uprising involving both enslaved Black people and white indentured servants was discovered and suppressed before it launched. Informants revealed the plot, and its leaders were executed. The conspiracy demonstrated early cross-racial class solidarity among unfree laborers, a threat the planter class would address by driving a legislative wedge between Black and white workers — offering poor whites racial privileges and increasingly differentiating their legal status from that of enslaved Black people.

The 1663 Charter of Carolina granted by King Charles II to eight Lords Proprietors included explicit protections for slaveholders' rights, and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (drafted 1669, largely by John Locke) declared that 'every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.' Enslaved Africans began arriving in the colony from its earliest settlement, with many brought by Barbadian planters who imported both their enslaved workforce and their slave codes to the new colony.

Maryland authorities uncovered an alleged plot by white indentured servants and enslaved Africans acting together. Alarmed planters began constructing harsher legal distinctions between white servants and Black enslaved people — a key step in hardening racial slavery.

Maryland authorities uncovered an alleged plot by white indentured servants and enslaved Africans to rise together against their masters. The conspiracy, one of several in this era, alarmed planters who began constructing harsher legal distinctions between white servants and Black enslaved people. Some historians cite such cross-racial alliances as a key motivation behind the hardening of racial slavery in the 1660s–1680s.

One of the earliest recorded plots by enslaved and indentured laborers in colonial Virginia.