1660s

Virginia statute declares that the status of a child follows the condition of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem), reversing English common law. Any child born of an enslaved woman is enslaved regardless of the father's status. This single law made slavery self-reproducing and made the rape of enslaved women economically profitable for enslavers.

The 1662 Virginia law establishing that children followed the condition of their mother (partus sequitur ventrem) created a direct economic incentive for the sexual violation of enslaved women: children born of such assaults became enslaved property of the slaveholder. Colonial records, court cases, and plantation inventories document the resulting pattern of sexual exploitation. Enslaved women had no legal recourse — rape by slaveholders was not recognized as a crime when committed against enslaved people. The law thus institutionalized rape as a mechanism of property accumulation, with enslaved women's reproductive capacity treated as an economic asset.

Virginia statute declared it was not a felony for an enslaver to kill an enslaved person 'in correction,' reasoning no one would intentionally destroy their own property. This gave enslavers legal impunity for lethal violence. The law codified that enslaved lives had no protection under criminal law, making terror a legally sanctioned tool of control.

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.

Virginia's Act III of 1667 explicitly declared that Christian baptism did not confer freedom on enslaved people. Colonists had previously hesitated to enslave fellow Christians. This law severed the last religious argument for manumission, closing a path to freedom and removing any incentive for enslavers to allow religious conversion.

John Locke, later celebrated as a philosopher of liberty and natural rights, drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 for the Lords Proprietors. Article 110 stated: 'Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.' Locke was also a direct investor in the Royal African Company. His authorship of a foundational slavery document while developing his theories of natural rights illustrates the philosophical contradictions at the heart of Enlightenment liberalism — and the degree to which 'freedom' was constructed as a racial category from its inception in Anglo-American thought.

By the 1650s–1660s, a small community of free Black landowners had established itself on Virginia's Eastern Shore, including Anthony and Mary Johnson, their son Richard, John Johnson, and others. These families owned land, went to court, and participated in colonial civic life. Over the following three decades, colonial legislation systematically destroyed this community: free Black people were barred from owning white servants (1670), stripped of voting rights, denied the ability to testify against white people, and had their estates subject to seizure. By 1700 the community had been legally and economically dismantled.

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.

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.

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.

When England seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York, the existing enslaved African population came under English colonial rule. The British systematically expanded the slave trade to the colony and tightened slave codes. The Dutch system of half-freedom was eliminated over time, and enslaved people who had held conditional freedom under the Dutch lost those protections. New York became an increasingly significant slave society, with enslaved Africans comprising roughly 15–20% of the population in New York City by the early 18th century.

Virginia's 1667 Act declared that the baptism of enslaved people as Christians did not entitle them to freedom. This law directly closed a loophole some enslaved people had used to petition for freedom on religious grounds, and severed the English common-law tradition linking Christian status to certain rights. It was part of a systematic legislative effort to make slavery absolute and hereditary, removing any pathway to freedom short of a slaveholder's decision.

Virginia's 1668 Act declared that free Black women, even if freed from slavery, remained subject to taxation as laborers — unlike free white women who were exempt. The law stated that 'negroe women, though permitted to enjoy their freedome' should still 'ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English.' This codified the principle that even freedom did not grant Black people the full legal status of white colonists, creating a permanent legal second-class status for free Black people.

New Jersey (first as part of New Netherland, then as an English proprietary colony after 1664) had enslaved African residents from its earliest colonial period. Under English rule, slavery was formalized: the East Jersey code of 1682 included slave regulations, and New Jersey's enslaved population grew steadily through the late 17th century. Like New York, New Jersey's slavery was largely domestic and agricultural — different in scale from the plantation South but no less brutal in its fundamental violence and denial of freedom.

Virginia law declares that a child's status follows the mother, making slavery inheritable and permanent.

A 1662 Virginia law decreed that a child inherited the enslaved or free status of its mother — making slavery hereditary, turning the children of enslaved women into property at birth, and reversing English common law, which followed the father.

Maryland decrees lifelong, inheritable slavery and penalizes interracial marriage.

Virginia declares that an enslaver who kills an enslaved person during "correction" commits no felony — codifying total power over Black life.

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