1670

Colonial estate inventories and court records from the late 17th century document the systematic separation of enslaved families through sale, inheritance division, and debt payment. Enslaved people appeared in wills as individual property items, routinely split among heirs regardless of family relationships. Plantation records from Virginia and Maryland show mothers separated from children, husbands from wives. One documented case: a 1672 Maryland estate divided four enslaved adults and three children among three heirs, splitting a family unit across different households. No colonial law recognized or protected enslaved family bonds.

After Anthony Johnson died around 1670, a Virginia court ruled that his son Richard Johnson's inherited land — originally part of Anthony's 250-acre grant — could be seized by the colonial government on the grounds that as a Black man, Anthony Johnson had been an 'alien' and therefore could not have held land under the same terms as English subjects. The ruling retroactively stripped the Johnson family of property accumulated over decades, demonstrating how colonial courts weaponized racial redefinition to dispossess free Black families.

Virginia's 1670 law prohibited free Black people from owning white indentured servants, a direct legislative attack on figures like Anthony Johnson who had built economic lives within the colonial system. The law began constructing a racial hierarchy in which whiteness conferred economic privileges denied to all Black people regardless of their freedom status. Combined with other restrictions of this era, it systematically dismantled the small community of free Black landowners that had existed on Virginia's Eastern Shore.