January 1680

Virginia's 1680 Act 'for preventing Negro Insurrections' imposed up to thirty lashes for any enslaved person who lifted a hand against a Christian (i.e., white) person, and authorized execution for enslaved people who resisted arrest or attempted to escape by force. The law also prohibited enslaved people from carrying weapons or leaving their enslaver's property without a written pass. Passed directly in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion, it was one of the founding documents of the terror-based enforcement system that would sustain chattel slavery.

Colonial court records from Virginia and Maryland in the 1680s–1690s document cases of enslaved women who killed their newborn children rather than allow them to be born into slavery. These acts, prosecuted as infanticide under colonial law, were understood by contemporaries as desperate resistance to the hereditary enslavement enforced by the partus principle. Historians have documented these cases as evidence of the psychological devastation of slavery and of enslaved women's determination to exercise some agency over their children's fate, even at the ultimate cost.

Virginia enacted legislation in 1680 prohibiting enslaved people from carrying weapons, leaving their master's plantation without written permission, or gathering in groups. Violations were punishable by whipping. The law was a direct response to the cross-racial solidarity visible in Bacon's Rebellion and established the template of pass systems and assembly prohibitions that would govern Black movement in the South for nearly two centuries.

Virginia prohibited enslaved people from carrying weapons, leaving plantations without written permission, or gathering in groups, punishable by whipping. A direct response to Bacon's Rebellion's cross-racial solidarity, it established the pass system that governed Black movement for nearly two centuries.

Plantation records and slaveholder correspondence from the late 17th century document enslaved people deliberately injuring themselves to reduce their market value or avoid sale, feigning illness to disrupt plantation work, and other forms of day-to-day resistance. A 1685 Virginia estate inventory notes that an enslaved man had cut off his own fingers to prevent being sold south. Such acts of what historians call 'weapons of the weak' — working slowly, breaking tools, poisoning livestock — were widespread enough that colonial laws specifically addressed sabotage, with severe penalties for enslaved people who damaged their enslavers' property.

Church of England missionaries in the American colonies debated in the 1680s–1690s whether enslaved people should be baptized and what religious instruction they should receive. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (founded 1701) would later attempt systematic missionary work among the enslaved. In the earlier period, most slaveholders resisted baptism and religious instruction, fearing it might imply freedom or make enslaved people less compliant. The debate illustrated how religion became a contested terrain between slaveholders seeking total control and missionaries with complex, often paternalistic motivations.