1680s

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'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.

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.

Virginia's 1682 Act declared that all imported servants who were not Christians in their native country were to be held as enslaved for life, regardless of subsequent baptism. The law also clarified that enslaved people who converted to Christianity after arrival remained enslaved. It further restricted enslaved people's movement and assembly. This comprehensive code tightened the legal architecture of hereditary race-based slavery, closing the Christianity loophole entirely and extending enslavement to all non-Christian imports regardless of prior status.

German-speaking Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, drafted the first formal anti-slavery protest in American history, arguing that slavery violated the Golden Rule. The petition was submitted to the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, which declined to act. Though suppressed for over a century, it established the moral framework that Quaker abolitionists would eventually use to challenge slavery in Pennsylvania and beyond.

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.

Virginia's 1682 act expanded the definition of who could be enslaved to include all people imported into the colony who were not Christians 'in their native Country' — regardless of whether they had since converted. This targeted not only Africans but also people from Turkey, India, and elsewhere, though in practice it overwhelmingly applied to Africans. The law also imposed pass requirements on enslaved people, requiring written permission to leave plantations, and prescribed thirty lashes for unlicensed assembly. It was among the most comprehensive slave codes enacted in 17th-century Virginia.

Following the Germantown Petition of 1688, a small but growing number of Quakers in Pennsylvania began refusing to buy or sell enslaved people. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1696 issued a formal caution against importing enslaved Africans, though it fell short of requiring members to free those they already held. These early actions, while limited, represented the first organized religious antislavery movement in North America. Figures like William Southeby and Robert Piles argued within the Quaker community that slaveholding was incompatible with Christian faith, laying groundwork for later abolitionist Quakers like John Woolman.

Despite the Quaker founding ethos of Pennsylvania, enslaved Africans were present from the colony's earliest years. The first documented slave ship arrival in Pennsylvania was the Isabella in 1684, carrying about 150 enslaved Africans. William Penn himself owned enslaved people at his Pennsbury Manor estate. The contradiction between Quaker religious principles and the economic convenience of enslaved labor generated immediate internal debate — the same debate that would produce the Germantown Petition four years later. Pennsylvania's slaveholding Quakers embodied the moral failure that early abolitionists would spend decades challenging.

Maryland's 1681 law revised the colony's approach to interracial unions, responding to cases where English and Irish servant women married enslaved men. The law imposed penalties on slaveholders who facilitated or encouraged such marriages (to prevent them from using the 1664 law's provisions to extend servitude to white women), while continuing to enforce the principle that children of enslaved fathers followed their father's condition. The law's complexity revealed ongoing tensions in constructing race-based slavery and the coercive sexual dynamics it created.

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.

Four Germantown Quakers write the first formal protest against slavery in the English colonies — an early seed of abolition.

A new law bars enslaved people from carrying weapons, leaving plantations without a pass, or gathering — the machinery of control.