Mixed Race Studies

Why and how race became the key to enslaveability was a question posed and resolved using myriad strategies across the early modern Atlantic as traders and setters constructed paradigms that enabled the exchange of human commodities and the enslaved constructed paradigms that enabled their response to the New World order. Children born to parents who occupied positions increasingly seen as racially distinct posed political, ideological, and economic problems. Their indeterminacy needed to be fixed. Recall the preamble: “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free.” The word doubts names mixed-race children as excess, as both circulating and unregulated, and ultimately as a source of chaos.²³ The law imposes order as it both configures those children as property and asserts its right to do so. It also points to a very specific legal case involving Elizabeth Keye (to which I will turn below) that compelled the Virginia legislators to make explicit the implicit logic that regulated the slave markets and the probate courts across Atlantic slave societies. In the context of a nascent colonial setting, then, these reproducing women and their chaotic children were grounds on which claims to sovereign authority rested.

Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Volume 22, Number 1 (55) (March 3, 2018), 6. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4378888.

Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Volume 22, Number 1 (55) (2018-03-01)
pages 1-17
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-4378888

Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor Of Social And Cultural Analysis & History
New York University

From the moment of its introduction into the Atlantic world, hereditary racial slavery depended on an understanding that enslaved women’s reproductive lives would be tethered to the institution of slavery. At the same time, few colonial slave codes explicitly defined the status of these children. This essay explores English slave codes regarding reproduction under slavery alongside the experience of reproduction to suggest that legislative silences are not the final word on race and reproduction. The presumption that their children would also be enslaved produced a visceral understanding of early modern racial formations for enslaved women. Using a seventeenth-century Virginia slave code as its anchor, this essay explores the explicit and implicit consequences of slaveowners’ efforts to control enslaved women’s reproductive lives.

Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother—Partus Sequitur Ventrem. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act. —Laws of Virginia, 1662 Act XII; Latin added by William Henig, The Statutes at Large, 1819

Atlantic slavery rested upon a notion of heritability. It thus relied on a reproductive logic that was inseparable from the explanatory power of race. As a result, women and their experiences of enslavement shed critical light on what it meant to be enslaved or free in the early modern Atlantic world. Regardless of the rate of reproduction among the enslaved—which remained low in all early American slave societies—the ideological solidity of those slave societies needed reproducing women. Building a system of racial slavery on the notion of heritability did not require the presence of natural population growth among the enslaved, but it did require a clear understanding that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children. Resituating heritability was key in the practice of an enslavement that systematically alienated the enslaved from their kin and their lineage. Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement.

As this essay will argue, enslaved women’s maternal possibilities became a crucial vehicle by which racial meaning was concretized—and it did so long before legislators indexed such possibilities into law. Further, by centering the women whose reproductive lives were at issue, I argue that enslaved people best understood the theory and praxis of racial slavery. The violence done when economic structures supersede kinship, and when enslaveability displaces maternity, is longstanding. There are moments when recognition of that agony of dispossession becomes clear.¹ So rather than an inquiry into legal history, here I argue that in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Atlantic world, women navigated the dawning recognition that their reproductive lives would be the evidence of racialized dispossession. Enslaved mothers were enmeshed in the foundational metalanguages of early modern Atlantic ideas of slavery, freedom, and racial colonialism.²…

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EIHS Lecture: “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery”

Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies
University of Michigan
1014 Tisch Hall
435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1003
2015-02-05, 16:00-18:00 CST (Local Time)

Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, History
New York University

In 1662, legislators in the Virginia Colony passed a law that determined that, in the matter of sex between free English men and “negro women,” the legal condition of the child should follow that of the mother. Long understood as the law that codified hereditary racial slavery, this code reassured slaveowning settlers that, in the matter of enslaved people, enslaveability devolved through the mother: Partus Sequitur Ventrem or, literally, “offspring follows belly.” In this paper I ask how this legislative intervention might have been perceived by enslaved women and men in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Atlantic.

Jennifer L. Morgan is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in colonial America. She is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she is at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, tentatively titled Accounting for the Women in Slavery. She is Professor of History in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University and lives in New York City.

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