Virginia adopted partus sequitur ventrem, making children inherit their mother’s enslaved status

Evidence

In 1662, Virginia lawmen plugged one of Key’s freedom loopholes to resolve “doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.” They proclaimed that “all children borne in this country” derived their status from “the condition of the mother.” Trashing English law, they dusted off the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which held that “among tame and domestic animals, the brood belongs to the owner of the dam or mother.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 97

Categorization

• XREF: Racial slavery legally overwrote English common law, where children normally took the father’s status — a clean legal-exception example of policy predating and producing racialized ideas.
• SHARE: The Roman-law animal-breeding rationale behind Virginia’s 1662 partus statute is a fact a legal or slavery-history buff would likely not know.