Virginia colonists replaced English patriarchal inheritance law with Roman animal-ownership law

Evidence

Enslaved Black women gave birth to enslaveable children even if the fathers were white. In discarding English legal tradition, the colonists adopted the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem—“the offspring follows the belly”—used to determine the ownership of animals. As a litter of pigs belonged to the owner of the sow, the children born to Black women were the property of the mother’s enslaver. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 208

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines partus sequitur ventrem, the precise legal principle underpinning hereditary slavery.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s running reframing thesis about how law, not biology, constructed American racial status.