he wrote that as a young man he had been captured in battle by the Turks and sold as a slave before later escaping by killing his master and fleeing by way of Russia.51
As historian Philip Morgan has explained, indentured servants and enslaved people in the British colonies came to recognize that they had much in common. “The level of exploitation each group suffered inclined them to see the others as sharing their predicament. … Not only did many blacks and whites work alongside one another, but they ate, caroused, smoked, ran away, stole, and made love together.”52
Prior to 1660 and the accession of Charles II the British colonies lacked any clear legal basis for keeping people in permanent servitude or any consistent legal way to distinguish the status of indentured and enslaved persons. Colonists in Bermuda dealt with the ambiguity by extending the length of the indenture for most enslaved Africans and Native Americans to 99 years. There were exceptions, however, including one European given such a 99-year term and about ten percent of the Africans in Bermuda who were given shorter periods of service.53 Something similar must have been going on at the same time in Virginia, where “in some counties perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s.” The Barbados Council included the possibility of a contract for a fixed term of service in a declaration about servitude for Native Americans and Africans in 1636.54
There also was confusion about the relationship between the Christian faith and perpetual servitude. Enslaved individuals who were or became Christians argued that they should be made free as a result of their faith. Some Christian servants in Virginia and Maryland sued in the courts for freedom. This argument was used in Virginia as late as the 1690s.55 There was also the question of the status of the children to those in permanent or ninety-nine-year servitude.56
The effort to codify the status of those in servitude was delayed by uncertainties of the English Civil War (1642–48) and the subsequent Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653–58), who increased the supply of indentured servants by sending large numbers of Irish prisoners to the Caribbean. With the restoration of Charles II in 1660, however, matters began to change. Charles II and his brother James, who would follow him to the throne as James II in 1685, were anxious to profit from the slave trade. They founded the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (1660, reorganized 1663), went to war with the Dutch to support the company’s interests (the second Anglo-Dutch War, 1665–1667), and finally reorganized the body as the Royal African Company (1672). The company claimed a monopoly on all transportation of enslaved persons to British colonies. It would eventually ship “more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade.”57
With a new king supportive of the slave trade, England’s colonies began to put servitude on a more certain level. Barbados led the way in 1661 with the adoption of one act “for the good governing of Servants, and ordering the Rights between Masters and Servants” and another for “the better ordering and governing of Negroes.” The new British colony in Jamaica adopted a version of the same act in 1664, and a further act in 1684. The new colony of Carolina, which Charles II chartered in 1663, would copy the Jamaica act of 1684 in 1691.58
In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly adopted an act that set aside the English precedent that the status of a child depended on that of the father. For enslaved Africans, the status of the child would thereafter depend on that of the mother. When the Lower Norfolk Court ruled in 1665 that a mixed-race Christian man named Manuel was to be treated as an indentured servant rather than permanently enslaved, the legislature responded with a 1667 act stating “that the sacrament of baptism ‘doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome.’”59 An act in 1670 let stand legislation (1655 and 1658) that classified enslaved Native Americans as indentured servants, but specified that non-Christians who arrived in the colony by ship (presumably from Africa or the Caribbean) were enslaved for life.60
One of the motives for treating enslaved African Americans and indentured servants differently was the perceived danger that the two groups might unite against their common oppressors. This is in fact what happened in Virginia in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. A dispute between English settler Thomas Matthews and members of the small Doeg tribe, which was touched off by the destruction of the Doegs’ corn by Matthews’s hogs, quickly escalated as a result of two complicating factors: the presence in the region of Iroquois-speaking Susquehannocks who were probing south from their base in southern New York and a simmering dispute among settlers about the exclusive trading agreements with Native Americans held by the colony’s upper class (which less-privileged settlers considered to be a scheme to limit available land and maintain the value of large estates). Matthews’s men attacked a Susquehannock village in error, thinking that it was inhabited by Doegs. The Susquehannocks retaliated, killing approximately three hundred settlers, particularly along the Rappahannock River that marked the northern most line of settlement in Virginia at the time. Nathaniel Bacon (1647–76), who had only been in the colony since 1674 and was related by marriage to Governor William Berkeley (1606–77), blamed Berkeley for inaction. Bacon raised an army composed of indentured servants and Africans to whom he promised land, attacked the Siouan-speaking Occaneechee tribe in the southwest of the colony (which had nothing to do with the Susquehannocks), and sacked the colonial capital at Jamestown. Bacon died of disease and the rebellion soon collapsed. His followers were subdued, with twenty-three going to the gallows.61
The fear of this sort of collaboration between indentured servants and Africans led legislators to construct provisions limiting contact between groups. This was already happening before Bacon’s uprising. The Virginia legislature passed laws in 1662 setting the fine for fornication of people of different races as twice that for those of the same race. A Maryland act in 1664 spoke of interracial marriage in strongly negative terms. In 1691 Virginia specified banishment for any person who married another of a different race.62 Other legislation was designed to limit the presence of free Africans, who might be perceived as offering hope to those who were still enslaved. In 1691 Virginia banned the freeing of any enslaved person, unless provisions were also made for that person to leave the colony. In 1729 Bermuda required all free Africans and Native Americans to leave the colony.63
This effort to separate enslaved Africans from English indentured servants was the source of the linguistic convention of referring to persons of European origin as “white.” Early acts had spoken of Africans and Christian servants but beginning in Barbados in the 1650s the term “Christian servants” was replaced by “whites.” In many cases the term was paired with the designation of persons of African heritage as “blacks.”64
By the 1670s some were raising their voices against the formalization of the slave trade and the status of enslaved people that had begun a decade earlier. Merchants protested against the monopoly of the Royal African Company, not objecting to perpetual servitude but arguing that their inability to engage in the profitable market was an abridgement of their rights.65 Some clergy—particularly
