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74 PERIOD 2 Colonial America amid Global Change: 1607–1754

in Virginia, Maryland, and northern Carolina for most of the seventeenth century.
Enslaved Africans labored under harsh conditions, and punishment for even minor
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
infractions could be severe. Plantation owners beat, whipped, and branded enslaved
people for a variety of behaviors.
During this time, some white indentured servants made common cause with Black
laborers, both indentured servants and enslaved, who worked side by side with them on
Copyright (c) 2024 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
tobacco plantations. They ran away together, stole goods from slaveholders, and planned
uprisings and rebellions. Contracted white laborers, however, had a far greater chance of
systems in Virginia Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
gaining their freedom even before slavery was fully entrenched in colonial law.

AP ® WORKING with EVIDENCE

Source: Virginia House of Burgesses, Selected Statutes Passed 1662–1669
1662
“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman
upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and
declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this country
shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother . . .
October, 1669
[B]e it enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly if any slave resists his
master (or other by his master’s order correcting him) and by the extremity
of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accounted
a felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to
punish him) be acquitted from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that
premeditated malice (which alone makes murder a felony) should induce any
man to destroy his own estate.”
Questions for Analysis
1. Identify the main point of each law in this document.
2. Describe how the laws treat violence by slaveholders toward enslaved Africans
differently from efforts of enslaved Africans to resist slaveholders.
3. Explain the factors that led the Virginia House of Burgesses to pass slave codes in the
1660s.

By the 1660s and 1670s, the population of former indentured servants who had
become free formed a growing and increasingly unhappy class. Most were struggling
economically, working as common laborers or tenants on large estates. Those who man-
aged to move west and claim land on the frontier were confronted by hostile American
Indians such as the Susquehannock nation.
AP EXAM TIP Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, who levied taxes to support nine forts on the
®
Be able to explain how frontier, had little patience with the complaints of these colonists. The labor demands
tobacco affected labor of wealthy tobacco planters had to be met, and frontier settlers’ call for an aggressive
American Indian policy would hurt the profitable deerskin trade with the Algonquin.
and Maryland through
indentured servitude and In late 1675, conflict erupted when frontier settlers, many of whom were former
the enslavement of Africans. indentured servants, attacked American Indians in the region. Rather than attacking
Avoid universal truisms, such only the Susquehannock nation, the settlers also assaulted communities allied with the
as tobacco increased the use English. When a large force of local Virginia militiamen surrounded a Susquehannock
of enslaved laborers. Instead, village, they ignored pleas for peace and murdered five chiefs. Susquehannock warriors
illustrate your understanding
by connecting tobacco, retaliated with raids on frontier farms.
the headright system, and Despite the outbreak of open warfare, Governor Berkeley refused to send troops, so
indentured servitude. disgruntled farmers turned to Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon came from a wealthy family and

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