Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Kathleen M. Brown, University of North Carolina Press, 1996. ‘Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London.’
page 108:
‘ . . . Only twenty-three Africans appear on the 1625 muster for the colony, which numbered nearly twelve hundred English. The name of eight of the twenty-three — including “Angelo,” “Antonio,” “Anthony,” “Isabell,” and “John Pedro” — suggest previous contact with the Portuguese, perhaps even Catholic baptism. Mary was one of only ten African women. In the twenty years after the muster, as these other Africans faded from colonial records, she and Anthony reemerged on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. With status accruing from both his property and his responsibility for legally dependent family members — an arrangement that would have been the envy of many of his English male contemporaries — Anthony might have considered himself a successful man in both an English and African sense.
‘Had Mary and Anthony arrived in Virginia a generation later, however, their chances of achieving freedom would have been significantly compromised by a set of laws distinguishing between the privileges and work roles of English and African women. Until the 1660s, slavery in Virginia remained legally ill-defined. . . . . The earliest slave laws in the colony built upon these implicit racial foundations. The first such measure, passed in 1643, consisted of a tithe levied on African women from which English women were exempt. This legal measure effectively made it harder for subsequent generations of Africans to do what Anthony and May had done earlier in the century: marry, purchase freedom, and establish families and independent households.
‘As slavery became a more important form of labor in Virginia, eventually replacing indentured servitude, early constructions of racial difference provided the legal background for more blatant measures of legal and social discriminating between African and English women. Perpetual bondage for the children of enslaved women distinguished these mothers from their English indentured counterparts after 1662. Christianity, which had long been a theme of English discussions of Africans, also became part of the legal discourse of slavery, race, and freedom, demarcating “Negro” people as a separate group from Christians by 1667. . . ’
