In 1624, White settler William Mutch had apparently worked off his indenture to Captain John Harvey. But master and former servant got into an altercation. Harvey demanded to see the contract ending Mutch’s indenture, while Mutch demanded his freedom dues before showing Harvey the contract. The standoff ended with Harvey assaulting Mutch by truncheon—“ftrooke over ye pate wth his Trunchione” (struck over the head with his truncheon)—which prompted Mutch to sue Harvey. The case worked its way up to the colonial Virginia Supreme Court, where Dr. John Potts, a member of the court, affirmed the facts as Mutch stated. Still, the court did not rule in Mutch’s favor.1
Why would they?
Harvey, known as an irascible sort, would later be knighted by Charles I and appointed governor of the colony. His case with Mutch was as much about status, privilege, and class in colonial America as it was about the law. Sir John Harvey was a member of the English aristocracy. William Mutch was not.
In beating Mutch with his truncheon, John Harvey was acting out a belief that a servant shall never rise to my equal, and it is my right and privilege to keep him down. Men, like Harvey, had come to Virginia seeking power and wealth. They also sought to retain the privileged social status they had known in England. They both needed and despised men like Mutch. They further recognized that in attempting to control such men, through indentured servitude, they were fostering a social underclass that would eventually rise as their competition once the indentures had been served.
A more permanent solution was required, and it would be found in the large numbers of Africans soon to be imported to the colony. But until that time, men like Harvey devised and refined a brutal, violent, oppressive regime to keep men like Mutch down. A template that ensured power and wealth would remain within the hands of a few, a template they could call upon when Africans arrived.
Meeting in Jamestown, the Virginia General Assembly, later the House of Burgesses, which served the American Founders as a model for the United States Congress and House of Representatives, was first called into session on July 30, 1619, by Governor Sir George Yeardley. Captain William Tucker, owner of the first-ever plantation and soon-to-be owner of Anthony and Isabella, was a member of that body when on August 3 and 4, just two weeks prior to the couple’s arrival, that first-ever session of the first-ever White legislative body in America enacted the first-ever laws regulating servitude: White servants were bound by the contracts they entered into in England. White servants could not marry without the consent of their masters. And, White masters could publicly flog their servants, or employ such cruel punishment as nailing a servant’s ears to a pillory.2
Why were such matters important then? Servants far outnumbered their planter-masters. At least three out of every four colonists in seventeenth-century Virginia was a servant.3 So, planters had a vested interest in controlling the lives of their servants. But planters also viewed themselves as the New World aristocracy. “The system of indentured service,” notes historian Philip A. Bruce, “in its social effects differed but little, if at all, from the system of slavery.” Bruce continues, “It really accentuated the social divisions among the whites more distinctly than the presence of the institution of slavery itself did. The indentured servants were as much a legalized lowest class in Virginia as the noblemen were a legalized highest class in England. It gave purely class distinction a recognized standing in the Colonial Courts of Law.”4
Why are such matters important now? In the growing debate over the intersection of race and class in America, particularly regarding which came first, the historical record, at least, seems clear. Class preceded race as the basis of inequality in the supposed land of equality. Both in the seventeenth century, and today, the American upper class (the 1 percent) was (and is) as concerned about class distinctions among Whites as it was (and is) about racial distinctions between Whites and Blacks.
While this intersection between class and race greatly influenced the development and codification of slavery in the seventeenth century, it continues its profound impact on our institutions today. Who can seriously look at Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which peeled southern Whites away from the Democratic Party to build the modern Republican Party, without also seeing racial animosity used to trump class distinctions? Who can conscientiously examine the statistics showing increased segregation in schools since the 1960s as White families send their children to White private schools of their own creation (rather than to private academies frequented by the White upper class), and not see the impact of class and race? And, who can watch video after disgusting video of White police officers murdering young Black men and women, even inside their homes, then going scot-free for months without question or arrest, and not also be aware of the hand that class and race plays in criminal justice?
Racial distinctions have long been the basis of eugenic notions about the superiority of one race over another. That skin color conveys intelligence (the lighter the color, the smarter), for example, is one of many enduring pseudoscientific ideas about race that continues to crop up year after year, and which many Americans firmly believe. But even in the absence of race, class distinction also borders on eugenics.
As much as disease, severe weather, incompetent farming, and making constant wars with Native Americans, the absence of women as colonial wives bearing children threatened the survival of the Virginia colony. So, not long after Anthony and Isabella arrived in 1619, the Virginia Company sent about 100 mail-order brides to the colony, primarily for indentured servants, each purchased for somewhere between 120 and 150 pounds of tobacco. It proved a huge success and a second shipment of women soon followed. Often the women were former inmates of the ironically named Bridewell prison near London. The story of these “tobacco wives,” as they were known, has been fictionalized, and immortalized, in the television show Jamestown. But writing about this situation, historian T. J. Wertenbaker raised the ugly head of eugenics, in voicing his belief that “[a]s years went on, the scarcity of women became a distinct blessing, for it made it impossible for the degraded laborer, even though he ultimately secured his freedom, to leave descendants to perpetuate his lowly instincts.”5
As repugnant as Wertenbaker’s thoughts about White servitude are, Abbott Emerson Smith went even further:
Essentially it was simply a workable means of supplying white settlers and cheap labor. Its social consequences were by no means altogether good, for it certainly tended to make the colonies “sinkes” into which the refuse of Europe could be thrown. Perhaps it was a fortunate thing that pioneer conditions were as difficult as they were, if there is any truth in theories of heredity, for the weak, diseased, and unenterprising were not preserved. The strong and competent survived, and if this manner of separating sheep from goats put too great a premium on sheer physical health, that at least was something well worth distinguishing and preserving. There was a speedy winnowing of the vast influx of riffraff which descended on the settlements; the residue, such as it was, became the American people.6
As modern as these distasteful views are, they were present when Anthony and Isabella arrived, if not articulated quite so clearly. Remember William Tucker’s 1624/25 muster? It laid out class in colonial Virginia simply: planters first, White servants next, Native Americans to follow, and Blacks last.
* * *
In recent years, the internet has circulated a story that the Irish were the first slaves in colonial America. The story states that in colonial America Irish slaves outnumbered African slaves and endured worse treatment at the hands of their masters. Though it’s undergone many iterations, and many have claimed authorship, the thrust of the story is contained in an article titled “Irish: The Forgotten White Slaves.”7
White nationalist groups have adopted the story in an effort to minimize the effects of slavery on Black Americans, and to claim that Blacks are too vocal in seeking justice. “If the Irish can pull themselves up from slavery, so, too, can Blacks. You don’t see the Irish asking for reparations,” so the reasoning goes. Black advocacy groups have railed against the myth as debasing and diminishing the history and suffering of Black Americans. Meanwhile, Irish activists have used it to showcase Britain as an oppressor, and to downplay the Irish role in the transatlantic slave trade. Historians have come to debunk the myth in its entirety, in essence saying that it conflates White servitude with Black chattel slavery, when the two are vastly different systems of labor.
Seems many groups get a bite of this apple!
And, here might be a perfect opportunity to offer yet another view because White indentured servitude profoundly affected Black slavery. First, myth is entirely appropriate in this context, though not in the way most ordinarily think of the term. When people hear myth their immediate association is with a falsehood as opposed to a fact, even though that is not the original sense of the word. Facts are denotative truths. Myths are connotative truths. Facts are literal. Myths are metaphorical.
Myths always contain some essence, some essential kernel of truth, even if wrapped in an off-putting, bizarre package. This is the case with the myth of Irish slaves. The story usually begins with the reasonable-sounding statement: “The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.”8 However, there is no such proclamation in any recorded history of the British monarchy.
So, where’s the truth?
In 1688, after what is referred to as the “Glorious Revolution,” the Catholic monarch James VII/II was deposed by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, who reigned as co-monarchs, she until her death in 1694, he until his death in 1702. Britons who wanted to see James VII/II restored to the throne were known as Jacobites (from Jacobus, the Latin rendering of James). Jacobites, Irish priests, and political prisoners were some of the frequent targets of unscrupulous English authorities who captured or coerced them into transport to American colonies as forced indentured servants.9
A second assertion is that Irish slaves outnumbered African slaves. In early colonial Virginia and Massachusetts, White indentured servants far outnumbered anyone else.10 By 1640, there were fewer than one hundred Africans in Virginia, so there is every likelihood that Irish indentured servants did, indeed, outnumber Africans.
Of course, the major assertion of this myth is that White servitude is in some way equivalent to Black slavery. Here, the debunkers go too far to press their counterclaims.
The enslavement of Africans involved abductions, human sales at auctions, and lifelong forced labor in a system that defined humans as property and trapped the children of those slaves in the same bondage.11
Wait a minute! With the possible exception of hereditary status, White servitude, as I have shown above and continue to show below, involved abductions, human sales at auctions, and, in some cases, lifelong forced labor in a system that defined humans as property.
Those attempting to debunk the myth of Irish slavery paint an overly benign picture of White servitude, as did Shawn Pogatchnik, writing for the Associated Press recently: “Indentured servitude, while often accompanied by years of deprivation and exploitation, offered a usually voluntary means for impoverished British and Irish people to resettle in the Americas from the 17th century to the early 20th century. Contracts committed the servant to perform unpaid labor for a benefactor or employer for a fixed number of years in return for passage across the ocean, shelter and sustenance.”12
This makes it sound as though indentured servitude was a benevolent immigration program for lower-class British and Irish citizens seeking a better life in America. It was anything but that. White servitude was a brutal system of labor that served as a dry run for chattel slavery.
J. B. McMaster, in his study of White servitude, wrote, “They became in the eyes of the law a slave and in both the civil and the criminal code were classified with the Negro and the Indian.”13
Historian and philosopher John Fiske uses the language and imagery of myth to put forth the truths of White servitude:
Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an indented servant came to his death from prolonged ill-usage, or from excessive punishment, or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to get a verdict against the master. In those days of frequent flogging, the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less compunction than upon the purchased slave; and in general the condition of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the latter, save that the servitude of the negro was perpetual, while that of the white man was pretty sure to come to an end. For him, Pandora’s box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.14
To say that the brutality of White servitude rivaled that of Black slavery does nothing to demean or diminish the experience of Black Americans; it does not, in any way, whitewash or minimize the impact of slavery. In fact, understanding that White servitude was the template for slavery forged in a crucible of violence and inhumanity indicts neither the servant nor the slave, but instead the perpetrators of both systems.15
White servitude was a colonial-era dress rehearsal for Black slavery. A “historic proving ground,” wrote Lerone Bennett, Jr., for the monumental, and consequential, system to succeed it:
The plantation pass system, the fugitive slave law, the use of the overseer and the house servant and the Uncle Tom, the forced separation of parents and children on the auction block and the sexual exploitation of servant women, the whipping post, the slave chains, and the branding iron: all these mechanisms were tried out and perfected first on white men and white women. Masters also developed a theory of internal white racism and used the traditional Sambo and minstrel stereotypes to characterize white servants who were said to be good natured and faithful but biologically inferior and subject to laziness, immorality, and crime.16
“Rule, Britannia!” That rousing patriotic anthem once sung by millions across a colonial empire upon which the “sun never set” contains the following refrain, bellowed to clenched, pumping fists: “Rule, Britannia! Rule the waves: ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves.’” Though sung without the slightest hint of irony, here in America, land of the free, home of the brave, Britons, and many fellow Europeans working as White indentured servants, were certainly treated as de facto slaves from the seventeenth to the early part of the nineteenth century.
In some instances, even the façade between White servitude and White slavery dissolved. In 1609, Captain John Smith, famed explorer of North America, and savior of Jamestown, bartered Henry Spelman, a White servant, to the Powhatan tribe, in exchange for the native village of Powhatan (near present-day Richmond), whose acquisition Smith hoped would yield provisions needed for Jamestown to survive the coming winter. After rescue a year later, Spelman reported, “I was carried by Capt. Smith, our President, to ye Fales [falls on the James River south of Richmond], to ye litell Powhatan [the Powhatan chief’s son, also known as Parahunt], wher, vnknowne to me he sould me to him for a towne called Powhatan.”17
North, in Massachusetts, also established by the London-based Virginia Company, slavery evolved as part of the local penal system. A Massachusetts court in 1636 decreed that Chousop, “the Indian of Black Island was adjudged to be sent to the island and there kept as a slave for life to worke, unless we see further cause.”18 Slavery sentences were handed down to White servants in a number of cases: In October 1638, to John Hazlewood for breaking and entry.19 In December 1638, to William Andrews for assaulting his master.20 On that same day, to Giles Player for breaking and entry, and theft.21 In June 1640, to Thomas Savory for breaking and entry.22 Later that same year to Jonathan Hatch.23 And, in 1641, Marmaduke Barton, by some accounts a forebearer of philanthropist Clara Barton, was “condemned to slavery and to be branded.”24
In 1659, a Massachusetts court, for the last time, attempted to impose a sentence of slavery, this time on the Southwicke family for being Quakers. The court empowered treasurers in the counties where the Southwickes resided, “to sell said persons to any of the English nation at Virginia or Barbadoes.” But no one arose to carry them to Virginia or Barbados for sale.25
Notwithstanding the fascination and taboo surrounding White slavery in America, the colonial world that Anthony and Isabella were thrust into in 1619 was, at best, in flux if not really in chaos. Slavery was not a fait accompli. Servitude was fast changing. The first plantations were just starting up. And, the Virginia Company, the ultimate lords of the manor, was failing. All of which did not bode well for our couple. Still, at the moment they arrived there was no colonial legal or social framework for slavery. That was yet to come. There was a legal and social framework for servitude. But it was still evolving, too.
Purchased by Captain William Tucker, put to work on his newly founded plantation, Anthony and Isabella, and their malungu aboard the White Lion, were dropped into the only social and legal status that existed at the time, indentured servitude, giving the laws and customs of the colony time to catch up to the demands and desires of the planters that came with the introduction of Africans into the labor market. It would take several decades for the laws of the land to align with the practices of the plantation.
In the meantime, plantations grew, and with them the amount of tobacco produced for export. Virginia growers had need for more than just field hands to plant, tend, and harvest the crop. Farm buildings for drying, curing, and storing tobacco were needed. So, too, the racks and other equipment located inside these buildings. Hogsheads, the large barrels used to transport and store tobacco, also needed construction. From making clothes for servants to making food for them, however meager the fabric or fare, the larger the plantation, the larger the support operation it required. Labor needs abounded, and many of those needs were for skilled labor.
Planters first looked to White indentured servants for skilled labor. And they were reluctant to let indentured servants go, even at the end of their indentures. Fraud by the planters was common. Trumped-up charges and false accusations leveled at indentured servants led to planters claiming the right to break contracts and unilaterally extend the length of a servant’s term. Sometimes a year or two was added to an indenture. In the case of Black indentured servants, especially, many years might be added, and sometimes, indentures might be extended indefinitely. Indefinite indentures strayed just shy of slavery. Because the colonies operated under English common law, one right that separated even indefinite indentured servants from slaves was the right to petition a court for a ruling against their masters. A tricky matter, at best, because most judges were planters who also held servants or slaves, and most juries, if they were impaneled, were peopled not with peers but with planters, or at least property owners.
Indentured servants, White and Black, knew of these shifting demands of planters. Not only did they experience them firsthand while at work on the plantation, but also, they learned of these changes coming in county courts, where many of them, no doubt, received their legal education.
Those days when county courts met were considered holidays for all strata of colonial Virginian society. The following description, though tinged with gratuitous racism, captures the essence of “court-day,” as it was known:
The county courts were not only a training-school for statesmen, but were also incidentally an agency for the education of the people. Court-day was a holiday for all the country-side, especially in the fall and spring. From all directions came in the people on horseback, in wagons, and afoot. On the court-house green assembled, in indiscriminate confusion, people of all classes, the hunter from the backwoods, the owner of a few acres, the grand proprietor, and the grinning, needless negro.26
Some Black observers of court-day may well have been grinning, at least prior to the end of the seventeenth century, because they were learning how to mount a legal challenge to their bondage, knowing the court would likely entertain their plea. These were direct affronts to the colonial system of White power and wealth.
Take Corven v. Lucas, the June 1675 case of Black indentured servant Phillip Corven, cited earlier, who petitioned the Virginia General Court for his freedom dues as well as his freedom and won.27
In 1655, a twenty-five-year-old single mother, Elizabeth Key, engaged in an even tougher legal battle than Phillip Corven to win her freedom from permanent servitude and that of her infant son,28 John. Her story, though long, is filled with drama and intrigue, and well worth the telling.
Elizabeth Key was born in 1630, to an Englishman, Thomas Key, and an African mother who worked for him as a servant. Elizabeth’s mother, whose name has been lost, was one of the first Africans in Virginia.29
Thomas Key arrived in Virginia aboard the Prosperous in 1619, just a few weeks prior to Anthony and Isabella’s arrival. His first wife, Sarah, died, not long after her arrival in Virginia aboard the Truelove in 1622. In 1628, he married a second time, to Martha, herself an ancient planter, vaulting Key into the ranks of prominent colonial Virginia families.30 Key served one session, 1629 to 1630, in the Virginia General Assembly (House of Burgesses) as a representative from Denbigh (near Newport News). His relationship with Elizabeth’s African mother began during the early years of his marriage to Martha. At age forty-one, in 1636, Thomas Key died in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, where Martha owned a substantial tract of land.31
Before his death and as part of his preparation to return to England with his wife, in 1636, Thomas Key wrote and signed a memorandum before prominent Northumberland County colonist Humphrey Higginson, that Elizabeth would be transferred as a servant to his care for a period of nine years, at which point she would be free.32 The memorandum further stipulated that Higginson should clothe and feed Elizabeth during her nine years with him, and that should he travel back to England to live, he would pay for her passage, and carry Elizabeth with him as well. Finally, Higginson agreed he would not sell, barter, or transfer Elizabeth to anyone else.
At Elizabeth Key’s first trial for her freedom before the Northumberland County Court jury, on January 20, 1656, Anne Clarke, thirty-nine, witness to the signing of the memorandum between Key and Higginson in 1636, testified that “mr Higginson promised to use her well as if shee were his own Child.”33
As noted, Thomas Key died in 1636 before he could leave for England, and Elizabeth Key was transferred to Humphrey Higginson’s custody. Anthony Lenton, forty-one, a servant to Higginson at the time and also a witness at the first trial, testified that “mr Higginson said that at the nine yeares end hee would carry the said Moletto [Elizabeth Key] to England and give her a portion [a part of the estate] and let her shift [assume responsibility] for her selfe. And it was a Common report amongst the Neighbours that the said Molletto was mr Kays Child begott by him.”
Higginson did move back to England, only he did not take Elizabeth Key with him, and through a series of undocumented events, she passed into the possession and control of Colonel John Mottrom, a Northumberland County justice of the peace. Her nine years of service would have expired in 1645, but Mottrom did not release her; instead he appeared intent on keeping her under his authority for life (most likely for an indefinite period of indenture).
When Mottrom died in 1655, his estate inventory included “Elizabeth the Negro woman & her sonne.” Sometime prior to Mottrom’s death, Elizabeth Key had become romantically involved with William Greenstead (Greensted, Grinsted, Grimstead; the spelling varies in the records), a young lawyer apparently also under indenture to Mottrom as a servant, whom Mottrom used for legal representation. Together they had two children. One son, John, survived.
At Mottrom’s death, William Greenstead took up Elizabeth Key’s case in the Northumberland County Court against the administrators of Mottrom’s estate, who’d classified her as a slave, and were prepared to dispose of her as such. Through her lover, Key pleaded three legal theories: (1) she was the daughter of a free Englishman, whose status she inherited; (2) she was a baptized and practicing Christian, who could therefore not be held in perpetual servitude; and (3) she had been already held to a term of service beyond the initial nine years agreed upon in the memorandum between Key and Higginson. The third was a common pleading of indentured servants seeking remedy from their masters. Phillip Corven used it as part of his successful plea. The second had been tested with limited success in the case of other Africans seeking release from lifetime servitude. But the first pleading, Key’s English parentage, had never been heard in a colonial Virginia court before. Combining all three was a masterful stroke, though some dispute whether William Greenstead was even educated,34 much less an attorney at law, and the legal tactics may have been drawn up by Elizabeth Key herself, from time spent at court-days.
At any rate, testimony in the case began on January 19, 1656, and continued through the next day. A jury was impaneled by the Northumberland County Court to hear Elizabeth Key’s pleadings, with Justice Nicholas Morris presiding.35
The plaintiffs called several witnesses, who, combined, testified that Thomas Key was Elizabeth Key’s father; that a fine had been imposed on him for fathering her; and, that Thomas Key had made arrangements for only a nine-year period of servitude with Humphrey Higginson. The defense called only one or two witnesses. Nicholas Jurnew, fifty-three, swore under oath that “a Turke” had actually impregnated Elizabeth Key’s mother. Elizabeth Newman, eighty, may have been recalled by the defense to testify that the plaintiff’s counsel, William Greenstead, and the plaintiff had two children together, as a means of impugning Greenstead and his vigorous pursuit of this case. The jury returned its verdict that same day:
Wee whose names are underwritted being impannelled upon a Jury to try a difference between Elizabeth pretended Slave to the Estate of Col. John Mottrom deceased and the overseers of the said Estate doe finde that the said Elizabeth ought to be free as by several oaths might appeare which we desire might be Recorded and that the charges of Court be paid out of the said Estate.36
Key’s victory, however, was short-lived, as the administrators of Mottrom’s estate immediately appealed to the General Court in Jamestown. This appeals court heard the case on March 12, 1656, and though the records have been lost, the verdict was clear: the appellate court ruled against Elizabeth Key.
Elizabeth Key, however, did not give up. She appealed the appellate court’s verdict to the colony’s supreme court, in this case the Virginia General Assembly, which because of the significance of the matters at hand—progeny, religion, and the status of mixed-race offspring—agreed to hear her appeal. On July 21, 1656, a committee from the General Assembly issued its findings.
On the matter of whether Elizabeth Key was the daughter of Thomas Key, an Englishman, the General Assembly found, “[i]t appeareth to us that shee is the daughter of Thomas Key by several Evidences and by a fine imposed upon the said Thomas for getting her mother with Child of the said Thomas.”37
On the matter of whether by virtue of being a child of Thomas Key, Elizabeth Key was herself free, the General Assembly found, “by the Comon Law the Child of a Woman slave begott by a freeman ought to bee free.”38
This was the first bombshell finding.
The common law cited here by the General Assembly was English common law, upon which the colonial legal system rested. And within English common law, several centuries of rulings had established that the status of a child—whether villein (in bondage) or free—followed the status of the father. The General Assembly found in Elizabeth Key’s favor, on that basis, since there were, at the time of her pleadings, no colonial laws to the contrary.
Just think about what this ruling meant for all of colonial America, in the middle of the seventeenth century, on the verge of establishing a system of slavery: any child born of a master forcing himself on a female slave would at birth be free. This would have completely disrupted the colonial system of power and wealth based on Black lives by offering mixed-race offspring a path beyond slavery.
On the matter of whether Elizabeth Key was a Christian, the General Assembly found, “shee hath bin long since Christened.”39
This was the second bombshell finding.
A widespread belief at that time was that Christians holding other Christians in slavery went against core biblical teachings. Again, think about what this ruling meant for a system of slavery. Most slaves during the seventeenth century came from the Angola-Congo region of Africa, where Christianity had long been practiced, and most arrived in Virginia already baptized, already Christians. Those who were not Christian upon arrival mostly converted to Christianity, and many had their children baptized. This ruling also would have completely disrupted the colonial system of power and wealth based on Black lives by affording slaves freedom based on conversion to Christianity.
On the matter of whether Elizabeth Key was bound to Humphrey Higginson for only a term of nine years, the General Assembly found, “Thomas Key sould her only for nine years to Col. Higginson with several conditions to use her more Respectfully then a Comon servant or slave.
“For theise Reasons,” the General Assembly concluded, “wee conceive that the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corne and Cloathes [freedom dues] and give her satisfaction for the time shee hath served longer then Shee ought to have done.”
But these conclusions were only the opinion of the General Assembly, which did not hand down a verdict. Instead, it referred the case back to the Northumberland County Court. This time the administrators of Mottrom’s estate must have realized they stood little chance of satisfaction. They offered no further causes of action. So, on that same day, July 21, 1656, the Northumberland County Court ruled,
Whereas the whole business concerning Elizabeth Key by Order of Assembly [the Supreme Court] was Referred to this County Court. According to the Report of a Committee at an Assembly held at the same time which upon the Records of this County appears, It is the judgement of this Court that the Said Elizabeth Key ought to be free and forthwith have Corne Clothes and Satisfaction according to the said Report of the Committee.40
Also, on that day, Elizabeth Key and William Greenstead had the Northumberland County justice of the peace post a notice of their intention to marry.
While July 21, 1656, must have been a very good day for this couple, it was a jarring wake-up call for the colonial architects of slavery. English common law, as Elizabeth Key’s case so clearly demonstrated, contained two major loopholes that demanded closure for slavery to take root as the basis of wealth and power in colonial America. If Black lives were to matter in creating White wealth, then a system of White power was also required to circumscribe and control those Black lives.