[Footnote 13:  The substance of this paragraph is drawn mainly from the illuminating discussion of J.H.  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia (Johns Hopkins University Studies, XXXI, no. 3, Baltimore, 1913), pp. 24-35.]

Until after the middle of the century the laws did not discriminate in any way between the races.  The tax laws were an index of the situation.  The act of 1649, for example, confined the poll tax to male inhabitants of all sorts above sixteen years old.  But the act of 1658 added imported female negroes, along with Indian female servants; and this rating of negro women as men for tax purposes was continued thenceforward as a permanent practice.  A special act of 1668, indeed, gave sharp assertion to the policy of using taxation as a token of race distinction:  “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether negro women set free were still to be accompted tithable according to a former act, it is declared by this grand assembly that negro women, though permitted to enjoy their freedome yet ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English, and are still liable to the payment of taxes."[14]

[Footnote 14:  W.W.  Hening, Statutes at Large of Virginia, I, 361, 454; II, 267.]

As to slavery itself, the earliest laws giving it mention did not establish the institution but merely recognized it, first indirectly then directly, as in existence by force of custom.  The initial act of this series, passed in 1656, promised the Indian tribes that when they sent hostages the Virginians would not “use them as slaves."[15] The next, an act of 1660, removing impediments to trade by the Dutch and other foreigners, contemplated specifically their bringing in of “negro slaves."[16] The third, in the following year, enacted that if any white servants ran away in company with “any negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time,” the white fugitives must serve for the time of the negroes’ absence in addition to suffering the usual penalties on their own score.[17] A negro whose time of service could not be extended must needs have been a servant for life—­in other words a slave.  Then in 1662 it was enacted that “whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, ... all children born in this colony shall be bond or free only according to the condition of the mother."[18] Thus within six years from the first mention of slaves in the Virginia laws, slavery was definitely recognized and established as the hereditary legal status of such negroes and mulattoes as might be held therein.  Eighteen years more elapsed before a distinctive police law for slaves was enacted; but from 1680 onward the laws for their control were as definite and for the time being virtually as stringent as those which in the same period were being enacted in Barbados and Jamaica.

[Footnote 15:  Ibid., I, 396.]