[Footnote 1:  Hening:  Statutes, I, 146.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., I, 552.]

Thus did Virginia pave the way, and more and more slave codes took on some degree of definiteness and uniformity.  Very important was the act of 1705, which provided that a slave might be inventoried as real estate.  As property henceforth there was nothing to prevent his being separated from his family.  Before the law he was no longer a person but a thing.

2. 737 The Indian, the Mulatto, and the Free Negro

All along, it is to be observed, the problem of the Negro was complicated by that of the Indian.  At first there was a feeling that Indians were to be treated not as Negroes but as on the same basis as Englishmen.  An act in Virginia of 1661-2 summed up this feeling in the provision that they were not to be sold as servants for any longer time than English people of the same age, and injuries done to them were to be duly remedied by the laws of England.  About the same time a Powhatan Indian sold for life was ordered to be set free.  An interesting enactment of 1670 attempted to give the Indian an intermediate status between that of the Englishman and the Negro slave, as “servants not being Christians, imported into the colony by shipping” (i.e., Negroes) were to be slaves for their lives, but those that came by land were to serve “if boys or girls until thirty years of age; if men or women, twelve years and no longer.”  All such legislation, however, was radically changed as a result of Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, in which the aid of the natives was invoked against the English governor.  Henceforth Indians taken in war became the slaves for life of their captors.  An elaborate act of 1682 summed up the new status, and Indians sold by other Indians were to be “adjudged, deemed, and taken to be slaves, to all intents and purposes, any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.”  Indian women were to be “tithables,"[1] and they were required to pay levies just as Negro women.  From this time forth enactments generally included Indians along with Negroes, but of course the laws placed on the statute books did not always bear close relation to what was actually enforced, and in general the Indian was destined to be a vanishing rather than a growing problem.  Very early in the eighteenth century, in connection with the wars between the English and the Spanish in Florida, hundreds of Indians were shipped to the West Indies and some to New England.  Massachusetts in 1712 prohibited such importation, as the Indians were “malicious, surly, and very ungovernable,” and she was followed to similar effect by Pennsylvania in 1712, by New Hampshire in 1714, and by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1715.