So, less than a 100 years in the colonies, and already this substantial redefine:
It looks like cheating for the sake of letting the economic benefits of slavery roll on. But it may be one level more complicated. For we as primates, just like chimps or gorillas, have a very highly attuned cheat-detector mechanism. And at times we overperceive. So, perhaps a rule change to prevent someone from 'getting out of slavery' by pretending to convert to Christianity. Oh no, can't have that.
Wow, kind of this grandfather clause. Or this parent clause, slaves if their parents and country were not Christian . . at time of 'first purchase.'Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Kathleen Brown, University of North Carolina Press, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), 1996.
page 180:
" . . . Over the next few years, new restrictions lumped those Indians together with Africans into one legal category designated ‘negroes and other slaves.’ By 1682, the Assembly had decided that owners of Indian women ‘ought to pay levies in like manner as negroe women.’ Virginia planters also reiterated the prohibition on Africans and Indians escaping perpetual bondage by converting to Christianity. As of 1682, all servants ‘whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes and Indians’ were to be considered slaves if their parents and native country were not Christian at the time of their first purchase.[116] Built on an earlier legal foundation of racial differentiation that had been newly politicized by Bacon’s Rebellion, racism toward Africans and Indians swelled during the 1680s and 1690s. . . "
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[116] SAL [Statutes at Large], Feb. 20, 1677, II, 404; Nov. 10, 1682, II, 490, 492. [William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, 13 vols. (1823; facsimile reprint, Charlottesville, Va., 1969).]
It looks like cheating for the sake of letting the economic benefits of slavery roll on. But it may be one level more complicated. For we as primates, just like chimps or gorillas, have a very highly attuned cheat-detector mechanism. And at times we overperceive. So, perhaps a rule change to prevent someone from 'getting out of slavery' by pretending to convert to Christianity. Oh no, can't have that.