Practice questions: Slavery in the British Colonies

Answer: (C) Courts punishing Africans more harshly than Europeans before Virginia's slave laws

1. Virginia passed its rule on a mother's condition in 1662, and the 1640 order dealt with Punch himself, not with a child.
2. The large shift to enslaved labor came after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, more than thirty years after this order.
3. The court added four years to the terms of the two European runaways and gave Punch a lifetime, decades before Virginia wrote slavery into statute.
4. Headrights went to whoever paid a migrant's passage, usually a planter, so they did not reward servants for finishing a term.

Answer: (A) Children of free English fathers seeking freedom under English common law

1. English common law passed status through the father, and Elizabeth Key won her freedom in 1656 partly because her father was a free Englishman.
2. Virginia answered the question of baptism separately, in a 1667 act declaring that baptism did not change a person's bondage or freedom.
3. Disputes over servants' terms were common, but the 1662 act settled the status of children at birth, not the length of an indenture.
4. Quarrels over the Dutch tobacco trade belonged to the Navigation Acts, which regulated shipping, not the legal status of children.

Answer: (B) She had been christened, so she ought to be free

1. The claim through a free father fell to the 1662 act, which made a child's status follow the mother instead.
2. The Assembly committee had cited Key's christening, and the 1667 act declared that baptism did not change a person's bondage or freedom.
3. A servant could still sue when an indenture ran out; Virginia's new laws targeted inherited status and baptism, not expired contracts.
4. Testimony about parentage was evidence, not a legal ground for freedom, and the 1667 act concerned baptism alone.

Answer: (D) Lawmakers drawing a strict racial line between free white colonists and others

1. Some Anglican leaders did urge conversion, but this act punished interracial marriage and set no rules for religious teaching.
2. The Toleration Act of 1689 dealt with Protestant worship in England, not with marriage or race in Virginia.
3. Assemblies did contest governors over taxes, but this act regulated marriage and freedom by race.
4. Along with the 1662 rule on mothers and the 1667 rule on baptism, the 1691 act banned marriage across racial lines and made freeing enslaved people harder.

Answer: (B) Rising wages in England that reduced the number of servants migrating

1. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 governed where tobacco was shipped, not who grew it.
2. As English wages rose, fewer people signed indentures, and Chesapeake planters bought more enslaved Africans to fill the gap.
3. European demand for tobacco kept growing, which raised planters' need for workers rather than lowering it.
4. The Puritan Great Migration ended around 1640 and brought families to New England, not workers to Virginia.

Answer: (D) Planters' growing reliance on enslaved Africans over servants

1. Virginia's House of Burgesses first met in 1619, more than fifty years before Bacon's Rebellion.
2. James II fell in 1688 because of English politics and religion, not because of unrest among Virginia's poor.
3. The 1646 treaty ended the last Anglo-Powhatan war, thirty years before Bacon's men attacked Native nations.
4. After Bacon's armed, landless followers burned Jamestown, many planters preferred enslaved workers who would not finish a term or demand land.

Answer: (C) Slavery was present in each region but concentrated in plantation colonies

1. Gradual emancipation began with Pennsylvania's law of 1780, three decades after these estimates.
2. The great majority of Africans sent to British America went to the Caribbean sugar islands, not to the mainland.
3. Even New England had enslaved residents, but the share rose sharply in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry, where export crops needed many workers.
4. South Carolina's plantations grew rice and indigo; tobacco was the main crop of Virginia and Maryland.

Answer: (A) A planter elite whose wealth and independence rested on enslaved labor

1. By the 1720s, great Virginia planters such as Byrd held large enslaved workforces, and the wealth those workers produced sustained the gentry's power.
2. Farms worked by family members were typical of New England, while great Chesapeake planters relied on enslaved workers.
3. Tobacco remained Virginia's main export; rice was the crop of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
4. By about 1700, enslaved Africans had replaced indentured servants as the main workers on Virginia's tobacco plantations.

Answer: (C) Large enslaved majorities living together on coastal rice plantations

1. South Carolina's 1740 Negro Act restricted enslaved people's gatherings and banned their drums.
2. Small holdings with a few enslaved people in the owner's household were typical of the North, not of the Lowcountry rice districts.
3. In the rice districts, enslaved people far outnumbered white colonists and lived in large communities, which helped them keep and reshape African music, language and customs.
4. Spanish Florida offered refuge to fugitives, but it did not shape the community life of people who remained on Carolina plantations.

Answer: (B) Virginia laws making slavery hereditary even for baptized Christians

1. The Navigation Acts regulated colonial trade and shipping, and they set no rules about who was enslaved or for how long.
2. Virginia's 1662 act passed slavery from mother to child, and its 1667 act declared that baptism freed no one.
3. Headrights rewarded planters for bringing in workers, but they did not define anyone's status or make it hereditary.
4. The Toleration Act of 1689 concerned Protestant worship in England and did not address slavery.

Answer: (D) the flight of enslaved people and the help others gave them

1. Colonial law protected enslavers' property, and owners could sell family members apart without a court's consent.
2. Notices like this were written to recapture runaways, not to argue about whether slavery should end.
3. Spain's offer drew fugitives mainly from Carolina and Georgia, far from the Virginia district where this notice ran.
4. Enslavers' notices often named the relatives and allies they suspected of hiding a runaway, which shows flight as resistance and the networks that supported it.

Answer: (A) Caribbean sugar colonies, where deaths outpaced births, took most captives

1. Sugar planters worked enslaved people so hard that deaths outnumbered births, so the islands kept buying new captives and received most of the trade.
2. Ships from Africa usually sold most captives in the Caribbean; the mainland received a small share of the trade.
3. Newport ships did carry rum to Africa, but that explains how traders bought captives, not why most were sold in the islands.
4. Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, long after this sale.

Answer: (C) Births among enslaved people in the mainland colonies outnumbering deaths

1. Some captives were shipped on from the islands, but most who landed in the Caribbean stayed there, where deaths outnumbered births.
2. Fugitives fled south from the British colonies to Spanish Florida, not north from it.
3. In the 1700s, births made the mainland's enslaved population grow alongside new arrivals, while on the sugar islands deaths outnumbered births.
4. Headrights rewarded imports, but the mainland received a small share of Atlantic arrivals, so imports alone cannot explain its growth.

Answer: (B) Spain's rivalry with Britain over the southeastern borderlands

1. Spain kept slavery in Florida and its other colonies; it freed fugitives from British colonies who became Catholic and served the Crown.
2. Spain welcomed fugitives to weaken the Carolina plantations and to strengthen St. Augustine's defenses with Black militiamen at Fort Mose.
3. Spanish Florida was a small military colony without large sugar plantations, and the fugitives it accepted were freed, not enslaved.
4. Spain and Britain were rivals in the Southeast and went to war in 1739, the year of the rising near the Stono River.

Answer: (D) The Stono Rebellion, in which enslaved men marched south toward Florida

1. Bacon's Rebellion took place in Virginia in 1676 and shaped Virginia's labor system, not South Carolina's 1740 law.
2. The New York trials followed a suspected plot in 1741, a year after South Carolina passed this act.
3. The Yamasee War of 1715 pitted Native nations against Carolina colonists, more than twenty years before this law.
4. Stono's rebels beat drums to call others to join them in 1739, and the next year lawmakers banned drums and limited gatherings.

Answer: (C) Colonies outside the South writing hereditary racial slavery into law

1. Gradual emancipation began in Pennsylvania in 1780, and New York did not pass such a law until 1799.
2. English common law traced status through the father, but this act made the mother's condition decide a child's status.
3. New York, like Virginia in 1662, made the children of enslaved mothers slaves, so hereditary slavery was law in the North too.
4. The same 1706 act declared that baptism did not free an enslaved person, as Virginia had in 1667.

Answer: (A) Laws that made a child's status follow the condition of the mother

1. Because a child's status followed the mother's, a baby born while Meg was enslaved would have belonged to her enslaver, so Smith bought her first.
2. Baptism laws kept converts enslaved, but they did not decide whether a newborn was free.
3. Limits on gatherings, like New York's 1702 law, aimed to stop group resistance and did not set a child's status at birth.
4. Virginia's 1691 law ordered freed people sent out of the colony, but it did not decide the status of a child at birth.

Answer: (B) The deadly labor regime on Caribbean sugar plantations

1. Spanish Florida offered refuge to fugitives, which made it a hope for enslaved people rather than a threat from an enslaver.
2. On the sugar islands, overwork and disease killed enslaved people faster than they were born, so mainland enslavers used the threat of sale there as a punishment.
3. New York's 1702 law limited gatherings in that colony and gave a Connecticut enslaver no power to send anyone away.
4. Connecticut did not pass its gradual emancipation law until 1784, more than twenty years after this threat.

Answer: (C) Massachusetts law allowed people to be enslaved as war captives or by sale

1. The law's exceptions covered war captives and people bought from traders, and slavery remained legal in Massachusetts until court rulings in the 1780s.
2. New England's small family farms used relatively few enslaved workers; large enslaved workforces belonged to southern plantations.
3. Massachusetts became the first mainland English colony to give slavery legal recognition, permitting it for war captives and people bought from traders.
4. A Salem ship brought enslaved Africans from the West Indies in 1638, and New England merchants took part in the Atlantic slave trade.

Answer: (D) A 1705 law forbidding masters to whip white Christian servants naked

1. The Punch ruling came in 1640, decades before Bacon's Rebellion, so it cannot show how planters reacted to that uprising.
2. Berkeley's 1671 count describes Virginia before the shift to enslaved labor, not the planters' later choices.
3. Stono was a revolt by enslaved people in South Carolina, not evidence of how Virginia's elite managed poor whites.
4. By giving white servants protections that enslaved Black people did not have, the 1705 code drew poor whites to the planters' side of a racial line.

Answer: (A) a restatement of a rule Virginia had first adopted in the 1660s

1. Virginia first made a child's status follow the mother's in 1662, and the 1705 code gathered that rule and others into one slave code.
2. The Stono Rebellion took place in 1739, more than thirty years after this code.
3. The 1662 act already made the mother's condition decide a child's status, so the 1705 code continued that rule.
4. The petition to the Bishop of London came in 1723, after this code, and it protested hereditary slavery rather than winning it.

Answer: (B) kept enslaved workers under an overseer's direct control all day

1. By about 1700, enslaved Africans had replaced servants as the main workers on Chesapeake tobacco farms.
2. Gang workers labored in supervised groups from sunrise to sunset, while task workers could sometimes use the time left after finishing a set job.
3. Neither system gave enslaved people legal ownership of property, though task workers sometimes sold what they raised in their own time.
4. Tobacco needed constant planting, weeding, topping and curing, which is why Chesapeake planters wanted so many workers.

Answer: (D) Their status varied, and some gained freedom and owned land

1. Virginia had no statute on slavery until the 1660s, when the 1662 act made a child's status follow the mother's.
2. Virginia grew tobacco; rice became the main crop of South Carolina's Lowcountry later in the century.
3. Headrights went to whoever paid a migrant's passage, not to workers who finished their service.
4. Before Virginia's laws hardened, some Africans were held for life while others, such as Anthony Johnson, became free and owned land.

Answer: (A) was an individual escape rather than an armed revolt by a group

1. Running away was a common form of resistance by individuals, while the Stono rebels seized guns and marched as an armed group.
2. South Carolina passed the Negro Act in 1740 after the Stono Rebellion, not because of a 1738 escape in Virginia.
3. Fort Mose attracted fugitives mainly from neighboring Carolina, far to the south of Virginia.
4. No colony required enslavers to sell freedom; self-purchase, like Venture Smith's, needed an enslaver's consent.