With the consolidation of a slave society in the Chesapeake, planters filled the law books with measures enhancing the master’s power over his human property and restricting blacks’ access to freedom. Violence lay at the heart of the slave system. Even a planter like Landon Carter, who prided himself on his concern for the well-being of his slaves, noted casually in his diary, “they have been severely whipped day by day.”
Race took on more and more importance as a line of social division. Whites increasingly considered free blacks dangerous and undesirable. Free blacks lost the right to employ white servants and to bear arms, were subjected to special taxes, and could be punished for striking a white person, regardless of the cause. In 1723, Virginia revoked the voting privileges of property-owning free blacks. When the Lords of Trade in London asked Virginia’s governor to justify discriminating among “freemen, merely upon account of their complexion,” he responded that “a distinction ought to be made between their offspring and the descendants of an Englishman, with whom they never were to be accounted equal.” Because Virginia law required that freed slaves be sent out of the colony, free blacks remained only a tiny part of the population—less than 4 percent in 1750. “Free” and “white” had become virtually identical.