The Year: 1655
Born in Warwick County, Virginia, in 1630, Elizabeth Key was the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved black mother and a white planter father, Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. She spent the first five or six years of her life with her mother.
Africans in the Chesapeake
The scarce labor supply in colonial Virginia led the planter class to find ways to create a permanent laboring class. Indentured servants were eventually freed, which meant they had to be replaced.
The Africans possessed a key trait that their English counterparts lacked. They were much more resistant to hot-weather diseases. Northern Europeans, little used to heat, malaria, and other ailments, succumbed to infection and heatstroke far more often than Africans.
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia, they joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters weren't punished for beating them to death.
There was great confusion in early Virginia concerning the legal status of the new black immigrants. Some served their term of indenture, and then were freed. Some Africans were allowed to earn money, and some even bought, sold, and raised cattle, and used the proceeds from those activities to purchase their freedom.
When Elizabeth Key was about six, her father, before moving back to England, made arrangements for Elizabeth's godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. It stipulated that she be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen.
Thomas Key died in 1636, and Higginson sold Elizabeth to Colonel John Mottram, for whom she was required to serve another nine years before being released from bondage. Mottram took her to Northumberland County, where he built a plantation, Coan Hall.
In 1650, Mottram brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. William and Elizabeth fell in love.
After Mottram death in 1655, Elizabeth sued Mottram's estate for her freedom. After being classified as a Negro (who could be enslaved) by the executors of Mottram's estate, Elizabeth Key petitioned the court for her freedom. Her lawsuit was one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. By that time, she had already served as an indentured servant for nineteen years.
Elizabeth, with William acting as her lawyer, asked the court to free her based on an English law that stated that if a child’s father was a free man, then the child should be free. The court gave Elizabeth her freedom, but the decision was reversed by a higher court, which ruled that she was a slave.
This is an excerpt from Elizabeth's first trial:
We whose names are underwritten being impaneled upon a Jury to try a difference between Elizabeth pretended slave to the Estate of Colonel John Mottram deceased and the overseers of the said Estate do find that the said Elizabeth ought to be free…Unfortunately, the decision was later overturned by a higher court that ruled that Elizabeth was a slave, but she didn't stop there. She appealed to Virginia’s General Assembly. This excerpt is from the General Assembly’s report:
It appears to us that she is the daughter of Thomas Key by several Evidences….That she hath been by verdict of a Jury impaneled 20th January 1655 in the County of Northumberland found to be free by several oaths which the Jury desired might be Recorded. That by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to be free. That she hath been long since Christened…That Thomas Key sold her only for nine Years to Higginson with several conditions to use her more Respectfully than a Common servant or slave… For these Reasons we conceive the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corn and Clothes and give her satisfaction for the time she hath served longer than She ought to have done.The committee sent the case back to the courts to be retried, but Elizabeth finally won her freedom in 1656. After winning the case, Elizabeth and William were married, and they had two sons together, John and William.
In 1662, Virginia reacted to lawsuits like Elizabeth's by passing a law that imposed lifetime hereditary bondage on Africans, and stated that a child would be "bond or free according to the condition of the mother."
Whatever their origins, free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia seem to have formed a larger share of the total black population than at any other time during slavery. In some counties, perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s. And these free blacks interacted with their white neighbors basically as equals.
SOURCES
Africans in Court
Slave Counterpoint
From Slavery to Freedom
Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit
The Invention of the White Race
A Documentary History of Virginia
Free African Americans in Colonial America
