What made someone a "slave" on paper: four legal routes

SUMMARYWhat made someone a "slave" on paper: four legal routes [Connections: espionage peonage, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORD (war capture of the land's people)Captives from the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip's War (1675–76) were sold to the West Indies and Bermuda; the Carolina trade sold tens of thousands of Native people, 1670–1715 (Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 2002; verify range)

RECORD (captives renamed "slaves" by statute)Virginia, June 1676 (Bacon's Laws, Act I): "that all Indians taken in warr be held and accounted slaves dureing life" (Hening, vol. 2, p. 346). The law itself turns prisoners of war into "slaves."

LENS (WW9, Tito, Nov 5, 2026)"Prisoner of war, not slave." Read the held people as captives of a war on the land's people; the 1662 mother's-status law made the captivity hereditary: prisoners of a war that never officially ended. House style: prefer "captive" or "held" over "slave"; quote "slave" only when quoting the law

RECORD (birth)Virginia, 1662: children "shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother" (Hening 2:170; verify page)

RECORD (color presumption, the paper rewrite)Hudgins v. Wright, Virginia, 1806. Jackey Wright, who looked white, won freedom by proving her mother's line came from Indian women (Frances Mingo). As Ariela Gross sums up the ruling: "Indians were by default citizens of a free nation; Africans were by default members of an enslaved race." Status hung on which label a court accepted

RECORD (ships)The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database estimates about 388,000 Africans were landed directly in mainland North America, of 12.5 million shipped in all. The 1860 census counted about 4 million enslaved, so the great majority in 1860 were born here, not shipped (mainstream explains this as natural increase)

LENS (WW9)Most people held in 1860 were never "brought over"; they were born on this land and held by a paper status: mother's label, color presumption, and capture in war. The relabeling (Indian → negro) moved people from the "free by default" side to the "enslaved by default" side

KILLED"Killing legal = martial law." The 1669 Virginia act was ordinary peacetime law, not a wartime order; that makes it worse

SOURCEWikipedia, "Hudgins v. Wright" (citing Hening and Gross); Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database via PBS/ABH Museum; mixedracestudies.org (1662 act).