Elizabeth Key Grinstead (or Greenstead) (c. 1630 or 1632 – 1665)[1][2][3] was one of the first Black people in the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win.
Key based her suit on the fact that her father was an Englishman who had acknowledged her and baptized her as a Christian in the American branch of the Church of England.
[1] Her mother was an indentured African woman, and her father was Thomas Key, an English planter and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, representing Warwick County, today's Newport News.
Thomas Key's legal white wife lived across the James River in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, where she owned considerable property.
Born in England, the Keys were considered pioneer planters as they had come to Virginia before 1616, remained for more than three years, paid their passage, and survived the Indian massacre of 1622.
In about 1650, Mottram paid for passage for a group of 20 young white English indentured servants to Coan Hall, his plantation in Northumberland County.
With William Grinstead acting as her attorney, Key sued the estate over her status, saying she was an indentured servant who had served past her term and that her son was thus freeborn.
According to Taunya Lovell Banks in the Akron Law Review, "subjecthood" rather than "citizenship" was more important for determining a person's social status in the young colony.
Because non-whites came to be denied civil rights as foreigners, mixed-race people seeking freedom often had to stress their English ancestry (and later, European).
In trying to establish whether Key's father was a free Englishman, the Court relied on the testimony of witnesses who knew the people in the case.
Mottram's estate appealed the decision to the General Court, which overturned it and ruled that Elizabeth was a slave because of her mother's status as Negro.
[5] The Assembly may also have been influenced by the reputation of Elizabeth's planter father, Thomas Key, who wanted to carry out his wishes after he had acknowledged his daughter.
Although Elizabeth Key won her court battle for freedom for her and her son John, she and Grinstead could not marry until he completed his indenture in 1656.
[6][8] As a result of the Elizabeth Key freedom suit (and similar challenges), in December 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a colonial law to clarify the status of children of women of Negro descent around "doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by an Englishmen upon a negro woman should be slave or free.
"[9][4] It required the children born in the colony to take the status of the mother, whether bond or free, using the principle of partus sequitur ventrum.
[5] But it also freed the white fathers from acknowledging the children as theirs, providing financial support, or arranging for apprenticeships, as they were required to do in England, or emancipating them.
Some white fathers did take an interest in their mixed-race children and passed on social capital, such as education or land; many others abandoned them.
After the American Revolutionary War, the new constitution counted enslaved people as only 3/5 persons in figuring apportionment for Congressional seats as a compromise between the slave states that wanted to obtain greater representation by counting enslaved people as whole persons and free states that feared being dominated by the South.