John Punch (slave)

Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life.

For this reason, some historians consider Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies,"[4] and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake.

"[2] Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony,[5] and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.

[6] In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper suggesting that John Punch was a twelfth-generation great grandfather of U.S. President Barack Obama on his mother's side, based on historical and genealogical research and Y-DNA analysis.

On July 9, the Virginia Governor's Council, which served as the colony's highest court, sentenced both Europeans to extend their indenture terms by another four years each.

One called Victor, a Dutchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures, and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is expired by their said indentures in recompense of his loss sustained by their absence, and after that service to their said master is expired, to serve the colony for three whole years apiece.

[21]Historians have noted that John Punch ceased to be an indentured servant and was condemned to slavery, as he was sentenced to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life.

"[23] A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. said, "Thus, although he committed the same crime as the Dutchman and the Scotsman, John Punch, a black man, was sentenced to lifetime slavery.

"[24] Winthrop Jordan also described this court ruling as "the first definite indication of outright enslavement appears in Virginia ... the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.

"[25] Theodore W. Allen notes that the court's "being a negro" justification made no explicit reference to precedent in English or Virginia common law and suggests that the court members may have been aware of common law that held a Christian could not enslave a Christian (with Punch being presumed to be a non-Christian, unlike his accomplices), wary of the diplomatic friction that would come of enslaving Christian Europeans, and possibly hopeful of replicating the lifetime indentures of enslaved Africans held in the Caribbean and South American colonies.

"[29] Historians consider this difference in penalties to mark the case as one of the first to make a racial distinction between black and white indentured servants.

But Russell states that the "most reasonable explanation" was that the Dutchman and the Scot, being white, were given only four additional years on top of their remaining terms of indenture.

While researchers cannot definitively prove that Punch was the father of Bunch, he is the only known African man of that time and place who is a possible progenitor.

Due to some challenges by racially mixed children of Englishmen to being enslaved, in 1662, the Virginia colony incorporated the principle of partus sequitur ventrem into slave law.

[34] At the same time, this law meant that racially mixed children of white women were born into their mother's free status.

In September 1705, a man referred to by researchers as John Bunch III petitioned the General Court of Virginia for permission to publish banns for his marriage to Sarah Slayden, a white woman.

[35]: 29 In the early nineteenth century, racially mixed people of less than one-eighth African or Native American ancestry (equivalent to one great-grandparent) were considered legally white.

Many racially mixed people lived as whites in frontier areas, where they were treated following their community and fulfillment of citizen obligations.

Several members of the Bunch family from South Carolina were living in Detroit, Michigan, by the 1900 and 1910 censuses,[10] as a result of moving in the Great Migration.