Partus sequitur ventrem
[1] The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Key's successful lawsuit was based upon the circumstances of her birth: her English father was a member of the House of Burgesses; had acknowledged his paternity of Elizabeth, who was baptized as a Christian in the Church of England; and, before his death, had arranged a guardianship for her, by way of indentured servitude until she came of age.
At the death of the second owner of her indenture, his estate classified Elizabeth Key and her mixed-race son (who also had a white father, William Grinstead) as "Negro slaves" who were the personal property of the deceased.
With William acting as her attorney, Elizabeth sued the estate over her status, claiming that she was an indentured servant who had served past her term and that her son was thus freeborn.
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).
[2]As a direct result of freedom suits such as those filed by Elizabeth, the Virginian House of Burgesses passed the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, noting that "doubts have arisen whether children got by an Englishmen upon a negro woman should be slave or free".
[12] In summary, the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem functioned economically to provide a steady supply of slaves.
They were fathered by white planters, overseers, and other men with power, with enslaved women and girls who were also sometimes of mixed race.
[14] Martha Wayles's three-quarters white ("quadroon") half-brothers and half-sisters included the much younger Sally Hemings.
[15][16] Under Virginia law at the time, being seven-eighths European ("octoroon") would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white if they had been free.
Thomas Jefferson is documented as having been at Monticello each time Hemings conceived, and the historical evidence favors his paternity but there are other possible suspects such as his younger brother Randolph.
[18] Concerning the sexual hypocrisy related to whites and their sexual abuse of enslaved women, the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut said: This only I see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body's household, but those [Mulatto children] in her own [household], she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think ...[19]Likewise, in the Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863), Fanny Kemble, the English wife of an American planter, noted the immorality of white slaveholders who kept their mixed-race children enslaved.
1855) owned and operated by the African Methodist Episcopal church, most of the two hundred subscribed students were mixed-race, natural sons of the white men paying their tuition.
