Few doubts about the legal status of Virginia's blacks remained after the General Assembly — meeting in the new capital of Williamsburg in October 1705 — doubled down on the increasingly restrictive laws of the late 1600s by defining slaves as real estate.
But that didn't stop the town's unusually literate African-American population from finding ways to test their shackles.
Landmark slave laws. Spurred by a late-1600s boom in the number of blacks and mixed-race people — who made up more than a quarter of Virginia's population in 1700 — the elite landowners of the colony passed several milestone acts in October 1705 defining slavery and race in ways that shaped life indelibly until the Civil War.
"Just 30 years earlier, you could look at someone and tell if they were black or white. But by 1705, it was starting to become a real problem," former Colonial Williamsburg historian Taylor Stoermer says, describing the widespread social, legal and economic impact of a population change driven by Virginia's rapid shift toward black labor.
"So these laws were designed to address that problem by defining who was black and who was not, who was free and who was not, who was property and who was not — and who did and did not have the right to make decisions about their own lives. And if you were black, those new definitions didn't come down on your side."
"An act declaring the Negro, Mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion, to be real estate" had the most far-reaching impact, transforming people who had been regarded as servants for life into property, Stoermer says.
"An act regarding Servants and Slaves" spelled out many of the consequences of this distinction, decreeing that "All servants imported and brought into the Country … who were not Christians in their native Country … shall be accounted and be slaves."
In Article XXIV, it stripped slaves of the right to resist or defend themselves when being physically "corrected," then absolved the master or his agent of guilt if such a slave "shall happen to be killed in such correction … as if such incident had never happened."
"An act declaring who shall not bear office in this country" had tremendous impact, too, outlining in its last paragraphs a pioneering racial definition in which "the child, grandchild or great-grandchild of a Negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and be taken to be a mulatto."
"These laws were all passed during the same session," Stoermer says. "This is the generation that chooses slavery over servants — and that decision transformed life in Virginia."
Planting the seeds of freedom. Founded in 1760 by the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg postmaster William Hunter and an Anglo-American missionary group whose trustees included Hunter's long-time friend and fellow postmaster Benjamin Franklin, the Bray School for African-Americans was the first institution of its kind affiliated with an American college.
Originally located off Prince George Street a stone's throw from the college's Wren Yard, it touched and often transformed the lives of several hundred young black students over its 14 years, not only making them more useful and valuable as servants who could read and write but also imbuing some with an ambition and sense of self-worth that the school's founders and supporters hadn't intended.
Tutored by schoolmistress Ann Wager with the help of spelling books and slate pencils purchased by their masters, its best students are likely to have been more literate than many of the period's whites — and some are believed to have played roles in the founding of America's first African-American church about 16 years after the Bray School opened.
They also contributed to the town's notably large and well-educated slave population, whose character can be judged in part by the conspicuous number of newspaper ads describing runaways who could not only read and write — and forge passes when they had to — but also believed they had as much right to be free as any white person.
"In an urban environment like Williamsburg, it could be very beneficial to have literate slaves," College of William and Mary historian Julie Richter says, describing the motives of such residents as King's Arms Tavern owner Jane Vobe, who sent some of her young slaves to the school.
"But in addition to making them more valuable, it shaped their lives in ways that were very different and unusual — especially compared to the slaves in the surrounding countryside."
First black church. Sparked by a free black itinerant preacher known as Moses, a small flock of African-Americans living in and around Williamsburg began worshipping together in the mid-1770s, defiantly skirting the prohibitions against black assemblies by gathering clandestinely in the woods near outlying Green Spring Plantation.