And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.

From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indigenous Americans. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.