The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

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ROFESSOR Alden T. Vaughan's recent note' on the blacks who arrived in Virginia between i6i9 and i630 has once again called attention to the origins of chattel slavery and racial prejudice in America. Using the few scraps of evidence which have survived from that decade, Vaughan suggests that the initial period of contact had profound implications for the development of white attitudes toward the blacks. As he admits, however, these bits and pieces of information serve only to tantalize the investigator; they do not, for example, reveal clearly how black's conversion to Christianity affected his status. A pair of court cases involving two blacks, man known only as Fernando2 and Elizabeth Key,3 sheds some light on the status of Christian blacks and on how that status deteriorated as result of hardening white attitudes. In addition, they provide few hints as to how some of the first laws defining slavery in Virginia came to be adopted by the General Assembly. Of Fernando nothing is known except that he was a slave for his life time, who sued for his freedom in the Lower Norfolk County Court