White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

Husbanding fertile women remained central to colonial concepts of class and property. This dictate became even more fixed as Virginians began to regulate the offspring of slave women. In a law passed in 1662, a slave was defined not only by place of origin, or as a heathen, but also for being born to an enslaved woman. In the wording of the statute, a law without any British precedent, “condition of the mother” determined whether a child was slave or free. It was Roman law that provided the basis for treating slave children as the property of masters; the English law of bastardy served as a model for children following the condition of the mother. It was the case that a slave followed the condition of the mother as far back as Saint Thomas Aquinas. The analogy Aquinas used associated the womb with the land: if a man visited the island of another man, and sowed his seed in another man’s land, the owner still had a right to the produce. The 1662 Virginia law could as easily have been based on a breeder’s model: the calves of the cow were the property of the owner, even if the male bull belonged to someone else.