<P> There is evidence in the 1650s that some Virginia Negroes were serving for life . In 1660 the Assembly stated that "in case any English servant shall run away in company with any Negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time...(he) shall serve for the time of the said Negroes absence ." This statute indicates quite clearly that Negroes served for life and hence could not make "satisfaction" by serving longer once they were recaptured . This phrase gave legal status to the already existing practice of lifetime enslavement of Negroes . Statutes were soon passed to define slavery with more conditions than lifetime servitude . </P> <P> In 1660 Elizabeth Key won the first freedom suit in Virginia . She challenged being classified as a slave in a complicated case related to a lengthy indenture and an estate . The mixed - race woman, daughter of an African woman and English planter, argued that she was free due to her white English father who had acknowledged her as his daughter, had her baptized as a Christian, and tried to protect her by establishing a guardian and indentureship for her as a girl when he was dying . After this case, the colonial legislature adopted the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, saying that all children born in the colony would take the status of their mothers, regardless of paternity . Thus children born to enslaved mothers would be enslaved, regardless of their ethnicity or paternity . This was contrary to English common law for children of parents who are both English subjects, in which the child takes status from the father . But the law also meant that mixed - race children born to white women were born free, and many families of free African Americans were descended from unions between white women and ethnic African men during the colonial era . </P> <P> Increasingly toward the end of the 17th century, large numbers of slaves from Africa were brought by Dutch and English slave ships to the Virginia Colony, as well as to Maryland and other southern colonies . On the large tobacco plantations, planters used them as chattel (owned property) to replace indentured servants (who were obligated to work only for a set period of time) as field labor, as well as to serve as household and skilled workers . As slaves, the Africans were not working by mutual agreement, nor for a limited period of time . The labor - intensive tobacco and later cotton plantations of the South were dependent on slavery for profitability . </P> <P> Prior to the adoption of the doctrine partus sequitur ventrem (partus) in the English colonies in 1662, beginning in Virginia, English common law had held that among English subjects, a child's status was inherited from its father . The community could require the father to acknowledge illegitimate children and support them . Officials did not know how to treat children in the colony born to parents of whom one was not an English subject . In 1658, Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African descent to bring a freedom suit in the Virginia colony . She sought recognition as a free woman of color, rather than being classified as a Negro (African) and slave . Her natural father was an Englishman (and member of the House of Burgesses). He had acknowledged her, had her baptized as a Christian in the Church of England, and had arranged for her guardianship under an indenture before his death . </P>

Who published an account of his or her enslavement in the mid-eighteenth-century