Slave Codes Quotes

“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.

...

The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019