Elizabeth Key Grinstead: The Origin of Partus Sequitur Ventrem

Her Fight for Freedom Led to Massive Retaliation

Elizabeth Key Grinstead — Alchetron, the free social encyclopedia

Elizabeth Key was born in 1630 in Warwick County, Virginia. Her mother was an indentured African woman; her father was the plantation owner Thomas Key. Key was an important member of the House of Burgess, the equivalent of today’s state legislature. Key and his white wife were recipients of land grants from the Virginia Company of London that colonized much of the east coast of North America. Ancient planters were given 100 acres if they agreed to come in person to settle Virginia lands and stay there for three years. The desire to double their land is how Key and his wife stayed on separate estates.

Thomas Key saw no need to be lonely while his wife was across the James River in Wight County. He raped his indentured servant, ultimately producing the child Elizabeth.

British law was strict about not wanting the state to be responsible for the care of children. Thomas Key was charged in court with being Elizabeth’s father. Key denied the charge, blaming an unknown Turk, but witnesses provided enough evidence to implicate Key. He ultimately admitted to being the father, arranged for the now six-year-old Elizabeth to be baptized in the colonial Church of England, and arranged for her to become an apprentice under a nine-year indenture contract. When Elizabeth came of age at 15, she would be free.

Thomas Key intended for Humphrey Higginson to be Elizabeth’s guardian. Higginson promised Key that he would take the girl with him if he returned to England. Higginson did return to London, instead selling her contract to Col. John Mottram, the first Anglo-European settler in Northumberland County. Mottram ignored the terms of Elizabeth’s contract, and she continued as a servant past age 15.

When Elizabeth was twenty, she met 16-year-old William Grinstead, one of twenty indentured servants who Mottram paid passage for from England to gain their headrights, allowing him an additional 50 acres per person. Grinstead, already a lawyer, was to serve a six-year term of indenture. Grinstead met Elizabeth; they became a couple and had a son, John Grinstead. They were not allowed to marry until William Grinstead completed his contract.

When Col. Mottram died in 1655, the overseers of his estate classified Elizabeth and her son John as enslaved people and part of the estate. Elizabeth had now been a servant for 19 years, long past her original nine-year term. William Grinstead acted as her lawyer, suing the estate for her and their son’s freedom. Grinstead produced multiple witnesses that Elizabeth was the daughter of a “free white man” and was, therefore, born free. As her son’s father was also a “free white man” and born to a free man and woman, he was also free. Their claim rested on proving Elizabeth’s paternity, which they did.

According to British law, the court found that Elizabeth’s paternity was established and granted her freedom and her son. The estate appealed to the higher general court based on the fact that Elizabeth’s mother was “a Negro.” The ruling was overturned, and Elizabeth and her child were declared slaves. Grinstead appealed that ruling to the Virginia General Assembly, which sent the case back to the courts for retrial. Elizabeth won her freedom based on English common law; the father’s status determined the child’s status. Her father was a free Englishman, and she was a practicing Christian. After Grinstead completed his indentured servitude in 1656, he married Elizabeth, one of the first recorded marriages in America between a free white man and a free Black woman.

William Grinstead died in 1661, not before having another son with Elizabeth, William II. Elizabeth later married widower John Pearce and inherited 500 acres of Virginia land upon his death,

Virginia plantation owners didn’t like the precedent set by losing to a Black woman in court. Worse still was the idea that they couldn’t simply extend the indentured servant contracts of their Black laborers as they routinely did, with or without cause. The economic model was beginning to shift from indentured servitude to enslavement of Black people, though the full-scale shift wouldn’t happen until after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.

In December 1662, the Virginia House of Burgess passed the first partus sequitur ventrem law in America, requiring children born to assume the mother’s status. This was the opposite of English common law, where social status was conferred by the father who was responsible for the care of his children, as Thomas Key found out. The new law absolved white fathers from the financial responsibility for their children, effectively legalizing the rape of Black women without consequence. The other American colonies quickly adopted partus sequitur ventrem as well as some European colonies. All this because Elizabeth Key Grinstead won her freedom in a Virginia court.