Partus sequitur ventrem (L. "That which is born follows the womb"; also partus) was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of slave women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property. Children of white mothers were born free, even with a black father. The doctrine's most significant effect, however, was placing into chattel slavery all children born to slave women. Partus sequitur ventrem soon spread from the colony of Virginia to all of the Thirteen Colonies. As a function of the political economy of chattel slavery in Colonial America, the legalism of partus sequitur ventrem exempted the biological father from relationship toward children he fathered with slaves, and gave all rights in the children to the owner. The denial of paternity to slave children secured the owners' right to profit from exploiting the labour of children engendered, bred, and born into slavery. The doctrine also meant that multiracial children with white mothers were born free. Early generations of Free Negros in the American South were formed from unions between free working-class, usually mixed race women, and black men. Similar legal doctrines also derived from the civil law, operated in all the various European colonies in the Americas and Africa which were established by the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Dutch. History Background In 1619, a group of "twenty and odd" Negroes were landed in the Colony of Virginia, marking the beginning of the importation of Africans into England's colonies in continental North America. They had been captured from a Portuguese slaver, the Portuguese having begun the Atlantic slave trade a century earlier. During the colonial era, English colonial administration struggled to determine the status of the children born in the colonies, where their births were the product of a union between an English subject and a "foreigner", or entirely between foreigners. English common law mandated that the legal place or status of an English subject's children was based on that of their father as the head of the household, known as pater familias.