rights of slaveholders, the colony passed laws to clarify the legal position. In 1692 the Maryland Assembly passed a law explicitly forbidding "miscegenation"—marriage between different races. It never controlled the abuse by white men of enslaved African women. State establishes perpetual slavery In 1664, under the governorship of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, the Assembly ruled that all enslaved people should be held in slavery for life, and that children of enslaved mothers should also be held in slavery for life. The 1664 Act read as follows: Be it enacted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Proprietary, by the advice and consent of the Upper and Lower House of this present General Assembly, that all negroes or other slaves already within the Province, and all negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the Province shall serve durante vita. And all children born of any negro or other slave shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives.Andrews, p. 192 In this way the institution of slavery in Maryland was made self-perpetuating, as the slaves had good enough health to reproduce. The numbers of slaves in Maryland was increased even more by continued imports up until 1808. By making slave status dependent on the mother, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, Maryland, like Virginia, abandoned the common law approach of England, in which the social status of children of English subjects depended on their father. In the colonies, children would take the status of their mothers and thus be born into slavery if their mothers were enslaved, regardless if their fathers were white, English and Christian, as many were. The wording of the 1664 Act suggests that Africans may not have been the only slaves in Maryland. Although there is no direct evidence of the enslavement of Native Americans, the reference to "negroes and other slaves" may imply that, as in Massachusetts, Virginia and the Carolinas, the colonists may have enslaved local Indians. Alternatively, the wording in the Act may have been intended to apply to slaves of African origin but of mixed-race ancestry. The early years included slaves who were African Creoles, descendants of African women and Portuguese men who worked at the slave ports. In addition, mixed-race children were born to slave women and white fathers. Numerous free families of color were formed during the colonial years by formal and informal