In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free (free people of color). Background Slavery was legal and practiced in every European colony in North America, at various points in history. Not all Africans who came to America were slaves; a few came even in the 17th century as free men, as sailors working on ships. In the early colonial years, some Africans came as indentured servants who were freed after a set period of years, as did many of the immigrants from Europe. Such servants became free when they completed their term of indenture; they were also eligible for headrights for land in the new colony in the Chesapeake Bay region, where indentured servants were more common. As early as 1678, a class of free black people existed in North America. Various groups contributed to the growth of the free Negro population: children born to colored free women (see Partus sequitur ventrem) mulatto children born to white indentured or free women mixed-race children born to free Native American women (the emancipation in the 1860s) freed slaves slaves who escaped from their enslavers As described above, descendants of free Blacks who were never enslaved Black labor was of economic importance in the export-oriented tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland, and in the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina. Between 1620 and 1780 about 287,000 slaves were imported into the Thirteen Colonies, or 5% of the more than six million slaves brought from Africa. The great majority of transported enslaved Africans were shipped to sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and slave numbers had to, and could be continually replenished to relatively low costs until the Slave Trade Act 1807. The life expectancy of slaves was much higher in the Thirteen Colonies than in Latin America, the Caribbean or Brazil. This, combined with a very high birth rate, meant that numbers of slaves grew rapidly, as the number of births exceeded the number of deaths, reaching nearly 4 million by the time of the 1860 United States Census. From 1770 until 1860 the rate of natural population growth among