GALLERY LXXXV
The Hardening Line
Slavery in English America was not present at the start and inevitable after — it was built, statute by statute, over roughly seventy years, and you can watch the line between servant and slave harden in the law.
ON THE FLOOR
Charles Horton Cooley
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“You learned who you are by watching what other people reflected back at you. The mirror, it turns out, was people all along.”
ON THE FLOOR
Edward Soja
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“Space is not the stage the story happens on - it is one of the actors. Ask WHERE, and half the mystery answers itself.”
ON THE FLOOR
George Herbert Mead
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“The self is a conversation: the I speaking, the Me listening with everyone else's ears. You rehearse society every time you think.”
AM1-031 · The Hardening Line — Open the drawer
A printed indenture form from mid-seventeenth-century Virginia or Maryland, with spaces left blank for the servant's name, term length, and master's name—a standard legal template for binding European laborers to colonial masters.
AM1-032 · The Hardening Line — What is this thing?
A printed indenture form with manuscript entries binding an English laborer to service in Virginia for a fixed term, representing the legal instrument that governed bound labor before racial slavery became codified in colonial law.
AM1-033 · The Hardening Line — Read the source
A Virginia statute declaring that children born to enslaved mothers would themselves be enslaved for life, severing inheritance of status from the father's condition and making slavery heritable and racialized by law.
AM1-034 · The Hardening Line — Map it / time it
A bound compilation of Virginia colonial statutes that progressively redefined servitude, race, and heredity between 1662 and 1705, transforming English common law categories into racial slavery through legislative increments.
AM1-035 · The Hardening Line — Two sources disagree
A bound court register page from colonial Virginia recording a legal decision about the status and children of a mixed-race woman, exemplifying the moment when English law began codifying race-based slavery through statute rather than custom.
AM1-036 · The Hardening Line — State the claim
A colonial Virginia law establishing that children born to enslaved mothers inherit enslaved status, marking a legal shift from servitude as temporary to slavery as heritable and racialized.
AM1-037 · The Hardening Line — Take the other side
A land grant document awarding acreage to planters based on the number of laborers they imported, regardless of status. Headrights incentivized mass importation and created economic pressure to distinguish permanent from temporary labor.
AM1-038 · The Hardening Line — Weigh it
A legislative text establishing that children born to enslaved mothers inherit enslaved status for life, codifying racial slavery into law and marking a decisive legal break from prior servitude practices.
AM1-039 · The Hardening Line — Build the answer
A printed copy of Virginia colonial legislation defining the legal status of enslaved and indentured persons, marking the statutory moment when maternal condition determined lifelong bondage rather than term service.
AM1-040 · The Hardening Line — For the file
A legislative text establishing that children born to enslaved mothers would themselves be enslaved for life, severing hereditary slavery from African birth and making bondage transmissible through maternal line alone.
AM1-041 · The Hardening Line — Go and look
A bound court record from a colonial Virginia county, containing the statute and case entries that formalized lifetime servitude and hereditary bondage for people of African descent, marking the legal hardening of slavery in English America.
AM1-042 · The Hardening Line — Now, today
Thomas Jefferson's 1777 draft bill disestablishing the Anglican Church in Virginia, marked with legislative revisions that narrowed its protections. The document shows how statutory language can be deliberately constrained through amendment to exclude rather than include.
AM1-043 · The Hardening Line — Teach it back
A legislative act establishing that children born to enslaved mothers would themselves be enslaved for life, severing inheritance of status from the father and making slavery heritable and permanent rather than temporary servitude.
AM1-044 · The Hardening Line — The other place
The comprehensive legal code enacted by Barbados planters in 1661, establishing racial slavery through statute a generation before Virginia's hardening laws, demonstrating that the colonial pressure toward enslaved labour produced divergent legal timelines across English America.
AM1-045 · The Hardening Line — One object, close
A legislative act declaring that children born to enslaved mothers would themselves be enslaved for life, severing inheritance of status from paternal condition and making slavery heritable through the maternal line alone.
From the gallery’s own wall — “AM1-031 · The Hardening Line — Open the drawer”.
🎧 A moment to consider
What will you carry out of this room?