Elizabeth Key Grinstead

Born in Warwick County, Virginia in 1630, Elizabeth Key was the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved black mother and a white English planter father, Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Before moving back to England in 1636, Thomas Key arranged for Elizabeth’s godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. The agreement stipulated that Higginson would be Elizabeth’s guardian, that she would be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen. Thomas Key died later that year and Higginson sold Elizabeth to Colonel John Mottram. She was required to serve another nine years before she would be freed.

Elizabeth remained with Colonel Mottram until 1650 when he brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. Under the English law of primogeniture, only the eldest son could inherit the father’s real property, so many younger sons crossed the Atlantic to seek their lives in the American colonies. During this time, William and Elizabeth fell in love and had a son together, John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture.

After Mottram’s death in 1655, Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom after the executors of her late master’s estate classified her and her infant son as Negroes and part of the property assets of the estate rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. By that time, she had already served as an indentured servant for nineteen years.

Her lawsuit was one of the earliest freedom suits in the American colonies filed by a person of African ancestry. With William acting as her lawyer, Elizabeth asked the court to free her based on an English law that stated that if a child’s father was a free man, then the child should be free. The court gave Elizabeth her freedom but the decision was later overturned by a higher court that ruled that she was a slave. She then appealed to Virginia’s General Assembly.

This excerpt is from the General Assembly’s report:

It appears to us that she is the daughter of Thomas Key by several Evidences… That she hath been by verdict of a Jury impaneled 20th January 1655 in the County of Northumberland found to be free by several oaths which the Jury desired might be Recorded. That by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to be free. That she hath been long since Christened… That Thomas Key sold her only for nine Years to Higginson with several conditions to use her more Respectfully than a Common servant or slave… For these Reasons we conceive the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corn and Clothes and give her satisfaction for the time she hath served longer than She ought to have done.

The committee sent the case back to the courts to be retried, and Elizabeth finally won her freedom in 1656. After winning the case, Elizabeth and William were married, and they had another son together, William II. William Grinstead died early in 1661. The widow Elizabeth Grinstead later remarried, to the widower John Parse. Upon his death, she and her sons John and William Grinstead II inherited 500 acres, helping to secure their future.

In 1662, Virginia reacted to lawsuits like Grinstead’s by passing a law to clarify the status of the children of women of African descent. This statute, the “Partus sequitur ventrem”, imposed lifetime hereditary bondage on Africans, and stated that a child would be “bond or free according to the condition of the mother,” rather than the father, as was the case in England.