Phase Two. Codification. As colonial systems expanded across the Americas, enslavement shifted from practice to law. What had once been enforced through custom and violence was formalized through statutes, court rulings, and inherited status. By the late seventeenth century, slavery was increasingly defined as permanent, racial, and transferable by birth. African ancestry became a legal condition rather than a circumstance.
Colonial governments codified labor, movement, marriage, punishment, and property rights. Enslaved Africans were stripped of legal personhood, while freedom for Black people became restricted and conditional. Laws varied by colony, but their direction was consistent. Status followed bloodlines. Children inherited bondage. Escape no longer altered classification. Identity became assigned, recorded, and enforced.
Indigenous nations were pulled deeper into this system as European and later American expansion intensified. Treaties, land seizures, and survival pressures forced tribes to navigate slave economies imposed by colonial powers. Some Native nations resisted participation. Others adopted chattel slavery under coercion, economic pressure, or promises of political recognition. These decisions occurred within systems designed to limit Indigenous sovereignty.
Codification narrowed earlier possibilities. Where proximity once allowed shared labor, refuge, or informal belonging, law demanded rigid classification. African ancestry was separated from Indigenous identity in legal terms, even when families and communities told a different story. Written records began to override lived reality.
This phase marked the moment slavery became self perpetuating. The system reproduced itself through law, reshaping citizenship, land ownership, and recognition, and laying foundations for exclusion and erasure that followed.
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