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ABSTRACT In 1624, Parliament passed An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children. The Virginia General Assembly enacted a similar law in 1710. Those statutes treated the concealment of a nonmarital newborn's death as presumptive murder. The essay argues that colonial Virginians' main objective in enforcing these acts was to scare pregnant servants into revealing their condition so that their masters could extract additional service without pay. Convictions for concealment alone, and not willful murder, rarely, if ever, resulted in execution. Deterrence was achieved through show trials and the criminal process, mitigated by a liberal pardon policy. KEYWORDS: infanticide; indentured servitude; childbearing; common-law murder; colonial law
IN MAY 1715, the magistrates of Richmond County, on Virginia's Northern Neck, began an investigation of Margaret Richardson, an unmarried white servant rumored to have falsely denied her pregnancy, murdered her newborn daughter, and concealed the infant's body. A justice of the peace impaneled a coroner's jury to look into the allegations. Richardson led the jurors to the spot in a tobacco field where she had buried her child's body. Pointing to the shallow grave, she exclaimed, "There is my poor Babe." An enslaved person "put a hoe under it, and lifted the Child up dirt and all, and the Arms were extended up over it's head." The back of the child's head seemed to have suffered a blow, though the rough exhumation may have caused the damage. At a hearing before the county examining court, Richardson admitted that she had delivered her baby alone. She insisted, however, that the infant had been born dead. When asked why she had not reported the birth to anyone, Richardson replied, "I was a fool and knew no better." The Richmond County magistrates bound her over for trial at the court of oyer and terminer in Williamsburg "on Suspition of Murdering her Bastard Child."1
Richardson's confession of a clandestine birth and burial subjected her to prosecution for presumptive murder under Virginia's version of the English Infanticide Act of 1624. Officially entitled An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children,2 the Jacobean act of Parliament made the concealment of a newborn's death "almost conclusive evidence of the child's being murdered by the mother," a rule that,...