A few were expressly described as servants for terms of years, and others were conceded property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution of slavery as elaborated in later times.

Some of the blacks were in fact liberated by the courts as having served out the terms fixed either by their indentures or by the custom of the country.

By the middle of the century several had become free landowners, and at least one of them owned a negro servant who went to court for his freedom but was denied it because he could not produce the indenture which he claimed to have possessed.
Nevertheless as early as the sixteen-forties the holders of negroes were falling into the custom of considering them, and on occasion selling them along with the issue of the females, as servants for life and perpetuity.
The fact that negroes not bound for a term were coming to be appraised as high as L30, while the most valuable white redemptioners were worth not above L15 shows also the tendency toward the crystallization of slavery before any statutory enactments declared its existence.[13] [Footnote 13: The substance of this paragraph is drawn mainly from the illuminating discussion of J.H.Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_ (Johns Hopkins University _Studies_, XXXI, no.

3, Baltimore, 1913), pp.
24-35.] Until after the middle of the century the laws did not discriminate in any way between the races.

The tax laws were an index of the situation.