To answer Emily Rose's question, Christianity collided with slavery from the very beginning in Virginia. Here is a short excerpt from my book about GW and slavery: The Jamestown colonists put the blacks to work but shrank from making them slaves for life, which struck the English as a form of blasphemy. Many blacks became "Christian servants" for a set period of servitude and some were even set free by pious masters for accepting Christianity. For a brief time belief in Christ overpowered slavery, but the Virginia assembly began to tighten this religious loophole in 1667: "Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made free; It is enacted . . that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome." For a few more years Africans who had been baptized before arrival in Virginia could have the status of indentured servants, but the assembly finally closed off this loophole entirely in 1682 with a law proclaiming that, Christian or not, any "negroes, moors, mulattoes or Indians" imported to Virginia would be "slaves to all intents and purposes, any law, usage or custome to the contrary notwithstanding." Henry Wiencek