A further process of enslavement was connected with questions of birth. By the recognized common law of nations, the civil law, and the Jewish law, the children of a slave mother became at birth the property of the mother’s owner. Nobody thought of the children of slaves being free. Yet, to make certainty doubly sure, the colonial laws from time to time considered the matter and declared the common law a part of colonial legislation.[721] South Carolina, for example, by an act of 1712,[722] repeated in 1722,[723] and 1735,[724] declared that, with the exception of certain individuals freed by the government, “all negroes, mulattoes, mustizoes, or Indians which at any time heretofore have been sold, or now are held or taken to be, or hereafter shall be bought and sold as slaves, are hereby declared slaves; and they and their children, are hereby made and declared slaves to all intents and purposes.” Another act of 1740, though worded differently, decreed a similar condition for the children of negro, mulatto, mustee and Indian slave mothers.[725] In 1705, Virginia similarly declared all children bond or free according to the condition of their mothers;[726] and, in 1723, decreed that children of female mulattoes or Indians obliged by law to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one should serve the master or mistress of such mulatto or Indian until they should attain the same age as that up to which the mother was obliged by law to serve.[727] A Maryland act of 1663 differs from the acts just mentioned by stating that “all children born of any negro or other slave, shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives.” Another section of this same act provides that “whatsoever freeborn woman shall intermarry with any slave, from and after the last day of the present assembly, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issue of such free-born woman, so married, shall be slaves as their fathers were.”[728] Though the law was of brief duration, persons born of the union between slaves and free white women, and the descendants of such persons, were held in slavery down to 1791, when the highest court of the state decided that for want of proof concerning the white woman who originally married a slave, her descendants were not slaves, and could not be legally held as such.[729] A later Maryland act, June 2, 1692, provided that all children born or thereafter to be born of slaves within the province were to be slaves for the term of their natural lives.[730] Nothing is said in the act of children one of whose parents was free. The act was repealed in 1715.[731] New York, on its own part, in 1706, decreed that any negro, Indian, mulatto or mustee child should follow the condition of the mother and be esteemed a slave “to all intents and purposes whatsoever.”[732] Frequent incidental mention, also, is found in the documents of the time and in newspaper advertisements to slaves “born