Margaret (originally ) was born in the Kingdom of Ndongo (now Angola), around 1610, and was later baptized a Catholic. She was taken as a slave by the , which was plundered by the two
privateer ships, the
White Lion and the
Treasurer, the former of which brought her to
Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. By 1625, she came to be owned by Robert Sheppard, an English planter and
Burgess for
James City County. In 1630, she was convicted of
fornication after having sex with Hugh Davis, an Englishman; he himself was whipped in front of a crowd as punishment.
Marriage to John Graweere During her time as a slave in Virginia, she married
John Graweere, and had a child with him in 1635. This child legally became a slave of Sheppard, due to his mother being a slave. On Oct. 17th, 1640, she and Robert Sweat, the son of a member of the
Virginia General Assembly in
Jamestown, were convicted of fornication by
Francis Wyatt after she gave birth to a mixed-race child via Sweat. In response, Graweere petitioned for custody of their three year-old son Mihill from Sheppard in 1641, which he obtained. Margaret received thirty lashes at the
whipping post as punishment, while Sweat wore a white sheet in church as an alternative sentence, to show his humility and penance. Scholar
Sheryll Cashin suggested Sweat received a lighter punishment due to his class status, while anthropologist Jill E. Rowe posed that the authorities were not reacting to Margaret's fornication, but her
miscegenation with a white man, seeing it as a social ill.
Marriage to Robert Sweat and later life Margaret later married Sweat, having three more children with him. He did not purchase her or their children's freedom from slavery. She was later emancipated by Sheppard because of her old age, as she had become less useful to his family. She moved to Lawnes Creek Parish, where on October 10th, 1670, she was exempted from taxes due to her old age and poverty. ==Descendants==