sentences:  According to laws in the slave colonies (later states), children were born into the social status of their mothers; thus, mixed-race children of white women were born free.Such free families of color tended to migrate to the frontier of Virginia and other Upper South colonies, and then west into Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee with white neighbors.In addition, during the first two decades after the Revolution, slaveholders freed thousands of slaves in the Upper South, inspired by revolutionary ideals.