Previous to 1699, the prices at which negroes were held was not increased by a duty on those who were imported. A law, however, was passed in that year, imposing a tax of twenty shillings a head upon each slave introduced into the Colony, to be paid by the master of the ship in which he had been conveyed; and if there was an effort to evade this charge, by landing the negroes without the warrant which had been prescribed in this case, they were to be forfeited and sold for the public benefit. It was stated that the object of this provision was to swell the fund that was required to meet the expense of the erection of a new capitol, the old one having been recently destroyed by fire. There could have been no intention to discourage the introduction of slaves alone, as a duty was also laid upon the white servants brought into Virginia at this time. No tax of this character would have been imposed if the demand for labor in the Colony upon the threshold of the eighteenth century had been as pressing as it had been during so large a part of the seventeenth.[1]
It has already been mentioned that the negro in the seventeenth century was thought to occupy a position in the human family very little removed from that of the ordinary brute. It is interesting to observe the various obstructions, legal as well as moral, which arose when the question of Christianizing him came to be settled. The attitude of many of the planters in the English Colonies in that age towards the moral elevation of the slave through the agency of the church was expressed in the reply of a lady of Barbadoes to Godwyn, the author of the Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate — a work of unusual
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, Vol. III, p. 193.
of negroes in the two counties on the Eastern Shore did not differ substantially from the prices prevailing elsewhere in the Colony.
