The African was totally devoid of the power to resist, and was easily and permanently subdued by the exercise of force. There was a growing demand for labor in the New World, and thither he was drawn without opposition on his part, to become in time the mudsill upon which the social organization of a large part of the Western Hemisphere was to rest. Not only were there sincere doubts in the minds of many Englishmen as to whether the place of the negro in the general system of life was higher than that of the horse or the ox, but there was a belief that if he were indeed a member of the human family, he belonged to a race of men who, as the descendants of Ham, had been cursed by God himself, and so branded for all time as servants of superior races, without claim to the fruits of their own arduous labor.[1] This was thought to be in itself a justification for African slavery. Its significance was as deeply impressed upon the minds of the colonists in Virginia as it was upon the minds of the colonists in Barbadoes and the Somers Isles.[2] And yet it is a remarkable fact, that not until many years after the introduction of the negro into Virginia, do we find him referred to in the statute book as a slave; in the beginning, he was simply a servant for life, different only from the white servant in the length of his term of service.
The first cargo of negroes brought into Virginia was transported thither without there having been any previous arrangement on the part of the planters to receive them upon their arrival. They were introduced under the
- ↑ “They make them the Posterity of that unhappy son of Noah, who, they say, was together with his whole Family and Race cursed by his father. . . . For from thence, as occasion shall offer they’ll infer their negro’s Brutality; justifie their reduction of him under bondage . . . Godwyn’s Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, pp. 14, 43.
- ↑ The Bermudas.
