During this period of a century and a half, slavery took deep root in the colony of Virginia, and attained unwieldy and alarming proportions. It had sent its dark death-roots into the fibre and organism of the political, judicial, social, and religious life of the people. It was crystallized now into a domestic institution. It existed in contemplation of legislative enactment, and had high judicial recognition through the solemn forms of law. The Church had proclaimed it a "sacred institution," and the clergy had covered it with the sanction of their ecclesiastical office. There it stood, an organized system,—the dark problem of the uncertain future: more terrible to the colonists in its awful, spectral silence during the years of the Revolution than the victorious guns of the French and Continental armies, which startled the English lion from his hurtful hold at the throat of white men's liberties—black men had no country, no liberty—in this new world in the West. But, like the dead body of the Roman murderer's victim, slavery was a curse that pursued the colonists evermore.
FOOTNOTES:
[119] A Flemish favorite of Charles V. having obtained of his king a patent, containing an exclusive right of importing four thousand Negroes into America, sold it for twenty-five thousand ducats to some Genoese merchants, who first brought into a regular form the commerce for slaves between Africa and America.--Holmes's American Annals, vol. i. p. 35.
[120] R. Beverley's History of Virginia, pp. 35, 36.
[121] See Campbell, p. 144; Burk, vol. i. p. 326.
[122] Smith, vol. ii pp. 38, 39.
[123] Smith's History of Virginia, vol. ii. p. 39.
[124] Virginia Company of London, p. 117, sq.
[125] Campbell, p. 144.
[126] Burk, vol. I. p. 319.