The institution of negro slavery in the United States was an historical growth, which was in some respects unique. We shall, therefore, do better to follow the main stages of that development than to attempt at the outset any definition whatsoever. We may, in this manner, build up a true description of it, and escape the error frequently contained in the brevity of a definition and in the nature of an abstract proposition.
| First appearance of slavery in the British North American colonies. Early theory of the benefits of slavery. |
It began its existence, like most institutions and relations, as a social custom. Most of the historians record the appearance of a Dutch merchant ship at Jamestown, in the year 1619, having negroes on board, and inform us that twenty of them were sold to the colonists. What title the Dutch traders had to such property, exactly what they sold to the colonists, and what rights the colonists acquired in or over such property, were defined, guaranteed, and secured by no existing statutes. If any of the parties to the transaction reflected upon these subjects at all, they must have supposed that the right of possession and the freedom of contract covered the whole case. There is certainly no evidence that any of these parties, or anybody else, had the faintest conception that the law of any state, or any principle of natural justice, or of reason, was violated or impaired by the procedure or the results of the procedure. It was a firmly and universally established opinion of the time that the attachment of infidels to Christians in a relation of servant to master was vastly beneficial to the infidel, certainly so when the infidel was also a barbarian, and was taken out of slavery to a barbarian master, as was the case in respect to almost all of the negroes brought to the English colonies in North America.
We cannot dismiss this opinion as one of the errors of the dark ages. It lives to-day as a principle of modern political science and practical politics, under the form of statement that civilized people have the right and duty to impose civilization upon uncivilized populations by whatever means they may deem to be just and proper.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the negroes transferred from slavery in Africa to slavery in the English-American colonies themselves felt the amelioration of their condition, and were, in general, entirely contented with their new lot.
| The earliest legal recognition of slavery in the colonies. |
The relation was established in the Northern colonies, as well as in the Southern, in the early years of their existence, and it was in Massachusetts rather than in Virginia that it first received legal recognition, and began to be changed from a purely domestic institution by suffering governmental regulation. In the Massachusetts "Fundamentals," or "Body of Liberties," passed by the General Court in 1641, the slavery of negroes and Indians, and the slave-trade, were expressly legalized. In fact, so far as the colonists themselves were responsible for the introduction of negro slavery among them, the impartial historian must place the greater blame upon a Northern colony. Its citizens were first to develop commerce, and it was their ships which brought the slave cargoes from the coasts of Africa to all of the colonies.