[226] Mass. Hist. Coll., Series II. vol. x. p. 183.
[227] Quoted by Doyle, Colonies under the House of Hanover (1907), p. 13.
CHAPTER IX
THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN AND MIDDLE COLONIES
The southern colonies in their geographical formation, their soil and climate, were of a uniform character; nor were there any decidedly marked religious differences. In the middle colonies this was by no means the case, but even here the style of life in such states as Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey had many points of resemblance. In all the colonies except Maryland and Virginia there was a heterogeneous population of English, Irish, Scots, Dutch, Huguenots, and Germans, but in New York State mixed nationalities were most apparent.
The distinction between the grades of society was well-marked in both the southern and middle colonies. In South Carolina in early times there was practically no middle class, but at the end of the seventeenth century a few Ulster Protestants settled in the colony as small farmers and remained in spite of economic conditions. In Maryland there were yeomen farmers and tradesmen, who were for the most part rude and uneducated. A professional middle class was unknown until the eighteenth century; doctors, for example, were not licensed in New York till 1760. In New Jersey there was a tendency to insist on democratic principles, though there is every reason to think that the gentleman farmer was treated with the same respect accorded to the Quaker squire of Pennsylvania, or the Dutch patroon of New York. In the South the upper classes resembled their contemporaries in England. Some were indolent, haughty, and vain, showing the greatest contempt for honest toil; many were confirmed gamblers and horse-racers. The bottle and the dice were the household deities of not a few; but they were nevertheless bountiful, generous, and patriotic, and proved themselves good specimens of England's manhood in time of peril.
Below these classes were the indentured servants and negro slaves. The former were composed of paupers and criminals sent out from England, the earliest instance being in 1618, when Ambrose Smythe, a felon, was transported to America, as a servant bound for a limited period. The life in Virginia on the tobacco plantations must have been of the hardest, but it was evidently preferable to that in the West Indian islands, as Penruddock, the conspirator against Cromwell, petitioned in 1656 to be sent to Virginia rather than to the Barbadoes. The evil of the system of indentured servants lay for the most part in the ease with which inconvenient people were got rid of, and in the kidnapping of harmless children. Fugitives from justice, guilty husbands or wives, the felon and the innocent were all to be found on those ships that sailed from Bristol. The scandal increased from year to year, so that in 1661 the new Colonial Board was obliged to make an effort to regulate indentured servants, while three years later a commission under the Duke of York was appointed to look into the whole matter. The outcome of this was a most salutary enactment by which kidnapping was made a capital offence. The inquisitorial system necessary for the proper enforcement of this Act soon came to be burdensome, as proved by a complaint of the merchants in 1682, concerning vexatious prosecutions; but that it was absolutely essential is shown by a fresh Order in Council, four years later, against kidnappers. The one great advantage possessed by the indentured servant over the negro slave was that no hereditary disqualification attached to the children of such servants, whereas in the case of the blacks the stigma of slavery passed from the parents to their offspring.
The system of binding servants for so many years tended to check the growth of slavery; but there is little doubt that during the first hundred years of American colonisation the influx of negro slaves reached alarming proportions. In 1620 a Dutch ship landed twenty negroes from the Guinea coast at the recently established Jamestown. From this small beginning the cursed traffic grew, and so rapidly that in 1637, and on many later occasions, enactments were passed to check all intercourse between whites and blacks. Within twenty years of the introduction of slavery there were in Virginia about three hundred blacks, while twelve years later the number had reached one thousand. It is not to be wondered at that the growth was so rapid, for the trade was a lucrative one,[228] and it was difficult to check when the first in the land participated in its spoils. Thus in 1662 the Royal African Company was founded with James, Duke of York, at its head, and with his brother Charles II. as a large shareholder. The negroes were in theory regarded as mere chattels, and to check risings such as those of 1678, 1712, and 1741, barbarous laws were passed against them. On the other hand, as individuals they were as a general rule comfortably clothed, fed, and housed; they had many amusements, and their work was not as arduous as has so often been described. At one time it was an understood thing in the colonies that the lord had the jus vitae necisque over his slaves, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Crown made the murder of a negro a capital offence, a decision vigorously upheld by Governor Spotswood. The number of slaves on each plantation varied very much; the average may, perhaps, be placed at thirty. But the largest owner in Virginia possessed 900; while in Maryland this was easily beaten by an owner with 1300. In the eighteenth century the negroes far outnumbered the whites in South Carolina; but in New York they only formed about one-sixth the total population. In Maryland and Virginia they were as one to three, while in the middle colonies it is calculated that a ratio of one to seven would give a rough estimate of their numbers.