Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/584

 of the Northern States long before the present day had been reached.

We may acknowledge that the negro would in all probability have been introduced into the Colony in the seventeenth century, even if the soil had been incapable of producing the tobacco plant, but without that plant it is not likely that the institution of slavery could have obtained a permanent foothold in Virginia. In time it would have died out and the African population have remained an insignificant part of the community. The extension of tobacco culture signified the importation of African slaves in large numbers as soon as the facilities for procuring them had been increased. What that culture required was the cheapest form of labor, and this the negro furnished because he was a bondsman for life, for whom only a provision of bare subsistence had to be made. It was not until the end of the century that the means of importing slaves grew to be equal to the demand for them, The white indented servant and not the negro was the principal factor in the labor system in operation in the Colony in that age; and yet as far as slavery existed then, it had all the features of the same institution as observed down to the late war between the States. It cannot be said, however, that it had an important effect upon the economic conditions in the Colony; on the contrary, if not a single negro had been introduced into Virginia in the seventeenth century, the peculiar character of that community during this period would hardly have been altered, for the very simple reason that the chief influence forming and controlling it sprang from the special needs of tobacco culture, which were satisfied by the system of indented labor, that system, as has been pointed out, being merely one of temporary slavery.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the