Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/396

 company, and the more trusty and industrious, after a certain period of labor, were allowed little farms, paying a stipulated amount of produce. This emancipation did not extend to the children, a circumstance inexplicable and highly displeasing to the Dutch commonalty, who could not understand "how any one born of a free Christian mother could nevertheless be a slave."

At a session of the Virginia legislature, in December, 1662, an act was passed, being the first statute of Virginia which attempts to give a legislative basis to the system of hereditary slavery. It was enacted that children should be held bond or free "according to the condition of the mother."

In 1663, the subject of slavery also attracted the notice of the Maryland legislature. It was provided, by the first section of an act now passed, that "all negroes and other slaves within this province, and all negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into this province, shall serve during life; and all children born of any negro or other slave, shall be slaves, as their fathers were, for the term of their lives." The second section recites that "divers free-born English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves;" and for deterring from such "shameful matches," it enacts that, during their husbands' lives, white women so intermarrying shall be servants to the masters of their husbands, and that the issue of such marriages shall be slaves for life.

In 1667, the assembly of Virginia enacted that negroes, though converted and baptized, should not thereby become free. At the same session, in remarkable deviation from the English law, it was also enacted, that killing slaves by extremity of correction should not be esteemed felony, "since it can not be presumed that prepense malice should induce any man to destroy his own estate." The prohibition against holding Indians as slaves was also relaxed as to those brought in by water, a new law having enacted "that all servants, not being Christians, imported by shipping, shall be slaves for life." About this period, and afterward, a considerable number of Indian slaves seem to have been imported into Virginia and New England from the West Indies and the Spanish main.

As a necessary pendent to the slave code, the system now also began of subjecting freed slaves to civil disabilities. It had already been enacted that female servants employed in field labor should be rated and taxed as tithable-Negro women, though free, were now subjected to the same tax. Free negroes and Indians were also disqualified to purchase or hold white servants.

Some replies of Berkeley to a series of questions submitted to him by the plantation committee of the privy council, give quite a distinct picture of the colony as it was in 1671. The population is estimated at 40,000, including 2,000 "black slaves," and 6,000 "Christian servants," of whom about 1,500 were imported yearly, principally English. Since the exclusion of Dutch vessels by the acts of navigation, the importation of negroes had been very limited; not above two or three ship loads had arrived in seven years. The English trade to Africa, a monopoly m the hands of the Royal African Company, does not seem to have been prosecuted with much spirit; and such supply of