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 enthusiasm into the slave trade long before English colonization began, the institution spread slowly in the seaboard regions after its introduction at Jamestown in 1619. At the end of three decades there were only about three hundred Africans in the Old Dominion. But before the close of the century the traffic in slaves had grown to immense proportions. Negroes had shown themselves more docile under bondage than their Nordic brethren, and the difficulty of obtaining an adequate supply of white servants had increased. Moreover, English and American capitalists had discovered that enormous profits were to be gathered from the carrying trade, and under that stimulus made the transport of Africans to the New World one of the most lucrative branches of the shipping business. The best families, noblemen, bishops, merchant princes, and politicians invested heavily in it and the English government took good care of their interests. When, for instance, the court of Madrid was humbled in the war of the Spanish Succession, it was forced, in 1713, to grant to English slavers the exclusive right of carrying Negroes to its colonies, saving to Their Majesties, the Kings of England and Spain, each one-fourth of the profits.

Between that year and 1780, it is estimated, twenty thousand slaves were annually carried over the sea; in 1771 nearly two hundred English ships were engaged in the traffic, mainly from Liverpool, London, and Bristol. The first of these cities, in fact, owed much of its prosperity to the trade, and not without reason did a celebrated actor, when hissed by his audience in that commercial metropolis, fling back the taunt: "The stones of your houses are cemented with the blood of African slaves." The same could have been said with equal justice of some New England towns—Newport, Rhode Island, for example—because the Puritans, quick to scent the profits of the business, were not a whit behind the merchants of the mother country in reaching for the harvest.

In the bitter annals of the lowly there is no more ghastly