and most of the remainder doubtless from the West Indies.  In 1649 Virginia was reckoned to have some three hundred negroes mingled with its fifteen thousand whites.[11] After two decades of a somewhat more rapid importation Governor Berkeley estimated the gross population in 1671 at forty thousand, including six thousand white servants and two thousand negro slaves.[12] Ere this there was also a small number of free negroes.  But not until near the end of the century, when the English government had restricted kidnapping, when the Virginia assembly had forbidden the bringing in of convicts, and when the direct trade from Guinea had reached considerable dimensions, did the negroes begin to form the bulk of the Virginia plantation gangs.

[Footnote 8:  John Smith Works, Arber ed., p. 541.]

[Footnote 9:  Tabulated in the Virginia Magazine, VII, 364-367.]

[Footnote 10:  Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, II, 72-77.]

[Footnote 11:  A New Description of Virginia (London, 1649).]

[Footnote 12:  W.W.  Hening, Statutes at Large of Virginia, II, 515.]

Thus for two generations the negroes were few, they were employed alongside the white servants, and in many cases were members of their masters’ households.  They had by far the best opportunity which any of their race had been given in America to learn the white men’s ways and to adjust the lines of their bondage into as pleasant places as might be.  Their importation was, for the time, on but an experimental scale, and even their legal status was during the early decades indefinite.

The first comers were slaves in the hands of their maritime sellers; but they were not fully slaves in the hands of their Virginian buyers, for there was neither law nor custom then establishing the institution of slavery in the colony.  The documents of the times point clearly to a vague tenure.  In the county court records prior to 1661 the negroes are called negro servants or merely negroes—­never, it appears, definitely slaves.  A few were expressly described as servants for terms of years, and others were conceded property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution of slavery as elaborated in later times.  Some of the blacks were in fact liberated by the courts as having served out the terms fixed either by their indentures or by the custom of the country.  By the middle of the century several had become free landowners, and at least one of them owned a negro servant who went to court for his freedom but was denied it because he could not produce the indenture which he claimed to have possessed.  Nevertheless as early as the sixteen-forties the holders of negroes were falling into the custom of considering them, and on occasion selling them along with the issue of the females, as servants for life and perpetuity.  The fact that negroes not bound for a term were coming to be appraised as high as L30, while the most valuable white redemptioners were worth not above L15 shows also the tendency toward the crystallization of slavery before any statutory enactments declared its existence.[13]