For the first fifty or sixty years of the life of the colonies the introduction of Negroes was slow; the system of white servitude furnished most of the labor needed, and England had not yet won supremacy in the slave-trade.  It was in the last quarter of the seventeenth century that importations began to be large, and in the course of the eighteenth century the numbers grew by leaps and bounds.  In 1625, six years after the first Negroes were brought to the colony, there were in Virginia only 23 Negroes, 12 male, 11 female. [1] In 1659 there were 300; but in 1683 there were 3,000 and in 1708, 12,000.  In 1680 Governor Simon Bradstreet reported to England with reference to Massachusetts that “no company of blacks or slaves” had been brought into the province since its beginning, for the space of fifty years, with the exception of a small vessel that two years previously, after a twenty months’ voyage to Madagascar, had brought hither between forty and fifty Negroes, mainly women and children, who were sold for L10, L15, and L20 apiece; occasionally two or three Negroes were brought from Barbadoes or other islands, and altogether there were in Massachusetts at the time not more than 100 or 120.

[Footnote 1:  Virginia Magazine of History, VII, 364.]

The colonists were at first largely opposed to the introduction of slavery, and numerous acts were passed prohibiting it in Virginia, Massachusetts, and elsewhere; and in Georgia, as we have seen, it had at first been expressly forbidden.  English business men, however, had no scruples about the matter.  About 1663 a British Committee on Foreign Plantations declared that “black slaves are the most useful appurtenances of a plantation,” [1] and twenty years later the Lords Commissioners of Trade stated that “the colonists could not possibly subsist” without an adequate supply of slaves.  Laws passed in the colonies were regularly disallowed by the crown, and royal governors were warned that the colonists would not be permitted to “discourage a traffic so beneficial to the nation.”  Before 1772 Virginia passed not less than thirty-three acts looking toward the prohibition of the importation of slaves, but in every instance the act was annulled by England.  In the far South, especially in South Carolina, we have seen that there were increasingly heavy duties.  In spite of all such efforts for restriction, however, the system of Negro slavery, once well started, developed apace.

[Footnote 1:  Bogart:  Economic History, 73.]

In two colonies not among the original thirteen but important in the later history of the United States, Negroes were present at a very early date, in the Spanish colony of Florida from the very first, and in the French colony of Louisiana as soon as New Orleans really began to grow.  Negroes accompanied the Spaniards in their voyages along the South Atlantic coast early in the sixteenth century, and specially trained Spanish slaves assisted in the founding of