depressed with their helplessness on the limitless sea, and their childish superstitions were fed by a thousand new terrors and emotions.  It was small wonder that, when disease began its ravages in the shipload of these kidnaped beings, “the mortality of thirty per cent was not rare.”  That this was primarily a physical selection which made no allowance for mental aptitudes did not greatly diminish in the eyes of the master the slave’s utility.  The new continent needed muscle power; and so tens of thousands of able-bodied Africans were landed on American soil, alien to everything they found there.

These slaves were kidnaped from many tribes.  “In our negro population,” says Tillinghast, “as it came from the Western Coast of Africa, there were Wolofs and Fulans, tall, well-built, and very black, hailing from Senegambia and its vicinity; there were hundreds of thousands from the Slave Coast—­Tshis, Ewes, and Yorubans, including Dahomians; and mingled with all these Soudanese negroes proper were occasional contributions of mixed stock, from the north and northeast, having an infusion of Moorish blood.  There were other thousands from Lower Guinea, belonging to Bantu stock, not so black in color as the Soudanese, and thought by some to be slightly superior to them."[9] No historian has recorded these tribal differences.  The new environment, so strange, so ruthless, swallowed them; and, in the welter of their toil, the black men became so intermingled that all tribal distinctions soon vanished.  Here and there, however, a careful observer may still find among them a man of superior mien or a woman of haughty demeanor denoting perhaps an ancestral prince or princess who once exercised authority over some African jungle village.

Slavery was soon a recognized institution in every American colony.  By 1665 every colony had its slave code.  In Virginia the laws became increasingly strict until the dominion of the master over his slaves was virtually absolute.  In South Carolina an insurrection of slaves in 1739, which cost the lives of twenty-one whites and forty-four blacks, led to very drastic laws.  Of the Northern colonies, New York seems to have been most in fear of a black peril.  In 1700 there were about six thousand slaves in this colony, chiefly in the city, where there were also many free negroes, and on the large estates along the Hudson.  Twice the white people of the city for reasons that have not been preserved, believing that slave insurrections were imminent, resorted to extreme and brutal measures.  In 1712 they burned to death two negroes, hanged in chains a third, and condemned a fourth to be broken on the wheel.  In 1741 they went so far as to burn fourteen negroes, hang eighteen, and transport seventy-one.

In New England where their numbers were relatively small and the laws were less severe, the negroes were employed chiefly in domestic service.  In Quaker Pennsylvania there were many slaves, the proprietor himself being a slave owner.  Ten years after the founding of Philadelphia, the authorities ordered the constables to arrest all negroes found “gadding about” on Sunday without proper permission.  They were to remain in jail until Monday, receiving in lieu of meat or drink thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.