The transplanting of the Negro from his African clan life to the West Indian plantation was a social revolution.  Marriage became geographical and transient, while women and girls were without protection.

The private home as a self-protective, independent unit did not exist.  That powerful institution, the polygamous African home, was almost completely destroyed, and in its place in America arose sexual promiscuity, a weak community life, with common dwelling, meals, and child nurseries.  The internal slave trade tended further to weaken natural ties.  A small number of favored house servants and artisans were raised above this—­had their private homes, came in contact with the culture of the master class, and assimilated much of American civilization.  This was, however, exceptional; broadly speaking, the greatest social effect of American slavery was to substitute for the polygamous Negro home a new polygamy less guarded, less effective, and less civilized.

At first sight it would seem that slavery completely destroyed every vestige of spontaneous movement among the Negroes.  This is not strictly true.  The vast power of the priest in the African state is well known; his realm alone—­the province of religion and medicine—­remained largely unaffected by the plantation system.  The Negro priest, therefore, early became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as the one who expressed, rudely but picturesquely, the longing and disappointment and resentment of a stolen people.  From such beginnings arose and spread with marvelous rapidity the Negro church, the first distinctively Negro American social institution.  It was not at first by any means a Christian church, but a mere adaptation of those rites of fetish which in America is termed obe worship, or “voodooism."[93] Association and missionary effort soon gave these rites a veneer of Christianity and gradually, after two centuries, the church became Christian, with a simple Calvinistic creed, but with many of the old customs still clinging to the services.  It is this historic fact, that the Negro church of to-day bases itself upon the sole surviving social institution of the African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary growth and vitality.

The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt to reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe.  The laborers were mainly black and were held for life.  Above them came the artisans, free whites with a few blacks, and above them the master class.  The feudalism called for the plantation system, and the plantation system as developed in America, and particularly in Virginia, was at first a feudal domain.  On these plantations the master was practically supreme.  The slave codes in early days were but moderately harsh, allowing punishment by the master, but restraining him in extreme cases and providing for care of the slaves and of the aged.  With the power, however, solely in the hands of the master class, and with the master supreme on his own plantation, his power over the slave was practically what he wished it to be.  In some cases the cruelty was as great as on the worst West Indian plantations.  In other cases the rule was mild and paternal.