the moral sensibilities of the colonists as to the enormity of the great crime to which they were parties.  Women were sold for wives,[136] and sometimes were kidnapped[137] in England and sent into the colony.  There was nothing in the moral atmosphere of the colony inimical to the spirit of bondage that was manifest so early in the history of this people.  England had always held her sceptre over slaves of some character:  villeins in the feudal era, stolen Africans under Elizabeth and under the house of the Tudors; Caucasian children—­whose German blood could be traced beyond the battle of Hastings—­in her mines, factories, and mills; and vanquished Brahmans in her Eastern possessions.  How, then, could we expect less of these “knights” and “adventurers” who “degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes"?[138]

The institution of slavery once founded, it is rather remarkable that its growth was so slow.  According to the census of Feb. 16, 1624, there were but twenty-two in the entire colony.[139] There were eleven at Flourdieu Hundred, three in James City, one on James Island, one on the plantation opposite James City, four at Warisquoyak, and two at Elizabeth City.  In 1648 the population of Virginia was about fifteen thousand, with a slave population of three hundred.[140] The cause of the slow increase of slaves was not due to any colonial prohibition.  The men who were engaged in tearing unoffending Africans from their native home were some time learning that this colony was at this time a ready market for their helpless victims.  Whatever feeling or scruple, if such ever existed, the colonists had in reference to the subject of dealing in the slave-trade, was destroyed at conception by the golden hopes of large gains.  The latitude, the products of the soil, the demand for labor, the custom of the indenture of white servants, were abundant reasons why the Negro should be doomed to bondage for life.

The subjects of slavery were the poor unfortunates that the strong push to the outer edge of organized African society, where, through neglect or abuse, they are consigned to the mercy of avarice and malice.  We have already stated that the weaker tribes of Africa are pushed into the alluvial flats of that continent; where they have perished in large numbers, or have become the prey of the more powerful tribes, who consort with slave-hunters.  Disease, tribal wars in Africa, and the merciless greed of slave-hunters, peopled the colony of Virginia with a class that was expected to till the soil.  African criminals, by an immemorial usage, were sold into slavery as the highest penalty, save death; and often this was preferred to bondage.  Many such criminals found their way into the colony.  To be bondmen among neighboring tribes at home was dreaded beyond expression; but to wear chains in a foreign land, to submit to the dehumanizing treatment of cruel taskmasters, was an ordeal that fanned into life the last dying ember of manhood and resentment.