In this gruesome business there lurked many tragedies, and very few romances.  Parents were separated from their children and husbands from their wives.  Hundreds of skilled artisans—­carpenters, smiths, and weavers—­utterly disappeared as if swallowed up by death.  A few thus dragged off to the New World to be sold into servitude for a term of five or seven years later became prosperous and returned home with fortunes.  In one case a young man who was forcibly carried over the sea lived to make his way back to England and establish his claim to a peerage.

Akin to the kidnapped, at least in economic position, were convicts deported to the colonies for life in lieu of fines and imprisonment.  The Americans protested vigorously but ineffectually against this practice.  Indeed, they exaggerated its evils, for many of the “criminals” were only mild offenders against unduly harsh and cruel laws.  A peasant caught shooting a rabbit on a lord’s estate or a luckless servant girl who purloined a pocket handkerchief was branded as a criminal along with sturdy thieves and incorrigible rascals.  Other transported offenders were “political criminals”; that is, persons who criticized or opposed the government.  This class included now Irish who revolted against British rule in Ireland; now Cavaliers who championed the king against the Puritan revolutionists; Puritans, in turn, dispatched after the monarchy was restored; and Scotch and English subjects in general who joined in political uprisings against the king.

=The African Slaves.=—­Rivaling in numbers, in the course of time, the indentured servants and whites carried to America against their will were the African negroes brought to America and sold into slavery.  When this form of bondage was first introduced into Virginia in 1619, it was looked upon as a temporary necessity to be discarded with the increase of the white population.  Moreover it does not appear that those planters who first bought negroes at the auction block intended to establish a system of permanent bondage.  Only by a slow process did chattel slavery take firm root and become recognized as the leading source of the labor supply.  In 1650, thirty years after the introduction of slavery, there were only three hundred Africans in Virginia.

The great increase in later years was due in no small measure to the inordinate zeal for profits that seized slave traders both in Old and in New England.  Finding it relatively easy to secure negroes in Africa, they crowded the Southern ports with their vessels.  The English Royal African Company sent to America annually between 1713 and 1743 from five to ten thousand slaves.  The ship owners of New England were not far behind their English brethren in pushing this extraordinary traffic.