Although, slavery was introduced into Virginia as early as 1619 it was
not until nearly one hundred years later that African slaves began to be
brought into the English colonies in any very large numbers. For nearly
a century the bulk of the rough labor in the field and in the forest was
performed, not by Negro slaves, but by white bond servants, who were
imported from England and sold like other merchandise in the markets of
the colonies.
In 1673, for example, the average price of a bond servant in the
colonies, so the historian Bancroft tells us, was ten pounds. At this
same time a Negro slave was worth twenty-five pounds.
It was often that the almshouses and prisons of England were emptied in
order to furnish laborers for America. It should be remembered, however,
that many of the persons who were sent out as bond servants to America
were political prisoners, and some of these were persons of quality.
When there was a civil war in England the victorious party frequently
disposed of its prisoners by sending them to the colonies as bond
servants, or even as slaves. Thousands of Irish Catholics were sent over
to America in this way, and it is said that the hardships which these
unfortunate bondsmen suffered on the voyage was hardly less than those
endured by the African slaves.
It should be remembered, also, in the case of these white bond servants,
as in that of the Negro slaves, the sale of human beings began
innocently enough. At the time the English colonies were planted in
America there was comparatively little free labor anywhere, and
especially was this true of farm labor.
The freedom and independence which seem now to be the natural rights of
everyone were enjoyed by very few among the masses of the laboring
people in Europe one hundred or two hundred years ago. At that time
nearly everyone who worked with his hands was bound, in one way or
another, to a master who had control over his actions to an extent which
amounted to something like servitude. But it was to the man on the soil
and in the country that freedom has everywhere come most slowly. In
fact, it was not until the middle of the last century that the complete
emancipation of the serfs took place in Western Europe. It was not until
1861, two years before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation set
the American Negroes free, that the Russian serfs were emancipated.
It is necessary to remember these facts if we wish to understand how it
came about that the slavery of the black man and the servitude of the
white man came to be established in this country.
When the first bond servants were sent to America it was not intended
that they should be transferred and sold from one owner to another. It
was merely intended that they should be bound to labor for the man who
paid their passage money until that sum had been repaid. Gradually,
however, in their eagerness to obtain labor, people lost sight of the
fact that the merchandise they were selling was human beings. It was not
long, therefore, before the bond servant was rated among the other
property, the horses, the sheep and the cattle, in the inventories of
the estate, and he could be disposed of by will and deed along with the
remainder of the stock on the plantation.
At first the only legal distinction between the bond servant and the
Negro slave was that the one was a servant for a period of years and the
other was a servant for life. In the long run, however, this distinction
made a great difference. In the first place, as the number of these bond
servants who became free increased there grew up in the colonies a
considerable body of citizens who had known the trials and hardships of
servitude. These people naturally sympathized with those of their own
class and this created a sentiment against white servitude.
The case of the Negro, however, was different. He was a man of a
different race and he was doomed to perpetual servitude. The result was,
as time went on, it came to be regarded as the natural vocation and
destiny of the man with the black skin to be the servant and the slave
of the white man.
One thing that helped to fix the status of the black man, and which
finally resulted in the passing away of white servitude in favor of
Negro slavery, was the fact that the Negro was better fitted to perform
the hard pioneer work which the time demanded. Particularly was this
true in the more Southern colonies, like Georgia and the Carolinas.
In South Carolina an effort had been made to reestablish serfdom as it
had existed in England one hundred years before. In Georgia, it was at
first hoped, by prohibiting slavery to establish a system of free labor.
In both instances the effort failed and, after a very few years, Negro
slavery was as firmly established in Georgia as it had been in the
neighboring state of South Carolina.
Still later, efforts were made to establish white servitude in Louisiana
and large numbers of German "redemptioners," as they were called, were
brought over for this purpose. In a very few years these colonists had
been swept away by disease.
In one of the reports setting forth "the true state" of the colony of
Georgia it was said that, "hardly one-half of the servants of working
people were able to do their masters or themselves the least labor: and
the yearly sickness of each servant, generally speaking, cost his master
as much as would have maintained a Negro for four years."
With the introduction of rice planting the necessity of employing
Africans was doubled, because, as it was said, "white servants would
have exhausted their strength in clearing a spot for their own graves."
Thus it came about that Negro slavery grew up on the mainland to replace
the servitude of the white man, just as it had grown up in the West
Indies to take the place of the slavery of the native Indians.
It most not be assumed, however, that the Negro slaves, because they
were better able than the white man to stand the hardships of labor in
the New World, did not suffer from the effects of the work they were
compelled to do. The truth is that so many of them died that the stock
of slaves had to be continually replenished. In some parts of the
country it was even said of the slave, as one hears it sometimes said of
horses, that it paid to work them to death. It was a rule on some of the
plantations that the stock of slaves was to be renewed every seven
years.
One of the effects of the passing away of white servitude was to make
the distance between the free white man and the black slave seem greater
than ever. There grew up in the minds of white people, and, to a certain
extent, in the minds of black people, the notion that slavery was the
natural condition of the Negro just as freedom was the natural condition
of the white man. People began to feel that the black man did not have
the same human feelings as the white man; that his pains and his sorrows
were somehow not as real and did not have to be considered in the same
way that one would consider these same feelings in a white man. All this
sentiment of the one race for the other entered into the system of
slavery and made it what it became finally before it was abolished as a
result of the Civil War.
What this system really was can not be best shown by any account of the
cruelties that were sometimes practiced upon slaves, because these
cruelties were not practiced by the best masters and were not supported
by public sentiment.
The best expression of the innate wrong of slavery will be found in the
decision of a Chief Justice of South Carolina in the case of a man who
had been tried for beating his slave. In this decision, which affirmed
the right of the master to inflict any kind of punishment upon a slave,
short of death, it is stated that, in the whole history of slavery there
has been no prosecution of a master for punishing his slave.
It had been said in the course of the trial of this case that the
relations of the master and slave were like those of parent and child.
Justice Ruffin, in delivering the decision, said that this was not so.
The object of a parent in training his son, for example, was to fit him
to live the life of a free man, and, as a means to that end, he gave him
moral and intellectual instruction. There was, said the Justice, no
sense in addressing moral instruction to a slave. He said:
"The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public
safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person and his posterity to
live without knowledge and without the capacity to make anything his
own, and to toil that another may reap the fruit. What moral
consideration shall be addressed to such a being to convince him, what
it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can never
be true--that he is thus to labor upon a principle of natural duty or
for the sake of his own personal happiness. Such services can only be
expected from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in
implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence
only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else
which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be
absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect."
In making this decision Justice Ruffin did not attempt to justify the
rule he had laid down on moral grounds. "As a principle of right," he
said, "every person must repudiate it, but in the actual condition of
things it must be so; there is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the
state of slavery. It constitutes the curse of slavery both to the bond
and free portion of our population."
Thus it is clear that at the bottom of slavery is the idea that one
man's evil is or can be some other man's good.