himself was a large shareholder. The chief profit of this
company was derived from the exportation of negroes from Guinea to the
plantations. The King and his brother henceforth had a direct interest
in limiting the supply of indented servants, and it is not unlikely
that this explains why Jeffreys for once deviated into the paths of
humanity and justice....

Had negro slavery never existed, had the natural resources of the
Southern colonies favored the growth of a free yeomanry, the system of
indenture would have been admirably fitted to establish a population
of small proprietors, trained in habits of industry and in a competent
knowledge of agriculture. The social and industrial life of the
colonies forbade this. A peasant proprietary can only exist under
severe restraints as to increase, or where there is urban life to take
off the surplus population for trades and handicrafts. The Southern
colonies fulfilled neither of these conditions. When the servant was
out of his indentures there was no place for him. He could not become
a shopkeeper or craftsman or a free agricultural laborer, for none of
these callings existed. Moreover, the very same conditions of soil and
climate which enabled slavery to exist, made it possible for the
freeman to procure a scanty livelihood, without any habits of settled
industry. Thus the liberated servant became an idler, socially
corrupt, and often politically dangerous. He furnished that class
justly described by a Virginian of that day as "a foeculum of beings
called overseers, a most abject, unprincipled race." He was the
forerunner, and possibly in some degree the progenitor, of that class
who did so much to intensify the evils of slavery, the "mean whites"
of later times....

When once negro slavery was firmly established, any rival form of
industry was doomed. For it is an economical law of slavery, that
where it exists it must exist without a rival. It can only succeed
where it is a predominant form of labor. The utility of the slave is
that of a machine. When once he has been trained to any special kind
of industry, no attempts to enlarge his sphere of activity can be
attended with profit. The time given to the new acquisition is so much
waste, and his mental incapacity and absence of any moral interest in
his work almost necessarily limits him to a single task. Thus, as we
have seen, the many attempts to develop varied forms of production in
the Southern colonies all failed.