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.

The character of the slaves imported, and the pitiable condition of
the white servants, produced rather an anomalous result. "Male
servants, and slaves of both sex" were bound together by the
fellowship of toil. But the distinction "made between them in their
clothes and food"[141] drew a line, not between their social
condition,--for it was the same,--but between their nationality.
First, then, was social estrangement, next legal difference, and last
of all political disagreement and strife. In order to oppress the
weak, and justify the unchristian distinction between God's creatures,
the persons who would bolster themselves into respectability must have
the aid of law. Luther could march fearlessly to the Diet of Worms if
every tile on the houses were a devil; but Macbeth was conquered by
the remembrance of the wrong he had done the virtuous Duncan and the
unoffending Banquo, long before he was slain by Macduff. A guilty
conscience always needs a multitude of subterfuges to guard against
dreaded contingencies. So when the society in the Virginia Colony had
made up its mind that the Negroes in their midst were mere
heathen,[142] they stood ready to punish any member who had the
temerity to cross the line drawn between the races. It was not a
mitigating circumstance that the white servants of the colony who came
into natural contact with the Negroes were "disorderly persons," or
convicts sent to Virginia by an order of the king of England. It was
fixed by public sentiment and law that there should be no relation
between the races. The first prohibition was made "September 17th,
1630." Hugh Davis, a white servant, was publicly flogged "before an
assembly of Negroes and others," for defiling himself with a Negr