Santo Domingo GEORGE W. BROWN
Canadian Negroes and the Rebellion of 1837 FRED LANDON
Lott Cary, the Colonizing Missionary MILES MARK FISHER
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THE JOURNAL

OF

NEGRO HISTORY

VOL. VII--JANUARY, 1922--NO. 1

SLAVE SOCIETY ON THE SOUTHERN PLANTATION

In the year 1619, memorable in the history of the United States, a
Dutch trading vessel carried to the colonists of Virginia twenty
Negroes from the West Indies and sold them as slaves, thus laying the
foundation of slave society in the American colonies. In the
seventeenth century slavery made but little progress in these parts of
America, and during that whole period not more than twenty-five
thousand slaves were brought to the colonies to work in the tobacco
and rice fields of the South or to serve as maids, butlers, and
coachmen in the North. The eighteenth century, however, saw a rapid
increase in slavery, until the census of 1790, much to the surprise of
most observers, showed a slave population of 679,679 living in every
State and territory of the country except Massachusetts and Maine.

With the extensive development of various industries in the colonies,
slavery soon left the North and was used exclusively in the South.
There are several reasons for this shift. In the first place, the
colonies of the North were settled by people from the lower and middle
classes, who had been accustomed to working for themselves and who
thus had no use for slaves, while the South was settled largely by
adventurers, who had never worked and who looked upon labor as
dishonorable. In the second place, the North had a temperate climate
in which any man could safely work, while the heat of the South was so
intense that a white man endangered his life by working in it, whereas
the Negro was protected by facility of acclimation. Another cause was
the difference in soil. The soil of the South was favorable to the
growth of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, the cultivation of which
crops required large forces of organized and concentrated labor, which
the slaves supplied. On the other hand, the soil of the North favored
the raising of cereals, which required neither organized nor
concentrated labor; for one man working alone was able to produce more
than one man working in a group: and thus slave labor was of little or
no advantage to the North. Then, too, its soil