A History of Slavery in Virginia

Abstract

History of Slavery in Virginia.equal ones.Society, and particularly industrial society, is essentially complex.Complexity appears within the simplest social unit itself, and is reflected in the manus of the husband and in the dominium of the father, which latter in ancient society developed institutionally into the patria potestas.The Roman clientela and the German comitatus illustrate the same truth, more especially in the political sphere.Ancient slav ery, medieval vassalage and villainage, modern servitude and slavery, and forms of dependent so-called free labor all par take of a common quality of subordination in their origin and development.From a past institutional standpoint at least the mere existence of such results sufficiently denies the doc trine of natural equality and inalienable rights in the social sphere.Given inequality of capacity or condition, whether natural or acquired, the evolution of the various forms in which dependent labor has found expression is determined by environment, and the particular form by the degree of the relation of dependence.Historic connection then of examples of these various forms as antecedent and consequent is not a necessary assumption, though in some cases it is a certain or plausible one.In the case of slavery at least the various phases it assumed in ancient times, in Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Greece and Rome for instance, present an institutional continuity that may have been based more or less upon actual contact, but it is also true that local conditions have existed amongst all known peoples at some stage of their development sufficient to account for the native origin of the most characteristic features of this institution.We may assume, then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that African slavery had such an independent origin and that in development its con nection with past as with future foreign forms of slavery was one of institutional similarity rather than of causal relation.Regardless of the continuity of the idea of modern slavery in Africa, Europe, and America, it is to be remembered that the sanction and growth of slavery depended upon local causes, and for this reason its form and incidents materially differed in these three countries and indeed in different parts of the same country.Thus the patriarchal institution of the Eng lish colonies had little in common with the type of the penal or galley slave to be found in the Spanish West Indies.The era of awakened commerce and discovery, that marked the transition of the mediaeval into the modern world, first brought Europeans into contact with African slavery as an already developed institution.Negroes under their tribal customs enslaved their kindred for debt, for crime, and as a matter of systematic poor relief.So, too, the sparing of the captive enemy to become a slave, the most fertile and humane source of slavery, was commonly practiced in native inter tribal warfare.1The Moors, also, from early times enslaved not only the blacks around them but also Christian whites. 2 It was through the Moors that Europeans were first made acquainted with the benefits to be derived from the African slave trade.When in the first half of the fifteenth century, 3 the ener getic Prince Henry of Portugal, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator, was actively pushing the course of Portuguese discovery along the west coast of Africa, Antony Gonzales, one of his mariners, captured, in 1440, two Moors near Cape Bajados.The prince ordered the exchange of the Moors for a proffered ransom of ten blacks, and these were brought from the Rio del Oro to Lisbon in 1442.He justi fied his act on the ground that the negroes might be Christian ized but the Moors could not.Two years later the Company of Lagos, chartered by the king and engaged in discovery on the African coast, imported two hundred negroes from the islands of Nar and Tidar.Of these the king received his 1 Snelgrave, Account of Guinea, 158.