It must be admitted that the worshipful company, notwithstanding its parsimonious spirit in the matter of vend, acted in good faith with both prospective husbands and present "maids." It had already made many regulations intended to promote matrimony by distinguishing in favor of married men; and in the selection and care of the feminine cargo exported it took the utmost precautions to ensure the purity of the women offered as wives. Moreover, the "maids" were carefully guarded from imposition or force. Orders were straitly given that "In case they cannot be presently married, we desire that they may be put with several householders that have wives until they can be supplied with husbands.... We desire that the marriage be free, according to nature, and we would not have these maids deceived and married to servants, but only such freemen and tenants as have means to maintain them... not enforcing them to marry against their wills." However, there was very little need for these precautions, since the men of the settlement flocked in crowds to the sale of the ladies, and the only difficulty was that there were more suitors than there were fair ones to make them happy. The scene presented must have been very much like that to be found at the old hiring fairs of England, and there does not seem to have been more embarrassment on the part of the "maids" while their charms were being appraised by their suitors than if they had been merely disposing of their services for a short time and in menial capacity. It is impossible to suppose that women who would seek matrimony under such circumstances were of a very refined type; but, on the other hand, they must have been possessed of bravery and independence beyond the common lot of women of whatever class. Later, sixty other "maids," "young, handsome, and chaste," according to the chronicle, were induced to come out to the colony under the same conditions, and these and their predecessors were among the founders of the race which developed into the soldiers of the Revolution and of the yet more terrible struggle of later years.
Unfortunately, there were at this time introduced into the young colony two elements that were to affect it, one slightly and temporarily only, the other profoundly and for as long as there was in the South a distinctiveness of culture. These were the practice of sending criminals to Virginia and the introduction of slavery. To the first number of settlers sent over by Sandys, James I. added one hundred felons, and this was by no means the last shipload of criminals to be exported to the Virginias. These criminals included both men and women, and their introduction among the colonists, though on the pretence of their being indented servants, was an evil which for long found results in the lower strata of the growing civilization. The women, generally of the lowest dregs of English life,--where not political convicts, who were of course of entirely different stamp,--were "hired" by the more dissolute of the unmarried male colonists, and became openly their mistresses; and thus there came into existence a social element which was to do important if insidious work in the undermining of the older morals of the settlement. Slavery, however, was of far more import, and affected all the future civilization. In August, 1619, twenty negroes were sold as slaves to some of the planters, the blacks having been brought by a Dutch ship. This was the rise of the African cloud, as yet no bigger than a man's hand, but in time to grow to most portentous dimensions, and to bear the whirlwind as its legitimate progeny. It may be questioned why note is made of the rise of slavery in a book devoted to the history of woman; but to those who will trouble to think the reason is evident. The woman is always at once a formative cause and a product of her civilization; and the civilization of the South was built upon the institution of slavery. To comprehend the culture even the nature of the Southern lady we must keep constantly in mind the influence of the national institution, so that, as its effects will have to be frequently noted in the future, it is not amiss to chronicle here the small root which afterward spread to such upas growth.