It is not easy to define the term slavery in the abstract without unfitting it for application to the great majority { 40} of the systems of servitude which have ever existed. Especially will it be difficult to gain a correct conception of the relation between the white man and the negro in North America previous to 1860 by means of such a definition.
The institution of negro slavery in the United States was an historical growth, which was in some respects unique. We shall, therefore, do better to follow the main stages of that development than to attempt at the outset any definition whatsoever. We may, in this manner, build up a true description of it, and escape the error frequently contained in the brevity of a definition and in the nature of an abstract proposition.
[Sidenote: First appearance of slavery in the British North American colonies.]
[Sidenote: Early theory of the benefits of slavery.]
It began its existence, like most institutions and relations, as a social custom. Most of the historians record the appearance of a Dutch merchant ship at Jamestown, in the year 1619, having negroes on board, and inform us that twenty of them were sold to the colonists. What title the Dutch traders had to such property, exactly what they sold to the colonists, and what rights the colonists acquired in or over such property, were defined, guaranteed, and secured by no existing statutes. If any of the parties to the transaction reflected upon these subjects at all, they must have supposed that the right of possession and the freedom of contract covered the whole case. There is certainly no evidence that any of these parties, or anybody else, had the faintest conception that the law of any state, or any principle of natural justice, or of reason, was violated or impaired by the procedure or the results of the procedure. It was a firmly and universally established opinion of the time that the attachment of infidels to Christians in a relation of servant to master was vastly beneficial to the infidel, certainly so when { 41} the infidel was also a barbarian, and was taken out of slavery to a barbarian master, as was the case in respect to almost all of the negroes brought to the English colonies in North America.