ontinent and in the West Indies.

The first Negroes were brought to Jamestown in 1619 and sold to English
masters as indentured servants. As such they were required to serve for
a definite number of years and after that they would become freemen
entitled to all the benefit of Virginia law. The goal set before them,
as before immigrants from France and the Netherlands, was eventual
freedom and naturalization as full citizens.

The tragedy of the Negro was that he had been procured by the
Portuguese as a captive taken in war between the native Negro tribes,
and he came into the life of Virginia utterly ignorant of every British
ideal of human freedom and government under constitutional law. He knew
nothing of the English language. The indentured Englishman or Scotsman
who was sold into service came with inherited knowledge of Anglo-Saxon
ideals of civil government and Christian faith; and the one great goal
set before him was that he could become a legal citizen of Virginia
after he completed his years of servitude. The Negro knew nothing of
all this.

There would have been little difficulty if the few Negroes in the first
ship had been all who came. The government could have provided for
their care and for their instruction in English ideals and the
Christian faith. But they were not all who came. The first indentured
Negroes proved useful as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they
were capable of far more work in the fields than many of the
Englishmen: and so the agrarian needs of the community where all men
were farmers made the governmental authorities willing to admit more
Negroes.

The authorities must have realized at once that if Negroes were brought
into the colony in great number they could not be permitted to become
freemen after any period of indenture. That would have brought into the
life of Virginia a steadily growing population of men and women who
knew nothing of English institutions, or of the English language, or of
the Christian religion. The welfare of the colony required that if they
were to be admitted at all, they could be admitted only as servants
under a permanent status of servitude. So slavery was introduced into
the British empire; and in America the enslavement of the Negro was
permitted in New England as well as in Virginia, the Carolinas and in
Georgia.

That was the first act in the great tragedy of Negro slavery in
America. The second was that the enslavement and sale of Negro