ia was
concerned by enactment of a law that all persons convicted of a first
offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead
benefit of clergy.

Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and
Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth
century. It was alien to English ideals of human freedom. Yet out of it
all one tremendously important fact has come to pass. The Negro came to
America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and
southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection
with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He
came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of
leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery the
Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial
consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro
today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the
world. As such he has the opportunity to make his own contribution to
the culture and the civilization of the world. This their centuries of
slavery and repression have brought them.

CHAPTER SIX

Fighting Adverse Conditions

The political conditions in England throughout the middle of the
seventeenth century bore heavily upon Virginia in religious as well as
in civil matters. The period of civil war which began in 1642 lasted
until the King was captured by the parliamentary forces, and Archbishop
Laud, the hated persecutor of dissenters, was beheaded. After an
imprisonment of four years the king was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell
reigned as Protector of the Commonwealth. The civil war had lined up
the dissenting bodies in England, and the Presbyterian Church in
Scotland, against the King and the Church of England.

On the American scene the Puritan colonies in New England were in
hearty sympathy with the dissenters in England. In Virginia the
government and the great body of the people were in equal sympathy with
King Charles and the Established Church. It is true there were in
Virginia the goodly number of several hundred Puritan settlers. In the
Church also there was some Puritan sympathy among a small group of the
clergy. One of these, indeed, the Rev. Thomas Harrison, who became
minister of Elizabeth River Parish (Norfolk) in 1640, was presented for
trial in the county court in April 1645 "For not reading the Book of
Common Prayer,