e died, and thus the Governor was obliged abruptly, on August 4th, to
prorogue the Assembly till March 1st. There being as yet no counties
laid off, the representatives were elected from the several towns,
plantations, and hundreds, styled boroughs, and hence they were called
burgesses.

INTRODUCTION OF NEGROES INTO VIRGINIA

SPREAD OF SLAVERY AND THE CULTIVATION OF TOBACCO

A.D. 1619

CHARLES CAMPBELL JOHN M. LUDLOW

It was not till one hundred twenty years after the beginning of
negro slavery in Spanish America that it was introduced in any
part of the present United States. From its first introduction
in Virginia (1619) the system grew and spread until it became
one of the most prominent features of American society. The
comprehensive view of its growth and decline presented by Mr.
Ludlow, a well-known English writer, has therefore a special
value here. From him and from the Virginia historian Mr.
Campbell we get two widely diverging views upon the subject.

Along with the adoption and increase of slavery in Virginia
went rapid progress in the cultivation there of tobacco, which
had begun in 1612. Tobacco proved to be a staple of the first
importance. It was destined to exert a controlling influence on
the growth and prosperity of the colony. It was not long before
this industry, by reason of the great profits which it
returned, overshadowed every other.

CHARLES CAMPBELL

In the month of August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and
sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first introduced into Virginia.
Some time before this, Captain Argall, the deputy governor of Virginia,
sent out on a "filibustering" cruise to the West Indies a ship called
the Treasurer, manned "with the ablest men in the colony." She returned
to Virginia, after some ten months, with her booty, which consisted of
captured negroes, who were not left in Virginia, because Captain Argall
had gone back to England, but were put on the Earl of Warwick's
plantation in the Somer Islands.

It is probable that the planters who first purchased negroes reasoned
but little on the morality of the act, or, if any scruples of conscience
presented themselves, they could be readily silenced by reflecting that
the negroes were heathens, descendants of Ham, and consigned by divine
appointment to perpetual bondage. The planters may, if they reasoned at
all o