ignificance as throwing light upon the status
of the slave especially in the southern colonies such as the Carolinas
and Georgia. The first Negro slaves imported into South Carolina came
from Barbados in 1671 and there is reason for thinking that the
Barbadian slave code and customs were imported with the slaves, for
the act passed in Barbados in 1668 declaring Negro slaves to be real
estate was copied very closely in the South Carolina act of
1690.[132] The stringency of the Barbadian slave code and the
resulting barbarous treatment of the slaves have made the little
island famous in history. "For a hundred years," says Johnston,
"slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left
to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar,
whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any
clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor'
whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the
same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery
of Virginia. The difference in the status of the slave in Virginia and
in the northern colonies as opposed to the colonies farther south,
where in some places the Barbadian conditions were at least
approximated, is to be explained in terms of the different social and
economic conditions rather than the character of the slave-owners. The
West Indian type of slavery was not conducive to the more intimate and
sympathetic relations which arose between slave and master in the
colonies to the north where a fairly complete integration of the Negro
in the social consciousness of the white took place.

It is easy to distinguish factors in the economic conditions in the
northern and southern colonies which brought about these differences
in the status of the slave in the two sections. In the trading
colonies of New England and in the farming colonies of the Middle
States the occupations in which slave labor could be profitably made
use of were limited in number. The climate was too cool, especially
for freshly imported slaves. Slave labor was ill adapted to the kind
of crops the soil demanded. The status of the slave from the very
nature of the case approximated that of the servant. The slaves became
for the most part servants, the time of whose service was perpetual.
The slaves of Pennsylvania, for this reason, were treated much more
kindly than the Negroes in the West Indies. Their lot was doubtless