you know very well how we
shall maintain twenty Moors cheaper than one English servant."[136]
Few passages better illustrate how religious ideas and economic needs
conspired to bring about the enslavement of both Indian and Negro at
this early period.

Race also played its part in determining the slave status. There was
present more or less from the very beginning of slavery in States like
Virginia the tendency to limit such servitude to the Negro race. At
first, when both Indian and Negro slaves were found together, there
was no _a priori_ ground for discriminating against the Negro in favor
of the Indian and designating the status of the slave as the normal
status of the Negro. The probable reason is that racial
characteristics of the Indian made him a bad subject for slavery. The
Massachusetts colonists found the Pequot Indians surly, revengeful and
in the words of Cotton Mather unable to "endure the Yoke."[137] The
Negro, on the contrary, proved himself much more tractable and
therefore more profitable as a slave. These plastic race traits, in
fact, have enabled the Negro to survive while the less adaptive Indian
has disappeared. Thus the bonds of a servile status hardened from
decade to decade about the Negro, being determined partly by economic
needs, partly by religious prejudices and partly by the Negro's own
peculiar racial traits.

Legislation, which always follows in the wake of status and normally
gives expression to it, corroborates what has just been stated.
Virginia in the act of 1670 first fixed the legal status of the slave
and so worded the act as virtually to protect the Indian from
enslavement. By an act of 1705 she made Indian enslavement illegal,
thus practically limiting slavery to the Negro. Hence at the time when
Virginia drew up her famous Declaration of Rights, in which she
affirmed the natural equality and inalienable rights of all men, the
prevailing sentiment of the community undoubtedly was that the normal
status of the Negro was that of the slave, which status placed him
entirely without the scope of these lofty declarations. The protests
of such men as George Wythe and Thomas Jefferson were contrary to the
drift of the social mind.[138] The last stage in this process of
determining status on the basis of race is to be found in the various
slave codes that grew up in the Southern States. They were supposed to
be done away with forever by the war amendments and Sumner's famous
Bill of