on of this discussion was an opinion of
the Crown-Attorney and Solicitor-General of England, given in 1729 in
response to an appeal from the colonists, to the effect that baptism
in no way changed the status of the slave.[151] The trade of British
merchantmen was being endangered and it was important to remove the
scruples of the religious slaveholder.

In this feeling of Christian sympathy and fellowship for the slave who
professed Christianity undoubtedly lay potentialities for the
betterment of his conditions. Had there been favorable economic and
political forces working to bring these notions of equality more and
more to the consciousness of men, just as the storm and stress of
political struggle forced them to espouse the doctrines of inalienable
human rights, doubtless freedom would have come to the slave with the
growing sense of the wider implications of democracy. Certainly had
there prevailed in the South economic and social forces similar to
those in the North, the emancipation of the Negro would have taken
place naturally and normally in both sections. That Locke and his
contemporaries felt no incongruity between their ideas of liberty and
the existence of slavery must be attributed to the fact that the full
social implications of their doctrines had not yet been brought home
to them by industrial development. They accepted the status of the
slave as a matter of course in the existing agricultural order.

It is easy to see in Virginia, the chief slave-holding State of the
earlier period, how economic interests in time narrowed the sphere of
action and finally counteracted entirely the tendency of religion to
extend to the slave the ideal of freedom. In the act of 1670, the
first which dealt with slaves in Virginia, the enfranchising effect of
conversion was limited to servants imported from Christian lands; thus
were excluded at once the great majority of Negroes who came, of
course, from Africa. The few Negroes brought in from Christian lands,
such as England and the West Indies, were assigned by the act to the
status of servants from which many attained freedom. It was inevitable
that, in Virginia and the southern colonies especially, the religious
notion that profession of Christianity made a difference in status
should disappear before the more practical principle of race and
color. By the time of the Revolution the matter of religion had
practically disappeared as a factor in the status of the slave,[