from Maryland to Texas. As
late as the famous Dred Scott case, when slavery was limited to the
South, Justice Curtis could say, "the status of slavery embraces every
condition from that in which the slave is known to the law simply as a
chattel, with no civil rights, to that in which he is recognized as a
person for all purposes, save the compulsory power of directing and
receiving the fruits of his labor. Which of these conditions shall
attend the status of slavery, must depend upon the municipal law which
creates and upholds it."[311] A comparative study of the legislation
of all the slave States with regard to the Negro both as slave and
free will very clearly reveal the effect of these varying conditions
in the several States concerned.[312] Nothing is more necessary to a
calm and unprejudiced study of the institution of slavery than the
realization of this fact.

What then were the economic, climatic and social conditions in the
South which contributed to shape the attitude of the social mind of
the section toward the Negro? The dominant feature of the social and
economic life of the South of ante bellum days was the plantation.
This was the industrial unit comprising usually large land areas,
worked by slaves divided into groups, under strict supervision, with a
fixed routine of labor in the production of special commodities such
as tobacco, rice, sugar-cane or cotton. Two types of plantation life
developed even before the Revolution, the Virginian and the West
Indian, the latter confined at first to the coast line of South
Carolina and later covering the "Black Belt" of the far South. The
term "plantation" was originally synonymous with colony. Virginia was
the "plantation of the London Company"[313] but was later broken up
into smaller economic units which retained the name. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century the prevailing industrial system in Virginia
and Maryland was these small plantations or farms where Negro slaves
gradually took the place of white redemptioners and the prevailing
staple was tobacco. About the end of the seventeenth century the
Jamaican or West Indian type of plantation was introduced on the coast
region around Charleston. It consisted of larger estates cultivated by
thirty or more slaves, with few or no white laborers, the master and
his family often being the only whites present the year around. Fanny
Kemble's "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation," 1838-39,
gives an