ant factor in the economic life of the colony, had become the
very foundation upon which it was established.

As we have seen it was not slavery but the protracted accumulation of
surplus stocks of tobacco in England which had broken the long continued
deadlock of the tobacco trade during the Restoration period and caused
the overflow into continental markets. That the labor of blacks at first
played no essential part in the movement is evident from the fact that
in 1682 when it first became pronounced, the slave population of
Virginia and Maryland was still insignificant. But that the trade not
only continued after the glut in England had been cleared up, but
increased with startling rapidity, was unquestionably the result of more
universal use of negroes in the years immediately preceding the War of
the Spanish Succession. Slavery so cheapened the cost of production that
it was now quite possible for those who used them to pay the half penny
a pound duty on reexported tobacco in England, and still undersell all
rivals in the European market. Before many years had passed the tobacco
trade, with all that it meant both to England and to the colonies,
rested almost entirely upon the labor of the savage black man so
recently brought from the African wilds.

That this fact was fully understood at the time is attested by various
persons interested in the colony and the trade. In 1728 Francis Fane, in
protesting against the imposition of a new tax in Virginia on the
importation of slaves declared "that Laying a Duty on Negroes can only
tend to make them scarcer and dearer, the two things that for the good
of our Trade and for the Benefit of Virginia ought chiefly to be guarded
against, since it is well known that the cheepness of Virginia tobacco
in European Marketts is the true Cause of the great Consumption thereof
in Europe, and one would have therefore Expected rather to have seen an
Act allowing a premium on the Importation of Negroes to have Encouraged
the bringing them in, than an Act laying so large a Duty to discourage
their Importation."[7-54] Similarly Colonel Spencer wrote to the Board
of Trade. "The low price of tobacco requires it should be made as cheap
as possible. The Blacks can make it cheaper than Whites, so I conceive
it is for his Majesty's interest full as much as the Country's or rather
much more, to have Blacks as cheap as possible in Virginia."[7-55]

It is evident, then, that the opening of the Euro