rovinces. The demand
for menials on the plantations was met, then, by importing bond-servants
from Great Britain. These were obtained in three ways.--

1. Convicted criminals were deported to serve out their terms on the
plantations. Some of these had been charged only with political
offenses, and had the making of good citizens; but the greater number
were rogues of the shiftless and petty delinquent order, such as were
too lazy to work but not desperate enough to have incurred capital
sentences.

2. Boys and girls, chiefly from the slums of British seaports, were
kidnapped and sold into temporary slavery on the plantations.

3. Impoverished people who wished to emigrate, but could not pay for
their passage, voluntarily sold their services for a term of years in
return for transportation.

Thus a considerable proportion of the white laborers of the South, in
the seventeenth century, were criminals or ne'er-do-wells from the
start. A large number of the others came from the dregs of society. As
for the remainder, the companionships into which they were thrust, the
brutalities to which they were subjected, their impotence before the
law, the contempt in which they were held by the ruling caste, and the
wretchedness of their prospect when released, were enough to undermine
all but the strongest characters. Few ever succeeded in rising to
respectable positions.

Then came a vast social change. At a time when the laboring classes of
Europe had achieved emancipation from serfdom, and feudalism was
overthrown, African slavery in our own Southland laid the foundation for
a new feudalism. Southern society reverted to a type that the rest of
the civilized world had outgrown.

The effect upon white labor was deplorable. The former bond-servants
were now freedmen, it is true, but freedmen shorn of such opportunities
as they were fitted to use. Sprung from a more or less degraded stock,
still branded by caste, untrained to any career demanding skill and
intelligence, devitalized by evil habits of life, densely ignorant of
the world around them, these, the naturally shiftless, were now turned
out into the backwoods to shift for themselves. It was inevitable that
most of them should degenerate even below the level of their former
estate, for they were no longer forced into steady industry.

The white freedmen generally became squatters on such land as was unfit
for tobacco, cotton, and other crops profitable to slave-owners.