hich was
strange to their lips; they were unable to understand the tongue of
their masters and often unable to understand the dialects of their
companions in misfortune; they were depressed with their helplessness
on the limitless sea, and their childish superstitions were fed by a
thousand new terrors and emotions. It was small wonder that, when
disease began its ravages in the shipload of these kidnaped beings,
"the mortality of thirty per cent was not rare." That this was
primarily a physical selection which made no allowance for mental
aptitudes did not greatly diminish in the eyes of the master the
slave's utility. The new continent needed muscle power; and so tens of
thousands of able-bodied Africans were landed on American soil, alien
to everything they found there.

These slaves were kidnaped from many tribes. "In our negro
population," says Tillinghast, "as it came from the Western Coast of
Africa, there were Wolofs and Fulans, tall, well-built, and very
black, hailing from Senegambia and its vicinity; there were hundreds
of thousands from the Slave Coast--Tshis, Ewes, and Yorubans,
including Dahomians; and mingled with all these Soudanese negroes
proper were occasional contributions of mixed stock, from the north
and northeast, having an infusion of Moorish blood. There were other
thousands from Lower Guinea, belonging to Bantu stock, not so black in
color as the Soudanese, and thought by some to be slightly superior to
them."[9] No historian has recorded these tribal differences. The new
environment, so strange, so ruthless, swallowed them; and, in the
welter of their toil, the black men became so intermingled that all
tribal distinctions soon vanished. Here and there, however, a careful
observer may still find among them a man of superior mien or a woman
of haughty demeanor denoting perhaps an ancestral prince or princess
who once exercised authority over some African jungle village.

Slavery was soon a recognized institution in every American colony. By
1665 every colony had its slave code. In Virginia the laws became
increasingly strict until the dominion of the master over his slaves
was virtually absolute. In South Carolina an insurrection of slaves in
1739, which cost the lives of twenty-one whites and forty-four blacks,
led to very drastic laws. Of the Northern colonies, New York seems to
have been most in fear of a black peril. In 1700 there were about six
thousand slaves in this colony, chiefly in