allowed to lie indefinitely, passers-by making a deviation through the brush,' and stage travel was intolerably tedious and interrupted by accidents. Dickens makes a lively chapter out of his adventures between Washington and Richmond in 1842.2

Foreign travellers in general were not pleasantly impressed by American hotels, although one distinguished nobleman could not forbear praising an inn at Utica and its well-spread table, except that "napkins you do not get, and instead, you are obliged to make use of the table-cloth." In the south, with its few cities and its small travel, hotels came in for plenty of frank criticism. Even the southern pleasure resorts seemed to the outsider extremely crude, the hotels dirty, ill-managed, overcrowded, the guests lodged in crazy cabins, and the table beset with "quick feeders." 4

Knowing how little could be found on the road, the planter removing with his slaves carried provisions with him and camped. But the ordinary traveller could often find no other shelter than a

1 Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., 23.

5

"Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 60, 87, 309-314, 320-331, 357-366, 380-382; Murray, Letters, 225; Featherstonhaugh, Excursion, chap. x.; Quincy, Figures of the Past, 188-208; Dickens, American Notes (ed. of 1842), 3-15; cf. Hart, Contemporaries, III., §§ 165-168. 3 Saxe-Weimar, Travels, I., 65.

Featherstonhaugh, Excursion, 22-28; Stuart, North America, II., 83-85; Latrobe, Rambles, II., 18; Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 74, 305, 309, 332-337, 624, 643.

'Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, 49, 111; Featherstonhaugh, Excursion, 53, 120, 154.

house, and the poor whites had too little for themselves to undertake the business of receiving travellers. Southern hospitality was the boast and the virtue of a people who had rude plenty and were glad to see a new face, but it was a virtue which was intended to be practised upon those who came with proper letters of introduction or who showed that they were of the same class as their hosts.1 In view of this universal belief in generous hospitality, it was a shock to some travellers to find that at almost any house which would entertain them at all a payment was expected, often out of proportion to the entertainment."

1 Lyell, Second Visit, I., 245; Paulding, Letters from the South, II., 92-97; Bremer, Homes of the New World, I., 232; Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 77-79; Hall, Travels, 412-415.

'Hodgson, Letters from North America, I., 266-268; Buckingham, Slave States, II., 147-150; Olmsted, Back Country, 31, 4244, 174-176, 396, 411.

CHAPTER IV

SLAVERY AS AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM

THAT

(1607-1860)

HAT slavery should exist in the United States was an anomaly, for the law of England when the colonies were planted recognized neither chattel slavery nor villeinage. Yet forced labor was not unknown in England: the apprentice must serve his seven years, and take such floggings as his master saw fit; the hired servant must carry out his contract for his term of service; the convicts, often including political offenders, were slaves of the state and sometimes sold to private owners over-seas. The colonists claimed these rights over some of their white fellows, and, in addition, had a large class of "redemptioners," who agreed that their services should be sold for a brief term of years to pay their passage-money, and of "indented" or "indentured" servants brought by their masters under legal obligation to serve for a term of years and subject to the same penalties of branding, whipping, and mutilation as negro slaves.1 These forms of servitude,

1 Butler, in Am. Hist. Rev., II., 12-32; Hart, Contemporaries II., § 107; “Diary of John Harrower," in Am. Hist. Rev., VI., 65

1

however, were limited in duration, and transmitted no claim to the servant's children. The presumption of law was always that a white person was free.

No new community in the midst of virgin soil ever had labor enough to satisfy it, and the English settlers at once began to enslave their Indian neighbors, soothing their consciences with the argument that it was right to make slaves of pagans. Fierce, intractable, unaccustomed to continuous labor, the Indians fled or died in captivity, leaving few of their descendants in bondage. Rather by way of experiment than with any confidence in their usefulness, in 1619 the Virginians began to import African negroes, first from the West Indies; later by a steady direct trade from Africa.1 For a century the trade was small: in 1700 there were not more than twenty or twenty-five thousand negro slaves in all the colonies, which was perhaps a twelfth of the total population; with little sacrifice or disturbance it was still possible to stop the traffic and to free the inchoate nation from a terrible race and labor problem.

People in these latter days have tried to prove that our ancestors made some effort to check slavery, by calling attention to early prohibitive statutes of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and to the foundation of Georgia as a free colony; but in Massachu

'Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, chap. xviii.; Greene, Provincial America, chap. xiv. (Am. Nation, V., VI.).

setts and Rhode Island these enactments were dead letters, for slaves were imported, sold, and their offspring born in slavery; and the Georgians soon insisted on having slaves like their neighbors. Efforts were, however, made in several of the colonies to restrict the slave-trade, but rarely from humanitarian objections; the colonial statutes were either intended to keep out a dangerous class or to secure some of the profits by laying a tax on the trade. Whatever the reasons, these acts were systematically disallowed by the British government, and the trade went on unrestricted down to the Revolution.

On the ordinary principle that the English statute law, in existence when the colonies were founded, applied to the colonists, slavery would have had no legal standing anywhere in the empire; but in all the colonies local enactments recognized and protected slave property, and criminal statutes established special offences which could be committed only by slaves,' and set up special tribunals for the summary trial of slaves. These slave codes, of which many parts lasted till 1865, bear witness to the ever-present danger of negro insurrection, of which there are about twenty-five recorded instances previous to the Revolution, the best known being the so-called New York Slave Plot of 1741, which resulted in the transportation of eighty negroes, the hanging of eighteen whites and negroes,

1 Morgan, Slavery in New York, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Papers, V., 337-346.