form of slavery was gradually extinguished by the feudal system, which substituted villeinage. To the serfs, who were the lowest grade of vassals, was committed the task of tilling the lands which the soldier gained or protected. There were grades even among the serfs, though probably there were not instances in which one held another as vassal and superior. The peculiarity of the class was, that they were astricted to the domain, and went with it when it changed hands. Some, however, had rights and privileges which they might maintain in the court of the manor of their lord. Some held small estates, which, however, they could not dispose of. The lowest class were abject and unprivileged.[1]
At the time of the first English emigration to America, but few faint traces were left of that system of villeinage once so universal throughout Europe, and still prevalent in Russia. In England it had disappeared, not by any formal legislative act, but as the joint result of private emancipations and by the discouragement long given by the English courts to claims so contrary to natural right. It became an established opinion throughout western Europe that Christians could not be held as slaves — but the immunity did not extend to infidels or heathen.
We have mentioned in a former chapter that slavery was first introduced into the North American colonies in 1620, by a Dutch vessel which landed a portion of her human merchandise at Jamestown, Virginia. The event was almost simultaneous with the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, Dec. 22d, 1620. In buying and holding negro slaves, the Virginians did not suppose themselves to be violating any law, human or divine. Whatever might be the case with the law of England, the law of Moses, in authorizing the enslavement of "strangers," seemed to give to the purchase of negro slaves an express sanction. The number of negroes in the colony, limited as it was to a few cargoes, brought at intervals by Dutch traders, was long too small to make the matter appear of much moment, and more than forty years elapsed before the colonists thought it necessary to strengthen the system of slavery by any express enactments.
In the colony of Massachusetts a body of fundamental laws was established in 1641. One of the articles, based on the Mosaic code, provides that "there shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, nor captivity among us, unless it be lawful captives, taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold unto us, and these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel requires. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authority." This article sanctions the slave-trade and the holding of negroes and Indians in bondage. This seems to be the first positive enactment in the colonies on the subject of slavery.
About this time a transaction occurred, (1645,) which some consider a protest on the part of Massachusetts against the African slave-trade. We state
- ↑ Chambers' History of Laws.
