George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

¹ in spite of the remonstrance of Haselrig and

Chap. V.}

Henry Vane, were shipped to America. At the corresponding period, in Ireland, the crowded exportation of Irish Catholics was a frequent event, and was attended by aggravations hardly inferior to the usual atrocities of the African slave-trade.² In 1685, when nearly a thousand of the prisoners, condemned for participating in the insurrection of Monmouth, were sentenced to transportation, men of influence at court, with rival importunity, scrambled for the convicted insurgents as a merchantable commodity.³

The condition of apprenticed servants in Virginia differed from that of slaves chiefly in the duration of their bondage; and the laws of the colony favored their early enfranchisement.⁴ But this state of labor easily admitted the introduction of perpetual servitude. The commerce of Virginia had been at first monopolized by the company; but as its management for the benefit of the corporation led to frequent dissensions, it was in 1620 laid open to free competition.⁵ In the

1620

month of August of that year, just fourteen months after the first representative assembly of Virginia, four months before the Plymouth colony landed in America, and less than a year before the concession of a written constitution, more than a century after the last vestiges of hereditary slavery had disappeared from English society and the English constitution, and six years after the commons of France had petitioned for the emancipation of every serf in every fief, a Dutch manof-war entered James River, and landed twenty