60 Chapter 2 American Society in the Making
slaves—roughly five times that of indentured
servants—was another disadvantage. In 1664 the gov-
ernor of Maryland informed Lord Baltimore that local
planters would use more “neigros” “if our purses
would endure it.” As long as white servants were avail-
able, few planters acquired slaves.
In the 1670s the flow of indentured servants
slackened as the result of improving economic condi-
tions in England and the competition of other
colonies for servants. At the same time, the formation
of the Royal African Company (1672) made slaves
more readily available. By 1700, nearly 30,000 slaves
lived in the English colonies.Prosperity in a Pipe: Tobacco
Labor and land made agriculture possible, but it
was necessary to find a market for American crops
in the Old World if the colonists were to enjoy any-
thing but the crudest sort of existence. They could
not begin to manufacture all the articles they
required; to obtain from England such items asof years as were indentured servants. What is certain is
that by about 1640 someblacks were slaves (a few,
with equal certainty, were free) and that by the 1660s
local statutes had firmly established the institution in
Virginia and Maryland.
Slavery soon spread throughout the colonies. As
early as 1626 there were only a handful of slaves in New
Netherland, and when the English conquered that
colony in 1664 there were 700 slaves in a population of
about 8,000. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties of
1641—strange title—provided that “there shall never
be any bond-slavery... amongst us; unlesse it be lawful
captives taken in just warrs [i.e., Indians] and such
strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are soldeto us.”
However, relatively few blacks were imported until late
in the seventeenth century, even in the southern
colonies. In 1650 there were only 300 blacks in
Virginia and as late as 1670 no more than 2,000.
White servants were much more highly prized.
The African, after all, was almost entirely unaccus-
tomed to both the European and the American ways
of life. In a country starved for capital, the cost of
A denunciation of the tobacco craze that swept Europe in the mid-1600s, by Abraham Teniers.
Source: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.