belongs the credit of the discovery of the Zuñi Indians and of New Mexico. Nothing from these early years, however, exercised any [11]abiding influence on the history of the Negro in the United States.

[11]

The status of the Negro after 1619 was for several decades complicated by the system of indentured labor known as servitude. This applied especially to white servants brought from England; but the first Negroes brought to the country technically fell into the system. According to the New International Encyclopedia, "Servitude became slavery when to such incidents as alienation, disfranchisement, whipping, and limited marriage, were added those of perpetual service and a denial of civil, juridical, marital and property rights as well as the denial of the possession of children." While legislation was enacted earlier in Massachusetts, it was Virginia that in 1661 really led the way for the South in the definite recognition of slavery as a system by saying that Negroes were "incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time." The next year the same colony enacted that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother, which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary; and thus the system definitely gained a foothold in the oldest of the colonies.

It must not be supposed that the [12]institution of slavery was fastened on the colonies without many doubts and fears. As early as 1688 the Germantown Quakers made a formal protest against the barter of human beings, and moral sentiment developed in other places as well as in Pennsylvania. In the far South, especially in the colony of South Carolina, where the slaves eventually outnumbered the white people, the constant fear of insurrections led to the imposition of heavier and heavier fines on those brought into the country; and for one reason or another Virginia before 1772 passed thirty-three acts looking toward the prohibition of the importation of slaves. Nothing, however, was able to stand in the way of the cupidity of Englishmen who were gaining riches by the traffic; economic considerations were as potent two hundred years ago as now. In the course of the eighteenth century slavery grew by leaps and bounds. By the time of the first regular census in 1790 there were 757,208 Negroes in the states, 19.3 per cent. of the total population. Fifty-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven of these were those who in one way or another had become free. It is important to note that the percentage of total population has never been higher than 19.3. It has in fact steadily declined [13]since 

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