of the United States which was not entered by slavers. The red men of the wilderness, unlike the Africans, among whom slavery had existed from immemorial time, would never abet the foreign merchant in the nefarious traffic. Fraud and force remained, therefore, the means by which, near Newfoundland or Florida, on the shores of the Atlantic, or among the Indians of the Mississippi valley, Cortereal and Vasquez de Ayllon, Porcallo and Soto, and private adventurers, transported the natives of North America into slavery in Europe and the Spanish West Indies. Columbus himself, in 1494, enslaving five hundred native Americans, sent them to Spain, that they might be publicly sold at Seville. The generous Isabella, in 1500, commanded the liberation of the Indians held in bondage in her European possessions. Yet her active benevolence extended neither to the Moors nor to the Africans; and even her compassion for the men of the New World was but transient. The commissions for making discoveries, issued a few days before and after her interference to rescue those whom Columbus had enslaved, reserved for herself and Ferdinand a fourth part of the slaves which the new kingdoms might contain. The slavery of Indians was recognized as lawful.

A royal edict of 1501 permitted negro slaves, born in slavery among Christians, to be transported. Within two years there were such numbers of Africans in Hispaniola that Ovando, the governor of the island, entreated that their coming might be restrained. For a short time the Spanish government forbade the introduction of negro slaves who had been bred in Moorish families, and allowed only those who were said to have been instructed in the Christian faith to be transported to the West Indies, under the plea that they might assist in converting infidel nations.

But, after the culture of sugar was begun, the

system of slavery easily overcame the scruples of men in power. King Ferdinand himself sent from Seville fifty slaves to labor in the mines, and promised to send more; and, because it was said that one negro could do the work of four Indians, the direct transportation of slaves from Guinea to Hispaniola was, in 1511, enjoined by a royal ordinance, and deliberately sanctioned by successive decrees. Was it not natural that Charles V., a youthful monarch, at his accession in 1516, should have readily granted licenses to the Flemings to transport negroes to the colonies? The benevolent Las Casas, who felt for the native inhabitants of the New World all that the purest missionary zeal could inspire, and who had seen them vanish away like dew before the cruelties of the Spaniards while the African thrived under the tropical sun, in 1517 suggested that negroes might still further be employed to perform the severe toils which they alone could endure. The board of trade at Seville was consulted, to learn how many slaves would be required; four for each Spanish emigrant had been proposed; deliberate calculation fixed the number at four thousand a year. In 1518 the monopoly, for eight years, of annually importing four thousand slaves into the West Indies was granted by Charles V. to La Bresa, one of his favorites, and was sold to the Genoese. The buyers of the contract purchased their slaves of the Portuguese, to whom a series of papal bulls had indeed granted the exclusive commerce with Western Africa; but the slave-trade between Africa and America was never expressly sanctioned by the see of Rome. Leo X. declared that "not the Christian religion only, but Nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery." Paul III., two years after he had given authority to make slaves of every English person who would not assist in the expulsion of Henry VIII., in two separate briefs im

precated a curse on the Europeans who should enslave Indians, or any other class of men. Ximenes, the stern grand-inquisitor, the austere but ambitious Franciscan, refused to sanction the introduction of negroes into Hispaniola, believing that the favorable climate would increase their numbers and infallibly lead them to a successful revolt. Hayti, the first spot in America that received African slaves, was the first to set the example of African liberty.

The odious distinction of having first interested England in the slave-trade belongs to Sir John Hawkins. In 1562 he transported a large cargo of Africans to Hispaniola; the rich returns of sugar, ginger, and pearls attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth; and five years later she took shares in a new expedition, though the commerce, on the part of the English, in Spanish ports, was by the law of Spain illicit, as well as by the law of morals detestable.

Conditional servitude, under indentures or covenants, had from the first existed in Virginia. Once at least James sent over convicts, and once at least the city of London a hundred homeless children from its streets. The servant stood to his master in the relation of a debtor, bound to discharge by his labor the costs of emigration. White servants came to be a usual article of merchandise. They were sold in England to be transported, and in Virginia were to be purchased on shipboard. Not the Scots only, who were taken in the field of Dunbar, were sold into servitude in New England, but the royalist prisoners of the battle of Worcester. The leaders in the insurrection of Penruddoc, in spite of the remonstrance of Haselrig and Henry Vane, were shipped to America. At the corresponding period, in Ireland, the exportation of Irish Catholics was frequent. In 1672, the average price in the colonies, where five years of service.

were due, was about ten pounds, while a negro was worth twenty or twenty-five pounds.

The condition of apprenticed servants in Virginia differed from that of slaves chiefly in the duration of their bondage; the laws of the colony favored their early enfranchisement. But this state of labor easily admitted the introduction of perpetual servitude. In the month of August, 1619, five years after the commons of France had petitioned for the emancipation of every serf in every fief, a Dutch man-of-war entered James River and landed twenty negroes for sale. This is the sad epoch of the introduction of negro slavery; but the traffic would have been checked in its infancy had it remained with the Dutch. Thirty years after this first importation of Africans, Virginia to one black contained fifty whites; and, after seventy years of its colonial existence, the number of its negro slaves was proportionably much less than in several Northern States at the time of the war of independence. Had no other form of servitude been known in Virginia than of men of the same race, every difficulty would have been promptly obviated. But the Ethiopian and Caucasian races were to meet together in nearly equal numbers beneath a temperate zone. Who could foretell the issue? The negro race, from its introduction, was regarded with disgust, and its union with the whites forbidden under ignominious penalties.

SAM LAWSON, THE VILLAGE DO-NOTHING.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

[The author of the celebrated "Uncle Tom's Cabin," daughter of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, and sister of the noted pulpit-orator Henry Ward Beecher, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1812. The immediate and extraordinary popularity of the work above named is one of the curiosities of literature, and its total sale was unprecedentedly large. Mrs. Stowe has written many other novels, in all of which she displays an insight into human nature, rich powers of description, earnest pathos, and a command of language unsurpassed by those of any other American novelist. "Oldtown Folks," from which we take our selection, is a more polished and finished work than "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and as a character-picture of New England life in a past generation it must be viewed as a work of high art. It has not its equal, in this respect, in American literature.]

"WAL, naow, Horace, don't ye cry so. Why, I'm railly consarned for ye. Why, don't you s'pose your daddy's better off? Why, sartin I do. Don't cry, there's a good boy, now. I'll give ye my jack-knife, now."

This was addressed to me the day after my father's death, while the preparations for the funeral hung like a pall over the house, and the terror of the last cold mystery, the tears of my mother, and a sort of bustling dreariness on the part of my aunts and grandmother, all conspired to bear down on my childish nerves with fearful power. It was a doctrine of those good old times, no less than of many in our present days, that a house invaded by death should be made as forlorn as hands could make it. It should be rendered as cold and stiff, as unnatural, as dead and corpse-like, as possible, by closed shutters, lookingglasses pinned up in white sheets, and the locking up and hiding out of sight of any pleasant little familiar object which would be thought out of place in a sepulchre. This