Negro laborers were brought to Virginia and sold as slaves, fifty years after the first cargo landed at Jamestown. In the year 1619, a Dutch vessel brought over twenty negroes to be thus held in bondage. To the men who watched the landing of this handful of Africans it was doubtless an unimportant matter, yet it was the beginning of a system that had an immense influence upon our country. In those days few persons in the world opposed slavery. Even kings and queens made money out of the traffic. But for tobacco slavery would not have taken such a hold on America. When it was found that the negro made the cheapest laborer for cultivating the plantation many more were imported. They were also employed in the New England and Middle States, largely as household servants, the soil not being favorable to the production of rice, indigo, cotton and sugar, which were the staples of Southern agriculture. Moreover, the African is not physically adapted to the northern climate. He was especially liable to tubercular disease--hence he was sold to the Southern planters, except in a few cases where the Puritan spirit caused his emancipation. In the year that Harvard College was erected, 1636, the first slave ship built in America was launched at Marblehead, Mass. It brought a large cargo of slaves to be sold to the settlers. During the one hundred years preceding 1776, millions of slaves had been imported to the States. King George III favored the institution, and forbade any interference with the colonies in this matter. The horrors of slavery in Massachusetts, as recorded by reliable documents of the period, far exceed all that has been charged against the South, by Uncle Tom's Cabin, or any other records of fact or romance. The Encyclopedia of Political Economy and United States History, Vol. 3, page 733, has the following taken from the New York Evening Post: "During the eighteen months of the years 1859-60 eighty-five slave ships (giving their names) belonging to New York merchants, brought in cargoes annually of between 30,000 and 60,000 African slaves, who were sold in Brazil, there being great demand for them in that country, owing to new industries. Old Peter Faneuil built Faneuil Hall with slave money, and many other fortunes were thus made."