Samuel Argall, "a sea-captain of piratical tastes," followed Dale in the governorship (1617), but was soon recalled (1618), because the settlers complained bitterly of tyrannical and mercenary treatment at his hands. The liberals in England--prominent among whom were Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton--had now gained control of the corporation, and were fighting the king through the colony, with the result that Virginia gained in the next few years political privileges which were never after wholly relinquished; the colonists, too, had, in the case of Argall, learned the power of organized resistance,--a lesson which long stood them in good stead. Sidenotes: First meeting of the assembly. Indented servants. Introduction of slavery. The colony was granted a representative assembly,--the first in America,--called the house of burgesses, which was first convened in June, 1619. In the words of the "briefe declaration," written a few years later, "That they might have a hande in the governinge of themselves, y{t} was graunted that a general Assemblie shoulde be helde yearly once, whereat were to be present the Gov{r} and Counsell w{th} two Burgesses from each Plantation, freely to be elected by the Inhabitants thereof, this Assemblie to have power to make and ordaine whatsoever lawes and orders should by them be thought good and profitable for our subsistance." In this assembly Governor Yeardley (arrived April, 1619) and his council had seats and took active part. The effect of this convention, composed of twenty-two burgesses, representing eleven "cities," "hundreds," and "plantations," was greatly to restrict the governor's power, heretofore quite absolute. Yeardley was a judicious executive, and the settlement, in spite of many difficulties, prospered under his rule. Men with families began to come out from England; but an unfortunate element in the immigration of the time was the class of indented servants, which not only included convicts and vagabonds, but was largely made up of boys and girls entrapped on the London streets by press-gangs and hurried off to Virginia to be forcibly placed in servitude for long terms of years,--the nucleus of the "poor white" element in the South. Another and far worse disaster befell the colony this year (1619). Twenty African slaves, the first in America, were landed and sold in Jamestown from a Dutch man-of-war. This was the beginning of a large and wide-spreading traffic in human beings throughout the Southern colonies. Sidenote: Further political concessions.