First Appearance of Slavery in the British North American Colonies--Early Theory of the Benefits of Slavery--The Earliest Legal Recognition of Slavery in the Colonies--Northern Colonies not well Adapted to Negro Labor--The Southern Colonies well Adapted to Negro Labor--Negro Slavery a Temporary Necessity in the South--Was Negro Slavery an Error and an Evil from the first?--Slavery Legislation in the Southern Colonies--Partus Sequitur Ventrem--Definitions of the Slave Class--The Test of the Slave Status as Fixed by the Virginia Statute--The Legal Position of the Slave--Tendency Toward Serfage in the Code of 1705--Public Relations of the Slave System--The General Object of the Laws in respect to Slaves--Slavery and the Revolutionary Ideas of the Rights of Man--First Prohibition upon Slave Importation--Abolition of Slavery in the Northern Commonwealths after the Beginning of the Revolution--Slavery and the Constitution of 1787--Reaction against the Humanitarian Principles of the Revolution--Abolition of the Foreign Slave-trade by Congress--Cotton Culture and the Cotton-gin--The Effect of the Return to the Arts of Peace upon the Ideas Concerning Slavery--Slavery During the War of 1812 and the Years just before and just after this War--Slavery in the Louisiana Territory--Slavery in the territory West of North Carolina and Georgia--Slavery in Louisiana a Different Question from Slavery in the North Carolina and Georgia Cessions--Interest in Slavery in Maryland and Virginia Increased by the Acquisition of Louisiana--The Domestic Slave-trade--The Relation of Slavery to the Diplomacy of the United States. It is not easy to define the term slavery in the abstract without unfitting it for application to the great majority {40} of the systems of servitude which have ever existed. Especially will it be difficult to gain a correct conception of the relation between the white man and the negro in North America previous to 1860 by means of such a definition. The institution of negro slavery in the United States was an historical growth, which was in some respects unique. We shall, therefore, do better to follow the main stages of that development than to attempt at the outset any definition whatsoever. We may, in this manner, build up a true description of it, and escape the error frequently contained in the brevity of a definition and in the nature of an abstract proposition. [Sidenote: First appearance of slavery in the British North American colonies.] [Sidenote: Early theory of the benefits of slavery.]