Some of the colonial planters of Virginia owned thousands of acres of the richest tobacco land in the world—whole tracts of virgin earth where the priceless loam lay open to the rain, the air, and the warm sky; bountifully fruitful loam, only waiting for tillage to be coined into vast tobacco fortunes for the princely owners. All that was needed was human labor to dig the earth, to plant, to hoe, to cultivate, and to prepare the tobacco for market, for there was not a hundredth part enough labor to turn the waiting soil, that lay ready to yield at any time its thousands of hogsheads of tobacco, and the question was, where and how labor was to be obtained. The easiest and quickest solution of the question appeared to be the importation of negro slave labor from Africa. The introduction of such slave labor began almost in the earliest days of the provinces. Hundreds of shiploads of African negroes were brought across the ocean and set to work digging and hoeing in the tobacco fields, and slave trade became a regular traffic between the west coast of Africa and the Americas. But the African slaves, when imported, were found only fit to do the very rudest and simplest sort of labor. They were poor, ignorant savages, who, until they were set to work on the plantations, knew almost nothing at all about such labor as was practised by civilized mankind. When they were told to dig the earth, they dug, but they labored without knowing either why they worked or wherefore. They did just as their masters or their overseers bade them, and nothing more. Beyond this they could be taught little or nothing, for not only were those earlier savages like children, incapable of learning much of anything; but, in most instances, they could not even speak a single word of the language of their masters, and so could not understand what their owners wanted of them. They were of use only to work as a dumb animal might work, and not as white men could work. So the Virginia plantations were still without that intelligent labor which white men alone could bring to the tilling of the soil; labor that knew what it was about when it dug the earth, and which, when told to do so, could turn its hand to other things that might be required of it. And so it was that every means was used to bring English men and women to the Virginia plantations.