Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3,000. In 1708, however, in Virginia there were 12,000 Negroes, in 1715, 23,000, in 1756, 120,156, and in 1774, 200,000. In 1715 there were in all the colonies about 58,850. These represented about 14 per cent. of the total population. When the first census was taken in 1790, the percentage of Negroes to total population was 19.3, 757,208 being the number in the states. Of these 697,897 were slaves, Virginia being first with 293,427, and South Carolina, Maryland, and North Carolina following with a little more than 100,000 each. The percentage has never been higher than 19.3. In the nineteenth century, except in two decades, it was constantly lowered. Thus, although in 1910 there were 9,827,763 Negroes in the United States, these represented but 10.7 per cent of the total population. 10. Status of the Slave.—What now was the exact position in society of this large addition to the body politic? The whole system of Negro slavery was distinctively an evolution. As the first Negroes were taken by pirates, the rights of ownership could not legally be given to those who purchased them; hence slavery by custom preceded slavery by statute'. Little by little the colonies drifted into the sterner system. The transition is marked by such an act as that of 1652 in Rhode Island, which permitted a Negro to be Blake, 378. bound for ten years. By the time it had become generally enacted or understood in the colonies that a child born of slave parents should serve for life, a new question had arisen, that of the issue of a free person and a slave. This led Virginia in 1662 to lead the way with an act to the effect that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother, which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary. In 1705 it was enacted in Virgini...