THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. 515 



been no distinct difference in their tolerance of the climate in any 

 part of this varied district. There are still negroes in the mari- 

 time provinces who are said to be the descendants of those who came 

 upon the ground certainly more than a century ago. They are 

 good specimens of their stock. So, too, along the New England 

 coast and in i^Tew York there is a sufficient number of the progeny 

 of those once held as slaves to make it clear that the failure to 

 become a considerable part of the population in that district is not 

 due to any incapacity to withstand the climate. The failure of 

 the negro to increase in this field can be accounted for in other 

 ways — by the effects of race prejudice, nowhere stronger than in 

 this part of the country, and by the vice and misery that overtake 

 a despised lower class. 



It early became evident that slavery was to be of no perma- 

 nent economic advantage to any part of the colonies within the 

 glaciated district, say from central New Jersey northward. In that 

 portion of the coastal belt the state of the surface and the charac- 

 ter of the crops alike tended to make the ownership of slaves un- 

 profitable. The farms were necessarily small. They became in a 

 natural way establishments worked by the head of the house, with 

 the help of his children. Such other help as was needed was, in the 

 course of two generations, readily had from hired white men and 

 women. It was otherwise in the tobacco-planting region to the 

 southward. The cultivation of that plant, to meet the extraordi- 

 nary demands that Europe made for it, gave slavery its chance to 

 become established in this country. But for that industry the 

 institution would most likely have taken but slight root, and the 

 territory as far south as North Carolina would have been in social 

 order not very different from Pennsylvania, New York, and the 

 New England settlements. But, owing to some peculiar, as yet 

 unrecognized, adjustments of climate and soil, tobacco for pipes 

 has a quality when grown in the Virginia district such as it has 

 nowhere else in the world, and the world turned to smoking it 

 with a disregard' for expense that made each laborer in the field 

 worth some hundred dollars a year. Moreover, the production of 

 good tobacco requires much care, which extends over about a year 

 from the time the seed is planted. Some parts of the work de- 

 mand a measure of judgment such as intelligent negroes readily 

 acquire. They are indeed better fitted for the task than white 

 men, for they are commonly more interested in their tasks than 

 whites of the laboring class. The result was that before the period 

 of the Revolution slavery was firmly established in the tobacco- 

 planting colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It 

 was already the foundation of their only considerable industry. 



