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Show 178 DESPO'l'ISI\f wa::; hrreditary- the villeins being the ~csccn~lants of the ancient Britons aml Saxons, held Ill servttudc from a time: whereof the memory of man ran not to the co ntrary. Previous to the discovery of America, or shortly after that period, English villeinage i.n gr~ss l.1ad almost ceased to exist.. So late as t.hc rc1gn o[ Elizabeth, only a few villeins regarda,nt remain ed, in 8omc obscure corners. The lawyers and the clrrgy, in whom the prindpal intelligence of that age was vested, had both greatly contributed to this result. In all questions touching villeinage., the English common law courts hJid made it a point to lean in favor of freedom. All men were supposed to be free, and the burden of proof lay on the claimant. To prove_ a man a villein, unless he confessed himself such m open court,-and the last recorded confession of this kind was in the nineteenth year of Henry VI., (1441,) -it was necessary to show title to him by proscrip· tion; that is, to show that, being born in lawful wedlock, he was descended of a stock of villeins on the father's side time out of memory. For the English common la'v courts refused to recognize the doctri11e of the civil law-that favorite docrrine of all slaveholdinO' communities-that the children of female slaves ft1herit from the mother the condition of slavery. 'I' hey held, on the contrary, that the child followed the condition of the father. Bastard children, be111g Ill the eye of the law children without fathers, of course were born free-a doctrine which gave freedo~1. to great numbers, for, in all slave-holding commumtiCs, the masters esteem it a part of their right to usc the slave women as concubines. 'l'aking a hint apparently from the MahometaiJS, the clergy had denouuccd it as a scandalous and out· ragcous thing for one Christian to hold another Jll slavery; and their preaching on this point l~ad been so succesHful, that about the time of the dtscovcry of America it. had come to be considered a settled matter, not in England only, but throughout West~rn IN AMERICA. 179 Europe, that no Christian ought to be, or lawfully could be, held as a slave. . But :vith. the customary narrowness of that age, t his 1mmumty Jrom slave ry was not thouaht to cxtC'nd to infidels ?r pagans. While the cman~ipaUon of serfs was gomg on, black slaves, brouaht by the Portuguese from the coast of Guinea, b~camc common in the south of Europe, an~ a few found their way to En~land. Th,~ first Engh~hman who engaged in this busmess was Su John Hawkins, who, Uurin(J' the rciO'n of ~Iizabeth, made several voyages to thg coaot ~f Gumea for negroes; whom he disposed of to the Spaniards of the West Indies. 'l'hc queen granted seycral patents to encourage this traflic; yet she is sa1d to have expressed to Hawkins her hope that the negroes went voluntarily from Africa, declarinO' that if any force were used to enslave them, she do0ubted not it would ?ring down the vengeance of Ilea ven upon those gmlty of such wickedness. The newly· d1scovered coasts of America were also visited by kidnappers. Few, if any, of the early voyagers scrupled to seize the natives, and to carry them home as slaves. Sir Ferdinanda Gorges, so active and so conspicuous in the early settlement of New England, had a number of these captured natives, whom he claimed as his property, kept under restraint, and employed as guides and pilots. The Mosaic law, then recently made familiar by the English translation of the Bible, and considered high authority on a~l 9ue~tions of right, seemed to countenance this distinctiOn between Christians and infidels. 'rhe Jews, according to the Mosaic code, could hold their brethren as servants only for a period of seven years, or at the utmost, till the next Jubilee, (for it is not v~r.y easy to reconcile the apparently cont1ictin0' proe VIsions on this subject in Exodus and Leviticus r:) but of "the heath~n round about,'' they might buy" bond .. men, as an mheritance for ever." The practice of the early English settlers in America, and their ideas of the English law on the subject, corresponded ex- |
