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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
often in places of business. The institution of slavery was not established
in Virginia until 1662, when the legislature enacted a law requiring that
all servants who were non-Christians should be held as slaves for life. By
means of this statute, Virginia accepted slavery and made it legal. It was
a fateful step that marked the introduction of slavery into the Southern
colonies. Like a blight, it spread to the North as well, and soon became
an accepted practice throughout the American colonies. The first slavetrading port on the continent was actually Boston.
Two hundred years would pass before slavery was abolished in North
America. The Negro was thus the last of the founding generation of
Americans—our first immigrants—to taste the fruits of liberty that were
originally cultivated in Tidewater Virginia.
Slavery, of course, had existed since ancient times and was not limited
to the American colonies or to the black race. It flourished in Greece and
Rome and throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East. The Spanish introduced human bondage into the West Indies in 1502. The discovery of the New World created a heavy demand for labor, stimulating the
slave trade. European traders and African chieftains developed a vast
commercial system for the capture, sale, and transportation of slaves,
and it is estimated that during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries at least fifteen million Africans were brought to the New World
by the maritime powers of Europe. Although slavery was eradicated in
the United States more than a century ago, it persists today, in other parts
of the world—but in a far more brutal form and on an even larger scale.
This is the system of forced labor that is characteristic of the modern totalitarian state. It consists not of individual ownership of human beings
as a species of private property, but of government ownership by the
state, usually in the form of the slave labor camp—what Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer, has described as the Gulag Archipelago.
It is estimated that during the reign of Joseph Stalin (1929–1956) there
were twelve to twenty million people housed in Soviet camps during
any one year.
At about the same time the first Negroes were brought to the Virginia
colony, there were two other important events that would later have an
enormous impact on American political and constitutional development.
In 1619, the House of Burgesses convened in a small church in James-