very much below that number.[1] In the instructions which Culpeper received in 1682 from the English Government, he was enjoined to inquire as to what would be the best means of facilitating the conversion of the slaves to the Christian religion, only it was added that caution was to be shown in taking any steps that tended to throw in jeopardy individual property in the negro, or to render less stable the safety of the Colony.[2]
Under the terms of the statute passed in 1670, all servants who were imported into Virginia who had not been brought up in the Christian religion, and who, therefore, were still unbaptized, were held to be servants for life. It is significant that the word “negro” was not used, although the law was really designed to cover the case of the African slaves, who were now introduced into the Colony in increasing numbers. After an interval of twelve years, in which comparatively few negroes were brought in, in consequence of the poverty of the planters following upon the agitation that led up to and succeeded Bacon’s Rebellion, this statute was repealed on the ground that it seriously obstructed further additions from without to the slave population, because many of the negroes who arrived in Virginia had come from lands where Christianity prevailed, and where they had received the rite of baptism.[3] The owners of such negroes, when they reached the Colony, either had to undergo the complete loss of their property or had to incur the heavy expense of returning them to the country from which they had been exported, or of sending them to some place where converted slaves were
