masters; and at best it was harsh enough. When the weary years of indenture were over, the bondmen were set free to enter any occupation for which they were qualified. The more fortunate became independent artisans or went into the interior, where they found liberty as the tillers of small farms, rising out of bondage into freedom. But others, weighed down by their heritage, individual and social, sank into that hopeless body of "poor whites," the proletariat of the countryside.
Finding it difficult to secure an adequate supply of indentured servants, promoters of settlements turned in the course of time to Negro slavery. Neither the Puritans nor the Cavaliers had fixed scruples against the enslavement of their fellow men, of their own or any other color; it seems to have been necessity rather than choice that forced them to resort to Africans. Both sought to reduce Indians to bondage and to a slight extent were successful; but the haughty spirit of the red man made him a poor worker under the lash.
Nor did the Puritans of England show any invincible repugnance to driving white men and women into perpetual servitude; Cromwell thought the Irish well adapted to that career, for he sold as slaves in the Barbadoes all the garrison that was not killed in the Drogheda massacre, and his agents made a business of combing Ireland for boys and girls to be auctioned to English planters in the West Indies. Even Cromwell's own countrymen were sometimes caught in the dragnet; there is in the archives of London a piteous petition of seventy Englishmen carried off from Plymouth and sold in the West Indies "for 1,550 pound weight of sugar a piece, more or less." Nevertheless, by the latter part of the seventeenth century, public opinion in England was running against this form of domestic enterprise and in favor of seeking slaves abroad.
Though Negro slavery had been common in the Spanish provinces for more than a hundred years when Virginia was founded, and though Elizabethan seamen had leaped with
