]
[Footnote 12: W.W. Hening, _Statutes at Large of Virginia_, II, 515.]
Thus for two generations the negroes were few, they were employed alongside
the white servants, and in many cases were members of their masters'
households. They had by far the best opportunity which any of their race
had been given in America to learn the white men's ways and to adjust
the lines of their bondage into as pleasant places as might be. Their
importation was, for the time, on but an experimental scale, and even their
legal status was during the early decades indefinite.
The first comers were slaves in the hands of their maritime sellers; but
they were not fully slaves in the hands of their Virginian buyers, for
there was neither law nor custom then establishing the institution of
slavery in the colony. The documents of the times point clearly to a vague
tenure. In the county court records prior to 1661 the negroes are called
negro servants or merely negroes--never, it appears, definitely slaves. A
few were expressly described as servants for terms of years, and others
were conceded property rights of a sort incompatible with the institution
of slavery as elaborated in later times.
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