« hollandais : c’étaient les premiers[1] ! » Voilà comment s’opéra la transition.
« On enrôlait aussi et même on enlevait quelquefois des jeunes filles qui se vendaient très bien en Virginie : en 1620, un premier convoi de quatre-vingt-dix jeunes filles, recrutées par un capitaine adroit et industrieux, fut vendu à raison de 100 livres de tabac par tête ; un exemple si profitable fut promptement suivi, et l’année suivante une nouvelle cargaison atteignit les prix de 150 livres de tabac par
- ↑ « During the year that Sandy’s held office, he sent to Virginia 1200 immigrants, twice as many as there were inhabitants in the colony when he
became treasurer. Among them were 90 young women “ pure and uncorrupt ”,
who were disposed of for the cost of their passage, as wives to the planters.
The price of a wife was one hundred pounds of tobacco, worth then about
75 dollars. But half as much more was obtained for those of a second cargo
sent out a year or two after. There were other immigrants of a sort less
desirable. By the King’s special order, one hundred dissolute vagabonds, the
sweepings of the prison, familiary known among the colonists as “jail-birds”,
were sent to Virginia to be sold as servants, — a practice long continued as a
regular item of British criminal jurisprudence, in spite of the repeated
complaints of the colonists and their efforts to prevent it. By the free consent
and co-operation of the colonists themselves, another and still more objectionable
species of the population was introduced into Virginia, not without
still enduring and disastrous effects upon the social condition of the United
States. Twenty negroes, brought to Jamestown by a Dutch trading vessel, and
purchased by the colonists, were held, not as intended servants for a term of
years, but as slaves for life.»
The History of the United States of America, by Richard Hildreth, vol. I, ch. IV. Settlement of Virginia, pp. 119-20. (New York, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 329-331, Pearl Str., Franklin Square, 1854).
Richard Hildreth est né à Deerfield (Mass.,) en 1807. Il prit ses degrés à Harvard en 1826. Il fut admis au barreau de Boston en 1830. Il a publié plusieurs ouvrages et collaboré à plusieurs revues. En 1840 parût son Despotism in America. En 1849, parurent les trois premiers volumes de son History of the United States of America ; en 1851, deux autres, et le sixième et dernier fut publié en 1852. En 1861, Richard Hildreth fut nommé consul des États-Unis à Trieste ; mais sa mauvaise santé ne lui permit pas d’occuper ce poste bien longtemps. Il dut donner sa démission et mourût à Florence le 11 juillet 1865.