541.] [Footnote 9: Tabulated in the _Virginia Magazine_, VII, 364-367.] [Footnote 10: Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia_, II, 72-77.] [Footnote 11: _A New Description of Virginia_ (London, 1649).] [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.