in every State in the Union.

The negro, however, is racially the most distinctly foreign element in
America. He belongs to a period of biological and racial evolution far
removed from that of the white man. His habitat is the continent of
the elephant and the lion, the mango and the palm, while that of the
race into whose state he has been thrust is the continent of the horse
and the cow, of wheat and the oak.

There is a touch of the dramatic in every phase of the negro's contact
with America: his unwilling coming, his forcible detention, his final
submission, his emancipation, his struggle to adapt himself to
freedom, his futile competition with a superior economic order. Every
step from the kidnaping, through "the voiceless woe of servitude" and
the attempted redemption of his race, has been accompanied by tragedy.
How else could it be when peoples of two such diverse epochs in racial
evolution meet?

His coming was almost contemporaneous with that of the white man.
"American slavery," says Channing,[7] "began with Columbus, possibly
because he was the first European who had a chance to introduce it:
and negroes were brought to the New World at the suggestion of the
saintly Las Casas to alleviate the lot of the unhappy and fast
disappearing red man" They were first employed as body servants and
were used extensively in the West Indies before their common use in
the colonies on the continent. In the first plantations of Virginia a
few of them were found as laborers. In 1619 what was probably the
first slave ship on that coast--it was euphemistically called a "Dutch
man-of-war"--landed its human cargo in Virginia. From this time onward
the numbers of African slaves steadily increased. Bancroft estimated