The Doctrine Emerges

That the black slaves of the South fared better than the mass of the world's free workers and peasants became gospel among southern whites of all classes. In seventeenth-century Virginia planters asserted, with some justification, that their slaves worked a shorter and less rigorous day than English herdsmen. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia, maintained that black slaves and white servants in Virginia did not work as long or hard as husbandmen and agricultural laborers of England. In the 1720s the Reverend Hugh Jones, a professor at the College of William and Mary, acknowledging that slaves did most of the hard work, reported their food and material conditions superior to those of English woodcutters.