A distinct article providing for the furnishing of blacks to settlers was incorporated in the " Freedoms and Exemptions " of the Dutch West India Company, a series of regulations adopted to promote colonization. All the leading English families who came to the province after the conquest owned negroes, both as laborers and as house servants. Colonel Lewis Morris, as has been noticed in another place, possessed at his death sixty-six negroes, of an aggregate value of £844; and the household slaves left by the first Frederick Philipse, in 1702, as shown by an inventory of his estate, numbered forty. According to a census of the year 1703, says a historian of New York City, there was " hardly a family that did not have from half a dozen to a dozen This custom of regarding negroes as or more in their service." absolute property was, moreover, viewed with entire and unquestioning approval in the mother country at that period. In a curious document drawn up by " the Committee of the Council of Foreigne Plantations," about 1683, " certaine propositions for the hotter accommodating the Foreigne Plantations with servants " are duly formulated. They are prefaced with the statement that " it being universally agreed that people are the foundations and improvement of all plantations, and that people are encreased principally by sending of servants thither, it is necessary that a settled course be taken for the furnishing them with servants.'' " Servants," it is next stated, " are either blacks or whites," and the status of the former is defined as follows: " Blacks are such as are brought by wave of trade and are sould at about £20 a head one with another, and are the principall and most useful 1 appurtenances of a plantation, and are such as are perpetuall servants." It would be difficult to find in the literature of slavery under English rule a more accurate and ingenuous definition of the position of the negro as understood in olden times.