From the years of its establishment in the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth century, slavery developed in the British colonies without significant controversy and through a haphazard, unplanned series of events. The practice was so common in America that, as one historian has written, "Slavery remained a largely unexamined fact of life." By the final decades of the eighteenth century, institutionalized slavery had existed for more than a century in the British colonies hugging the Atlantic Coast. Before that, blacks had worked in the colonies by another half century. Slavery ...