54	WILLIAM   AND   MARY   QUARTERLY                                 I

experience than it had been in the seventeenth century. It is ironic that,
as the law of slavery hardened, as white racism deepened, and as the
identification of blacks with bondage became firmly ingrained, demo-
graphic processes seldom studied by historians of Africans in the Chesa-
peake region made slavery more tolerable and slaves better able to cope
with their oppression.