Thus stealthily and almost imperceptibly was the idea of legalized human chattelhood introduced. Thus ambiguous and tortuous were the enactments under cover of which the slave traffic was prosecuted. A graphic and truthful description of that traffic we present in the language of Hon. Horace Mann, of Massachusetts.*

"One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue, to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils. Great Britain was the mother. Her American Colonies were the daughter. The mother lusted for gold. To get it, she made partnership with robbery and death. Shackles, chains, and weapons for human butchery, were her outfit in trade. She made Africa her hunting ground. She made its people her prey, and the unwilling colonies her market-place. She broke into the Ethiop's home, as a wolf into a sheep-fold at midnight. She set the continent aflame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran shrieking from their blazing hamlets. The aged and the infant she left to the vultures, but the strong men and the strong women she drove, scourged and bleeding, to the shore. Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun. Once a day the hatches were opened, to receive food and disgorge the dead. Thousands and thousands of corpses which she plunged into the ocean from the decks of her slave ships, she counted only as the tare of her commerce. The blue monsters of the deep became familiar with her pathway; and, not more remorseless than she, they shared her plunder. At length the accursed vessel reached the foreign shore. And there, the monsters of the land, fiercer and feller than any that roam the watery plains, rewarded the robber by purchasing his spoils. For more than a century did the madness of this traffic rage.f During all those years the clock of eternity never counted out a minute that did not witness the cruel death by treachery or violence of some father or mother of Africa."

"Mr. Edwards says that from 1700 to 1786, the number imported into Jamaica was 610,000. 'I say this,' he observes, on sufficient evidence, having in my possession lists of all the entries.' The total import into all the British Colonies from 1680 to 1786 may be put down at 2,130,000.' In 1771, which he considers the most flourishing period of the trade, there sailed from England to the coast of Africa, one hundred and ninety-two ships, provided for the importation of 47,146 negroes. And now,' he observes, (1793) 'the whole number annually exported from Africa by all the European powers, is 74,000, of which 38,000 are imported by the British."-Godwin, page 187.

*Speech in the House of Representatives of the U. S., June 30, 1848.

It has not ceased. It rages with violence still, as will be shown in another chapter.

CHAPTER III.

SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE BRITISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA, NOW THE UNITED STATES.

Slavers from New England-Slavery in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas-Condition of the Slaves-Testimony of Wesley and Whitefield-Inquiry into the legal foundation of Colonial SlaveryComplaints of the Colonies against the King of Great Britain, for favoring the traffic-Paradoxes-Absence of English Statutes legalizing Slavery-Common Law-Lord Mansfield-Colonial Charters-Slavery introduced in absence of Colonial enactments-Date and circumstances of introduction of Slavery into Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia-Prohibition of Slavery in Georgia, (Gen. Ogelthorpe)-Dates of early enactments concerning Slavery in Virginia, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland-Loose and vague character of these enact

ments.

SOON after the settlement of the British North American Colonies, Africans were imported into them, and sold and held as slaves. Of the extent of these importations we have met with no authenticated statistics. The whole number of slaves in these states, by the first census under the present Constitution, 1790, was 697,697.

The colonies now known as the Southern or slave states, on the Atlantic coast, received the principal share of these importations. The middle and eastern colonies received comparatively few, and these chiefly for domestic servants in the cities, and in the families of professional gentlemen in the interior. As the soil was not adapted to slave culture, and was owned in small farms by a hardy race of agriculturists, inured to habits of labor, the process of cultivation by slaves never obtained, particularly in New England, except to a very limited extent. In New York, first settled by the Dutch, in New Jersey, and perhaps in some portions of Pennsyl

vania, the labor of slaves was introduced to a greater extent than further east. But in the importation of slaves for the southern colonies, the merchants of the New England seaports competed with those of New York and the South. They appear, indeed, to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized, at one time, the immense profits of that lucrative but detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport, in Massachusetts, and Newport and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill gotten wealth, which, in many instances, quite as rapidly and very remarkably, took to itself wings and flew away. In some cases, however, it remained, and formed the basis of the capital of some prominent mercantile houses, almost or quite down to the present time. Citizens, honored with high posts of office in the State and Federal Governments, have owed their rank in society, and their political elevation, to the wealth thus acquired, sometimes thus acquired by themselves, since the colonies became states, and while the traffic was tolerated as it was, till the year 1808. Among these was a late Senator in Congress, from Rhode Island, James D'Wolf, who, at the time, was reputed to be the owner of a large slave plantation in Cuba. Such incidents may convey some idea of the influence of the traffic in New England, even to the present day. The former seats of the traffic are still the centers of influences hostile to the agitation of the slave question.

The servitude of domestic slaves, in families, is known to be less intolerable than that of slaves on plantations. From this consideration, and from the limited extent of slavery in the northern and eastern colonies, it may be inferred that the slavery of that region was of a comparatively mild type. And yet we find sufficient evidence of its affinity, in many respects, with the present American slave system. Not even in Connecticut was there any recognition of the legality and validity of a slave's marriage.* A master's inadvertent con

According to Judge Reeve, however, as quoted by Stroud, the murder of a slave was held in Connecticut to be the same as the murder of a freeman. The

sent to the marriage of his female slave to a free colored man, was held to be equivalent to her manumission, because

master could be sued by the slave for immoderate chastisement; the slave could hold property, in the character of a devisee or legatee, and the master could not take away such property, or might be sued for it on behalf of the slave by his next friend.-Reeve's Law of Baron and Femme, &c., 340-1; Stroud, p. 24.

In Massachusetts, too, "if the master was guilty of a cruel or unreasonable castigation of the slave, he was liable to be punished for a breach of the peace, and, I believe, the slave was allowed to demand sureties of the peace against a violent and barbarous master."-Opinion of Chief Justice Parsons, case of Winchendon vs. Hatfield, Mass. Rep., 127-8, cited by Stroud, p. 23.

In Massachusetts colony, in 1641, the following law was enacted: "It is ordered by this court and the authority thereof, that there shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, or captivity among us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just war, (such) as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us, and such shall have the liberties and Christian usage which the law of GOD established in Israel concerning such persons doth morally require."-See General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts Bay, chap. 12, sect. 2; Stroud, p. 28.

Whether this act prohibited, or whether it authorized such slavery as afterwards actually existed in the colony of Massachusetts, might not be very difficult to determine. It certainly prohibited such slavery as now exists at the South.

There is little doubt that slavery was introduced into Boston, by one Maverick, previous to its settlement by George Winthrop and others, in 1680. There is no evidence that Maverick was a Puritan. The Boston colonists, generally, were not Puritans, and ought never to have been confounded with them by historians. The Puritans, with all their defects and errors on this and other subjects, "made a wide distinction between those who were stolen and seized by the violence of the slavers, and those who" (as they supposed) "had been made captives in a lawful war, or were reduced to servitude for their crimes by a judicial sentence."

This sentiment became current in the New England colonies. "An express law was made, prohibiting the buying and selling of the former, while the latter were to have the same privileges as were allowed by the laws of Moses." "In November, 1646, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law against man-stealing, making it a capital crime. They also ordered that two Africans, forcibly brought into the colony, should be sent home at the public expense.-[Felt's Annals of Salem.] The other colonies soon passed a law similar to that of Massachusetts. The Connecticut Code, prepared in 1650, has the following section: If any man stealeth a man or mankinde, he shall be put to death.' The New Haven Code, printed in London in 1656, contains a similar article: If any person steale a man, or mankind, that person shall surely be put to death.' The Plymouth laws probably made manstealing a capital offence."-[See First Annual Report of the New Hampshire AntiSlavery Society, penned by the late John Farmer, Esq., and published in the "Monthly Emancipator," for August, 1885.]

In all this we see the stealthy and deceptive introduction of chattel slavery. The early laws did not authorize, but prohibited such slavery as was actually introduced! The sin, the shame, and the curse would have been excluded, had it been clearly understood that slavery is malum in se.

The action of the colony of RHODE ISLAND and PROVIDENCE Plantations, eleven years later than that in Massachusetts, was more direct and explicit. The following

a-slave could not be married, and because a husband could claim the assistance of his wife.

A still more discreditable illustration was previously furnished by a rural pastor in the same colony, the owner of a male and female slave. Having admitted them both to the communion of his church (Congregational) as members, and having himself officially pronounced them husband and wife, he afterwards separated them forever by the sale of the wife to a distant purchaser, in despite of the entreaties of both wife and husband. And no court of law, no church, no ecclesiastical body interposed, or even censured.

In Massachusetts, another Congregational pastor, of high reputation, is said to have reared up a female slave in his family in a state of almost absolute heathenism, and never attempted to teach her the alphabet.

When it is remembered that a large portion of the ministers of religion in New England were among the slave

document is said to be the first act of any government designed to prevent enslaving the negroes. It is copied from the records of the colony:

"At a general court held at Warwick, the 18th of May, 1652.

"Whereas, there is a common course practised among Englishmen, to buy nogroes to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered, That no black mankind or white being shall be forced, by covenant, bond, or otherwise, to serve any man or his assignees longer than ten years, or until they come to be twenty-four years of age, if they be taken in under fourteen, from the time of their coming within the liberties of this colony; at the end or term of ten years to set them free, as the manner is with the English servants. And that man that will not let them go free or shall sell them away elsewhere, to that end they may be enslaved to others for a longer time, he or they shall forfeit to the colony forty pounds."

To the credit of the members that enacted this law, we subjoin their names from the record:

"The general officers were, John Smith, president; Thomas Olney, general assistant, from Providence; Samuel Gorton, from Warwick; John Green, general recorder; Randal Holden, treasurer; Hugh Bewett, general sergeant.

"The commissioners were from Providence-Robert Williams, Gregory Dexter, Richard Waterman, Thomas Harris, William Wickenden, and Hugh Bewett; from Warwick-Samuel Gorton, John Wickes, John Smith, Randal Holden, John Green, jr., and Ezekiel Holliman."

The prevalence of slavery and the briskness of the slave trade in Rhode Island, long after the enactment of this law (which does not appear to have ever been repealed), furnishes another illustration of the fact that slavery grew up in the colonies in violation of law.