Part 8 (1/2)
[Footnote 14: Cotton Mather, ”Diary,” in Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, LXVII, 22, 203.]
An early realization that the price of negroes also was greater than the worth of their labor under ordinary circ.u.mstances in New England led the Yankee partic.i.p.ants in the African trade to market their slave cargoes in the plantation colonies instead of bringing them home. Thus John Winthrop entered in his journal in 1645: ”One of our s.h.i.+ps which went to the Canaries with pipestaves in the beginning of November last returned now and brought wine and sugar and salt, and some tobacco, which she had at Barbadoes in exchange for Africoes which she carried from the Isle of Maio.”[15] In their domestic industry the Ma.s.sachusetts people found by experience that ”many hands make light work, many hands make a full fraught, but many mouths eat up all”;[16] and they were shrewd enough to apply the adage in keeping the scale of their industrial units within the frugal requirements of their lives.
[Footnote 15: Winthrop, _Journal_, II, 227.]
[Footnote 16: John Josslyn, ”Two Voyages to New England,” in Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XXIII, 332.]
That the laws of Ma.s.sachusetts were enforced with special severity against the blacks is indicated by two cases before the central court in 1681, both of them prosecutions for arson. Maria, a negress belonging to Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, having confessed the burning of two dwellings, was sentenced by the Governor ”yt she should goe from the barr to the prison whence she came and thence to the place of execution and there be burnt.--ye Lord be mercifull to thy soule, sd ye Govr.” The other was Jack, a negro belonging to Samuel Wolcott of Weathersfield, who upon conviction of having set fire to a residence by waving a fire brand about in search of victuals, was condemned to be hanged until dead and then burned to ashes in the fire with the negress Maria.[17]
[Footnote 17: _Records of the Court of a.s.sistants, 1630-1692_ (Boston, 1901), p. 198.]
In this period it seems that Indian slaves had almost disappeared, and the number of negroes was not great enough to call for special police legislation. Governor Bradstreet, for example, estimated the ”blacks or slaves” in the colony in 1680 at ”about one hundred or one hundred and twenty.”[18] But in 1708 Governor Dudley reckoned the number in Boston at four hundred, one-half of whom he said had been born there, and those in the rest of the colony at one hundred and fifty; and in the following decades their number steadily mounted, as a concomitant of the colony's increasing prosperity, until on the eve of the American Revolution they were reckoned at well above five thousand. Although they never exceeded two per cent. of the gross population, their presence prompted characteristic legislation dating from about the beginning of the eighteenth century.
This on one hand taxed the importation of negros unless they were promptly exported again on the other hand it forbade trading with slaves, restrained manumission, established a curfew, provided for the whipping of any negro or mulatto who should strike a ”Christian,” and prohibited the intermarriage of the races. On the other hand it gave the slaves the privilege of legal marriage with persons of their own race, though it did not attempt to prevent the breaking up of such a union by the sale and removal of the husband or wife.[19] Regarding the status of children there was no law enacted, and custom ruled. The children born of Indian slave mothers appear generally to have been liberated, for as willingly would a man nurse a viper in his bosom as keep an aggrieved and able-bodied redskin in his household. But as to negro children, although they were valued so slightly that occasionally it is said they were given to any one who would take them, there can be no reasonable doubt that by force of custom they were the property of the owners of their mothers.[20]
[Footnote 18: Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XXVIII, 337.]
[Footnote 19: Moore, _Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts_, pp. 52-55.]
[Footnote 20: _Ibid_., pp. 20-27.]
The New Englanders were ”a plain people struggling for existence in a poor wilderness.... Their lives were to the last degree matter of fact, realistic, hard.” [21] Shrewd in consequence of their poverty, self-righteous in consequence of their religion, they took their slave-trading and their slaveholding as part of their day's work and as part of G.o.d's goodness to His elect. In practical effect the policy of colonial Ma.s.sachusetts toward the backward races merits neither praise nor censure; it was merely commonplace.
[Footnote 21: C.F. Adams, _Ma.s.sachusetts, its Historians and its History_ (Boston, 1893), p. 106.]
What has been said in general of Ma.s.sachusetts will apply with almost equal fidelity to Connecticut.[22] The number of negroes in that colony was hardly appreciable before 1720. In that year Governor Leete when replying to queries from the English committee on trade and plantations took occasion to emphasize the poverty of his people, and said as to bond labor: ”There are but fewe servants amongst us, and less slaves; not above 30, as we judge, in the colony. For English, Scotts and Irish, there are so few come in that we cannot give a certain acco[un]t. Some yeares come none; sometimes a famaly or two in a year. And for Blacks, there comes sometimes 3 or 4 in a year from Barbadoes; and they are sold usually at the rate of 22l a piece, sometimes more and sometimes less, according as men can agree with the master of vessels or merchants that bring them hither.” Few negroes had been born in the colony, ”and but two blacks christened, as we know of.”[23] A decade later the development of a black code was begun by an enactment declaring that any negro, mulatto, or Indian servant wandering outside his proper town without a pa.s.s would be accounted a runaway and might be seized by any person and carried before a magistrate for return to his master. A free negro so apprehended without a pa.s.s must pay the court costs. An act of 1702 discouraged manumission by ordering that if any freed negroes should come to want, their former owners were to be held responsible for their maintenance. Then came legislation forbidding the sale of liquors to slaves without special orders from their masters, prohibiting the purchase of goods from slaves without such orders, and providing a penalty of not more than thirty lashes for any negro who should offer to strike a white person; and finally a curfew law, in 1723, ordering not above ten lashes for the negro, and a fine of ten s.h.i.+llings upon the master, for every slave without a pa.s.s apprehended for being out of doors after nine o'clock at night.[24] These acts, which remained in effect throughout the colonial period, const.i.tuted a code of slave police which differed only in degree and fullness from those enacted by the more southerly colonies in the same generation. A somewhat unusual note, however, was struck in an act of 1730 which while penalizing with stripes the speaking by a slave of such words as would be actionable if uttered by a free person provided that in his defence the slave might make the same pleas and offer the same evidence as a freeman. The number of negroes in the colony rose to some 6500 at the eve of the American Revolution. Most of them were held in very small parcels, but at least one citizen, Captain John Perkins of Norwich, listed fifteen slaves in his will.
[Footnote 22: The scanty materials available are summarized in B.C.
Steiner, _History of Slavery in Connecticut_ (Johns Hopkins University _Studies_, XI, nos. 9, 10, Baltimore, 1893), pp. 9-23, 84. See also W.C.
Fowler, ”The Historical Status of the Negro in Connecticut,” in the _Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries_, III, 12-18, 81-85, 148-153, 260-266.]
[Footnote 23: _Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut_, III, 298.]
[Footnote 24: _Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut_, IV, 40, 376; V, 52, 53; VI, 390, 391.]
Rhode Island was distinguished from her neighbors by her diversity and liberalism in religion, by her great activity in the African slave trade, and by the possession of a tract of unusually fertile soil. This last, commonly known as the Narragansett district and comprised in the two so-called towns of North and South Kingstown, lay on the western sh.o.r.e of the bay, in the southern corner of the colony. Prosperity from tillage, and especially from dairying and horse-breeding, caused the rise in that neighborhood of landholdings and slaveholdings on a scale more commensurate with those in Virginia than with those elsewhere in New England. The Hazards, Champlins, Robinsons, and some others acc.u.mulated estates ranging from five to ten thousand acres in extent, each with a corps of bondsmen somewhat in proportion. In 1730, for example, South Kingstown had a population of 965 whites, 333 negroes and 233 Indians; and for a number of years afterward those who may safely be a.s.sumed to have been bondsmen, white, red and black, continued to be from a third to a half as many as the free inhabitants.[25] It may be noted that the prevalent husbandry was not such as generally attracted unfree labor in other districts, and that the climate was poorly suited to a negro population. The question then arises, Why was there so large a recourse to negro slave labor? The answer probably lies in the proximity of Newport, the main focus of African trading in American s.h.i.+ps. James Browne wrote in 1737 from Providence, which was also busy in the trade, to his brother Obadiah who was then in Southern waters with an African cargo and who had reported poor markets: ”If you cannot sell all your slaves to your mind, bring some of them home; I believe they will sell well.” [26] This bringing of remainders home doubtless enabled the nearby townsmen and farmers to get slaves from time to time at bargain prices. The whole colony indeed came to have a relatively large proportion of blacks. In 1749 there were 33,773 whites and 3077 negroes; in 1756 there were 35,939 and 4697 respectively; and in 1774, 59,707 and 3668. Of this last number Newport contained 1246, South Kingstown 440, Providence 303, Portsmouth 122, and Bristol 114.[27]
[Footnote 25: Edward Channing, _The Narragansett Planters_ (Johns Hopkins University _Studies_, IV, no. 3, Baltimore, 1886).]
[Footnote 26: Gertrude S. Kimball, _Providence in Colonial Times_ (Boston, 1912), p. 247.]
[Footnote 27: W.D. Johnston, ”Slavery in Rhode Island, 1755-1776,” in Rhode Island Historical Society _Publications_, new series, II, 126, 127.]
The earliest piece of legislation in Rhode Island concerning negroes was of an anti-slavery character. This was an act adopted by the joint government of Providence and Warwick in 1652, when for the time being those towns were independent of the rest. It required, under a penalty of 40, that all negroes be freed after having rendered ten years of service.[28] This act may be attributed partly perhaps to the liberal influence of Roger Williams, and partly to the virtual absence of negroes in the towns near the head of the bay. It long stood unrepealed, but it was probably never enforced, for no sooner did negroes become numerous than a conservative reaction set in which deprived this peculiar law of any public sanction it may have had at the time of enactment. When in the early eighteenth century legislation was resumed in regard to negroes, it took the form of a slave code much like that of Connecticut but with an added act, borrowed perhaps from a Southern colony, providing that slaves charged with theft be tried by impromptu courts consisting of two or more justices of the peace or town officers, and that appeal might be taken to a court of regular session only at the master's request and upon his giving bond for its prosecution. Some of the towns, furthermore, added by-laws of their own for more thorough police. South Kingstown for instance adopted an order that if any slave were found in the house of a free negro, both guest and host were to be whipped.[29] The Rhode Island Quakers in annual meeting began as early as 1717 to question the propriety of importing slaves, and other persons from time to time echoed their sentiments; but it was not until just before the American Revolution that legislation began to interfere with the trade or the inst.i.tution.
[Footnote 28: _Rhode Island Colonial Records_, I, 243.]
[Footnote 29: Channing, _The Narragansett Planters_, p. 11.]
The colonies of Plymouth and New Haven in the period of their separate existence, and the colonies of Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re throughout their careers, are negligible in a general account of negro slavery because their climate and their industrial requirements, along with their poverty, prevented them from importing any appreciable number of negroes.
New Netherland had the distinction of being founded and governed by a great slave-trading corporation--the Dutch West India Company--which endeavored to extend the market for its human merchandise whithersoever its influence reached. This pro-slavery policy was not wholly selfish, for the directors appear to have believed that the surest way to promote a colony's welfare was to make slaves easy to buy. In the infancy of New Netherland, when it consisted merely of two trading posts, the company delivered its first batch of negroes at New Amsterdam. But to its chagrin, the settlers would buy very few; and even the company's grant of great patroons.h.i.+p estates failed to promote a plantation regime. Devoting their energies more to the Indian trade than to agriculture, the people had little use for farm hands, while in domestic service, if the opinion of the Reverend Jonas Michaelius be a true index, the negroes were found ”thievish, lazy and useless trash.”