[257] Smith’s Hist. of N.Y., vol. ii. pp. 59, 60.

[258] “On the 6th of March, 1742, the following order was passed by the Common Council:  ’Ordered, that the indentures of Mary Burton be delivered up to her, and that she be discharged from the remainder of her servitude, and three pounds paid her, to provide necessary clothing.’  The Common Council had purchased her indentures from her master, and had kept her and them, until this time.”—­DUNLAP, vol. ii.  Appendix, p. clxvii.

[259] “On the 17th of November, 1767, a bill was brought into the House of Assembly “to prevent the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind, and the importation of slaves into this province.”  It was changed into an act “for laying an impost on Negroes imported.”  This could not pass the governor and council; and it was afterward known that Benning I. Wentworth, the governor of New Hampshire, had received instructions not to pass any law “imposing duties on negroes imported into that province.”  Hutchinson of Massachusetts had similar instructions.  The governor and his Majesty’s council knew this at the time.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE COLONY OF MASSACHUSETTS.

1633-1775.

     THE EARLIEST MENTIONS OF NEGROES IN MASSACHUSETTS.—­PEQUOD
     INDIANS EXCHANGED FOR NEGROES.—­VOYAGE OF THE SLAVE-SHIP
     “DESIRE” IN 1638.—­FUNDAMENTAL LAWS ADOPTED.—­HEREDITARY
     SLAVERY.—­KIDNAPPING NEGROES.—­GROWTH OF SLAVERY IN THE
     SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.—­TAXATION OF SLAVES.—­INTRODUCTION OF
     INDIAN SLAVES PROHIBITED.—­THE POSITION OF THE CHURCH
     RESPECTING THE BAPTISM OF SLAVES.—­SLAVE MARRIAGE.—­CONDITION
     OF FREE NEGROES.—­PHILLIS WHEATLEY THE AFRICAN POETESS.—­HER
     LIFE.—­SLAVERY RECOGNIZED IN ENGLAND IN ORDER TO BE
     MAINTAINED IN THE COLONIES.—­THE EMANCIPATION OF
     SLAVES.—­LEGISLATION FAVORING THE IMPORTATION OF WHITE
     SERVANTS, BUT PROHIBITING THE CLANDESTINE BRINGING-IN OF
     NEGROES.—­JUDGE SEWALL’S ATTACK ON SLAVERY.—­JUDGE SAFFIN’S
     REPLY TO JUDGE SEWALL.

Had the men who gave the colony of Massachusetts its political being and Revolutionary fame known that the Negro—­so early introduced into the colony as a slave—­would have been in the future Republic for years the insoluble problem, and at last the subject of so great and grave economic and political concern, they would have committed to the jealous keeping of the chroniclers of their times the records for which the historian of the Negro seeks so vainly in this period.  Stolen as he was from his tropical home; consigned to a servitude at war with man’s intellectual and spiritual, as well as with his physical, nature; the very lowest of God’s creation, in the estimation of the Roundheads of New England; a stranger in a strange land,—­the poor Negro of Massachusetts found no place in the sympathy or history of the Puritan,—­Christians whose