of burden: pretending to doubt, and some of them
even presuming to deny, that the efficacy of the death
of Christ extended to them. Which is particularly
noted in a book, intitled The Negroes and Indians
advocate, dedicated to the then Archbishop of
Canterbury, wrote so long since as in the year 1680,
by Morgan Godwyn, thought to be a clergyman of the
church of England.[A] The same spirit of sympathy
and zeal which stirred up the good Bishop of Chapia
to plead with so much energy the kindred cause of
the Indians of America, an hundred and fifty years
before, was equally operating about a century past
on the minds of some of the well disposed of that day;
amongst others this worthy clergyman, having been
an eye witness of the oppression and cruelty exercised
upon the Negro and Indian slaves, endeavoured to raise
the attention of those, in whose power it might be
to procure them relief; amongst other matters, in his
address to the Archbishop, he remarks in substance,
“That the people of the island of Barbadoes
were not content with exercising the greatest hardness
and barbarity upon the Negroes, in making the most
of their labour, without any regard to the calls of
humanity, but that they had suffered such a slight
and undervaluement to prevail in their minds towards
these their oppressed fellow creatures, as to discourage
any step being taken, whereby they might be made acquainted
with the christian religion. That their conduct
towards their slaves was such as gave him reason to
believe, that either they had suffered a spirit of
infidelity, a spirit quite contrary to the nature
of the gospel, to prevail in them, or that it must
be their established opinion that the Negroes had no
more souls than beasts; that hence they concluded
them to be neither susceptible of religious impressions,
nor fit objects for the redeeming grace of God to
operate upon. That under this persuasion, and
from a disposition of cruelty, they treated them with
far less humanity than they did their cattle; for,
says he, they do not starve their horses, which they
expect should both carry and credit them on the road;
nor pinch the cow, by whose milk they are sustained;
which yet, to their eternal shame, is too frequently
the lot and condition of those poor people, from whose
labour their wealth and livelihood doth wholly arise;
not only in their diet, but in their cloathing, and
overworking some of them even to death (which is particularly
the calamity of the most innocent and laborious) but
also in tormenting and whipping them almost, and sometimes
quite, to death, upon even small miscarriages.
He apprehends it was from this prejudice against the
Negroes, that arose those supercilious checks and
frowns he frequently met with, when using innocent
arguments and persuasions, in the way of his duty
as a minister of the gospel, to labour for the convincement
and conversion of the Negroes; being repeatedly told,
with spiteful scoffings, (even by some esteemed religious)
that the Negroes were no more susceptible of receiving