and rich prizes taken at sea.  Some of the latter contained cargoes of negro slaves, as was of course expected, who were distributed among the settlers to aid in raising tobacco; and when a certain Samuel Rishworth undertook to spread ideas of liberty among them he was officially admonished that religion had no concern with negro slavery and that his indiscretions must stop.  Slaves were imported so rapidly that the outnumbered whites became apprehensive of rebellion.  In the hope of promoting the importation of white labor, so greatly preferable from the public point of view, heavy impositions were laid upon the employment of negroes, but with no avail.  The apprehension of evils was promptly justified.  A number of the blacks escaped to the mountains where they dwelt as maroons; and in 1638 a concerted uprising proved so formidable that the suppression of it strained every resource of the government and the white inhabitants.  Three years afterward the weakened settlement was captured by a Spanish fleet; and this was the end of the one Puritan colony in the tropics.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A.P.  Newton, The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, 1914).]

Massachusetts was likewise inaugurated by a corporation of Puritans, which at the outset endorsed the institution of unfree labor, in a sense, by sending over from England 180 indentured servants to labor on the company’s account.  A food shortage soon made it clear that in the company’s service they could not earn their keep; and in 1630 the survivors of them were set free.[2] Whether freedom brought them bread or whether they died of famine, the records fail to tell.  At any rate the loss of the investment in their transportation, and the chagrin of the officials, materially hastened the conversion of the colony from a company enterprise into an industrial democracy.  The use of unfree labor nevertheless continued on a private basis and on a relatively small scale.  Until 1642 the tide of Puritan immigration continued, some of the newcomers of good estate bringing servants in their train.  The authorities not only countenanced this but forbade the freeing of servants before the ends of their terms, and in at least one instance the court fined a citizen for such a manumission.[3] Meanwhile the war against the Pequots in 1637 yielded a number of captives, whereupon the squaws and girls were distributed in the towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and a parcel of the boys was shipped off to the tropics in the Salem ship Desire.  On its return voyage this thoroughly Puritan vessel brought from Old Providence a cargo of tobacco, cotton, and negroes.[4] About this time the courts began to take notice of Indians as runaways; and in 1641 a “blackmore,” Mincarry, procured the inscription of his name upon the public records by drawing upon himself an admonition from the magistrates.[5] This negro, it may safely be conjectured, was not a freeman.  That there