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American Negro Slavery
Chapter VI The Northern Colonies
by Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell
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Had any American colony been kept wholly out of touch with both Indians
and negroes, the history of slavery therein would quite surely have been
a blank. But this was the case nowhere. A certain number of Indians were
enslaved in nearly every settlement as a means of disposing of captives
taken in war; and negro slaves were imported into every prosperous colony
as a mere incident of its prosperity. Among the Quakers the extent of
slaveholding was kept small partly, or perhaps mainly, by scruples of
conscience; in virtually all other cases the scale was determined by
industrial conditions. Here the plantation system flourished and slaves
were many; there the climate prevented profits from crude gang labor in
farming, and slaves were few.
The nature and causes of the contrast will appear from comparing the
careers of two Puritan colonies launched at the same time but separated by
some thirty degrees of north latitude. The one was planted on the island
of Old Providence lying off the coast of Nicaragua, the other was on the
shores of Massachusetts bay. The founders of Old Providence were a score of
Puritan dignitaries, including the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and
John Pym, incorporated into the Westminster Company in 1630 with a
combined purpose of erecting a Puritanic haven and gaining profits for
the investors. The soil of the island was known to be fertile, the nearby
Spanish Main would yield booty to privateers, and a Puritan government
would maintain orthodoxy. These enticements were laid before John Winthrop
and his companions; and when they proved steadfast in the choice of New
England, several hundred others of their general sort embraced the tropical
Providence alternative. Equipped as it was with all the apparatus of a "New
England Canaan," the founders anticipated a far greater career than seemed
likely of achievement in Massachusetts. Prosperity came at once in the form
of good crops 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 were at least several other
blacks in the colony, one of whom proved unamenable to her master's
improper command, is told in the account of a contemporary traveler.[6] In
the same period, furthermore, the central court of the colony condemned
certain white criminals to become slaves to masters whom the court
appointed.[7] In the light of these things the pro-slavery inclination of
the much-disputed paragraph in the Body of Liberties, adopted in 1641,
admits of no doubt. The passage reads: "There shall never be any bond
slaverie, villinage or captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull captives
taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or
are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages
which the law of God established in Israell concerning such persons doeth
morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged
thereto by authoritie."[8]
[Footnote 2: Thomas Dudley, Letter to the Countess of Lincoln, in Alex.
Young, Chronicles of the First Planters of Massachusetts Boy (Boston,
1846), p. 312.]
[Footnote 3: Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of
Massachusetts Bay, 1630-1692 (Boston, 1904), pp. 135, 136.]
[Footnote 4: Letter of John Winthrop to William Bradford, Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections, XXXIII, 360; Winthrop, Journal
(Original Narratives edition, New York, 1908), I, 260.]
[Footnote 5: Records of the Court of Assistants, p. 118.]
[Footnote 6: John Josslyn, "Two Voyages to New England," in Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections, XXIII, 231.]
[Footnote 7: Records of the Court of Assistants, pp. 78, 79, 86.]
[Footnote 8: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXVIII, 231.]
On the whole it seems that the views expressed a few years later by Emanuel
Downing in a letter to his brother-in-law John Winthrop were not seriously
out of harmony with the prevailing sentiment. Downing was in hopes of a war
with the Narragansetts for two reasons, first to stop their "worship of the
devill," and "2lie, If upon a just warre the Lord should deliver them into
our hands, we might easily have men, women and children enough to exchange
for Moores,[9] which wil be more gaynful pilladge for us than wee conceive,
for I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee get into a stock of slaves
sufficient to doe all our buisines, for our children's children will hardly
see this great continent filled with people, soe that our servants will
still desire freedome to plant for themselves, and not stay but for verie
great wages.[10] And I suppose you know verie well how we shall mayntayne
20 Moores cheaper than one Englishe servant."
[Footnote 9: I. e. negroes.]
[Footnote 10: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXXVI. 65.]
When the four colonies, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven,
created the New England Confederation in 1643 for joint and reciprocal
action in matters of common concern, they provided not only for the
intercolonial rendition of runaway servants, including slaves of course,
but also for the division of the spoils of Indian wars, "whether it be in
lands, goods or persons," among the participating colonies.[11] But perhaps
the most striking action taken by the Confederation in these regards was
a resolution adopted by its commissioners in 1646, in time of peace
and professedly in the interests of peace, authorizing reprisals for
depredations. This provided that if any citizen's property suffered injury
at the hands of an Indian, the offender's village or any other which
had harbored him might be raided and any inhabitants thereof seized in
satisfaction "either to serve or to be shipped out and exchanged for
negroes as the cause will justly beare."[12] Many of these captives were in
fact exported as merchandise, whether as private property or on the public
account of the several colonies.[13] The value of Indians for export was
greater than for local employment by reason of their facility in escaping
to their tribal kinsmen. Toward the end of the seventeenth century,
however, there was some importation of "Spanish Indians" as slaves.[14]
[Footnote 11: New Haven Colonial Records, 1653-1665, pp. 562-566.]
[Footnote 12: Plymouth Records, IX, 71.]
[Footnote 13: G.H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in
Massachusetts (New York, 1866), pp. 30-48.]
[Footnote 14: Cotton Mather, "Diary," in Massachusetts 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 circumstances in New England led the
Yankee participants 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 ships 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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections, XXIII, 332.]
That the laws of Massachusetts 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 Assistants, 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: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXVIII, 337.]
[Footnote 19: Moore, Slavery in Massachusetts, 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 God's goodness to His elect. In practical effect the policy of
colonial Massachusetts toward the backward races merits neither praise nor
censure; it was merely commonplace.
[Footnote 21: C.F. Adams, Massachusetts, its Historians and its History
(Boston, 1893), p. 106.]
What has been said in general of Massachusetts 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 pass 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 pass 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 shillings upon the
master, for every slave without a pass apprehended for being out of doors
after nine o'clock at night.[24] These acts, which remained in effect
throughout the colonial period, constituted 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 shore 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 accumulated 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 assumed 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 ships. 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 institution.
[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 Hampshire 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 patroonship estates
failed to promote a plantation régime. 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."
It might perhaps be surmised that the Dutch were too easy-going for success
in slave management, were it not that those who settled in Guiana became
reputed the severest of all plantation masters. The bulk of the slaves in
New Netherland, left on the company's hands, were employed now in building
fortifications, now in tillage. But the company, having no adequate means
of supervising them in routine, changed the status of some of the older
ones in 1644 from slavery to tribute-paying. That is to say, it gave eleven
of them their freedom on condition that each pay the company every year
some twenty-two bushels of grain and a hog of a certain value. At the same
time it provided, curiously, that their children already born or yet to be
born were to be the company's slaves. It was proposed at one time by some
of the inhabitants, and again by Governor Stuyvesant, that negroes be armed
with tomahawks and sent in punitive expeditions against the Indians, but
nothing seems to have come of that.
The Dutch settlers were few, and the Dutch farmers fewer. But as years went
on a slender stream of immigration entered the province from New England,
settling mainly on Long Island and in Westchester; and these came to be
among the company's best customers for slaves. The villagers of Gravesend,
indeed, petitioned in 1651 that the slave supply might be increased. Soon
afterward the company opened the trade to private ships, and then sent
additional supplies on its own account to be sold at auction. It developed
hopes, even, that New Amsterdam might be made a slave market for the
neighboring English colonies. A parcel sold at public outcry in 1661
brought an average price of 440 florins,[30] which so encouraged the
authorities that larger shipments were ordered. Of a parcel arriving in
the spring of 1664 and described by Stuyvesant as on the average old and
inferior, six men were reserved for the company's use in cutting timber,
five women were set aside as unsalable, and the remaining twenty-nine, of
both sexes, were sold at auction at prices ranging from 255 to 615 florins.
But a great cargo of two or three hundred slaves which followed in the same
year reached port only in time for the vessel to be captured by the English
fleet which took possession of New Netherland and converted it into the
province of New York.[31]
[Footnote 30: The florin has a value of forty cents.]
[Footnote 31: This account is mainly drawn from A.J. Northrup, "Slavery in
New York," in the New York State Library Report for 1900, pp. 246-254,
and from E.B. O'Callaghan ed., Voyages of the Slavers St. John and Arms of
Amsterdam, with additional papers illustrative of the slave trade under the
Dutch (Albany, 1867), pp. 99-213.]
The change of the flag was very slow in bringing any pronounced change in
the colony's general régime. The Duke of York's government was autocratic
and pro-slavery and the inhabitants, though for some decades they bought
few slaves, were nothing averse to the institution. After the colony was
converted into a royal province by the accession of James II to the English
throne popular self-government was gradually introduced and a light import
duty was laid upon slaves. But increasing prosperity caused the rise of
slave importations to an average of about one hundred a year in the first
quarter of the eighteenth century;[32] and in spite of the rapid increase
of the whites during the rest of the colonial period the proportion of the
negroes was steadily maintained at about one-seventh of the whole. They
became fairly numerous in all districts except the extreme frontier, but in
the counties fronting New York Harbor their ratio was somewhat above the
average.[33] In 1755 a special census was taken of slaves older than
fourteen years, and a large part of its detailed returns has been
preserved. These reports from some two-score scattered localities enumerate
2456 slaves, about one-third of the total negro population of the
specified age; and they yield unusually definite data as to the scale of
slaveholdings. Lewis Morris of Morrisania had twenty-nine slaves above
fourteen years old; Peter DeLancy of Westchester Borough had twelve; and
the following had ten each: Thomas Dongan of Staten Island, Martinus
Hoffman of Dutchess County, David Jones of Oyster Bay, Rutgert Van Brunt of
New Utrecht, and Isaac Willett of Westchester Borough. Seventy-two others
had from five to nine each, and 1048 had still smaller holdings.[34] The
average quota was two slaves of working age, and presumably the same number
of slave children. That is to say, the typical slaveholding family had a
single small family of slaves in its service. From available data it may be
confidently surmised, furthermore, that at least one household in every ten
among the eighty-three thousand white inhabitants of the colony held one or
more slaves. These two features--the multiplicity of slaveholdings and the
virtually uniform pettiness of their scale--constituted a régime never
paralleled in equal volume elsewhere. The economic interest in slave
property, nowhere great, was widely diffused. The petty masters, however,
maintained so little system in the management of their slaves that the
public problem of social control was relatively intense. It was a state
of affairs conducing to severe legislation, and to hysterical action in
emergencies.
[Footnote 32: Documentary History of New York (Albany, 1850), I, 482.]
[Footnote 33: Ibid., I, 467-474.]
[Footnote 34: Documentary History of New York, III, 505-521.]
The first important law, enacted in 1702, repeated an earlier prohibition
against trading with slaves; authorized masters to chastise their slaves at
discretion; forbade the meeting of more than three slaves at any time or
place unless in their masters' service or by their consent; penalized with
imprisonment and lashes the striking of a "Christian" by a slave; made the
seductor or harborer of a runaway slave liable for heavy damages to the
owner; and excluded slave testimony from the courts except as against other
slaves charged with conspiracy. In order, however, that undue loss to
masters might be averted, it provided that if by theft or other trespass a
slave injured any person to the extent of not more than five pounds, the
slave was not to be sentenced to death as in some cases a freeman might
have been under the laws of England then current, but his master was to be
liable for pecuniary satisfaction and the slave was merely to be whipped.
Three years afterward a special act to check the fleeing to Canada provided
a death penalty for any slave from the city and county of Albany found
traveling more than forty miles north of that city, the master to be
compensated from a special tax on slave property in the district. And in
1706 an act, passed mainly to quiet any fears as to the legal consequences
of Christianization, declared that baptism had no liberating effect, and
that every negro or mulatto child should inherit the status of its mother.
The murder of a white family by a quartet of slaves in conspiracy not only
led to their execution, by burning in one case, but prompted an enactment
in 1708 that slaves charged with the murder of whites might be tried
summarily by three justices of the peace and be put to death in such manner
as the enormity of their crimes might be deemed to merit, and that slaves
executed under this act should be paid for by the public. Thus stood the
law when a negro uprising in the city of New York in 1712 and a reputed
conspiracy there in 1741 brought atrociously numerous and severe
punishments, as will be related in another chapter.[35] On the former of
these occasions the royally appointed governor intervened in several cases
to prevent judicial murder. The assembly on the other hand set to work
at once on a more elaborate negro law which restricted manumissions,
prohibited free negroes from holding real estate, and increased the rigor
of slave control. Though some of the more drastic provisions were afterward
relaxed in response to the more sober sense of the community, the negro
code continued for the rest of the colonial period to be substantially as
elaborated between 1702 and 1712.[36] The disturbance of 1741 prompted
little new legislation and left little permanent impress upon the
community. When the panic passed the petty masters resumed their customary
indolence of control and the police officers, justly incredulous of public
danger, let the rigors of the law relapse into desuetude.
[Footnote 35: Below, pp. 470, 471.]
[Footnote 36: The laws are summarized and quoted in A.J. Northrup "Slavery
in New York," in the New York State Library Report for 1900, pp. 254-272.
See also E.V. Morgan, "Slavery in New York," in the American Historical
Association Papers (New York, 1891), V, 335-350.]
As to New Jersey, the eastern half, settled largely from New England, was
like in conditions and close in touch with New York, while the western
half, peopled considerably by Quakers, had a much smaller proportion of
negroes and was in sentiment akin to Pennsylvania. As was generally the
case in such contrast of circumstances, that portion of the province which
faced the greater problem of control determined the legislation for
the whole. New Jersey, indeed, borrowed the New York slave code in all
essentials. The administration of the law, furthermore, was about as it was
in New York, in the eastern counties at least. An alleged conspiracy near
Somerville in 1734 while it cost the reputed ringleader his life, cost his
supposed colleagues their ears only. On the other hand sentences to burning
at the stake were more frequent as punishment for ordinary crimes; and on
such occasions the citizens of the neighborhood turned honest shillings
by providing faggots for the fire. For the western counties the published
annals concerning slavery are brief wellnigh to blankness.[37]
[Footnote 37: H.S. Cooley, A Study of Slavery in New Jersey (Johns
Hopkins University Studios, XIV, nos. 9, 10, Baltimore, 1896).]
Pennsylvania's place in the colonial slaveholding sisterhood was a little
unusual in that negroes formed a smaller proportion of the population than
her location between New York and Maryland might well have warranted.
This was due not to her laws nor to the type of her industry but to the
disrelish of slaveholding felt by many of her Quaker and German inhabitants
and to the greater abundance of white immigrant labor whether wage-earning
or indentured. Negroes were present in the region before Penn's colony was
founded. The new government recognized slavery as already instituted. Penn
himself acquired a few slaves; and in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century the assembly legislated much as New York was doing, though somewhat
more mildly, for the fuller control of the negroes both slave and free. The
number of blacks and mulattoes reached at the middle of the century
about eleven thousand, the great majority of them slaves. They were most
numerous, of course, in the older counties which lay in the southeastern
corner of the province, and particularly in the city of Philadelphia.
Occasional owners had as many as twenty or thirty slaves, employed either
on country estates or in iron-works, but the typical holding was on a petty
scale. There were no slave insurrections in the colony, no plots of any
moment, and no panics of dread. The police was apparently a little more
thorough than in New York, partly because of legislation, which the white
mechanics procured, lessening negro competition by forbidding masters to
hire out their slaves. From travelers' accounts it would appear that the
relation of master and slave in Pennsylvania was in general more kindly
than anywhere else on the continent; but from the abundance of newspaper
advertisements for runaways it would seem to have been of about average
character. The truth probably lies as usual in the middle ground, that
Pennsylvania masters were somewhat unusually considerate. The assembly
attempted at various times to check slave importations by levying
prohibitive duties, which were invariably disallowed by the English crown.
On the other hand, in spite of the endeavors of Sandiford, Lay, Woolman
and Benezet, all of them Pennsylvanians, it took no steps toward relaxing
racial control until the end of the colonial period.[38]
[Footnote 38: E.R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania (Washington, 1911);
R.R. Wright, Jr., The Negro in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912).]
In the Northern colonies at large the slaves imported were more generally
drawn from the West Indies than directly from Africa. The reasons were
several. Small parcels, better suited to the retail demand, might be
brought more profitably from the sugar islands whither New England, New
York and Pennsylvania ships were frequently plying than from Guinea whence
special voyages must be made. Familiarity with the English language and
the rudiments of civilization at the outset were more essential to petty
masters than to the owners of plantation gangs who had means for breaking
in fresh Africans by deputy. But most important of all, a sojourn in the
West Indies would lessen the shock of acclimatization, severe enough under
the best of circumstances. The number of negroes who died from it was
probably not small, and of those who survived some were incapacitated and
bedridden with each recurrence of winter.
Slavery did not, and perhaps could not, become an important industrial
institution in any Northern community; and the problem of racial
adjustments was never as acute as it was generally thought to be. In not
more than two or three counties do the negroes appear to have numbered more
than one fifth of the population; and by reason of being distributed
in detail they were more nearly assimilated to the civilization of the
dominant race than in southerly latitudes where they were held in gross.
They nevertheless continued to be regarded as strangers within the gates,
by some welcomed because they were slaves, by others not welcomed even
though they were in bondage. By many they were somewhat unreasonably
feared; by few were they even reasonably loved. The spirit not of love but
of justice and the public advantage was destined to bring the end of their
bondage.
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