University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VI
THE NORTHERN COLONIES

HAD any American colony been kept wholly out of touch
with both Indians and negroes, the history of slavery
therein would quite surely hare 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 gaming 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]

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 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 unless 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 Israeli concerning such persons
doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who
shall be judged thereto by authoritie."[8]

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] I suppose you know verie well how we
shall mayntayne 20 Moores cheaper than one Englishe servant."

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]

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.

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]

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 1860 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
the one hand taxed the importation of negroes 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]

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

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 Engish
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]

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 countiesdo

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.