II.

BOOK to exempt the offices from the pretensions of unworthy candidates, and the officers from calumny and envy. Virtue and ability were fairly appreciated; and we frequently find the same individuals re-elected for a long series of years to the same offices,1 and in some instances succeeded by their sons, where inheritance of merit recommended inheritance of place. In more than one of the settlements, the first codes of law were the composition of single persons; the people desiring an eminent citizen to compose for them a body of laws, and then legislating unanimously in conformity with his suggestions. The estimation and the disinterestedness of public services were not unfrequently attested by legislative appropriations of public money to defray the funeral charges of men who for many years had enjoyed the highest official dignities. The public respect for distinguished patriots, though not perpetuated by titles of nobility, was preserved in the recollection of their actions, and stimulated instead of relaxing the ardour of their descendants. The virtue of remarkable benefactors of their country was more diffusively beneficial from their never being separated from the mass of the community by titular distinctions. Remaining incorporated with the order of citizens, their merit more visibly reflected honour upon it, than if they had been advanced to an imaginary eminence, tending to engender in themselves or their descendants contempt for the bulk of their country

men.

The most lasting, if not the most serious, evil with which New England has ever been afflicted, was the institution of slavery, which continued till a late period to pollute all its provinces, and even now lingers, though to a very slight extent, in the province of New Hampshire. The practice, as we have seen, originated in the supposed necessity created by

In the year 1634, the people of Massachusetts having elected a particular individual to the office of governor, in place of Winthrop, who had previously enjoyed this dignity, their conduct was censured by John Cotton, who, in a sermon preached before the general court, maintained that a magistrate ought not to be remitted to the condition of a private individual, without some cause of complaint publicly esta blished against him. This curious proposition was discussed by the court, and "referred for farther consideration."-Winthrop's Journal.

2 The assemby of this province, as early as the reign of George the First, passed a law, enacting, that 'if any man smite out the eye or tooth of his man or maid servant, or otherwise maim or disfigure them, he shall let him or her go free from his service, and shall allow such farther recompense as the court of quarter sessions shall

V.

the Indian hostilities; but, once introduced, it was banefully CHA P. calculated to perpetuate itself, and to derive accessions from various other sources. For some time, indeed, this was successfully resisted; and instances have been recorded of judicial interposition to restrain the evil within its original limits. In the year 1645, a negro fraudulently brought from Africa, and enslaved within the New England territory, was liberated by the magistrates and sent back to his native country.1 No law expressly authorizing slavery was ever enacted by any of the New England states; and such was the influence of religious and moral feeling in all these states, that, even while there was no law prohibiting the continuance of slavery, it never succeeded in gaining any considerable prevalence. By the early laws of Connecticut, man-stealing was declared a capital crime. In the year 1703, the assembly of Massachusetts imposed a duty of 47. on every negro imported into the province; and eight years after passed an act prohibiting the importation of any more Indian servants or slaves. In Massachusetts, the slaves never exceeded the fiftieth part of the whole population; in Connecticut and Rhode Island, when slaves were most numerous (in the middle of the eighteenth century), the proportion was nearly the same and in the territory that afterwards received the name of Vermont, when the number of inhabitants amounted to nearly nine thousand, there were only sixteen persons in a state of slavery.3 The cruelties and vices that slavery tends to produce were repressed at once by so great a preponderance of the sound over the unhealthy part of the body politic, and by the circumstances to which this preponderance was owing. The majority of the inhabitants were decidedly hostile to slavery; and numerous remonstrances were addressed to the British govern

adjudge;" and that "if any person kill his Indian or negro servant, he shall be punished with death." The slaves in this province are said to have been treated in all respects like white servants.-Warden's United States.

1 Belknap.

2 Blue Laws of Connecticut. Holmes. "In the early part of the eighteenth centnry, Judge Sewell, of New England, came forward as a zealous advocate for the negroes. He addressed a memorial to the legislature, which he entitled The Selling of Joseph, and in which he pleaded their cause both as a lawyer and a christian. This memorial produced an effect upon many, but particularly upon those of his own religious persuasion."-Clarkson's Hist. of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Warden. Winterbotham's America. Dwight.

432

II.

THE HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA.

BOOK ment against the encouragement she afforded to it by supporting the slave trade. When North America attained independence, the New England states (with the single exception of New Hampshire) adopted measures which, in the course of a few years, abolished every trace of this vile institution. In New Hampshire, it seems to have been rather a preposterous regard for liberty, and the sacredness of existing possessions, than a predilection for slavery, that prevented this practice from being formally abolished by the principles by which it has been essentially modified and substantially condemned.1

There is a strange, I hope not a disingenuous, indistinctness in the statements of some writers respecting the negro slavery of New England. Winterbotham, writing in 1795, asserts, that "there are no slaves in Massachusetts." If he meant that a law had been passed which denounced, and was gradually extinguishing slavery, he was right; but the literal sense of his words is contradicted by Warden's Tables, which demonstrate that fifteen years after (the law not yet having produced its full effect) there were several thousand slaves in Massachusetts. Dwight relates his travels, in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, through every part of New England, without giving us the slightest reason to suppose that such beings as slaves existed in any one of its states, except when he stops to defend the legislature of Connecticut from an imputation on the manner in which her share of the abolition had been conducted. Warden himself says, in one page, that "slavery no longer exists in New England," even while, in another, he admits and seeks to palliate the occurrence of its lingering traces in New Hampshire.

NOTES

TO

THE FIRST VOLUME.

NOTE I. Page 20.

THE important instruction, both moral and political, which may be derived from a consideration of the origin of the Slave Trade, is forcibly depicted by that distinguished philanthropist (Thomas Clarkson,) whose virtue promoted, and whose genius. has recorded, the abolition of this detestable traffic. It is a remarkable fact, that the pious and benevolent Las Casas, actuated by an earnest desire to emancipate the feeble natives of South America from the bondage of the Spanish colonists, was the first person who proposed to the government of Spain the importation of negroes from Africa to America. His proposition was rejected by Cardinal Ximenes, who considered it unlawful to consign innocent people to slavery at all, and was, moreover, struck with the moral inconsistency of delivering the inhabitants of one country from a state of misery, by transferring it to the inhabitants of another. "After the death of Cardinal Ximenes, the Emperor Charles the Fifth encouraged the slave trade. In 1517, he granted a patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right of importing four thousand Africans into America. But he lived long enough to repent of what he had thus inconsiderately done. For in the year 1542, he made a code of laws for the better protection of the unfortunate Indians in his foreign dominions; and he stopped the progress of African slavery by an order that all slaves in his American islands should be made free." This order was subsequently defeated by his own retirement into a monastery; but "it shows he had been ignorant of what he was doing, when he gave his sanction to this cruel trade. It shows, when legislators give one set of men an undue power over another, how quickly they abuse it; or he never would have found himself obliged, in the short space of twenty-five years, to undo that which he had countenanced as a

great state measure. And while it confirms the former lesson to statesmen, of watching the beginnings or principles of things, in their political movements, it should teach them never to persist in the support of evils, through the false shame of being obliged to confess that they had once given them their sanction; nor to delay the cure of them, because, politically speaking, neither this nor that is the proper season; but to do them away instantly, as there can be only one fit or proper time in the eye of religion, namely, on the conviction of their existence." Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Louis the Thirteenth of France was at first staggered by the same scruples of conscience that prevailed with Charles, and could not be persuaded to authorize the slave trade till he had been made to believe that he would promote the religious conversion of the negroes by suffering them to be transported to the colonies. Ibid.

NOTE II. Page 56.

Captain Smith appears to have been so obnoxious to the leading patentees, that, even if he had remained in the colony, it is highly improbable that they would ever have intrusted him with official authority. They neither rewarded nor re-employed him after his return to England. They were bent on deriving immediate supplies of gold or rich merchandize from Virginia; and ascribed their disappointment in a great measure to his having restricted his views to the establishment of a solid and respectable frame of provincial society. This is apparent from many passages of his writings, and particularly from his letter to the patentees while he held the presidency. An honester but absurder reason, that appears to have prevailed with some of them to oppose his pretensions to office, was, that certain fortune-tellers had predicted that he would be unlucky; a prediction that sometimes contributes to its own fulfilment.

In various parts of his history, Smith applies himself to refute their unreasonable charges, and account for the disappointment of their expectations. For this purpose he has drawn a parallel between the circumstances of the Spanish and the English colonists of America. "It was the Spaniards' good hap," he observes, "to happen in those parts where were infinite numbers of people, who had manured the ground with that providence it afforded victuals at all times. And time had brought them to that perfection, that they had the use of gold and silver, and the most of such commodities as those countries afforded: so that what the Spaniard got was chiefly the spoil and pillage of those country people, and not the labours of their own hands. But had these fruitful countries been as savage, as barbarous, as ill peopled, as little planted, laboured, and manured, as Virginia,