leap year”—and sure enough Tom was correct.— Williams.

The following was published in several newspapers when Thomas Fuller died:

"DIED.-Negro Tom, the famous African Calculator, aged 80 years. He was the property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox, of Alexandria. Tom was a very black man. He was brought to this country at the age of fourteen, and was sold as a slave with many of his unfortunate countrymen. This man was a prodigy; though he could neither read nor write, he had perfectly acquired the use of enumeration. He could give the number of months, days, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds for any period of time that a person chose to mention allowing in his calculations for all the leap years that happened in the time. He would give the number of poles, yards, feet, inches and barleycorns in a given distance-say the diameter of the earth's orbit-and in every calculation he would produce the true answer in less time than ninety-nine out of a hundred men would take with their pens. And what was, perhaps, more extraordinary, though interrupted in the progress of his calculations and engaged in discourse upon any other subject, his operations were not thereby in the least deranged. He would go on where he left off, and could give any and all of the stages through which his calculations had passed. Thus died Negro Tom,

this untaught arithmetician, this untutored scholar. Had his opportunities of improvement been equal to those of a thousand of his fellow-men, neither the Royal Society of London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, nor even a Newton himself need have been ashamed to acknowledge him a brother in science."

How many of his kind might there have been had the people of Jamestown seen fit to give the Negroes who came to their shores a laborer's and emigrant's chance rather than enslaving them! Much bloodshed and dissension might thus have been avoided, and the honor of the nation never besmirched with human bondage.

CHAPTER III.

THE NEW YORK COLONY.

THE enslavement of the Negro seems to have commenced in the New York Colony about the same time as at Jamestown (1619). The slaves were used on the farms, and became so profitable that about the time the English took the colony from the Dutch, 1664, there was a great demand for slaves, and the trade grew accordingly.

The Privileges of the Slaves in New York were, for a while, a little better than in Virginia. They were taken into the church and baptized, and no law was passed to prevent their getting an education. But the famous Wall Street, now the financial centre of the New World, was once the scene of an auction block where Indians and persons of Negro descent were bought and sold. A whipping boss was once a characteristic officer in New York city.

The Riot of 1712 shows the feeling between the master and servant at that time. The Negro population being excluded from schools, not allowed to own land, even when free, and forbidden to "strike

a Christian or Jew" in self-defence, and their testimony excluded from the courts, arose in arms and with the torch; houses were burned, and many whites killed, before the militia suppressed them. Many of the Negroes of New York were free, and many came from the Spanish provinces.

CHAPTER IV.

MASSACHUSETTS, RHODE ISLAND, AND CONNECTICUT.

NEGRO slavery existed in Massachusetts as early as 1633. The Puritan fathers who came to this country in search of liberty, carried on for more than a century a traffic in human flesh and blood. The New England ships of the 17th century brought cargoes of Negroes from the west coast of Africa and the Barbadoes. They sold many of them in New England as well as in the Southern colonies. In 1764 there were nearly 6000 slaves in Massachusetts, about 4000 in Rhode Island, and the same in Connecticut.

The Treatment of the slaves in these colonies at this time was regulated by laws which classed them as property," being rated as horses and hogs." They could not bear arms nor be admitted to the schools. They were baptized in the churches, but this did not make them freemen, as it did white serfs.

Better Treatment was given the slaves as the colonies grew older and were threatened with wars