American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[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 L40, 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 regime. 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 regime. 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 regime 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.

CHAPTER VII

REVOLUTION AND REACTION

After the whole group of colonies had long been left in salutary neglect
by the British authorities, George III and his ministers undertook the
creation of an imperial control; and Parliament was too much at the king's
command for opposing statesmen to stop the project. The Americans wakened
resentfully to the new conditions. The revived navigation laws, the stamp
act, the tea duty, and the dispatch of redcoats to coerce Massachusetts
were a cumulation of grievances not to be borne by high-spirited people.
For some years the colonial spokesmen tried to persuade the British
government that it was violating historic and constitutional rights; but
these efforts had little success. To the argument that the empire was
composed of parts mutually independent in legislation, it was replied that
Parliament had legislated imperially ever since the empire's beginning, and
that the colonial assemblies possessed only such powers as Parliament might
allow. The plea of no taxation without representation was answered by the
doctrine that all elements in the empire were virtually represented in
Parliament. The stress laid by the colonials upon their rights as Britons
met the administration's emphasis upon the duty of all British subjects
to obey British laws. This countering of pleas of exemption with
pronouncements of authority drove the complainants at length from proposals
of reform to projects of revolution. For this the solidarity of the
continent was essential, and that was to be gained only by the most
vigorous agitation with the aid of the most effective campaign cries. The
claim of historic immunities was largely discarded in favor of the more
glittering doctrines current in the philosophy of the time. The demands for
local self-government or for national independence, one or both of which
were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the claim of the
inherent and inalienable rights of man. Hence the culminating formulation
in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The cause of the community was to be
won under the guise of the cause of individuals.