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of coffee into the West Indies, and the increasing consumption in Europe of colonial produce, gave fresh impulse to this detestable traffic, and it now began to be carried on to an extent which soon roused against it the indignant humanity of an enlightened age. The West Indies were the chief market; but the imports to Virginia and the Carolinas were largely increased. New England rum, manufactured at Newport, was profitably exchanged on the coast of Africa for negroes, to be sold in the southern colonies; and vessels sailed on the same business from Boston and New York. The trade, however, was principally carried on by English merchants of Bristol and Liverpool. Except in Pennsylvania, the colonial duties levied on the import of slaves were intended chiefly for revenue. They were classed in the instructions to the royal governors with duties on British goods, as impediments to British commerce not to be favored. On this ground several of these acts received the royal veto. Yet Virginia, as we have seen, was allowed to impose such duties as she pleased, on the sole condition of making them payable by the buyer. (1750.)

The importation of indented white persons, called 'servants,' or sometimes redemptioners,' in distinction from negroes, who were known as slaves, was still extensively carried on, especially in the middle colonies. The colonial enactments for keeping these servants in order, and especially for preventing them from running away, were often very harsh and severe. They were put, for the most part, in these statutes, on the same level with the slaves, but their case in other respects was very different. In all the colonies, the term of indented service, even where no express contract had been entered into, was strictly limited by law, and, except in the case of very young persons, it seldom or never exceeded seven years. On the expiration of that term, these freed servants were absorbed into the mass of white inhabitants, and the way lay open before them and their children to wealth and social distinction. One of the future signers of the Declaration of Independence was brought to Pennsylvania as a redemptioner. In Virginia, at the expiration of his term of service, every redemptioner, in common with other immigrants to the colony, was entitled to a free grant of fifty acres of land, and in all the colonies certain allowances

of clothing were required to be made by the late masters. Poverty, however, and want of education on the part of the mass of these freed men, kept them too often in a subservient condition, and created in the middle as well as in the southern colonies, an inferior order of poor whites, a distinction of classes, and an inequality in society almost unknown in republican New England.

The position of the Africans was much more disastrous. Not only were they servants for life, which possibly the law of England might have countenanced, but by colonial statute and usage this servitude descended to their children also. The few set free by the good-will or the scruples of their masters seemed a standing reproach to slavery, and an evil example in the eyes of the rest. They became the objects of a suspicious legislation, which deprived them of most of the rights of freemen, and reduced them to a social position very similar, in many respects, to that which inveterate prejudice in many parts of Europe has fixed upon the Jews. Hence, too, legislative restraints on the bounty or justice of the master in manumitting his slave.

Intermarriage with the inferior race, whether bond or free, was prohibited by religion as a sin, by public opinion as a shame, and by law as a crime. But neither law, Gospel, nor public opinion could prevent that amalgamation which, according to all experience, inevitably and extensively takes place whenever two races come into that close juxtaposition which domestic slavery of necessity implies. Falsehood and hypocrisy took the place of restraint and self-denial. The Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists, less filled with pride of race, and less austere and pretending in their religious morality, esteemed that white man mean and cruel, who did not, so far as his ability permitted, secure for his colored children emancipation and some pecuniary provision. Laws were even found necessary, in some of those colonies, to limit what was esteemed a superfluity of parental tenderness. In the Anglo-American colonies, colored children were hardly less numerous. But conventional decorum, more potent than law, forbade any recognition by the father. They followed the condition of the mother. They were born, and they remained slaves. European blood was thus constantly transferred into servile veins; and hence, among the slaves sold

and bought to-day in our American markets, may be found the descendants of men distinguished in colonial and national annals.'

In 1741, says Hildreth, the city of New York became the scene of a cruel and bloody delusion, less notorious, but not less lamentable than the Salem witchcraft. That city now contained some seven or eight thousand inhabitants, of whom twelve or fifteen hundred were slaves. Nine fires in rapid succession, most of them, however, merely the burning of chimneys, produced a perfect insanity of terror. An indented servant woman purchased her liberty and secured a reward of £100, by pretending to give information of a plot formed by a low tavern-keeper, her master, and three negroes to burn the city and murder the whites. This story was confirmed and amplified by an Irish prostitute convicted of a robbery, who, to recommend herself to mercy, reluctantly turned informer. Numerous arrests had been already made among the slaves and free blacks. Many others followed. The eight lawyers who then composed the bar of New York, all assisted by turns on behalf of the prosecution. The prisoners, who had no counsel, were tried and convicted upon most insufficient evidence. The lawyers vied with each other in heaping all sorts of abuse on their heads, and chief justice Delancey, in passing sentence, vied with the lawyers. Many confessed, to save their lives, and then accused others. Thirteen unhappy convicts were burned at the stake, eighteen were hanged, and seventy-one transported. (1741.)

The war and the religious excitement then prevailing, tended to inflame the yet hot prejudices against Catholics. A non-juring schoolmaster, accused of being a Catholic priest in disguise, and of stimulating the negroes to burn the city by promises of absolution, was condemned and executed. Glutted with blood, and their fright appeased, the citizens began at last to recover their senses. The informers lost their credit, and a stop was put to these judicial murders.

One of your periodical frights! says Sam. Now will you hush about slavery, once and forever? You deserve to be spanked and put to bed-the whole of you!

CHAPTER XI,

Puritan Sam and Individuality-"Day" first Printer-abuse of the Virginia Settlers in the "Yellow covered Literature" of History-Who were the true Discoverers and Settlers of America?

BUT enough of Puritanical Sam for the present. We have seen him to be a strange compound of manhood and cant, a bigot, a bully, a hero and a savage, as well as the proud originator of the grave problem of "individuality," or "the one man development," which made him with so much emphasis, "Soldier, Slaver, Psalmist, Cobler, Farmer, Persecutor, Parson, Legislator and good Citizen alike." This idea, which however little understood in Europe, and especially in France, constitutes the basis of the much abused idea of "Liberty and Equality." But the Plymouth Sam was not the only hero of progressive humanity, although he has managed, from the fact of having had the earliest printingpress, to have been systematically and pertinaciously his own glorificator, in asserting what amounts to as much.

The first printing in America was done in New England, in 1639, by one "Day," who was very properly named as the originator of Light. The proprietor of this first press, was characteristically a clergyman, who was quite as characteristically named "Glover;" but unluckily, he died on the passage. It seems somewhat significant, that the first thing printed should have been the "Freeman's Oath;" the second an almanac; the third, an edition of the Psalms. Since this important event, it is quite natural that most of the Psalmody of Puritanical Sam, should have been in and for his own honor.

Having, for a long time, the exclusive control of the "Day," of the printing-press, he has managed to make, as

much as possible, a dark lantern of it, casting its light only where it best suited his interest and bigotries.

This may be well enough says Sam, but while he has been thus assiduously staining paper in his own glorification, my Southern children have been producing the material out of which this same paper is manufactured; and, watching his round-headed brother manufacture a "character" for himself, has been content with producing orators, statesmen, generals, and presidents for him.

The first adventurers who settled St. Augustine in Florida, and Jamestown in Virginia, Sam continues, have been methodically characterized by my Quaker-hanging descendants, as "dissolute and sensual' vagabonds, who left their respective countries for their country's good." But we, Sam, have never been able to discover, why the adventurers who dared the perils of storm, and sea, and wilderness in the South, were not as good and true men-the nasal twang left out-as those who presume they have performed the same feats at the North.

Sam thinks it is about time that this ridiculous cant should be rebuked. There is an old fable which tells us that, once upon a time, there came a question between the lion and a man, as to which should rank superior. The man, in proof of his argument, made a sculpture of a human figure astride of a lion; the lion's answer was: "Make me the sculptor, and then you would be underneath my paws."

Thus it is the Southern Sam has never been an illustrator of himself in idle words, but an actor, a power, and a governing presence; and therefore it is, that Puritanical Sam makes a harmonican of his nose, in speaking of his "dissolute" Southern brother. We say harmonican, because it is an instrument invented since the "Blue Laws," or else he would not dare to play upon that even-if it had been a harp now, it would have been all legitimate.

The best of the joke is, says Sam, that these patronizing inventors of the "yellow-covered Literature" of History, who have thus systematically stigmatized a portion of my Family, seem to be utterly oblivious of the fact, that the Southern races are most intimately connected with the primitive history of my small plantation, and to them belong the undivided honor, not only of discovering a New World, but

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