ere brought by Dutchmen for sale into Virginia
in 1619. The New England public was at first opposed to the practice of
negro slavery, and there is even a record of a slave, who had been sold
by a member of the Boston Church, being ordered to be sent back to
Africa (1645). Yet negro slaves were to be found in New England as early
as 1638. Massachusetts and Connecticut recognized the lawfulness of
slavery; Massachusetts, however, only when voluntary or in the case of
captives taken in war. Rhode Island, more generous, made illegal the
perpetual service of "black mankind," requiring them to be set free
after two years, the period of white men's indentures--a condition
which, however, would only tend to the working slaves to death in the
allotted time. But although there was no importation of negroes on any
considerable scale into New England, the ships by which the slave trade
was mainly carried on were those from Massachusetts and Rhode Island,
which carried rum to Africa, and brought back slaves to the West Indies
and the southern colonies. In Maryland slavery had been established at
once; in South Carolina it came into birth with the colony itself. The
attempt to exclude it from Georgia failed.

The guilt of the institution cannot, however, be fairly charged on the
colonists. Queen Elizabeth had been a partner in the second voyage of
Sir John Hawkins, the first English slave-captain. James I chartered a
slave-trading company (1618); Charles I a second (1631); Charles II a
third (1663), of which the Duke of York was president, and again a
fourth, in which he himself, as well as the Duke, was a subscriber. Nor
did the expulsion of the Stuarts cause any change of feeling in this
respect. England's sharpest stroke of business at the Peace of Utrecht
(1713) was the obtaining for herself the shameful monopoly of the
"Asiento"--the slave trade with the Spanish West Indies--undertaking "to
bring into the West Indies of America belonging to his Catholic majesty,
in the space of thirty years, one hundred forty-four thousand negroes,"
at the rate of forty-eight hundred a year, at a fixed rate of duty, with
the right to import any further number at a lower rate. As nearly the
whole shores of the Gulf of Mexico were still Spanish, England thus
contributed to build up slavery in most of the future Southern States of
the Union. Whether for foreign or for English colonies, it is reckoned
that, from 1700 to 1750, English ships carried aw