of higher sensibilities, more sensitive affections, greater pride;
one who could not live a slave. Such a one was the haughty Congo Pomp,
who escaped to a swamp near Truro on Cape Cod--a swamp now called by his
name--and placing at the foot of a tree a jug of water and loaf of bread
to sustain him on his last long journey, hanged himself from the
low-hanging limbs, and thus obtained freedom. Such also was Parson
Williams's slave Cato in Longmeadow, Mass. He bore repeated whippings
for his high-spirited disobedience, "for speaking out loud in meeting,
drinking too much cider, going on a rampage," and finally drowned
himself in a well.

Waitstill Winthrop wrote thus of one suicidal Moor to Fitz John Winthrop
in 1682.

"I fear Black Tom will do but little seruis. He usued to make a
show of hangeing himselfe before folkes, but I believe he is not
very nimble about it when he is alone. Tis good to have an eye to
him & you think it not worth while to keep him eyether sell him or
send him to Virginia or the Barbadoes."

William Pyncheon had also a slave who was "assiduous in hangeing." To be
sold to Virginia was a standard threat to New England slaves, as work in
Southern tobacco-fields was thought much more severe than in northern
cornfields.

Slavery lingered in New England until after Revolutionary days. It is
said that its death blow was dealt in Worcester, Mass., in 1783, when a
citizen was tried for assaulting and beating his negro servant. The
defence was that the black man was a slave, and the beating was but
necessary restraint and correction. The master was found guilty in the
Worcester County Court and fined forty shillings.

Though there were few slaves who were willing to leave life in order to
be free, many were willing to try to leave their masters. The early New
England newspapers abound in advertisements of runaway blacks--in gay
attire, with fiddles and guns, bewigged and silk-stockinged, well
dressed if not well treated.

I know no records that show more fully, though wholly unconsciously, the
vast simplicity of our ancestors than these advertisements of runaway
servants. Fancy giving as a possible means of identification of any
human being such an item of descriptions as this: "When he gets drunk or
drinks much he is red in the face"--as if that were an extraordinary or
peculiar trait in any drunken man! Another runaway is said to have had
"sometimes a sly look in his eye an