ws that there was no desire to abate the traffic. In
August, 1712, a law was passed "prohibiting the importation or
bringing into the province any Indian servants or slaves;"[309] but it
was only intended as a check upon the introduction of the Tuscaroras
and other "revengeful" Indians from South Carolina.[310] Desperate
Indians and insubordinate Negroes were the occasion of grave fears on
the part of the colonists.[311] Many Indians had been cruelly dealt
with in war; in peace, enslaved and wronged beyond their power of
endurance. Their stoical nature led them to the performance of
desperate deeds. There is kinship in suffering. There is an unspoken
language in sorrow that binds hearts in the indissoluble fellowship of
resolve. Whatever natural and national differences existed between the
Indian and the Negro--one from the bleak coasts of New England, the
other from the tropical coast of Guinea--were lost in the commonality
of degradation and interest. The more heroic spirits of both races
began to grow restive under the yoke. The colonists were not slow to
observe this, and hence this law was to act as a restraint upon and
against "their rebellion and hostilities." And the reader should
understand that it was not an anti-slavery measure. It was not
"hostile to slavery" as a system: it was but the precaution of a
guilty and ever-gnawing public conscience.

Slavery grew. There was no legal obstacle in its way. It had the
sanction of the law, as we have already shown, and what was better
still, the sympathy of public sentiment. The traffic in slaves appears
to have been more an object in Boston than at any period before or
since. For a time dealers had no hesitation in advertising them for
sale in their own names. At length a very few who advertised would
refer purchasers to "inquire of the printer, and know further."[312]
This was in 1727, fifteen years after the afore-mentioned Act became a
law, and which many apologists would interpret as a specific and
direct prohibition against slavery; but there is no reason for such a
perversion of so plain an Act.

Slavery in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, in self-defence had to claim
as one of its necessary and fundamental principles, that the slave was
either _naturally_ inferior to the other races, or that, by some
fundamentally inherent law in the institution itself, the master was
justified in placing the lowest possible estimate upon his slave
property. "Property" implied a