estates. We have seen the supply-bills for 1736,
1738, 1739, and 1740, in which this feature is the same.

"And thus they continued to be rated with horses, oxen,
cows, goats, sheep, and swine, until after the commencement
of the War of the Revolution.[316]

On the 22d of April, 1728, the following notice appeared in a Boston
newspaper:--

"Two very likely Negro girls. Enquire two doors from the
Brick Meetinghouse in Middle-street. At which place is to be
sold women's stays, children's good callamanco
stiffened-boddy'd coats, and childrens' stays of all sorts,
and women's hoop-coats; all at very reasonable rates."[317]

So the "likely Negro girls" were mixed up in the sale of "women's
stays" and "hoop-coats"! It was bad enough to "rate Negroes with
Horses and Hogs," but to sell them with second-hand clothing was an
incident in which is to be seen the low depth to which slavery had
carried the Negro by its cruel weight. A human being could be sold
like a cast-off garment, and pass without a bill of sale.[318] The
announcement that a "likely Negro woman about nineteen years and a
child about six months of age _to be sold together or apart_"[319] did
not shock the Christian sensibilities of the people of Massachusetts.
A babe six months old could be torn from the withered and famishing
bosom of the young mother, and sold with other articles of
merchandise. How bitter and how cruel was such a separation,
mothers[320] only can know; and how completely lost a community and
government are that regard with complacency a hardship so diabolical,
the Christians of America must be able to judge.

The Church has done many cruel things in the name of Christianity. In
the dark ages it filled the minds of its disciples with fear, and
their bodies with the pains of penance. It burned Michael Servetus,
and it strangled the scientific opinions of Galileo. And in stalwart
old Massachusetts it thought it was doing God's service in denying the
Negro slave the right of Christian baptism."

"The famous French _Code Noir_ of 1685 obliged every planter
to have his Negroes baptized, and properly instructed in the
doctrines and duties of Christianity. Nor was this the only
important and humane provision of that celebrated statute,
to which we may seek in vain for any parallel in British
Colonial legislation."[321]

On the 25th of October, 1727, Matthias Plant[322]