may be attributed partly perhaps to the liberal influence of Roger
Williams, and partly to the virtual absence of negroes in the towns near
the head of the bay. It long stood unrepealed, but it was probably never
enforced, for no sooner did negroes become numerous than a conservative
reaction set in which deprived this peculiar law of any public sanction it
may have had at the time of enactment. When in the early eighteenth century
legislation was resumed in regard to negroes, it took the form of a slave
code much like that of Connecticut but with an added act, borrowed perhaps
from a Southern colony, providing that slaves charged with theft be tried
by impromptu courts consisting of two or more justices of the peace or town
officers, and that appeal might be taken to a court of regular session only
at the master's request and upon his giving bond for its prosecution. Some
of the towns, furthermore, added by-laws of their own for more thorough
police. South Kingstown for instance adopted an order that if any slave
were found in the house of a free negro, both guest and host were to be
whipped.[29] The Rhode Island Quakers in annual meeting began as early as
1717 to question the propriety of importing slaves, and other persons from
time to time echoed their sentiments; but it was not until just before the
American Revolution that legislation began to interfere with the trade or
the institution.

[Footnote 28: _Rhode Island Colonial Records_, I, 243.]

[Footnote 29: Channing, _The Narragansett Planters_, p. 11.]

The colonies of Plymouth and New Haven in the period of their separate
existence, and the colonies of Maine and New Hampshire throughout their
careers, are negligible in a general account of negro slavery because
their climate and their industrial requirements, along with their poverty,
prevented them from importing any appreciable number of negroes.

New Netherland had the distinction of being founded and governed by a great
slave-trading corporation--the Dutch West India Company--which endeavored
to extend the market for its human merchandise whithersoever its influence
reached. This pro-slavery policy was not wholly selfish, for the directors
appear to have believed that the surest way to promote a colony's welfare
was to make slaves easy to buy. In the infancy of New Netherland, when it
consisted merely of two trading posts, the company delivered its first
batch of negroes at New Amsterdam. But to its chagr