stern counties at least. An alleged conspiracy near
Somerville in 1734 while it cost the reputed ringleader his life, cost his
supposed colleagues their ears only. On the other hand sentences to burning
at the stake were more frequent as punishment for ordinary crimes; and on
such occasions the citizens of the neighborhood turned honest shillings
by providing faggots for the fire. For the western counties the published
annals concerning slavery are brief wellnigh to blankness.[37]

[Footnote 37: H.S. Cooley, _A Study of Slavery in New Jersey_ (Johns
Hopkins University _Studios_, XIV, nos. 9, 10, Baltimore, 1896).]

Pennsylvania's place in the colonial slaveholding sisterhood was a little
unusual in that negroes formed a smaller proportion of the population than
her location between New York and Maryland might well have warranted.
This was due not to her laws nor to the type of her industry but to the
disrelish of slaveholding felt by many of her Quaker and German inhabitants
and to the greater abundance of white immigrant labor whether wage-earning
or indentured. Negroes were present in the region before Penn's colony was
founded. The new government recognized slavery as already instituted. Penn
himself acquired a few slaves; and in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century the assembly legislated much as New York was doing, though somewhat
more mildly, for the fuller control of the negroes both slave and free. The
number of blacks and mulattoes reached at the middle of the century
about eleven thousand, the great majority of them slaves. They were most
numerous, of course, in the older counties which lay in the southeastern
corner of the province, and particularly in the city of Philadelphia.
Occasional owners had as many as twenty or thirty slaves, employed either
on country estates or in iron-works, but the typical holding was on a petty
scale. There were no slave insurrections in the colony, no plots of any
moment, and no panics of dread. The police was apparently a little more
thorough than in New York, partly because of legislation, which the white
mechanics procured, lessening negro competition by forbidding masters to
hire out their slaves. From travelers' accounts it would appear that the
relation of master and slave in Pennsylvania was in general more kindly
than anywhere else on the continent; but from the abundance of newspaper
advertisements for runaways it would seem to have been of about average
characte