Page:Notes on the History of Slavery - Moore - 1866.djvu/28

 in imilar legilation. It anticipates by many years anything of the ort to be found in the tatutes of Virginia, or Maryland, or South Carolina, and nothing like it is to be found in the contemporary codes of her iter colonies in New England. Compare Hildreth,, 278.

Yet this very law has been gravely cited in a paper communicated to the Maachuetts Hitorical Society, and twice reprinted in its publications without challenge or correction, as an evidence that "o far as it felt free to follow its own inclinations, uncontrolled by the action of the mother country, Maachuetts was hotile to lavery as an intitution.” M. H. S. Coll.,, iv., 334. Proc., 1855–58, p. 189.

And with the tatute before them, it has been peritently aerted and repeated by all orts of authorities, hitorical and legal, up to that of the Chief Jutice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, that "lavery to a certain extent eems to have crept in; not probably by force of any law, for none uch is found or known to exit." Commonwealth vs. Aves, 18 Pickering, 208. Shaw, C. J.

The leading cae in Maachuetts is that of Winchendon vs. Hatfield in error, ''Mas. Reports,'' 123. It relates to the ettlement of a negro pauper who had been a lave as early as 1757, and paed through the hands of nine eparate owners before 1775. From the ninth he abconded, and enlited in the Maachuetts Army among the eight-months' men, at Cambridge, in the beginning of the Revolutionary War. His term of ervice had not expired when he was again old, in July, 1776, to another citizen of