Page:Notes on the History of Slavery - Moore - 1866.djvu/91

 olitary blat in the ears of his brother magitrates and the people, who litened in amazement and wonder, not unmingled with orrow and contempt. His performance is all the more remarkable from the fact that it tands out in the hitory of the time eparate and ditinct as "the voice of one crying in the wildernes."

, at that time a Judge of the Superior Court, and afterwards Chief-Jutice, publihed a brief tract in 1700, entitled: "The Selling of Joeph a Memorial." It filled three pages of a folio heet, ending with the imprint: "Boton of the Maachuetts; Printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen. June 24th, 1700."

The author preented a copy of this tract "not only to each member of the General Court at the time of its publication, but alo to numerous clergymen and literary gentlemen with whom he was intimate." ''MS. Letter. Compare Briot,'', 224. Although thus extenively circulated at that day, it has for many years been known apparently only by tradition, as nearly all the notices of it which we have een are confined to the fact of its publication early in the eighteenth century, the date being nowhere correctly tated.

Beyond this, it appears to have been unknown to our hitorians, and is now reproduced probably for the firt time in the preent century. Indeed, we have met with no quotation even from it later than 1738, when it was reprinted in Pennylvania, where antilavery took an earlier and deeper root, and bore earlier fruit, than in any other part of America.