Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/223

Rh Boston of fhe Fugitive Slave Bill; from the town which hung Grenville and Huske in effigy, to the city which approved Mr Webster's speech in defence of slave-catching! Boston tolled her bells for the Stamp Act, and fired a hundred holiday cannons for the Slave Act! Massachusetts, all New England, has been deeply guilty of slavery and the slave-trade. An exile from Germany finds the chief street of Newport paved by a tax of ten dollars a head on all the slaves landed there; the little town sent out Christian New England rum, and brought home heathen men—for sale. Slavery came to Boston with the first settlers. In 1639, Josselyn found here a negro woman in bondage refusing to become the mother of slaves. There was much to palliate the offence: all northern Europe was stained with the crime. It did not end in Westphalia till 1789. But the consciences of New England never slept easy under that sin. Before 1641, Massachusetts ordered that a slave should be set free after seven years' service, reviving a merciful ordinance of the half-barbarous Hebrews a thousand years before Christ. In 1645, the General Court of Massachusetts sent back to Guinea two black men illegally enslaved, and made a law forbidding the sale of slaves, except captives in war, or men sentenced to sale for crime. Even they were set free after seven years' service. Still slavery always existed here, spite of the law; the newspapers once contained advertisements of "negro-babies to be given away" in Boston! Yet New England never loved slavery: hard and cruel as the Puritans were, they had some respect for the letter of the New Testament. In 1700, Samuel Sewall protested against "the selling of Joseph;" as another Sewall, in 1851, protested against the selling of Thomas. There was a great controversy about slavery in Massachusetts in 1766; even Harvard College took an interest in freedom, setting its young men to look at the rights of man! In 1767, a bill was introduced to the General Assembly to prevent "the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind." It was killed by the Hunkers of that time. In 1774, a bill of a similar character passed the Assembly, but was crushed by the veto of Governor Hutchinson.

In 1788, three men were illegally kidnapped at Boston by "one Avery, a native of Connecticut," and carried off