The Massachusetts Slave Trade.

though its general attitude was well known. "The Bill which prohibited= the importation of Negro Slaves," he writes,¹ "appeared to me to come within his Majesty's Instruction to Sir Francis Bernard, which restrains the Governor from Assenting to any Laws of a new and unusual nature. I doubted besides whether the chief motive to this Bill which, it is said, was a scruple upon the minds of the People in many parts of the Province of the lawfulness, in a meerly moral respect, of so great a restraint of Liberty, was well founded." In Pennsylvania bills to abolish the slave trade had met with a similar fate in 1712, 1714 and 1717. Rhode Island and Connecticut succeeded in prohibiting it in 1774.²
The growing interest in the subject is suggested by the debate at the Harvard commencement in 1773, which was on the question, "Whether the slavery, to which Africans are in this province, by the permission of law, subjected, be agreeable to the law of nature."³ Another indication of the change taking place in public sentiment is preserved in the tribute paid to John Jack, a freed negro who died in Concord in 1773. His epitaph⁴ has historic as well as rhetorical interest.

"Though born in a land of slavery,
He was born free.
Though he lived in a land of liberty,
He lived a slave.
Till by his honest though stolen labors,
He acquired the source of slavery,
Which gave him his freedom;
Though not long before
Death the grand tyrant
Gave him his final emancipation,
And put him on a footing with kings.
Though a slave to vice,
He practised those virtues,
Without which kings are but slaves."

In January, 1774, the General Court received a petition from negroes, praying that they might be "liberated from a State of Bondage, and made Freemen of the Community; and that this Court would give and grant to them some part of the unimproved Lands belonging to the Province for a Settlement, or relieve them in such other Way as shall seem good and wise upon the Whole."⁵ This petition was partly responsible for the bill that was soon passed "to prevent the importation of Negroes or other Persons as Slaves into this Province; and the purchasing them within the same; and for making provision for relief of the children of such as are already subjected to slavery Negroes Mulattoes & Indians born within this Province."⁶ The bill is craftily declared to originate from a realization that "the Importation of Persons as Slaves into this Province has been found detrimental to the interest of his Majesty's subjects there-in; And it being apprehended that the abolition thereof will be beneficial to the Province." If these reasons could not gain the Governor's signature, the case was truly hopeless. Whether or not Hutchinson had received instructions from the Crown since 1771, he had no doubt as to the general policy of Great Britain on this subject, and accordingly vetoed the bill twice within the year.⁷ It is not improbable that the position taken by England served to strengthen the moral scruples of the people of Massachusetts.
Tory writers made good use of the dramatic element in the situation. "Negroe slaves in Boston!" wrote one,⁸ "It cannot be! It is nevertheless very true. For though the Bostonians have grounded their rebellions on the 'immutable laws of nature,' and have resolved in their Town Meetings, that 'It is the first principle in civil society, founded in nature and reason, that no law of society can be binding on any individual, without his consent given by himself in person, or by his representatives of his own free election'; yet, notwithstand-

¹ Quoted by Moore, p. 140.
² Lalor, Cyclopædia, III, 732.
³ Moore, p. 135.
⁴ Bartlett, Concord Guide Book, p. 14.
⁵ Moore, p. 140.
⁶ Mass. Arch., IX, 457
⁷ Do Bois, p. 32.
⁸ Moore, p. 545.

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