When the four colonies, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, created the New England Confederation in 1643 for joint and reciprocal action in matters of common concern, they provided not only for the intercolonial rendition of runaway servants, including slaves of course, but also for the division of the spoils of Indian wars, “whether it be in lands, goods or persons,” among the participating colonies.[11] But perhaps the most striking action taken by the Confederation in these regards was a resolution adopted by its commissioners in 1646, in time of peace and professedly in the interests of peace, authorizing reprisals for depredations.  This provided that if any citizen’s property suffered injury at the hands of an Indian, the offender’s village or any other which had harbored him might be raided and any inhabitants thereof seized in satisfaction “either to serve or to be shipped out and exchanged for negroes as the cause will justly beare."[12] Many of these captives were in fact exported as merchandise, whether as private property or on the public account of the several colonies.[13] The value of Indians for export was greater than for local employment by reason of their facility in escaping to their tribal kinsmen.  Toward the end of the seventeenth century, however, there was some importation of “Spanish Indians” as slaves.[14]

[Footnote 11:  New Haven Colonial Records, 1653-1665, pp. 562-566.]

[Footnote 12:  Plymouth Records, IX, 71.]

[Footnote 13:  G.H.  Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), pp. 30-48.]

[Footnote 14:  Cotton Mather, “Diary,” in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, LXVII, 22, 203.]

An early realization that the price of negroes also was greater than the worth of their labor under ordinary circumstances in New England led the Yankee participants in the African trade to market their slave cargoes in the plantation colonies instead of bringing them home.  Thus John Winthrop entered in his journal in 1645:  “One of our ships which went to the Canaries with pipestaves in the beginning of November last returned now and brought wine and sugar and salt, and some tobacco, which she had at Barbadoes in exchange for Africoes which she carried from the Isle of Maio."[15] In their domestic industry the Massachusetts people found by experience that “many hands make light work, many hands make a full fraught, but many mouths eat up all";[16] and they were shrewd enough to apply the adage in keeping the scale of their industrial units within the frugal requirements of their lives.

[Footnote 15:  Winthrop, Journal, II, 227.]

[Footnote 16:  John Josslyn, “Two Voyages to New England,” in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXIII, 332.]