That the laws of Massachusetts were enforced with special severity against the blacks is indicated by two cases before the central court in 1681, both of them prosecutions for arson.  Maria, a negress belonging to Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, having confessed the burning of two dwellings, was sentenced by the Governor “yt she should goe from the barr to the prison whence she came and thence to the place of execution and there be burnt.—­ye Lord be mercifull to thy soule, sd ye Govr.”  The other was Jack, a negro belonging to Samuel Wolcott of Weathersfield, who upon conviction of having set fire to a residence by waving a fire brand about in search of victuals, was condemned to be hanged until dead and then burned to ashes in the fire with the negress Maria.[17]

[Footnote 17:  Records of the Court of Assistants, 1630-1692 (Boston, 1901), p. 198.]

In this period it seems that Indian slaves had almost disappeared, and the number of negroes was not great enough to call for special police legislation.  Governor Bradstreet, for example, estimated the “blacks or slaves” in the colony in 1680 at “about one hundred or one hundred and twenty."[18] But in 1708 Governor Dudley reckoned the number in Boston at four hundred, one-half of whom he said had been born there, and those in the rest of the colony at one hundred and fifty; and in the following decades their number steadily mounted, as a concomitant of the colony’s increasing prosperity, until on the eve of the American Revolution they were reckoned at well above five thousand.  Although they never exceeded two per cent. of the gross population, their presence prompted characteristic legislation dating from about the beginning of the eighteenth century.  This on one hand taxed the importation of negros unless they were promptly exported again on the other hand it forbade trading with slaves, restrained manumission, established a curfew, provided for the whipping of any negro or mulatto who should strike a “Christian,” and prohibited the intermarriage of the races.  On the other hand it gave the slaves the privilege of legal marriage with persons of their own race, though it did not attempt to prevent the breaking up of such a union by the sale and removal of the husband or wife.[19] Regarding the status of children there was no law enacted, and custom ruled.  The children born of Indian slave mothers appear generally to have been liberated, for as willingly would a man nurse a viper in his bosom as keep an aggrieved and able-bodied redskin in his household.  But as to negro children, although they were valued so slightly that occasionally it is said they were given to any one who would take them, there can be no reasonable doubt that by force of custom they were the property of the owners of their mothers.[20]

[Footnote 18:  Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXVIII, 337.]

[Footnote 19:  Moore, Slavery in Massachusetts, pp. 52-55.]