[Footnote 20:  Ibid., pp. 20-27.]

The New Englanders were “a plain people struggling for existence in a poor wilderness....  Their lives were to the last degree matter of fact, realistic, hard.” [21] Shrewd in consequence of their poverty, self-righteous in consequence of their religion, they took their slave-trading and their slaveholding as part of their day’s work and as part of God’s goodness to His elect.  In practical effect the policy of colonial Massachusetts toward the backward races merits neither praise nor censure; it was merely commonplace.

[Footnote 21:  C.F.  Adams, Massachusetts, its Historians and its History (Boston, 1893), p. 106.]

What has been said in general of Massachusetts will apply with almost equal fidelity to Connecticut.[22] The number of negroes in that colony was hardly appreciable before 1720.  In that year Governor Leete when replying to queries from the English committee on trade and plantations took occasion to emphasize the poverty of his people, and said as to bond labor:  “There are but fewe servants amongst us, and less slaves; not above 30, as we judge, in the colony.  For English, Scotts and Irish, there are so few come in that we cannot give a certain acco[un]t.  Some yeares come none; sometimes a famaly or two in a year.  And for Blacks, there comes sometimes 3 or 4 in a year from Barbadoes; and they are sold usually at the rate of 22l a piece, sometimes more and sometimes less, according as men can agree with the master of vessels or merchants that bring them hither.”  Few negroes had been born in the colony, “and but two blacks christened, as we know of."[23] A decade later the development of a black code was begun by an enactment declaring that any negro, mulatto, or Indian servant wandering outside his proper town without a pass would be accounted a runaway and might be seized by any person and carried before a magistrate for return to his master.  A free negro so apprehended without a pass must pay the court costs.  An act of 1702 discouraged manumission by ordering that if any freed negroes should come to want, their former owners were to be held responsible for their maintenance.  Then came legislation forbidding the sale of liquors to slaves without special orders from their masters, prohibiting the purchase of goods from slaves without such orders, and providing a penalty of not more than thirty lashes for any negro who should offer to strike a white person; and finally a curfew law, in 1723, ordering not above ten lashes for the negro, and a fine of ten shillings upon the master, for every slave without a pass apprehended for being out of doors after nine o’clock at night.[24] These acts, which remained in effect throughout the colonial period, constituted a code of slave police which differed only in degree and fullness from those enacted by the more southerly colonies in the same generation.  A somewhat unusual note, however, was struck in an