1688, and there was drawn up a document signed by Garret Hendericks, Franz Daniel Pastorius, Dirck Op den Graeff, and Abraham Op den Graeff.  The protest was addressed to the monthly meeting of the Quakers about to take place in Lower Dublin.  The monthly meeting on April 30 felt that it could not pretend to take action on such an important matter and referred it to the quarterly meeting in June.  This in turn passed it on to the yearly meeting, the highest tribunal of the Quakers.  Here it was laid on the table, and for the next few years nothing resulted from it.  About 1696, however, opposition to slavery on the part of the Quakers began to be active.  In the colony at large before 1700 the lot of the Negro was regularly one of servitude.  Laws were made for servants, white or black, and regulations and restrictions were largely identical.  In 1700, however, legislation began more definitely to fix the status of the slave.  In this year an act of the legislature forbade the selling of Negroes out of the province without their consent, but in other ways it denied the personality of the slave.  This act met further formal approval in 1705, when special courts were ordained for the trial and punishment of slaves, and when importation from Carolina was forbidden on the ground that it made trouble with the Indians nearer home.  In 1700 a maximum duty of 20s. was placed on each Negro imported, and in 1705 this was doubled, there being already some competition with white labor.  In 1712 the Assembly sought to prevent importation altogether by a duty of L20 a head.  This act was repealed in England, and a duty of L5 in 1715 was also repealed.  In 1729, however, the duty was fixed at L2, at which figure it remained for a generation.

[Footnote 1:  Turner:  The Negro in Pennsylvania, 1.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., 21.]

[Footnote 3:  Faust:  The German Element in the United States, Boston, 1909, I, 45.]

It was almost by accident that slavery was officially recognized in Connecticut in 1650.  The code of laws compiled for the colony in this year was especially harsh on the Indians.  It was enacted that certain of them who incurred the displeasure of the colony might be made to serve the person injured or “be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes.”  In 1680 the governor of the colony informed the Board of Trade that “as for blacks there came sometimes three or four in a year from Barbadoes, and they are usually sold at the rate of L22 apiece.”  These people were regarded rather as servants than as slaves, and early legislation was mainly in the line of police regulations designed to prevent their running away.

In 1652 it was enacted in Rhode Island that all slaves brought into the colony should be set free after ten years of service.  This law was not designed, as might be supposed, to restrict slavery.  It was really a step in the evolution of the system, and the limit of ten years was by no means observed.  “The only legal recognition of the law was in the series of acts beginning January 4, 1703, to control the wandering of African slaves and servants, and another beginning in April, 1708, in which the slave-trade was indirectly legalized by being taxed."[1] “In course of time Rhode Island became the greatest slave-trader in the country, becoming a sort of clearing-house for the other colonies."[2]