It is only for Virginia that we can state with definiteness the year in which Negro slaves were first brought to an English colony on the mainland.  When legislation on the subject of slavery first appears elsewhere, slaves are already present.  “About the last of August (1619),” says John Rolfe in John Smith’s Generall Historie, “came in a Dutch man of warre, that sold us twenty Negars.”  These Negroes were sold into servitude, and Virginia did not give statutory recognition to slavery as a system until 1661, the importations being too small to make the matter one of importance.  In this year, however, an act of assembly stated that Negroes were “incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time”; [1] and thus slavery gained a firm place in the oldest of the colonies.

[Footnote 1:  Hening:  Statutes, II, 26.]

Negroes were first imported into Massachusetts from Barbadoes a year or two before 1638, but in John Winthrop’s Journal, under date February 26 of this year, we have positive evidence on the subject as follows:  “Mr. Pierce in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months.  He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and Negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos.  Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for those parts.  He met there two men-of-war, sent forth by the lords, etc., of Providence with letters of mart, who had taken divers prizes from the Spaniard and many Negroes.”  It was in 1641 that there was passed in Massachusetts the first act on the subject of slavery, and this was the first positive statement in any of the colonies with reference to the matter.  Said this act:  “There shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, nor captivity among us, unless it be lawful captives, taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us, and these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel requires.”  This article clearly sanctioned slavery.  Of the three classes of persons referred to, the first was made up of Indians, the second of white people under the system of indenture, and the third of Negroes.  In this whole matter, as in many others, Massachusetts moved in advance of the other colonies.  The first definitely to legalize slavery, in course of time she became also the foremost representative of sentiment against the system.  In 1646 one John Smith brought home two Negroes from the Guinea Coast, where we are told he “had been the means of killing near a hundred more.”  The General Court, “conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunity to bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing,” ordered that the Negroes be sent at public expense to their native country.[1] In later cases, however, Massachusetts did not find herself able to follow this precedent.  In general in these early years New England was more concerned about Indians than about Negroes, as the presence of the former in large numbers was a constant menace, while Negro slavery had not yet assumed its most serious aspects.