In this study the author found nothing “to indicate that there was any movement or any serious discussion of the advisability of abolishing slavery or devising any plan that would eventually lead to it.”  In that State there never were many anti-slavery inhabitants.  The Quakers who came into the State soon left and the Germans, who at first abstained from slavery, finally yielded.  There probably was an academic deprecation of the evils of the institution but hardly any tendency toward agitation; and if there had been such, the promoters would not have secured support among the leading people.  A few men like Judge O’Neall favored the emancipation of worthy slaves, but the agitation from without gave this sentiment no chance to grow.  Yet the author is anxious not to leave the impression that, had it not been for outside interference, slavery in South Carolina would have been modified.  This would not have happened, he contended, because unlike the States of North Carolina and Virginia, South Carolina did not find slaves less valuable.  The condition of the slave in the upper country was better than that in the low lands, but no section of the State showed signs of abolition.

This work is a well-documented dissertation.  It has an appendix containing valuable documents, and a critical bibliography of the works consulted.  It could have been improved by digesting documents which appear almost in full throughout the work.  Another defect is that it has no index.

C. B. WALTER.

Gouldtown.  By William Steward, A.M., and REV.  Theophilus G. Steward, D.D.  J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1913. 237 pages. $2.50.

There are hundreds of thousands of mulattoes in the United States.  Anyone interested in this group of the American people will find many illuminating and suggestive facts in Gouldtown.  It is the history of the descendants of Lord Fenwick, who was a major in Oliver Cromwell’s army, and of Gould a Negro man.  Fenwick’s will of 1683 contains the following:  “I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye leaste part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abdominable transgression against him, me and her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking yt Black yt hath been ye ruin of her, and becoming penitent for her sins; upon yt condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her.”  Elizabeth did not forsake this Negro by the name of Gould and the remarkable mulatto group of Gouldtown is the result of this marriage.  Gouldtown is a small settlement in southwest New Jersey.