sentiment against slavery, and from Boston to New York slaves were held in small numbers and their prices quoted in the shipping lists and newspapers like any other merchandise.  Curiously enough, the first African slaves brought to Boston were sent home again and their captors prosecuted—­not wholly for stealing men, but for breaking the Sabbath.  It happened in this way:  A Boston ship, the “Rainbow,” in 1645, making the usual voyage to Madeira with staves and salt fish, touched on the coast of Guinea for a few slaves.  Her captain found the English slavers on the ground already, mightily discontented, for the trade was dull.  It was still the time when there was a pretense of legality about the method of procuring the slaves; they were supposed to be malefactors convicted of crime, or at the very least, prisoners taken by some native king in war.  In later years the native kings, animated by an ever-growing thirst for the white man’s rum, declared war in order to secure captives, and employed decoys to lure young men into the commission of crime.  These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at the long delay.  Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for slaves inflamed their own blood.  At any rate, dragging ashore a small cannon called significantly enough a “murderer,” they attacked a village, killed many of its people, and brought off a number of blacks, two of whom fell to the lot of the captain of the “Rainbow,” and were by him taken to Boston.  He found no profit, however, in his piratical venture, for the story coming out, he was accused in court of “murder, man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking,” and his slaves were sent home.  It was wholly as merchandise that the blacks were regarded.  It is impossible to believe that the brutalities of the traffic could have been tolerated so long had the idea of the essential humanity of the Africa been grasped by those who dealt in them.  Instead, they were looked upon as a superior sort of cattle, but on the long voyage across the Atlantic were treated as no cattle are treated to-day in the worst “ocean tramps” in the trade.  The vessels were small, many of them half the size of the lighters that ply sluggishly up and down New York harbor.  Sloops, schooners, brigantines, and scows of 40 or 50 tons burden, carrying crews of nine men including the captain and mates, were the customary craft in the early days of the eighteenth century.

In his work on “The American Slave-Trade,” Mr. John R. Spears gives the dimensions of some of these puny vessels which were so heavily freighted with human woe.  The first American slaver of which we have record was the “Desire,” of Marblehead, 120 tons.  Later vessels, however, were much smaller.  The sloop, “Welcome,” had a capacity of 5000 gallons of molasses.  The “Fame” was 79 feet long on the keel—­about a large