brought, shall be security for payment of the said duty; and both or either of them shall stand charged in the law therefor to the commissioner, who may deny to grant a clearing for such ship or vessel, until payment be made, or may recover the same of the master, at the commissioner’s election, by action of debt, bill, plaint or information in any of her majesty’s courts of record within this province."[308]

A fine of eight pounds was imposed upon any person refusing or neglecting to make a proper entry of each slave imported, in the “Impost Office.”  If a Negro died within six weeks after his arrival, a drawback was allowed.  If any slave was sold again into another Province or plantation within a year after his arrival, a drawback was allowed to the person who paid the impost duty.  A subsequent and more stringent law shows that there was no desire to abate the traffic.  In August, 1712, a law was passed “prohibiting the importation or bringing into the province any Indian servants or slaves;"[309] but it was only intended as a check upon the introduction of the Tuscaroras and other “revengeful” Indians from South Carolina.[310] Desperate Indians and insubordinate Negroes were the occasion of grave fears on the part of the colonists.[311] Many Indians had been cruelly dealt with in war; in peace, enslaved and wronged beyond their power of endurance.  Their stoical nature led them to the performance of desperate deeds.  There is kinship in suffering.  There is an unspoken language in sorrow that binds hearts in the indissoluble fellowship of resolve.  Whatever natural and national differences existed between the Indian and the Negro—­one from the bleak coasts of New England, the other from the tropical coast of Guinea—­were lost in the commonality of degradation and interest.  The more heroic spirits of both races began to grow restive under the yoke.  The colonists were not slow to observe this, and hence this law was to act as a restraint upon and against “their rebellion and hostilities.”  And the reader should understand that it was not an anti-slavery measure.  It was not “hostile to slavery” as a system:  it was but the precaution of a guilty and ever-gnawing public conscience.

Slavery grew.  There was no legal obstacle in its way.  It had the sanction of the law, as we have already shown, and what was better still, the sympathy of public sentiment.  The traffic in slaves appears to have been more an object in Boston than at any period before or since.  For a time dealers had no hesitation in advertising them for sale in their own names.  At length a very few who advertised would refer purchasers to “inquire of the printer, and know further."[312] This was in 1727, fifteen years after the afore-mentioned Act became a law, and which many apologists would interpret as a specific and direct prohibition against slavery; but there is no reason for such a perversion of so plain an Act.