On the 22d of April, 1728, the following notice appeared in a Boston newspaper:—­

“Two very likely Negro girls.  Enquire two doors from the Brick Meetinghouse in Middle-street.  At which place is to be sold women’s stays, children’s good callamanco stiffened-boddy’d coats, and childrens’ stays of all sorts, and women’s hoop-coats; all at very reasonable rates."[317]

So the “likely Negro girls” were mixed up in the sale of “women’s stays” and “hoop-coats”!  It was bad enough to “rate Negroes with Horses and Hogs,” but to sell them with second-hand clothing was an incident in which is to be seen the low depth to which slavery had carried the Negro by its cruel weight.  A human being could be sold like a cast-off garment, and pass without a bill of sale.[318] The announcement that a “likely Negro woman about nineteen years and a child about six months of age to be sold together or apart"[319] did not shock the Christian sensibilities of the people of Massachusetts.  A babe six months old could be torn from the withered and famishing bosom of the young mother, and sold with other articles of merchandise.  How bitter and how cruel was such a separation, mothers[320] only can know; and how completely lost a community and government are that regard with complacency a hardship so diabolical, the Christians of America must be able to judge.

The Church has done many cruel things in the name of Christianity.  In the dark ages it filled the minds of its disciples with fear, and their bodies with the pains of penance.  It burned Michael Servetus, and it strangled the scientific opinions of Galileo.  And in stalwart old Massachusetts it thought it was doing God’s service in denying the Negro slave the right of Christian baptism.”

“The famous French Code Noir of 1685 obliged every planter to have his Negroes baptized, and properly instructed in the doctrines and duties of Christianity.  Nor was this the only important and humane provision of that celebrated statute, to which we may seek in vain for any parallel in British Colonial legislation."[321]

On the 25th of October, 1727, Matthias Plant[322] wrote, in answer to certain questions put to him by “the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,” as follows:—­

“6.  Negro slaves, one of them is desirous of baptism, but denied by her master, a woman of wonderful sense, and prudent in matters, of equal knowledge in Religion with most of her sex, far exceeding any of her own nation that ever yet I heard of."[323]

It was nothing to her master that she was “desirous of baptism,” “of wonderful sense,” “prudent in matters,” and “of equal knowledge in religion with most of her sex!” She was a Negro slave, and as such was denied the blessings of the Christian Church.