and that you may be enabled to conduct as such; and in particular, that you may have Grace to behave suitably towards each Other, as also dutifully towards your Masters & Mistresses, Not with Eye Service as Men pleasers, ye Servants of Christ doing ye Will of God from ye heart, &c.

["ENDORSED] NEGRO MARRIAGE."[332]

Where a likely Negro woman was courted by the slave of another owner, and wanted to marry, she was sold, as a matter of humanity, “with her wearing apparel” to the owner of the man.  “A Bill of Sale of a Negro Woman Servant in Boston in 1724, recites that ’Whereas Scipio, of Boston aforesaid, Free Negro Man and Laborer, proposes Marriage to Margaret, the Negro Woman Servant of the said Dorcas Marshall [a Widow Lady of Boston]:  Now to the Intent that the said Intended Marriage may take Effect, and that the said Scipio may Enjoy the said Margaret without any Interruption,’ etc., she is duly sold, with her apparel, for Fifty Pounds."[333] Within the next twenty years the Governor and his Council found public opinion so modified on the question of marriage among the blacks, that they granted a Negro a divorce on account of his wife’s adultery with a white man.  But in Quincy’s Reports, page 30, note, quoted by Dr. Moore, in 1758 the following rather loose decision is recorded:  that the child of a female slave never married according to any of the forms prescribed by the laws of this land, by another slave, who “had kept her company with her master’s consent,” was not a bastard.

The Act of 1705 forbade any “christian” from marrying a Negro, and imposed a fine of fifty pounds upon any clergyman who should join a Negro and “christian” in marriage.  It stood as the law of the Commonwealth until 1843, when it was repealed by an “Act relating to Marriage between Individuals of Certain Races.”

As to the political rights of the Negro, it should be borne in mind, that, as he was excluded from the right of Christian baptism, hence from the Church; and as “only church-members enjoyed the rights of freemen, it is clear that the Negro was not admitted to the exercise of the duties of a freeman.[334] Admitting that there were instances where Negroes received the rite of baptism, it was so well understood as not entitling them to freedom or political rights, that it was never questioned during this entire period.  Free Negroes were but little better off than the slaves.  While they might be regarded as owning their own labor, political rights and ecclesiastical privileges were withheld from them.

“They became the objects of a suspicious legislation, which deprived them of most of the rights of freemen, and reduced them to a social position very similar, in many respects, to that which inveterate prejudice in many parts of Europe has fixed upon the Jews.”

Though nominally free, they did not come under the head of “Christians.”  Neither freedom, nor baptism in the Church, could free them from the