18th.  The motion to lie on the table until the “next May” was defeated.  An amendment was then offered to limit the life of the bill to one year, which was carried, and the bill recommitted.  On the afternoon of the same day it was read a third time, and placed on its passage with the amendment.  It passed, was ordered engrossed, and was “sent up by Col.  Bowers, Col.  Gerrish, Col.  Leonard, Capt.  Thayer, and Col.  Richmond.”  On the 19th of March it was read a first time in the council.  On the 20th it was read a second time, and passed to be engrossed “as taken into a new draft.”  When it reached the House for concurrence, in the afternoon of the same day, it was “Read and unanimously non-concurred, and the House adhere to their own vote, sent up for concurrence."[385]

Massachusetts has gloried much and long in this Act to prohibit “the Custom of enslaving mankind;” but her silver-tongued orators and profound statesmen have never possessed the courage to tell the plain truth about its complete failure.  From the first it was harassed by dilatory motions and amendments directed to its life; and the substitute, imposing an impost tax on imported slaves for one year, showed plainly that the friends of the original bill had been driven from their high ground.  It was like applying for the position of a major-general, and then accepting the place of a corporal.  It was as though they had asked for a fish, and accepted a serpent instead.  It seriously lamed the cause of emancipation.  It filled the slaves with gloom, and their friends with apprehension.  On the other hand, those who profited by barter in flesh and blood laughed secretly to themselves at the abortive attempt of the anti-slavery friends to call a halt on the trade.  They took courage.  For ten weary years the voices lifted for the freedom of the slave were few, faint, and far between.  The bill itself has been lost.  What its subject-matter was, is left to uncertain and unsatisfactory conjecture.  All we know is from the title just quoted.  But it was, nevertheless, the only direct measure offered in the Provincial Legislature against slavery during the entire colonial period, and came nearest to passage of any.  But “a miss is as good as a mile!”

It was now the spring season of 1771.  Ten years had flown, and no one in all the Province of Massachusetts had had the courage to attempt legislation friendly to the slave.  The scenes of the preceding year were fresh in the minds of the inhabitants of Boston.  The blood of the martyrs to liberty was crying from the ground.  The “red coats” of the British exasperated the people.  The mailed hand, the remorseless steel finger, of English military power was at the throat of the rights of the people.  The colony was gasping for independent political life.  A terrible struggle for liberty was imminent.  The colonists were about to contend for all that men hold dear,—­their wives, their children, their homes, and their country.  But while they were panting for an untrammelled existence, to plant a free nation on the shores of North America, they were robbing Africa every year of her sable children, and condemning them to a bondage more cruel than political subjugation.  This glaring inconsistency imparted to reflecting persons a new impulse toward anti-slavery legislation.