Gov.  Hutchinson was gone, and Gen. Gage was now governor.  He convened the General Court at Salem, in June, 1774.  On the 10th of June the same bill that Gov.  Hutchinson had refused to sign was introduced, with a few immaterial changes, and pushed to a third reading, and engrossed the same day.  It was called up on the 16th of June, and passed.  It was sent up to the Council, where it was read a third time, and concurred in.  But the next day the General Court was dissolved!  And over the grave of this, the last attempt at legislation to suppress the slave-trade in Massachusetts, was written:  “Not to have been consented to by the governor”!

These repeated efforts at anti-slavery legislation were strategic and politic.  The gentlemen who hurried those bills through the House and Council, almost regardless of rules, knew that the royal governors would never affix their signatures to them.  But the colonists, having put themselves on record, could appeal to the considerate judgment of the impatient Negroes; while the refusal of the royal governors to give the bills the force of law did much to drive the Negroes to the standard of the colonists.  In the long night of darkness that was drawing its sable curtains about the colonial government, the loyalty of the Negroes was the lonely but certain star that threw its peerless light upon the pathway of the child of England so soon to be forced to lift its parricidal hand against its rapacious and cruel mother.

FOOTNOTES: 

[380] Felt, vol. ii. p. 416.

[381] Newspaper Literature, vol. i. p. 31.

[382] Lyman’s Report, quoted by Dr. Moore.

[383] House Journal, p. 387.

[384] Ibid.

[385] House Journals; see, also, Gen. Court Records, May, 1763, to May, 1767, p. 485.

[386] Slavery in Mass., pp. 131, 132.

[387] Felt, vol. ii. pp. 416, 417.

[388] Hist. of Leicester, pp. 442, 443.

[389] Freeman’s Hist. of Cape Cod, vol. ii. pp. 114, 115.

[390] Boston Gazette, Aug. 17, 1761.

[391] Letters of Mrs. Adams, p. 20.

[392] Adams’s Works, vol. ii. p. 200.

[393] Adams’s Works, vol. ii, p. 213.

[394] Records, 1768, fol., p. 284.

[395] This is the case referred to by the late Charles Sumner in his famous speech in answer to Senator Butler of South Carolina; see also Slavery in Mass., p. 115, 116; Washburn’s Judicial Hist. of Mass., p. 202; Mass.  Hist.  Soc.  Proc., 1863-64, p. 322.

[396] Records, 1769, fol. p. 196.  Gray in Quincy’s Reports, p. 30, note, quoted by Dr. Moore.

[397] Slavery in Mass., pp. 115, 116, note.

[398] Lyman’s Report, 1822.

[399] Slavery in Mass., p. 118.

[400] Hist. of Newbury, p. 339.

[401] The Watchman’s Alarm, p. 28, note; also Slavery in Mass., p. 119.