“AN ACT FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF NEGROES, INDIAN AND MULATTO
     SLAVES, FOR SPEAKING DEFAMATORY WORDS.

“Be it enacted by the Governour, Council and Representatives, in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, That if any Negro, Indian or Molatto slave shall utter, publish and speak such words of any person that would by law be actionable if the same were uttered, published or spoken by any free person of any other, such Negro, Indian or Molatto slave, being thereof convicted before any one assistant or justice of the peace, (who are hereby impowred to hear and determine the same,) shall be punished by whipping, at the discretion of the assistant or justice before whom the tryal is, (respect being had to the circumstances of the case,) not exceeding forty stripes.  And the said slave, so convict, shall be sold to defray all charges arising thereby, unless the same be by his or their master or mistress paid and answered, &c."[444]

The above act is the most remarkable document in this period of its kind.  And yet there are two noticeable features in it:  viz., the slave is to be proceeded against the same as if he were a free person; and he was to be entitled to offer evidence, enter his plea, and otherwise defend himself against the charge.  This was more than was allowed in any of the other colonies.

On the 9th of September, 1730, Gov.  J. Talcott, in a letter to the “Board of Trade,” said that there were “about 700 Indian and Negro slaves” in the colony.  The most of these were Negro slaves.  For on the 8th of July, 1715, a proclamation was issued by the governor against the importation of Indians;[445] and on the 13th of October, 1715, a bill was passed “prohibiting the Importation or bringing into” the colony any Indian slaves.  It was an exact copy of the Act of May, 1712, passed in the colony of Massachusetts.

The colony of Connecticut never established slavery by direct statute; but in adopting a code which was ordered by the General Court of Hartford to be “copied by the secretary into the book of public records,” it gave the institution legal sanction.  This code was signed on the 5th of September, 1646.  It recognized the lawfulness of Indian and Negro slavery.  This was done under the confederacy of the “United Colonies of New England."[446] For some reason the part of the code recognizing slavery is omitted from the revised laws of 1715.  In this colony, as in Massachusetts, only members of the church, “and living within the jurisdiction,” could be admitted to the rights of freemen.  In 1715 an Act was passed requiring persons who desired to become “freemen of this corporation,” to secure a certificate from the selectmen that they were “persons of quiet and peaceable behavior and civil conversation, of the age of twenty-one years, and freeholders.”  This provision excluded all free Negroes.  It was impossible for one to secure such a certificate.  Public sentiment alone would have frowned upon such an innovation upon the customs and manners of the Puritans.  On the 17th of May, 1660, the following Act was passed:  “It is ordered by this court, that neither Indian nor negar serv’ts shall be required to traine, watch or ward in the Collo:"[447]