The men who founded Rhode Island, or Providence Plantation as it was called early, were of the highest type of Christian gentlemen.  They held advanced ideas on civil government and religious liberty.  They realized, to the full, the enormity of the sinfulness of slavery; but while they hesitated to strike down what many men pronounced a necessary social evil, it grew to be an institution that governed more than it could be governed.  The institution was established.  Slaves were upon the farms, in the towns, and in the families, of those who could afford to buy them.  The population of the colony was small; and to manumit the slaves in whom much money was invested, or to suddenly cut off the supply from without, was more than the colonists felt able to perform.  The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.

For a half-century there was nothing done by the General Court to check or suppress the slave-trade, though the Act of 1652 remained the law of the colony.  The trade was not extensive.  No vessels from Africa touched at Newport or Providence.  The source of supply was Barbadoes; and, occasionally, some came by land from other colonies.  Little was said for or against slavery during this period.  It was a question difficult to handle.  The sentiment against it was almost unanimous.  It was an evil; but how to get rid of it, was the most important thing to be considered.  During this period of perplexity, there was an ominous silence on slavery.  The conservatism of the colonists produced the opposite in the Negro population.  They began to think and talk about their “rights.”  The Act of 1652 had begun to bear fruit.  At the expiration of ten years’ service, slaves began to demand their freedom-papers.  This set the entire Negro class in a state of expectancy.  Their eagerness for liberty was interpreted by the more timid among the whites as the signal for disorder.  A demand was made for legislation that would curtail the personal liberties of the Negroes in the evenings.  It is well to produce the Act of Jan. 4, 1703, that the reader may see the similarity of the laws passed in the New-England colonies against Negroes:—­

     “An Act to restrict negroes and Indians for walking in
     unseasonable times in the night, and at other times not
     allowable.

“Voted, Be it enacted by this Assembly and the authority thereof, and it is hereby enacted, If any negroes or Indians, either freemen, servants, or slaves, do walk in the streets of the town of Newport, of any other town in this Collony, after nine of the clock of the night, without a certificate from their masters, or some English person of said family with them, or some lawfull excuse for the same, that it shall be lawfull for any person to take them up and deliver them to a Constable, to be secured, or see them secured, till the next morning, and then to be brought before some Justice of the Peace in said town, to be dealt withall, according