promoters held by the community to be degraded. Indeed, some of the most
eminent men in the community engaged in it, and its receipts were so
considerable that as early as 1729 one-half of the impost levied on slaves
imported into the colony was appropriated to pave the streets of the town
and build its bridges--however, we are not informed that the streets were
very well paved.

It was not at Newport, however, nor even in New England that the
importation of slaves first began, though for reasons which I will
presently show, the bulk of the traffic in them fell ultimately to New
Englanders. The first African slaves in America were landed by a Dutch
vessel at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The last kidnapped Africans were
brought here probably some time in the latter part of 1860--for though the
traffic was prohibited in 1807, the rigorous blockade of the ports of the
Confederacy during the Civil War was necessary to bring it actually to an
end. The amount of human misery which that frightful traffic entailed
during those 240 years almost baffles the imagination. The bloody Civil
War which had, perhaps, its earliest cause in the landing of those twenty
blacks at Jamestown, was scarcely more than a fitting penalty, and there
was justice in the fact that it fell on North and South alike, for if the
South clung longest to slavery, it was the North--even abolition New
England--which had most to do with establishing it on this continent.

However, it is not with slavery, but with the slave trade we have to do.
Circumstances largely forced upon the New England colonies their unsavory
preeminence in this sort of commerce. To begin with, their people were as
we have already seen, distinctively the seafaring folk of North America.
Again, one of their earliest methods of earning a livelihood was in the
fisheries, and that curiously enough, led directly to the trade in slaves.
To sell the great quantities of fish they dragged up from the Banks or
nearer home, foreign markets must needs be found. England and the European
countries took but little of this sort of provender, and moreover England,
France, Holland, and Portugal had their own fishing fleets on the Banks.
The main markets for the New Englanders then were the West India Islands,
the Canaries, and Madeira. There the people were accustomed to a fish diet
and, indeed, were encouraged in it by the frequent fastdays of the Roman
Catholic church, of which most were devout members.