r
able they are to buie, for in a year and a half they will earne _with
God's blessing_, as much as they cost." Most of the slaves brought from
the coast of Guinea in New England vessels were deported again--sent to
the southern States or to the West Indies for a market. The climate and
the industrial conditions of New England were alike unfavorable to the
growth there of slavery, and its ports served chiefly as clearing-houses
for the trade. Yet there was not even among the most enlightened and
leading people of the colony any moral sentiment against slavery, and from
Boston to New York slaves were held in small numbers and their prices
quoted in the shipping lists and newspapers like any other merchandise.
Curiously enough, the first African slaves brought to Boston were sent
home again and their captors prosecuted--not wholly for stealing men, but
for breaking the Sabbath. It happened in this way: A Boston ship, the
"Rainbow," in 1645, making the usual voyage to Madeira with staves and
salt fish, touched on the coast of Guinea for a few slaves. Her captain
found the English slavers on the ground already, mightily discontented,
for the trade was dull. It was still the time when there was a pretense of
legality about the method of procuring the slaves; they were supposed to
be malefactors convicted of crime, or at the very least, prisoners taken
by some native king in war. In later years the native kings, animated by
an ever-growing thirst for the white man's rum, declared war in order to
secure captives, and employed decoys to lure young men into the commission
of crime. These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not
at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a
dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at
the long delay. Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for
slaves inflamed their own blood. At any rate, dragging ashore a small
cannon called significantly enough a "murderer," they attacked a village,
killed many of its people, and brought off a number of blacks, two of
whom fell to the lot of the captain of the "Rainbow," and were by him
taken to Boston. He found no profit, however, in his piratical venture,
for the story coming out, he was accused in court of "murder,
man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking," and his slaves were sent home. It was
wholly as merchandise that the blacks were regarded. It is impossible to
believe that the