ETESS.--HER
LIFE.--SLAVERY RECOGNIZED IN ENGLAND IN ORDER TO BE
MAINTAINED IN THE COLONIES.--THE EMANCIPATION OF
SLAVES.--LEGISLATION FAVORING THE IMPORTATION OF WHITE
SERVANTS, BUT PROHIBITING THE CLANDESTINE BRINGING-IN OF
NEGROES.--JUDGE SEWALL'S ATTACK ON SLAVERY.--JUDGE SAFFIN'S
REPLY TO JUDGE SEWALL.

Had the men who gave the colony of Massachusetts its political being
and Revolutionary fame known that the Negro--so early introduced into
the colony as a slave--would have been in the future Republic for
years the insoluble problem, and at last the subject of so great and
grave economic and political concern, they would have committed to the
jealous keeping of the chroniclers of their times the records for
which the historian of the Negro seeks so vainly in this period.
Stolen as he was from his tropical home; consigned to a servitude at
war with man's intellectual and spiritual, as well as with his
physical, nature; the very lowest of God's creation, in the estimation
of the Roundheads of New England; a stranger in a strange land,--the
poor Negro of Massachusetts found no place in the sympathy or history
of the Puritan,--Christians whose deeds and memory have been embalmed
in song and story, and given to an immortality equalled only by the
indestructibility of the English language. The records of the most
remote period of colonial history have preserved a silence on the
question of Negro slavery as ominous as it is conspicuous. What data
there are concerning the introduction of slavery are fragmentary,
uncertain, and unsatisfactory, to say the least. There is but one work
bearing the luminous stamp of historical trustworthiness, and which
turns a flood of light on the dark records of the darker crime of
human slavery in Massachusetts. And we are sure it is as complete as
the ripe scholarship, patient research, and fair and fearless spirit
of its author, could make it.[260]

The earliest mention of the presence of Negroes in Massachusetts is in
connection with an account of some Indians who were frightened at a
Colored man who had lost his way in the tangled path of the forest.
The Indians, it seems, were "worse scared than hurt, who seeing a
blackamore in the top of a tree looking out for his way which he had
lost, surmised he was _Abamacho_, or the devil; deeming all devils
that are blacker than themselves: and being near to the plantation,
they posted to the English, and entreat