g and enjoying, as the lion's share of results of the grand
alliance against the Bourbons, the exclusive right for thirty years of
selling African slaves to the Spanish West Indies and the coast of
America![413] Why _should_ Gov. Hutchinson sign a bill that was
intended to choke the channel of a commerce in human souls that was so
near the heart of the British throne?

Gov. Hutchinson was gone, and Gen. Gage was now governor. He convened
the General Court at Salem, in June, 1774. On the 10th of June the
same bill that Gov. Hutchinson had refused to sign was introduced,
with a few immaterial changes, and pushed to a third reading, and
engrossed the same day. It was called up on the 16th of June, and
passed. It was sent up to the Council, where it was read a third time,
and concurred in. But the next day the General Court was dissolved!
And over the grave of this, the last attempt at legislation to
suppress the slave-trade in Massachusetts, was written: "_Not to have
been consented_ to by the governor"!

These repeated efforts at anti-slavery legislation were strategic and
politic. The gentlemen who hurried those bills through the House and
Council, almost regardless of rules, knew that the royal governors
would never affix their signatures to them. But the colonists, having
put themselves on record, could appeal to the considerate judgment of
the impatient Negroes; while the refusal of the royal governors to
give the bills the force of law did much to drive the Negroes to the
standard of the colonists. In the long night of darkness that was
drawing its sable curtains about the colonial government, the loyalty
of the Negroes was the lonely but certain star that threw its peerless
light upon the pathway of the child of England so soon to be forced to
lift its parricidal hand against its rapacious and cruel mother.

FOOTNOTES:

[380] Felt, vol. ii. p. 416.

[381] Newspaper Literature, vol. i. p. 31.

[382] Lyman's Report, quoted by Dr. Moore.

[383] House Journal, p. 387.

[384] Ibid.

[385] House Journals; see, also, Gen. Court Records, May, 1763, to
May, 1767, p. 485.

[386] Slavery in Mass., pp. 131, 132.

[387] Felt, vol. ii. pp. 416, 417.

[388] Hist. of Leicester, pp. 442, 443.

[389] Freeman's Hist. of Cape Cod, vol. ii. pp. 114, 115.

[390] Boston Gazette, Aug. 17, 1761.

[391] Letters of Mrs. Adams, p. 20.

[392] Adams's Works, vol. ii. p. 200.

[393] Adams's Works, vol. ii, p. 213.

[394