ere forced to leave the
province. One hundred and fifty-four Negroes were arrested. Thirteen
were burned, eighteen were hanged, and seventy-one transported.

* * * * *

It is evident from these events and from the legislation of the era
that, except for the earnest work of such a sect as the Quakers, there
was little genuine effort for the improvement of the social condition
of the Negro people in the colonies. They were not even regarded as
potential citizens, and both in and out of the system of slavery were
subjected to the harshest regulations. Towards amicable relations with
the other racial elements that were coming to build up a new country
only the slightest measure of progress was made. Instead, insurrection
after insurrection revealed the sharpest antagonism, and any outbreak
promptly called forth the severest and frequently the most cruel
punishment.

CHAPTER III

THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

1. _Sentiment in England and America_

The materialism of the eighteenth century, with all of its evils, at
length produced a liberalism of thought that was to shake to their very
foundations old systems of life in both Europe and America. The progress
of the cause of the Negro in this period is to be explained by the
general diffusion of ideas that made for the rights of man everywhere.
Cowper wrote his humanitarian poems; in close association with the
romanticism of the day the missionary movement in religion began to
gather force; and the same impulse which in England began the agitation
for a free press and for parliamentary reform, and which in France
accounted for the French Revolution, in America led to the revolt from
Great Britain. No patriot could come under the influence of any one
of these movements without having his heart and his sense of justice
stirred to some degree in behalf of the slave. At the same time it must
be remembered that the contest of the Americans was primarily for the
definite legal rights of Englishmen rather than for the more abstract
rights of mankind which formed the platform of the French Revolution;
hence arose the great inconsistency in the position of men who were
engaged in a stern struggle for liberty at the same time that they
themselves were holding human beings in bondage.

In England the new era was formally signalized by an epoch-making
decision. In November, 1769, Charles Stewart, once a merchant in Norfolk
and later receiver genera