ggrieved and able-bodied redskin
in his household. But as to negro children, although they were valued so
slightly that occasionally it is said they were given to any one who would
take them, there can be no reasonable doubt that by force of custom they
were the property of the owners of their mothers.[20]

[Footnote 18: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XXVIII, 337.]

[Footnote 19: Moore, _Slavery in Massachusetts_, pp. 52-55.]

[Footnote 20: _Ibid_., pp. 20-27.]

The New Englanders were "a plain people struggling for existence in a
poor wilderness.... Their lives were to the last degree matter of
fact, realistic, hard." [21] Shrewd in consequence of their poverty,
self-righteous in consequence of their religion, they took their
slave-trading and their slaveholding as part of their day's work and as
part of God's goodness to His elect. In practical effect the policy of
colonial Massachusetts toward the backward races merits neither praise nor
censure; it was merely commonplace.

[Footnote 21: C.F. Adams, _Massachusetts, its Historians and its History_
(Boston, 1893), p. 106.]

What has been said in general of Massachusetts will apply with almost equal
fidelity to Connecticut.[22] The number of negroes in that colony was
hardly appreciable before 1720. In that year Governor Leete when replying
to queries from the English committee on trade and plantations took
occasion to emphasize the poverty of his people, and said as to bond labor:
"There are but fewe servants amongst us, and less slaves; not above 30, as
we judge, in the colony. For English, Scotts and Irish, there are so few
come in that we cannot give a certain acco[un]t. Some yeares come none;
sometimes a famaly or two in a year. And for Blacks, there comes sometimes
3 or 4 in a year from Barbadoes; and they are sold usually at the rate of
22l a piece, sometimes more and sometimes less, according as men can agree
with the master of vessels or merchants that bring them hither." Few
negroes had been born in the colony, "and but two blacks christened, as we
know of."[23] A decade later the development of a black code was begun by
an enactment declaring that any negro, mulatto, or Indian servant wandering
outside his proper town without a pass would be accounted a runaway and
might be seized by any person and carried before a magistrate for return to
his master. A free negro so apprehended without a pass must pay the court
costs. An act of 1702 dis