exception, no involuntary bond-slavery, villeinage, or
captivity should ever be in the colony; and in 1646 it took measures for
returning to Africa negroes who had been kidnapped by a slaver. It is
not strange that reflection on the golden rule should soon raise doubts
whether the precedents of the Book of Joshua had equal authority with
the law of Christ. In 1675 John Eliot, from the midst of his work among
the Indians, warned the governor against the sale of Indians taken in
war, on the ground that "the selling of souls is dangerous merchandise,"
and "with a bleeding and burning passion" remonstrated against "the
abject condition of the enslaved Africans." In 1700 that typical
Puritan, Judge Samuel Sewall, published his pamphlet on "The Selling of
Joseph," claiming for the negroes the rights of brethren, and predicting
that there would be "no progress in gospeling" until slavery should be
abolished. Those were serious days of antislavery agitation, when
Cotton Mather, in his "Essays to Do Good," spoke of the injustice of
slavery in terms such that his little book had to be expurgated by the
American Tract Society to accommodate it to the degenerate conscience of
a later day, and when the town of Boston in 1701 took measures "to put a
period to negroes being slaves." Such endeavors after universal justice
and freedom, on the part of the Christians of New England, thwarted by
the insatiable greed of British traders and politicians, were not to
cease until, with the first enlargement of independence, they should
bring forth judgment to victory.

The voice of New England was echoed from Pennsylvania. The Mennonites of
Germantown, in 1688, framed in quaint and touching language their
petition for the abolition of slavery, and the Quaker yearly meetings
responded one to another with unanimous protest. But the mischief grew
and grew. In the Northern colonies the growth was stunted by the
climate. Elsewhere the institution, beginning with the domestic service
of a few bondmen attached to their masters' families, took on a new type
of malignity as it expanded. In proportion as the servile population
increases to such numbers as to be formidable, laws of increasing
severity are directed to restraining or repressing it. The first
symptoms of insurrection are followed by horrors of bloody vengeance,
and "from that time forth the slave laws have but one quality--that of
ferocity engendered by fear."[153:1] It was not from the will