ely profitable,
and hence popular, did not cease. England, then as now, the most
enterprising of commercial nations on the high seas, engrossed the
trade, in large part, from 1680 to 1780. In 1711, there was
established a slave depot in New York City on or near what is now
Wall Street; and about the same time a depot was established for
receiving slaves in Boston, near where the old Franklin House stood.
From New England ships, and perhaps from others, negroes were landed
and sent to these and other central slave markets.

But few of these freshly stolen negroes were sold to Northern
slaveholders. Slave labor was not even then found profitable in
the climate of the North. The bondsman went to a more southern
clime, and to the cotton, rice, and tobacco fields of the large
plantations of the South.

As late as 1804-7, negroes from the coast of Africa were brought
to Boston, Bristol, Providence, and Hartford to be sold into
slavery.

Shipowners of all the coast colonies, and later of all the coast
States of the United States, engaged in the slave trade.

But it was among the planters of Maryland, Virginia, and the
Carolinas that slaves proved to be most profitable. The people in
these sections were principally rural; plantations were large, not
subject to be broken up by frequent partition, if at all. The
crops raised were better suited to cultivation by slaves in large
numbers; and the hot climate was better adapted to the physical
nature of the African negro.

The first inhabitants of the South preferred a rural life, and on
large plantations. The Crown grants to early proprietors favored
this, especially in the Virginia and Carolina colonies. The Puritans
did not love or foster slavery as did the Cavalier of the South.
Castes or classes existed among the Southern settlers from the
beginning, which, with other favoring causes, made it easier for
slavery to take root and prosper, and ultimately fasten itself upon
and become a dominating factor in the whole social and political
fabric of the South. Slavery there soon came to be considered of
paramount importance in securing a high social status or a high,
so-called, civilization.

But we have, by this brief _resume_, sufficiently shown that the
responsibility for the introduction and maintenance of slavery and
the slave trade does not rest exclusively on any of our early
colonies, North or South, nor on any one race or nationality of
the world; it remain