rights, the ſame indifference to ſuffering, the ſame contempt for the oppreſſed races, the ſame hate for thoſe who are injured. It has been aſſerted that in Maſſachuſetts, not only were the miſeries of ſlavery mitigated, but ſome of its worſt features were wholly unknown. But the record does not bear out the ſuggeſtion; and the traditions of one town at leaſt preſerve the memory of the moſt brutal and barbarous[1] of all, "raiſing ſlaves for the market." Barry's Hanover, 175.
The firſt newſpapers publiſhed in America illuſtrate among their advertisements the peculiar features of the inſtitution to which we refer, and in their ſcanty columns of intelligence may be found thrilling accounts of the barbarous murders of maſters and crews by the hands of their ſlave-cargoes.[2] The caſe of the Amiſtad negroes had its occaſional parallel in the colonial hiſtory of the traffic—excepting that the men of New England had a ſympathy at home in the 17th and 18th centuries, which was juſtly withheld from their Spaniſh and Portugueſe imitators in the 19th. Nor was that region wholly exempt from the terror by day and by night of ſlave inſurrections. In Coffin's Newbury, 153, is a notice of a conſpiracy of Indian and negro ſlaves "to obtain their inalienable rights,"—apparently a ſcheme of ſome magnitude.
- ↑ "The ſlave-trade can be ſupported only by barbarians; for civilized nations purchaſe ſlaves, but do not produce them." Gibbon, Extraits de mon Journal, Oct. 19, 1763. What would the hiſtorian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have ſaid of the Virginia of the nineteenth century!
- ↑ Boſton News Letter, No. 1399, New England Weekly Journal, No. 214, Boſton News Letter, No. 1422, No. 1423.
