Facts About Slavery

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Facts About Slavery

(Sources: #2 Northampton County Order Book 1655-1668 Vol. 10, taken from the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, the Marine Research Society, the Library of Congress. #8 taken from the Congressional Record, March 26, 1884, pg. 2284. Also from the book "Slave Ships and Slaving" by the Marine Research Society.)

1. Under the first code of laws toward slavery in 1641 the Court of Salem, Massachusetts directed the sale of Quaker children to be sold to the English in Virginia or Barbados.

2. Anthony Johnson is a central figure in the slavery debate and in an utterly bizarre and "politically incorrect" twist of fate is our country's first legally recorded slaveholder. In 1651 Anthony Johnson, a free Negro, imports several enslaved Africans and is given a grant of land on Virginia's Puwgoteague River. Other free Negroes follow this pattern. In 1655 Anthony Johnson won a court battle to keep John Casor, a Negro, as his servant for life.

3. In 1652, 270 Scotchmen were sold in Boston into servitude as Negro slaves were sold.

4. In 1708 Govenor Cranston of Rhode Island reported that 103 vessels had been built for slaving!

5. In 1742 there were 1514 slaves owned in Boston. In 1764 the number had increased to 5779 Negro slaves and free Negroes living in Boston.

6. In 1789 Massachusetts, Delaware and several New England states refuse to ratify the Constitution if it did not have provisions to allow slavery.

7. In 1792 Virginia passes legislation that forbids the importation and sale of foreign slaves into Virginia.

8. On March 26, 1864, a Congressman from North Carolina made a speech to Congress that "Massachusetts is a state more responsible under heaven than any other community in this land for the introduction of slavery into this continent, with all the curses that have followed it; that it is the nursing mother of the horrors of the middle passage that after slavery in Massachusetts was found not to pay, her slavers were sold down South for a consideration and then their former owners thanked God the long metre doxology through their noses, that they were responsible no longer for the sin of human slavery."