Slavery and antislavery - 1855 Author:William Goodell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE BRITISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA, NOW THE UNITED STATES. Slavers from New England—Slavery in Massachusetts... more », Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas—Condition of tha Slaves—Testimony of Wesley and Whitefleld—Inquiry into the legal foundation of Colonial Slavery— Complaints of the Colonies against the King of Great Britain, for favoring the traffic—Paradoxes—Absence of English Statutes legalizing Slavery—Common Law—Lord Mansfield—Colonial Charters—Slavery introduced in absence of Colonial enactments—Date and circumstances of introduction of Slavery into Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia—Prohibition of Slavery in Georgia, (Gen. Ogel- thorpe)—Dates of early enactments concerning Slavery in Virginia, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland—Loose and vague character of these enactments. Soon after the settlement of the British North American Colonies, Africans were imported into them, and sold and held as slaves. Of the extent of these importations we have met with no authenticated statistics. The whole number of slaves in these states, by the first census under the present Constitution, 1790, was 697,697. The colonies now known as the Southern or slave states, on the Atlantic coast, received the principal share of these importations. The middle and eastern colonies received comparatively few, and these chiefly for domestic servants in the cities, and in the families of professional gentlemen in the interior. As the soil was not adapted to slave culture, and was owned in small farms by a hardy race of agriculturists, inured to habits of labor, the process of cultivation by slaves never obtained, particularly in New England, except to a very limited extent. In New York, first settled by the ...« less