Slavery.
For a long time but a few women were brought over in the slave ships and many of the slaves were from wild tribes in Africa and so they were fierce and dangerous. They committed many crimes and were severely punished. Some of the punishments were most cruel, as the hanging in chains, and burning. Other punishments were whipping, cropping the ears, hamstringing, branding in the face, and slitting the nose. As slavery could be much more profitably used in the South, there were, of course, more negroes taken there, and so it was the home of much of the cruel treatment. But the North had it share in such, as is shown in the following quotations:
"In colonies where the statutes did not warrant extraordinary penalties on slaves, the administration of law went to the limit of severity. In Massachusetts hanging was the worst penalty for murder, but the obsolete common-law punishment specially assigned to women who were guilty of petty treason was revived in 1755, in order to burn alive a slave-woman who had killed her master in Cambridge; earlier still the old lex talionis had been put in force, that a negro woman might die by fire in Boston for arson causing death. In New Jersey, even in that part of the province in which Quakerism should have softened the spirit of the people, negroes were burned in many instances. New York, without the excuse of serious danger—for her negroes were not more than a sixth of the population—had a code barely less fierce than that of South Carolina, where the multitude of the slaves was a perpetual danger to the whites. Some of the revolting penalties inflicted on slaves in New York with the sanction of law-courts are striking proofs of the small advance the men of that time had made from positive barbarism."[222]
"Though in the beginning he refused to harbor or tolerate negro-stealers, the Massachusetts Puritan of that day, enraged at the cruelty of the savage red men, did not hesitate to sell Indian captives as slaves to the West Indies. King Phillip's wife and child were thus sold and there died. Their story was told in scathing language by Edward Everett. In 1703 it was made legal to transport and sell in the Barbadoes all Indian male captives under ten, and Indian women captives. Perhaps these transactions quickly blunted whatever early feeling may have existed against negro slavery, for soon the African slave-trade flourished in New England, as in Virginia, Newport being the New England center of the Guinea trade. From 1707 to 1732 a tax of three guineas a head was imposed in Rhode Island on each negro imported—on 'Guinea blackbirds.' It would be idle to dwell now on the cruelty of that horrid traffic, the sufferings on board the slavers from lack of room, of food, of water, of air. But three feet three inches was allowed between decks for the poor negro, who, accustomed to a free, out-of-door life, thus crouched and sat through the passage. No wonder the loss of life was great. It was chronicled in the newspapers and letters of the day in cold, heartless language that plainly spoke the indifference of the public to the trade and its awful consequence. I have never seen in any Southern newspapers advertisements of negro sales that surpass in heartlessness and viciousness the advertisement of our New England newspapers of the eighteenth century. Negro children were advertised to be given away in Boston, and were sold by the pound as was other merchandise. Samuel Pewter advertised in the Weekly Rehearsal in 1737 that he would sell horses for ten shillings pay if the horse sale were accomplished, and five shillings if he endeavored to sell and could not; and for negroes 'sixpence a pound on all he sells, and a reasonable price if he does not sell.'"[223]
The Dutch of New Netherlands had negro slaves but it would seem they differed from the English colonists in that they treated their slaves with kindness. Masters were placed under bonds and they were not permitted to whip their slaves without authorization from the government.
When more slave-women were brought in and negro families were established, the slaves became less fierce and more willing to accept their lot. Too, the children born to them learned to use the English language as their own and took up the ways of their masters and families and the old savage doings were for the most part forgotten. Cruelty to the slaves then decreased and new and less cruel laws were made for their government and control or the old laws and barbarous punishments were not enforced or used against them. The revolutionary movement did a great deal toward giving the negroes a better legal standing. This was particularly true in reference to free negroes and Indians, for many of the discriminations against them were abolished.