James Russell Lowell commenting on this letter says, “Let any housewife of our day, who does not find the Keltic element in domestic life so refreshing as to Mr. Arnold in literature, imagine a household with one wild Pequot woman, communicated with by signs, for its maid of all work, and take courage. Those were serious times indeed, when your cook might give warning by taking your scalp, or chignon, as the case might be, and making off with it into the woods.”—“New England Two Centuries Ago,” in Among My Books, I., 263.
[147] Teele, History of Milton, Massachusetts, 1640-1887, Journal of Rev. Peter Thatcher, Appendix B, pp. 641-642.
[148] The Report of a French Protestant Refugee in Boston, 1687, evidently submitted to guide friends in France thinking of coming to America, says: “You may also own negroes and negresses; there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two. There are those that have five or six, and all make a good living.”—Pp. 19-20.
The New England papers, even in the first part of the eighteenth century, are full of advertisements like the following: “A Negro Wench with a Girl Four Years old both born in the Country, used to all Family work on a Farm, to be sold on reasonable Terms.”—Boston News Letter, October 5, 1719.
“A very likely young Negro Wench that can do any Household Work to be sold, inquire of Mr. Samuel Sewall.”—Ibid., April 9, 1716.
“Lately arrived from Jamaica several Negro boys and girls, to be sold by Mr. John Charnock & Co.”—Ibid., May 11, 1719.
Most of the advertisements describe those offered for sale as “very likely,” and add the specially desirable qualification that he or she “speaks good English.” Judge Sewall, in 1700, gives this account of his first protest against negro slavery: “Having been long and much dissatisfied with the Trade of fetching Negros from Guinea; at last I had a strong Inclination to Write something about it; but it wore off. At last reading Bayne, Ephes. about servants, who mentions Blackmoors; I began to be uneasy that I had so long neglected doing anything.”—Diary, II., 16.
[149] But it is of interest in passing to note two contemporaneous judgments on the effect of slavery. Elkanah Watson, writing of his journey through the South in 1778, says: “The influence of slavery upon southern habits is peculiarly exhibited in the prevailing indolence of the people. It would seem as if the poor white man had almost rather starve than work, because the negro works.”—Men and Times, p. 72.
Thomas Anburey writes, “Most of the planters consign the care of their plantations and negroes to an overseer, even the man whose house we rent, has his overseer, though he could with ease superintend it himself; but if they possess a few negroes, they think it beneath their dignity, added to which, they are so abominably lazy.”—Travels, II., 328.
[150] A New England woman writes: “In several instances our ‘help’ was married from our parlor with my sisters for bridesmaids. I correspond with a woman doctor in Florida whose sister was our cook when I was a child, and who shared her sister’s room at our home while she earned her education, alternating work in the cotton mills and going to school.” This is but one illustration of hundreds that have doubtless come within the experience of most persons living in New England fifty years ago.