[3] This movement had for years been promoted by the heroic few. It was then getting a hearing in Parliament. They first advocated the abolition of the slave trade and then directed attention to slavery.
[4] These contributions closely connected Hill with the men whose new thought revolutionized science a few decades later.
[5] San Domingo was then independent and the success of the free Negroes there would have a direct bearing on the anti-slavery movement, as indifferent white men sometimes contended that the free Negro was a failure.
[6] Slavery in the British West Indies was not actually abolished instantly. Gradual emancipation was the method tried in most parts and even in cases of immediate emancipation the system of apprenticeship which followed was not much better than slavery.
[7] The office of Secretary to the Stipendiary Magistrates was established in order to assist Governor Sligo to get through the enormous amount of correspondence entailed by the complaints sent to him in connection with the administration of the laws with regard to the apprenticeship system.
THE RELATIONS OF NEGROES AND INDIANS IN MASSACHUSETTS
One of the longest unwritten chapters of the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and Indians. The Indians were already here when the white men came and the Negroes brought in soon after to serve as a subject race found among the Indians one of their means of escape. That a larger number of the Negroes did not take refuge among the Indians was due to the ignorance of the blacks as to the geographic situation. Not knowing anything about the country and unacquainted with the language of the white man or that of the Indians, most Negroes dared not venture very far from the plantations on which they lived. Statistics show, however, that in spite of this impediment to the escape of Negroes to Indian communities, a considerable number of blacks availed themselves of this opportunity. From the most northern colonies as far south as Florida there was much contact resulting in the interbreeding of Indians and Negroes.
In no case was this better exemplified than in Massachusetts. Because of the cosmopolitan influences in that State where the fur trade, fisheries, and commerce brought the people into contact with a large number of foreigners, the Indian settlements by an infusion of blood from without served as a sort of melting pot in which the Negroes became an important factor. There was extensive miscegenation of the two races after the middle of the seventeenth century. In the course of ten or twelve generations there was an opportunity for "foreign blood early introduced to permeate the whole mass and when it is considered that the intermixture was constantly kept up from the outside, it is a wonder that Indians of pure native race remained."[1]