The first few Negroes in Connecticut were servants along with a few Indian and white servants. It was due, no doubt, to the paucity of the Negroes—there were in 1680 not above thirty in the colony—that they became servants. However, as this number increased, their status became gradually that of slaves by custom. Because of the fear of treachery from the Negro and Indian servants, the General Court, in 1680, ordered that "neither Indian nor negar servants shall be required to train, watch or ward in the Colony."[25] Evidently some of the servants very early had served out their time and had been freed, for by a law, in 1690, "Negro, mulatto, or Indian servants," "suspected persons" and free Negroes who were found wandering could be taken up and brought before a magistrate.[26] An act in 1711 made provision for the care of Negro servants and others who came to want after they had served out their time. "An act relating to slaves, and such in particular as shall happen to become servants for life, enacts that all slaves set at liberty by their owners, and all negro, mulatto, and Spanish Indians, who are servants to masters for time, in case they shall come to want after they shall be so set at liberty or the time of their service be expired, they shall be relieved at the cost of their masters." In fact, slavery of the "absolute, rigid kind" never existed to any extent in Connecticut.[27]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ballagh, pp. 36-37.
[2] Ibid., 32.
[3] Ibid., 37; Beatty, The Free Negroes in the Carolinas before 1860, p. 3.
The children, resulting from the intermixture and intermarriage of the races were likewise servants in these two colonies. Stroud, Laws Relating to Slavery, pp. 8-9.
[4] Servitude was recognized in statute law in this colony by 1630-36. Ballagh, Hist. of Slavery in Va., pp. 32, 33, 36.
[5] Washburn, Slavery as It Once Prevailed in Mass., p. 193.
[6] Providence Isle was "an island in the Caribbean, off the Nicaraguan coast. In 1630 Charles I granted it, by a patent similar to that of Massachusetts, to a company of Englishmen, mostly Puritans, who held it till 1641, when the Spaniards captured it." Winthrop's Journal, II, pp. 227, 228, 260; Moore, Notes on the Hist. of Slavery in Mass., p. 5.
[7] Ballagh, Hist. of Slavery in Va., note 2, quoted from Calendar State Papers, pp. 160, 168, 229.