Nevertheless
it was a community to be reckoned with. Its people were awake to their
peculiar conditions and problems; it had plenty of talented citizens to
formulate policies; and it had excellent machinery for uniting public
opinion. In colonial times, plying its trade mainly with England and the
West Indies, it was in little touch with its continental neighbors, and it
developed a sense of separateness. As part of a loosely administered
empire its people were content in prosperity and self-government. But in a
consolidated nation of diverse and conflicting interests it would be likely
on occasion to assert its own will and resist unitedly anything savoring of
coercion. In a double sense it was of the _southern_ South.
CHAPTER VI
THE NORTHERN COLONIES
Had any American colony been kept wholly out of touch with both Indians
and negroes, the history of slavery therein would quite surely have been
a blank. But this was the case nowhere. A certain number of Indians were
enslaved in nearly every settlement as a means of disposing of captives
taken in war; and negro slaves were imported into every prosperous colony
as a mere incident of its prosperity.
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