Maria, a negress belonging to Joshua Lamb
of Roxbury, having confessed the burning of two dwellings, was sentenced by
the Governor "yt she should goe from the barr to the prison whence she
came and thence to the place of execution and there be burnt.--ye Lord be
mercifull to thy soule, sd ye Govr." The other was Jack, a negro belonging
to Samuel Wolcott of Weathersfield, who upon conviction of having set fire
to a residence by waving a fire brand about in search of victuals, was
condemned to be hanged until dead and then burned to ashes in the fire with
the negress Maria.[17]
[Footnote 17: _Records of the Court of Assistants, 1630-1692_ (Boston,
1901), p. 198.]
In this period it seems that Indian slaves had almost disappeared, and
the number of negroes was not great enough to call for special police
legislation. Governor Bradstreet, for example, estimated the "blacks or
slaves" in the colony in 1680 at "about one hundred or one hundred and
twenty."[18] But in 1708 Governor Dudley reckoned the number in Boston at
four hundred, one-half of whom he said had been born there, and those in
the rest of the colony at one hundred and fifty; and in the following
decades their number steadily mounted, as a concomitant of the colony's
increasing prosperity, until on the eve of the American Revolution they
were reckoned at well above five thousand.
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