Some
of the towns, furthermore, added by-laws of their own for more thorough
police. South Kingstown for instance adopted an order that if any slave
were found in the house of a free negro, both guest and host were to be
whipped.[29] The Rhode Island Quakers in annual meeting began as early as
1717 to question the propriety of importing slaves, and other persons from
time to time echoed their sentiments; but it was not until just before the
American Revolution that legislation began to interfere with the trade or
the institution.
[Footnote 28: _Rhode Island Colonial Records_, I, 243.]
[Footnote 29: Channing, _The Narragansett Planters_, p. 11.]
The colonies of Plymouth and New Haven in the period of their separate
existence, and the colonies of Maine and New Hampshire throughout their
careers, are negligible in a general account of negro slavery because
their climate and their industrial requirements, along with their poverty,
prevented them from importing any appreciable number of negroes.
New Netherland had the distinction of being founded and governed by a great
slave-trading corporation--the Dutch West India Company--which endeavored
to extend the market for its human merchandise whithersoever its influence
reached.
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