Conditions in New York in the eighteenth century serve to illustrate the same point. In July, 1715, Colonel Heathcote wrote home to Secretary Townsend: “The Indians complain that their children, who were many of them bound out for a limited time to be taught and instructed by the Christians, were, contrary to the intent of their agreement, transferred to other plantations and sold for slaves, and I don’t know but there may be some truth in what they allege”.[692] The authorities were aware of the danger caused by the colonists’ action, and in 1750 Governor Clinton ordered all Indian children held as pledges or slaves, to be returned to their families.[693] Johnson, the Indian commissioner, was much pleased with the governor’s action and January 22, 1750, wrote him: “I am very glad that your excellency has given orders to have the Indian children returned, who are kept by the traders as pawns or pledges as they call it, but rather stolen from them (as the parents came at the appointed time to redeem them, but they sent them away before hand), and as they were children of our Friends and Allies, and if they are not returned next Spring, it will confirm what the French told the Six Nations (viz.): that we looked upon them as slaves or negroes, which affair gave me a great deal of trouble at that time to reconcile”. Evidently the holders were disinclined to obey the governor’s order, for Johnson cited in his letter two cases where such return had not been made, and from which he feared disturbance.[694] To what extent the governor’s decree was effective would be hard to state. There certainly were Indian slaves in the colony after its publication. “A list of the Negro, Indian and Mulatto Slaves within the district whereof Benjamin Smith is Captain at Hempstead in Queens County taken the first day of April, 1755,” shows that Indian slaves were being used on Long Island at that date,[695] and it seems not unlikely that some of them might have been obtained by abuse of indenture. Another process of enslaving Indians was that which had to do with the infliction of punishment for offenses against law and order. The custom of sentencing Indians to enslavement at home, or to transportation and enslavement abroad, for such offenses was general throughout the colonies. Such a sentence came about in one of two ways: either the colonial legislature enacted a law which imposed enslavement as the punishment for a given offense; or a colonial court acting on its own initiative used it to that end.