A New York law of 1712, on the other hand, provided that any one manumitting “any negro, Indian or mulatto slave” should give security of not less than £200 to pay yearly to such freed slave the sum of £20 lawful money of the colony. If the slave were freed by will and testament, the executors of the deceased person were required to give the same security after probate. If such security were not given, the manumission should be void.[1096] Since the law proved to be unsatisfactory, in 1717 it was amended so as to provide that any master or other person manumitting an Indian or negro slave should give security at the General Sessions of the Peace for city and county where such freed Indian or negro should reside, to keep such freedman from becoming a charge on the city, town or place.[1097] New Jersey, too, in 1713, passed an act declaring that no negro or mulatto slave could be manumitted unless the slave’s master gave surety to pay such freed slave £20 yearly.[1098] This is the only section of the act which did not include Indian slaves in its provisions. Evidently the omission was unsatisfactory, for a later act, November 16, 1769, repealed the section and provided that, if any owner should by will or otherwise free “any negro, Indian or mulatto slave”, then such owner, his heirs or executors, at the next session of the Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace in the county where such owner resided, must give a bond of £200, so as to indemnify the community if such freedman became a pauper.[1099] CHAPTER XII +The Decline of Indian Slavery+ The small number of the Indians within the territory actually occupied by the English had its influence upon both the extent and the decline of Indian slavery. The Indians were never as numerous in the English territory as in that occupied or claimed by the Spanish and French. From many estimates made of the Indian population in the section under English rule,[1100] it would seem that the supply was sufficient to nourish the system of Indian slavery indefinitely: but it must be noted that the greater portion of this Indian population was made up of tribes generally remote from the English settlements. The consensus of opinion to-day is that the number of Indians in New England about the year 1600 was not greater than twenty-four or twenty-five thousand. This number was so much reduced by the plague of 1616,[1101] that Palfrey states that the English found practically a vacant domain.[1102] In the Florida country many small tribes were so thoroughly exterminated before the coming of the whites that no trace of their existence remained except a few local names.[1103] In the interior of the continent before the French or the English had obtained a foothold, the whole country during the seventeenth century was the seat of intertribal wars so disastrous in their results as to destroy many large and powerful tribes.[1104]