I have spoken of Pompey, a colored servant, once a slave of General Nathaniel Goodwin, with whom he lived in the old tavern house. He died within my recollection, and I think he was the last of the old slaves living in Plymouth. I remember his living with Nathaniel Goodwin, Cashier of the Plymouth Bank, who lived in what was called the bank house, which stood on Court street, where the Russell building now stands. Prince, whom I also remember, was once a slave of Dr. Wm. Thomas, and lived until his death, after the death of Dr. Thomas, with his son, Judge Joshua Thomas, who died January 10, 1821, and afterwards with his widow, in the house now occupied as an inn, called the Plymouth Tavern. There is no reason to doubt that the institution of slavery was recognized, and as firmly upheld in Plymouth as in other considerable towns in the northern states. So far as the slave trade was concerned, though it was abolished by an act of Congress in 1808, there is reason to believe that in the town of Bristol, R. I., within the limits of the original Plymouth Colony, until by a Royal Commission in 1751, that town was taken from Massachusetts and added to Rhode Island, it was pursued until 1820. In that year Congress declared the trade to be piracy, and Captain Nathaniel Gordon, engaged in the trade, was in November, 1861, convicted and executed in New York. It was the generally entertained belief that one or more citizens of Bristol were engaged in the trade, which led Mr. Webster to make the following denunciatory reference to the trade in his memorable oration delivered in Plymouth on the celebration in 1820 of the anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims. “It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer. I hear the sound of the hammer; I see the smoke of the furnace where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and midnight labor in this work of hell foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and tortures. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified or let it be set aside from the Christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards, and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it.” Slavery existed in Massachusetts until the adoption of its constitution on the 15th of June, 1780. Article first of the “declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth” declared as follows: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”