=Slavery.= In 1619 the first negroes were brought to the colonists. They were carried to Jamestown by a Dutch ship and fourteen of them were bought by the people and remained at Jamestown. They were kept as slaves and their work proved so profitable that more were brought in and this continued till there were quite a number in the colonies. Not only in Virginia, but in all the colonies, both North and South, slaves from Africa were used. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the colonies tried to put a check on the slave-trade but it had proved so profitable to the English ship owners who carried on the traffic in African slaves, that the mother-country favored them and would not allow laws of the colonies against the slave trade to be enforced. For a long time but a few women were brought over in the slave ships and many of the slaves were from wild tribes in Africa and so they were fierce and dangerous. They committed many crimes and were severely punished. Some of the punishments were most cruel, as the hanging in chains, and burning. Other punishments were whipping, cropping the ears, hamstringing, branding in the face, and slitting the nose. As slavery could be much more profitably used in the South, there were, of course, more negroes taken there, and so it was the home of much of the cruel treatment. But the North had it share in such, as is shown in the following quotations: "In colonies where the statutes did not warrant extraordinary penalties on slaves, the administration of law went to the limit of severity. In Massachusetts hanging was the worst penalty for murder, but the obsolete common-law punishment specially assigned to women who were guilty of petty treason was revived in 1755, in order to burn alive a slave-woman who had killed her master in Cambridge; earlier still the old _lex talionis_ had been put in force, that a negro woman might die by fire in Boston for arson causing death. In New Jersey, even in that part of the province in which Quakerism should have softened the spirit of the people, negroes were burned in many instances. New York, without the excuse of serious danger--for her negroes were not more than a sixth of the population--had a code barely less fierce than that of South Carolina, where the multitude of the slaves was a perpetual danger to the whites. Some of the revolting penalties inflicted on slaves in New York with the sanction of law-courts are striking proofs of the small advance the men of that time had made from positive barbarism."[222]