Massachusetts has the honor of being the first community in America to legalize the slave-trade and slavery by legislative act; the first to send out a slave-ship, and the first to secure a fugitive-slave law. Slavery having been planted on this continent (not by the South, as has been reiterated until it is the generally received doctrine, but by a Dutch ship, which in 1619 landed a cargo of “twenty negers” in a famished condition at Jamestown), it shortly took general root, and after a time began to flourish. Indeed, it flourished here and elsewhere, so that in 1636, only seventeen years later, a ship, _The Desire_, was built and fitted out at Marblehead as a slaver, and thus became the first American slave-ship, but by no means the last. In the early period of the institution it was conceived that as it was justified on the ground that the slaves were heathen, conversion to Christianity might operate to emancipate them. In Virginia, the leading Southern colony, it was adjudicated that this did not so operate; but long prior to that, and while it was the accepted theory, Negroes are shown, by the church records, to have been baptized. In Massachusetts, at that time, baptism was expressly prohibited. The fugitive-slave law, which proved ultimately and naturally so powerful an excitant in the history of slavery, and which is generally believed to have been the product of only Southern cupidity and brutality, had its prototype in the Articles of the Confederation of the United Colonies of New England (19th May, 1643), in which Massachusetts was the ruling colony. Many of the good people of Massachusetts, in their zeal and their misapprehension of the facts, have been accustomed to regard their own skirts as free from all taint whatsoever of the accursed doctrine of property in human beings, and have been wont to boast that slavery never existed by virtue of law in that grand old Commonwealth, and that certainly no human creature was ever born a slave on her sacred soil. For refutation one need go no further than the work of Mr. George H. Moore, entitled “History of Slavery in Massachusetts.”[67] Mr. Moore was librarian of the Historical Society of New York, and corresponding member of the Historical Society of Massachusetts. He says, page 19, citing Commonwealth _vs._ Aves, 18 Pick., Shaw, C. J.: “It has been persistently asserted and repeated by all sorts of authorities, historical and legal, up to that of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, that ‘slavery to a certain extent seems to have crept in; not probably by force of any law, for none such is found or known to exist.’” “In Mr. Sumner’s famous speech in the Senate, June 28, 1854, he boldly asserted that ‘in all her annals no person was ever born a slave on the soil of Massachusetts’; and, says he, ‘if in point of fact the issue of slaves was sometimes held in bondage, it was never by sanction of any statute law of colony or commonwealth.’”