Publisher's Synopsis
While it is not within the purview of our purpose to de fend the institution of slavery, as it existed in the South ern States, either upon moral or political grounds, yet we would not vindicate the truth of history, in passing over in silence the real authors of an institution that has been the theme of such bitter invective at the hands of their intol erant and hypocritical descendants. Massachusetts and Connecticut were among the first colonies to introduce African slavery upon their soil, and conducted 'the new en terprise with more interest and zeal than any of their sister colonies. Massachusetts in particular had an addition al incentive to stimulate her to engage in the slave traffic; for, besides the demand for the African as a laborer to till her soil, she enjoyed a monopoly of the shipping in terest among the colonies, and did not stop at that early day to consider the horrors of the middle passage, but at once fitted out her ship for the coast of Africa, and con tinned this species of merchandise as long as she could find a market for the so-called human chattels. Virginia, and other more Southern colonies, entered an earnest re monstrance against the slave trade, and raised an issue with the New England colonies against its continuance, which was not met in a spirit of compromise by those men, whose descendants, eighty years later, began a sectional war to overturn an institution their fathers had been mainly instrumental in setting up.
