and Pownalboro' had nine negroes out of eight hundred and eighty-nine inhabitants. The whole population of Maine, in 1764, was 23,686 white persons, and three hundred and thirty-two blacks. How many of the latter were slaves cannot be ascertained. Rev. Jacob Bailey mentions a slave held in Pownalboro', by Major Samuel Goodwin, in 1774. Further east than Pownalboro' the existence of the institution cannot be traced. Slaves were not usually found away from maritime towns, as farmers preferred white laborers to black.

The inquiry naturally suggests itself, what was the condition of slaves in Maine and in Massachusetts, and how did the system become extinct. At first their treatment was harsh, but during the last years the institution existed, they suffered no greater hardships than hired servants. They were admitted as church members. They could hold property, both real and personal. They testified in courts of justice. Their family relations were seldom disturbed, although one advertisement in a Boston newspaper offers for sale, together or separately, a slave mother and her child six months old, and although small negro children when weaned, were sometimes given away like puppies, as an incumbrance. "The slave was the absolute "property of his master," says Chief Justice Parsons, "subject to his orders, and to reasonable correction for "misbehavior, was transferrable like a chattel by gift or "sale, and was assets in the hands of his executor or "administrator. If the master was guilty of a cruel or "unreasonable castigation of his slave, he was liable to be "punished for the breach of the peace, and the slave was "allowed to demand sureties of the peace against a violent "and barbarous master, which generally caused a sale to "another master. And the children of the female slave, "according to the maxim of the civil law, were the property "of her master."

The first decisive movement for the abolition of slavery

in Massachusetts was made in 1773. In that year the negroes, emboldened by the glimmerings of independence, presented a petition for their freedom to the General Court. It was referred, and the next year a bill was passed to prevent the importation of slaves. Governor Hutchinson declined giving to it his signature, for the reason that he had no authority to sanction such a measure. To the last, Great Britain continued to resist every colonial limitation of the slave trade, with the same firmness with which she opposed our efforts at independence. "We cannot allow," wrote the Earl of Dartmouth to an agent in America, in 1776, "we cannot allow the colonists to check or discourage "a traffic so beneficial to the nation." The passage of the `bill in 1774, was an express declaration of public opinion, and prepared the way six years afterwards for inserting in the constitution of the Commonwealth, that important provision that all men were born free and equal. In the first case involving the right of the master to his slave, which was adjudicated by the Supreme Court of the new Commonwealth, the judges decided that by virtue of the clause referred to, the slave no longer owed any service, and slavery from that time henceforth, and it is to be hoped forever ceased to have a legal existence in Massachusetts or in Maine.

ARTICLE XII.

CONDITION OF THE

RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS

OF MAINE,

AT THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTION.

COPIED FROM PAPERS OF HON. WM. D. WILLIAMSON,

RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS.

WHEN the Revolution terminated, Maine contained forty-one incorporated towns, and in 1784, the year after the ratification of peace, there were in them thirty-one resident located ministers of the Congregational and Presbyterian orders, including three installed that year. To this period a remarkable unanimity prevailed among the people about their religious sentiments. There was a single society of German Lutherans, at Waldoboro', that had existed for over forty years. Its minister, for nearly a quarter of a century, was the excellent Mr. Schaeffer, from Germany. There were then no Catholics in Maine, except the Romish missionaries and their Indian converts.

The thirty-one Congregational and Presbyterian ministers settled in our State in 1784, were as follows: