impossible that he should have much admiration for the Teacher of Boston as a maker of laws and constitutions; and, though an earlier scheme had been fortified by that eminent person with Scriptural authorities, Ward does not appear to have paid the slightest regard to it in preparing his own. Even in respect to capital crimes, he did not adopt the whole code of Moses; he did not make the striking or reviling of parents, or the breaking of the Sabbath, punishable with death. That penalty was imposed for only ten offences. These were, idolatry; witchcraft; blasphemy, when "direct, express, presumptuous, or high-handed;" homicide, whether committed in malice or in passion; adultery; two other crimes of lust;1 man-stealing; false witness, "of purpose to take any man's life;" and treason against the Commonwealth.2 ვ Ward's laws of inheritance and of servitude borrowed principles from the Law of Moses. The oldest son of a parent dying intestate was to have "a double portion of his whole estate, real and personal, unless the General Court, upon just cause alleged, should judge otherwise." 3 Servants, of whom there were a considerable number, bound by indentures, if they fled from a cruel master, were to be "protected and sustained till due order should be taken for their relief." If they were excessively pun 1 Great consternation was occasioned by the discovery, in several instances, of unnatural crimes. The disgusted reader does not know what to think of the story of them, except that it was entirely believed, sometimes on the evidence of confession. Of course, among the adventurers who crowded hither from Europe, there were individuals grossly bad, and the restraints of the ascetic society into which they were brought may have quickened their brutal passions into a desperate depravity. 2 The definition of treason is significant not only from its silence re specting all allegiance except to Massachusetts. Its terms are such as to threaten with a traitor's death all who should take the King's part against her: "If any man shall conspire and attempt any invasion, insurrection, or public rebellion against our Commonwealth, or shall endeavor to surprise any town or towns, fort or forts therein, or shall treacherously and perfidiously attempt the alteration and subversion of our frame of polity or government fundamentally, he shall be put to death." (Art. 94.) Body of Liberties, Art. 81; comp. Deut. xxi. 17. 1 ished, they were to be discharged and compensated. When they had rendered diligent service seven years, they were not to be "sent away empty." The conditions of bondage were thus expressed: "There shall never be any bond-slavery, villanage, or captivity amongst us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God estab lished in Israel concerning such persons doth morally require." "2 1 Body of Liberties, Arts. 85-88; comp. Exod. xxi. 26, 27; Lev. xxv. 39; Deut. xv. 12, 13. 2 Body of Liberties, Art. 91. The being born of a slave mother is not mentioned among the causes of subjection to slavery; and in fact no person was ever born into legal slavery in Massachusetts. (Massachusetts Reports, IV. 128, 129; Cushing's Reports, X. 410.) Persons who "willingly sold themselves" must be supposed to have been generally such as contracted to labor for a term of years, though there may have been those who entered into such an engagement for their whole life; and the engagement, whatever was its limit as to duration, would be subject to be transferred to a third party, in which case the original contractor would be "sold." (Colony Laws, Art. Arrests; comp. Winthrop, II. 347, Mass. Hist. Coll., XXI. 27.) Before Winthrop's arrival, there were two negro slaves in Massachusetts, held by Mr. Maverick, on Noddle's Island. (Josselyn, Two Voyages, &c., 28.) In the list of men capable of bearing arms, at Plymouth, in 1643, (Plym. Rec., VIII. 187,) occurs the name of "Abraham Pearse, the blackmore," from which we infer, both that negroes were not dispensed from mili tary service in that Colony, and that their number was extremely small. Negro slaves in Massachusetts could take and hold property; Captain Keayne, in his will, made in 1653, left five pounds to his "three negars." (HistoricGeneal. Reg., VI. 156.) They served in the militia. (Mass. Rec., III. 268.) They testified in Courts of Justice. "Andrew, Mr. Oliver Wendell's negro," and "Cato, a negro," were witnesses on the trial of the British soldiers in 1770. (Depositions appended to the Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, &c., 56.) From the reverence entertained by the fathers of New England for the nuptial tie, it is safe to infer that slave husbands and wives were never parted. A negro slave might be a member of the church (Winthrop, II. 26); and this fact presents a curious question. As a church-member, he was eligible to the political franchise; and, if he should be actually invested with it, he would have a part in making laws to govern his master, laws with which his master, if a non-communicant, would have had no concern except to obey them. But it is improbable that the Court would have made a slave-while a slave - a member of the Company, though he were a communicant. In the year after the adoption of the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts, an order passed for printing that part which designated capital offences, and another 1642. crime (rape) was added to the list.1 Before June 14. the end of the time for which the instrument had been provisionally adopted, two committees, consisting, the one of Winthrop, Dudley, and Hibbens, the 1644. other of "the Magistrates residing at Ipswich," March 7. were appointed "to consider of the Body of Liberties against the next General Court, what is fit to be repealed or allowed." It may be presumed to have, on trial, obtained general favor, as the next General Court does not appear to have reconsidered it, and as it continued to be the rule of administration in after times. 2 1642. Dec. 1. The earliest code in Connecticut related only to capital offences. Adopted a year later than the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, it is in great part a verbal copy from that instrument. Neither be- necticut and fore, nor for several years after, the confederation 3 Laws in Con New Haven. of the Colonies, had New Haven any body of statutes. During this time the courts were guided in their decisions by what they received as the rules of equity and Scripture. "The fundamental order" on this 1644. subject was "The judicial laws of God, as April 3. they were delivered by Moses, and as they are a fence to the moral law, being neither typical nor ceremonial, nor having any reference to Canaan, shall be accounted of moral equity, and shall generally bind all offenders, and be a rule to all the courts in this jurisdiction in their proceedings against offenders, till they shall be branched out into particulars hereafter."1 The opinions of the present age respecting the proper province of law are not altogether the same as were 1 N. H. Rec., I. 130; comp. 113. Most American readers have heard of the "Blue Laws" of New Haven, which have been precisely described as making "one thin volume in folio," embracing the following among other provisions: "No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave, on the Sabbath-day. No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or Fasting day. No one shall read Common Prayer, keep Christmas or Saint days, make minced pies, dance, play cards, or play on any instrument of music, except the drum, trumpet, and jewsharp. Every male shall have his hair cut round, according to a cap." (General History of Connecticut, 65, 66, 68, 69, 82.) It is not perhaps so well known that these statements are without historical foundation. In the primitive age of the Colony, the discretionary action of the Magistrates sometimes resembled the discipline of the head of a family, rather than a formal legal administration; but the existence, at any time, of a code containing provisions such as are quoted above, is a mere fabrication, nor is there any record of so much as single judgments pronounced agreeably to the tenor of those provisions. The anonymous work which first vented the fiction was published in London in 1781, and a second edition appeared in the following year. The author was Samuel Peters, a loyalist and refugee. He was a college contemporary of Trumbull, the conscientiously exact historian of Connecticut, and is said to have been a native of the same town. Trumbull said of him, that "of all men with whom he had ever been acquainted, Dr. Peters he had thought, from his first knowledge of him, the least to be depended on as to any matter of fact." (Kingsley's Historical Discourse, p. 84.) The reader at all acquainted with Connecticut history may satisfy himself concerning Peters's credibility by five minutes' inspection of his work. The reader without such acquaintance will form some judgment of the author's capacity for telling the truth, when he comes upon the following representation of a scene on the river Connecticut: "Here water is consolidated without frost, by pressure, by swiftness, between the pinching, sturdy rocks, to such a degree of induration, that no iron crow can be forced into it; here iron, lead, and cork have one common weight." (General History, &c., p. 127.) Malte-Brun (Géographie Universelle, Liv. XIII.) expresses the judicious opinion that this must be "grossly exaggerated." A small volume, containing "The [Connecticut] Code of 1650," was published in Hartford in 1822, with an Appendix of twelve pages, in duodecimo, entitled "New-Haven Antiquities, or Blue-Laws." Of course, this was a taking title, intended to help the sale, as was the binding of the book in blue covers. The collection, brief as it is, is in great part made up of a record of orders having nothing of a fanciful or rigorous character;- as, for instance, for the building of a meeting-house, for the laying out of lands, for a supply of arms. It embraces a few notices of punishment inflicted for drunkenness and impurity, but nothing of the kinds specified by Dr. Peters, and currently quoted as Blue Laws. Regulation of expenses. current at the time of the colonization of New England.1 In all the Colonies, orders were made for the regulation of the prices of commodities and la- of prices and bor. This legislation was fluctuating, because experience could not fail speedily to show the inutility or mischief of each particular provision. The theory of a public control over the terms of private contracts is plausible; and, till experiments prosecuted in every promising direction had exposed its unsoundness, the idea was not abandoned that some new device would remedy the manifest defects of those which had preceded. But the error was not native in New England, nor did it linger longest in that country. It was embodied in the statutes of the mother country at least as early as the fourteenth century; it continued in good credit there at least to the latest days of the Stuarts, long after it had been abandoned by the practical wisdom of the colonists; a and all along it was asserted in provisions much more comprehensive and more rigorous than theirs. The less objectionable legislation which was tried for the restraint of extravagance in dress, was also no invention of New England or of Puritanism. It had precedent in the earlier times of England.* In Massachusetts, not only the support of the ministrations of religion, but personal attendance upon them, 1 February 8, 1640, by the General Court of Connecticut, "Mr. Webster and Mr. Phelps are desired to consult with the elders of both plantations to prepare instructions against the next Court for the punishing of the sin of lying, which begins to be practised by many persons in this Commonwealth." (Conn. Rec., I. 62.) 2 "The Court having found by experience, that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers' and workmen's wages, &c., for, being restrained, they would either |