Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

chusetts Bay. Mather, Willard, and Wadsworth took care to denounce running
away as a grievous sin. And from the earliest days of the colony, Massachusetts
law allowed the conscription of boats and horses in any chase after
runaway labor.
It is not surprising that protest and rebelliousness took different forms
among different classes of servants. The protest of contracted servants who
had friends or relatives in the colony tended to take the form of unruly
behavior or of taking their case to the courts. The more alienated and
oppressed Negroes and foreign servants tended to run away. Thus, from 1629
through 1750 the latter class accounted for twenty-five percent of the cases of
legal protest, but for sixty-nine percent of the runaways. Only a few servants
bothered to go to court, and running away accounted for almost half of the
recorded cases of protest, the latter growing with the shift in the type of
forced labor during the eighteenth century.* Here was a significant indication
that the propaganda of the Puritan apologists was becoming increasingly ineffective.
Increasingly, the unruliness of servants and slaves reduced the profitability
of such labor for their masters. And Samuel Sewall pointed out that the
Negro's drive toward liberty made him a poor servant.
In the midst of this general miasma of opinion, some courageous voices
were raised in behalf of liberty, even for Negroes. The eminent merchant
Judge Samuel Sewall wrote, in The Selling of Joseph (1700), that "liberty is
a real value next to life"; despite the Fall, all men, as the sons of Adam,
"have equal rights into liberty." To the excuse that the Negroes had already
been enslaved through wars in Africa, Sewall trenchantly replied that "an
unlawful war can't make lawful captives. And by receiving we are in danger
to promote and partake in their barbarous cruelties." Indeed, the excuse of
humanitarianism for purchasing Negro slaves rings thin; if true, the slave
traders should have instantly released their charges instead of herding and
dragging them at great cost in life to the New World.
The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 had ensured religious liberty for all
Protestants and had eliminated the religious test for voting. An established
church, however, was still permitted and the General Court quickly moved to
establish a Puritan church in each town, to be supported by the taxpayers.
The ministers, however, were to be selected locally by the voters of each town,
including nonmembers of the church. This system was quickly shifted to confine
the choice of a minister to the church's members, subject to ratification by
the town voters. Already, in 1694, opposition to the church by non-Puritans
was blocking the ratification of ministers, and a new Massachusetts law provided
for ratification by a Council of Elders of several churches, which council
could then override a negative vote by the town.
Despite these props and privileges, however, the Puritan establishment
*See Tower, oþ. c¡t., pp. 213 ff.
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