Note [546 — Chapter V
Reading edition
[546]
Early Records of the Town of Portsmouth
, p. 188. Rhode Island was accustomed to sell both whites and Indians into temporary servitude as punishment for crime. The Indians here mentioned were probably examples of such cases. See
Rhode Island Tracts
, No. 18, p. 131. The towns appears to have reversed its policy later. See Weeden,
Early Rhode Island
, etc., p. 178.
It was politic for the colonial governments to oppose the enslavement of Indians who were friendly to the English or in alliance with them. Two such instances are recorded in connection with North Carolina. In 1713, at the request of the governor of New York, the Seneca Indians sent an Indian to the Tuscarora to caution them against going to war with the English. The South Carolina Indians captured this Indian and held him as a slave. The council decided to buy him and send him back to his own nation. North Carolina Colonial Records, ii, pp. 1–2. In the same year the council ordered that a colonist who had sold a friendly Indian as a slave should be held for trial. Ibid., ii, p. 55.
During the intercolonial wars the French Indians were accustomed to take both their white and red captives to Canada, where the latter became slaves. As a part of their protective, diplomatic and military policy, the English sought to regain the freedom of these Indians, and thus retain the friendship of the Six Nations. In 1688, Governor Dongan demanded of the French agents that certain New York Indians who had been sent from Canada to France, be returned to the English consul at Paris or to the authorities in London, so that they might be brought home and be given their freedom. New York Colonial Documents, iii, p. 526. The French authorities agreed, and the Indians were brought back. Ibid., iii, pp. 621, 732, 733. In 1748, Governor Shirley sought to obtain the freedom of a Rhode Island Indian who had been sold as a slave in Canada, and on another occasion sent fourteen French prisoners to South Carolina to redeem certain members of the Six Nations who were held there. Ibid., vi, p. 448. Throughout the French and Indian struggle the governors of New York insisted that the members of the Six Nations, when captured in war, should be treated exactly as other English subjects, or, in other words, that they should not be enslaved.