Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. LEGISLATION AND CASES BEFORE THE CONSTITUTION. § 1. Elements of colonial slavery. § 2. Regulations as to fugitives (1640-1700). § 3. Treatment of fugitives. § 4. Regulations in New England colonies. § 5. Escapes in New England: Attucks case. § 6. Dutch regulations in New Netherlands. § 7. Escapes from New Amsterdam. § 8. Intercolonial regulations. § 9. Intercolonial cases. § 10. International relations. § n. International cases. § 12. Relations with the mother country. § 13. Regulation under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1788). § 14. Ordinance for the Northwest Territory (1787). § 15. The Fugitive question in the Constitutional Conventions. § 1. Elements of colonial slavery.—By the middle of the seventeenth century, the settlements made in America by the English, Dutch, and Swedes were arranged for the most part in a line of little colonies closely following the Atlantic coast. To the west, wide forests and plains, broken only by the paths of the Indian, stretched on to the Pacific; while long intervals of unpopulated country separated the colonists on the north from the French in Canada, and on the south from the Spaniards in Florida. In all the colonies thus grouped together, the system of slavery had already become well established, and with its institution the question of the escape and return of the slaves had necessarily arisen. The conditions of the country, both physical and social, gave unusual facilities for flight. The wild woods, the Indian settlements, or the next colony, peopled by a foreign race, and perhaps as yet without firmly established government, offered to the slave a refuge and possibly protection. Escape, therefore, as a peculiar danger, demanded peculiar remedies. Though it is the purpose of th...