Plymouth and Massachusetts P4

Last week we talked about the Puritans using the biblical values concerning private property, work ethic, and requiring education for all. Because these colonists were familiar with Biblical teachings on the equality of all mankind, they saw chattel slavery as wrong. In 1641, manstealing became a capital crime, punishable by death. (Manstealing, made a crime by Exodus 21:16 and I Timothy 1:10 in the Bible, was the forcible abduction of a person from their own country to send to another.) Because of that law, in 1646 when a shipload of slaves arrived in Massachusetts, the colonists freed the slaves then imprisoned and punished the slave traders.

Massachusetts permitted slavery in narrow and very limited circumstances. But after independence, Massachusetts became the first state to completely abolish slavery, and by the time of the first national census in 1790, there was not a single slave in the state.

Content sourced from “The American Story the beginnings. By David Barton & Tim Barton”