and the Spanish in Florida, hundreds of Indians were shipped to the West
Indies and some to New England. Massachusetts in 1712 prohibited
such importation, as the Indians were "malicious, surly, and very
ungovernable," and she was followed to similar effect by Pennsylvania in
1712, by New Hampshire in 1714, and by Connecticut and Rhode Island in
1715.

[Footnote 1: Hurd, commenting on an act of 1649 declaring all imported
male servants to be tithables, speaks as follows (230): "_Tithables_
were persons assessed for a poll-tax, otherwise called the 'county
levies.' At first, only free white persons were tithable. The law of
1645 provided for a tax on property and tithable persons. By 1648
property was released and taxes levied only on the tithables, at
a specified poll-tax. Therefore by classing servants or slaves as
tithables, the law attributes to them legal personality, or a membership
in the social state inconsistent with the condition of a chattel or
property."]

If the Indian was destined to be a vanishing factor, the mulatto and the
free Negro most certainly were not. In spite of all the laws to prevent
it, the intermixture of the races increased, and manumission somehow
also increased. Sometimes a master in his will provided that several of
his slaves should be given their freedom. Occasionally a slave became
free by reason of what was regarded as an act of service to the
commonwealth, as in the case of one Will, slave belonging to Robert
Ruffin, of the county of Surry in Virginia, who in 1710 divulged a
conspiracy.[1] There is, moreover, on record a case of an indentured
Negro servant, John Geaween, who by his unusual thrift in the matter of
some hogs which he raised on the share system with his master, was able
as early as 1641 to purchase his own son from another master, to the