lack of echoes leads them to hold their peace.

Although slavery, or perpetual servitude, was forbidden by the statute,
there were many slaves in New England, Indians and whites as well as
negroes. The first importation of the latter was in 1619, by the Dutch, it
is said. No slave could be kept in bondage more than ten years; it was
stipulated that they were to be brought from Africa, or elsewhere, only
with their own consent; and when, in 1638, it appeared that a cargo of
them had been forcibly introduced, they were sent back to Africa.
Prisoners of war were condemned to servitude; and, altogether, the feeling
on the subject of human bondage appears to have been both less and more
fastidious than it afterward became. There was no such indifference as was
shown in the Southern slave trade two centuries later, nor was there any
of the humanitarian fanaticism exhibited by the extreme Abolitionists of
the years before the Civil War. It may turn out that the attitude of the
Puritans had more common-sense in it than had either of the others.

The great event of 1643 was the natural outcome of the growth and
expansion of the previous time. It was the federation of the four colonies
of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut. Connecticut had
been settled in 1680, but it was not till six years afterward that a party
headed by the renowned Thomas Hooker, the "Son of Thunder," and one of the
most judicious men of that age, journeyed from Boston with the deliberate
purpose of creating another commonwealth in the desert. Connecticut did
not offer assurances of a peaceful settlement; the Indians were numerous
there, and not well-disposed; and in the south, the Dutch of New Amsterdam
were complaining of an infringement of boundaries. These ominous
conditions came to a head in the Pequot war; after which peace reigned for
many years. A constitution of the most liberal kind was created by the
settlers, some of the articles of which led to a correspondence between