be necessary to show more scruple in governing him, the conscience of each planter as well as the force of public opinion requiring him to furnish his slave with more palatable food and more comfortable lodgings, and to inflict punishments with less severity under the circumstances. It was even supposed by some that the act of baptizing the negro destroyed the right of his owner to his service, and that he was thereafter entitled to all the privileges of an English citizen.
Godwyn declares that the same general views as to the impropriety of Christianizing slaves prevailed in Virginia, and that their conversion was thought to be so idle and unmeaning, that the reputation for good sense of the man who suggested it was seriously impaired. This statement was made by Godwyn in 1681, and seems to have exaggerated the state of feeling in the Colony with reference to the moral elevation of the negroes held there in bondage. It is a fact worthy of note that one of the two African children included in the muster of 1624-25, William, the son of Anthony and Isabel, two negroes who belonged to Captain Tucker, was entered in the general list as having received baptism.[1] This privilege was conferred over half a century before Godwyn published his treatise. A still more interesting case occurred in 1611. John Grawere, who is represented as an African servant of William Evans, was the father of a child by a slave who belonged to Robert Sheppard. He expressed great anxiety that this child should be baptized, and afterwards brought up in the knowledge of religion as taught in the church of England. Being permitted by his master to keep a number of hogs, Grawere was able to accumulate from his annual sales a small fund with which he purchased the freedom of his offspring. The court declared that the disposition
- ↑ Hotten’s Original List of Emigrants, 1600-1700, p. 244.
