Waitstill Winthrop wrote thus of one suicidal Moor to Fitz John Winthrop in 1682.

William Pyncheon had also a slave who was "assiduous in hangeing." To be sold to Virginia was a standard threat to New England slaves, as work in Southern tobacco-fields was thought much more severe than in northern cornfields.

Slavery lingered in New England until after Revolutionary days. It is said that its death blow was dealt in Worcester, Mass., in 1783, when a citizen was tried for assaulting and beating his negro servant. The defence was that the black man was a slave, and the beating was but necessary restraint and correction. The master was found guilty in the Worcester County Court and fined forty shillings.

Though there were few slaves who were willing to leave life in order to be free, many were willing to try to leave their masters. The early New England newspapers abound in advertisements of runaway blacks-in gay attire, with fiddles and guns, bewigged and silk-stockinged, well dressed if not well treated.

I know no records that show more fully, though wholly unconsciously, the vast simplicity of our ancestors than these advertisements of runaway servants. Fancy giving as a possible means of identification of any human being such an item of descriptions as this: "When he gets drunk or drinks much he is red in the face"—as if that were an extraordinary or peculiar trait in any drunken man! Another runaway is said to have had "sometimes a sly look in his eye and wears the button of his hat in front;" another to have been a liar; another to have been "somewhat impudent if crossed, and has a leering look under his eyes." Others were "awkward in manners," "somewhat morose in countenance," "had long finger-nails," "had one or two pimples on the face," "is too fond of talking." It seems almost incredible that intelligent persons should have given such childish and easily obliterated or varied particulars of description.