The children born of Indian slave mothers appear generally to have been liberated, for as willingly would a man nurse a viper in his bosom as keep an aggrieved and able-bodied redskin in his household.

But as to negro children, although they were valued so slightly that occasionally it is said they were given to any one who would take them, there can be no reasonable doubt that by force of custom they were the property of the owners of their mothers.[20] [Footnote 18: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XXVIII, 337.] [Footnote 19: Moore, _Slavery in Massachusetts_, pp.

52-55.] [Footnote 20: _Ibid_., pp.

20-27.] The New Englanders were "a plain people struggling for existence in a poor wilderness....

Their lives were to the last degree matter of fact, realistic, hard." [21] Shrewd in consequence of their poverty, self-righteous in consequence of their religion, they took their slave-trading and their slaveholding as part of their day's work and as part of God's goodness to His elect.