Williamsburg April 11th: 1795.
Sir,
Be pleased to accept my best Acknowledge=
=ments for your several favors of
Febry 15. &
March 18th. and
more especially for the very obliging attention you have
paid to my request, in transmitting Copies of my Queries
to your friends, and the trouble you have taken in answering
the first of them. -- I anticipate (from the manner in --
which you have answered the first) an answer to the second,
that the African trade hath never obtained a place in your
State: happy would it have been for us had that horrid
traffic never found its way hither: our historian Mr. Stith
[Note in left margin: Stith p.182, Beverley p.35 ]
mentions the arrival of a Dutch-ship here with twenty Slaves
in the year 1620. This is the only notice of the subject in
his Book. -- Beverley's, & Sir William Keith's histories
are so scarce that I never saw but one Copy of the former,
and that many years ago, & not one of the latter. Our
laws contain the only registers on the subject that are now to be
met with. -- From these, however, it appears, as I mentioned
in my former Letter, that the Legislature of
Virginia began
to discountenance the Importation of Slaves so long ago as
the year 1699. -- but the African Company had too much
interest with the Government in
England, for the wishes of
the Colonial legislature to prevail.
The Communication between
Boston &
Norfolk
being perhaps more frequent, than with either
Richmond
or
Petersburg, your favors addressed to the Care of Mr.
conveyance to this place.
Permit me, Sir, as a trifling Acknowledgment of
your favors to request your Acceptance of three small
pamphlets, which have probably never before --
crossed the
Hudson-river: they are sent by the Mail.
Your obliged hbl servt.