FULL TEXT Cambridge, 4th March, 1795.
Reverend Sir, Yesterday I was favored with your queries, and take the first opportunity to give you all the intelligence I am possessed of on the subject of the slave-trade.
1. I do not know when that trade begun among the citizens of this State, but acts were passed for the regulation of negroes, and their manumission, as early as 1703,
2. When a duty of £4 was exacted for every negro imported; for the payment whereof both master and vessel were answerable.† The whole duty was refunded on re-exportation. I have no certain information, but believe it never was carried on to any considerable extent but by way of Rhode Island.
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Cotton has sometimes been identified as the posthumous son of Anne Graves Cotton and William Cotton, the rector of Hungars Parish in Northampton County who died about 1640 or 1641, and as the John Cutten who with his wife Hannah Cutten, of that county, had a daughter in 1660 and a son in 1662, but extant records do not sustain either identification. The clergyman’s only known surviving child was a daughter, and it has been impossible to establish any relationship between John Cotton and any members of the several Eastern Shore families whose surnames in the local records were spelled Cotten, Cotton, Cutten, Cutton, Cutting, or Cuttinge. The earliest known reference to John Cotton in Virginia documents is in the will of William Evans, of York County, which John Cotton and Ann Cotton witnessed on November 4, 1657, when a son of the Northampton clergyman would have been no more than sixteen years old. It is more likely that Cotton and his wife were married adults alrea