had come into the
Union, declared very positively against the system. In 1782 the old
Virginia statute forbidding emancipation except for meritorious services
was repealed. The repeal was in force ten years, and in this time
manumissions were numerous. Maryland soon afterwards passed acts similar
to those in Virginia prohibiting the further introduction of slaves and
removing restraints on emancipation, and New York and New Jersey also
prohibited the further introduction of slaves from Africa or from other
states. In 1780, in spite of considerable opposition because of the
course of the war, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act forbidding
the further introduction of slaves and giving freedom to all persons
thereafter born in the state. Similar provisions were enacted in
Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. Meanwhile Massachusetts was much
agitated, and beginning in 1766 there were before the courts several
cases in which Negroes sued for their freedom.[1] Their general argument
was that the royal charter declared that all persons residing in the
province were to be as free as the king's subjects in Great Britain,
that by Magna Carta no subject could be deprived of liberty except by
the judgment of his peers, and that any laws that may have been passed
in the province to mitigate or regulate the evil of slavery did not
authorize it. Sometimes the decisions were favorable, but at the
beginning of the Revolution Massachusetts still recognized the system
by the decision that no slave could be enlisted in the army. In 1777,
however, some slaves brought from Jamaica were ordered to be set at
liberty, and it was finally decided in 1783 that the declaration in the
Massachusetts Bill of Rights to the effect that "all men are born
free and equal" prohibited slavery. In this same year New Hampshire
incorporated in her constitution a prohibitive article. By the time the
convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States
met in Philadelphia in 1787, two of the original thirteen states
(Massachusetts and New Hampshire) had positively prohibited slavery, and
in three others (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) gradual
abolition was in progress.

[Footnote 1: See Williams: _History of the Negro Race in America_, I,
228-236.]

The next decade was largely one of the settlement of new territory, and
by its close the pendulum seemed to have swung decidedly backward. In
1799, however, after much effort and de