e children in such cases to be supported at the common
charge.... The manumission and emancipation acts were naturally
followed, as in the case of the constitutional provision in Vermont,
by the attempts of some of the slave-owners to dispose of their
property outside the State. Amendments to the laws were found
necessary, and the Abolition Societies found plenty of occasion for
their exertions in protecting free blacks from seizure and illegal
sale and in looking after the execution and amendment of the laws.
The process of gradual emancipation was also unsatisfactory on
account of the length of time it would require, and in Pennsylvania
and Connecticut attempts were made to obtain acts for immediate
emancipation.

5. _Beginning of Racial Consciousness_

Of supreme importance in this momentous period, more important perhaps
in its ultimate effect than even the work of the Abolition Societies,
was what the Negro was doing for himself. In the era of the Revolution
began that racial consciousness on which almost all later effort for
social betterment has been based.

By 1700 the only cooeperative effort on the part of the Negro was such as
that in the isolated society to which Cotton Mather gave rules, or in a
spasmodic insurrection, or a rather crude development of native African
worship. As yet there was no genuine basis of racial self-respect. In
one way or another, however, in the eighteenth century the idea of
association developed, and especially in Boston about the time of the
Revolution Negroes began definitely to work together; thus they assisted
individuals in test cases in the courts, and when James Swan in his
_Dissuasion from the Slave Trade_ made such a statement as that "no
country can be called free where there is one slave," it was "at the
earnest desire of the Negroes in Boston" that the revised edition of the
pamphlet was published.

From the very beginning the Christian Church was the race's foremost
form of social organization. It was but natural that the first
distinctively Negro churches should belong to the democratic Baptist
denomination. There has been much discussion as to which was the very
first Negro Baptist church, and good claims have been put forth by the
Harrison Street Baptist Church of Petersburg, Va., and for a church
in Williamsburg, Va., organization in each case going back to 1776.
A student of the subject, however, has shown that th