e was too harsh, the social system
too simple, to engender a good economic employment of black labor. The
simple industrial methods of each New England homestead, described in
so many ways through these pages, make a natural barrier against an
alien social system including either black or copper-colored
dependents. The blacks soon dwindled in numbers, or dropped out from a
life too severe for any but the hardiest and firmest fibered
races."[293] When we see how during the constitutional convention of
1787 selfish economic interests led Massachusetts to enter into the
unholy alliance with the pro-slavery States of the far South to fix
upon another section of the country the nefarious slave-trade for
twenty years longer, we may perhaps conclude that it was after all
fortunate for the integrity of the Puritan conscience that slavery was
unprofitable as a domestic institution. The slave-trade ended in 1808
and during the years 1806, 1807 six hundred New England slavers
arrived at the port of Charleston alone.[294]

There seems to have been, on the whole, comparatively little express
legislation in the way of constitutional changes and few express acts
abolishing slavery in the North during this period.[295] The process
was a gradual one, proceeding by acts of manumission or gradual
abolition, the act of Pennsylvania in 1780 being typical. Slavery does
not appear to have ever been made illegal in Pennsylvania by express
law but died out in the natural course of events. Hence slaves were
found in this State well on toward the middle of the nineteenth
century.[296] This goes to show that the abolition of slavery and the
admission of the Negro to complete citizenship were the result of a
slow evolution of public sentiment. Moore even contends that slavery
was never formally abolished in Massachusetts until 1866 when it was
agreed on all hands that it was "considered as abolished."[297] Thus
the social mind, by a natural and normal development of democratic
ideals, arrived unconsciously at the point where it was impossible to
harmonize the status of the slave with the prevailing sentiments of
the community. The social mind was for this reason often far in
advance of the legal status of the Negro as determined by the laws
which represented earlier stages of opinion. A case in point is the
Massachusetts act of 1788, of which Moore says: "We doubt if anything
in human legislation can be found which comes nearer branding color as
a