As to conduct, each
individual, each neighborhood enjoyed the freedom of a large, roomy
country. Even within state lines there was liberty enough. No keen sense
of responsibility for a uniform state policy existed. It was therefore
not difficult for those who were growing wealthy by the use of imported
negroes to maintain their privileges in the State.

If the sense of active responsibility was wanting within the separate
States, much more was this true of the citizens of different States.
Slavery was regarded as strictly a domestic institution. Families bought
and owned slaves as a matter of individual preference. None of the
original colonies or States adopted slavery by law. The citizens of the
various colonies became slaveholders simply because there was no law
against it. * The abolition of slavery was at first an individual matter
or a church or a state policy. When the Constitution was formulated, the
separate States had been accustomed to regard themselves as possessed
of sovereign powers; hence there was no occasion for the citizens of
one State to have a sense of responsibility on account of the
domestic institutions of other States. The consciousness of national
responsibility was of slow growth, and the conditions did not then
exist which favored a general crusade against slavery or a prolonged
acrimonious debate on the subject, such as arose forty years later.

* In the case of Georgia there was a prohibitory law, which
was disregarded.

In many of the States, however, there were organized abolition
societies, whose object was to promote the cause of emancipation already
in progress and to protect the rights of free negroes. The Friends, or
Quakers, were especially active in the promotion of a propaganda for
universal emancipation. A petition which was presented to the first
Congress in February, 1790, with the signature of Benjamin Franklin
as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, contained this
concluding paragraph:

"From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally, and is still, the
birthright of all men, and influenced by the strong ties of humanity
and the principles of their institutions, your memorialists conceive
themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bonds
of slavery, and to promote the general enjoyment of the blessings of
freedom. Under these impressions they earnestly entreat your attention
to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased