Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807

Significance: On July 2, 1777, Vermont became the first of eight northeastern states to end slavery. On March 2, 1807, a federal bill outlawed the slave trade but failed to condemn slavery outright, reflecting the young nation’s moral ambiguity.

On July 2, 1777, Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery fully. Its 1777 Constitution outlawed “holding anyone by law to serve any person” as a servant, slave, or apprentice after he or she reached twenty-one years of age. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law gradually abolishing slavery. An attempt five years earlier had failed, partly because opponents argued that abolishing slavery would antagonize the South, where slavery was a deeply embedded institution, and break up the Union during the war for independence from England. Under the Pennsylvania law, any African American not registered as a slave by the end of the year would be considered free; however, children born slaves in 1780 would remain in service to their owners until they were twenty-eight years of age to compensate the owners for the cost of raising them. The law also enabled blacks to testify against whites in courts and legalized interracial marriage.

In Massachusetts, opponents defeated a gradual emancipation bill in 1777, and three years later, voters rejected a constitution that declared all men free and equal and provided voting rights for free blacks. In 1781, however, a slave named Quork Walker sued for his freedom in a state court because his owner had severely abused him. The trial judge, Caleb Cushing, instructed the jury that the idea of slavery conflicted with state law, so Walker was ordered freed. Although the legislature refused to act, by 1790, slavery no longer existed in Massachusetts because of similar court actions in dozens of other cases.

During the American Revolution, the New Hampshire legislature gave freedom to any of the state’s six hundred slaves who volunteered for the militia. Other slaves gained their liberty by running away and joining the British military. Thus, when the state’s 1783 constitution declared all men equal and independent from birth, only fifty slaves remained in the state. Although slavery was never abolished legally, slave property was removed from tax roles in 1789 and eleven years later, only eight slaves remained in the state.

In 1783, Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation bill after six Quakers petitioned the state assembly for immediate liberation for all human beings kept as property. The bill stipulated that all slave children born after March 1 would be apprentices; girls became free at age eighteen, boys at age twenty-one. After slaves were freed, their masters were required to post bonds with the state guaranteeing that the former slaves would never require public assistance.

Connecticut, the New England state with the largest population of African Americans, granted freedom to slaves who fought against England but three times—in 1777, 1779, and 1780—rejected gradual emancipation. In 1784, however, the legislature declared that all adult slaves would be free by the end of the year and that black and mulatto (mixed-race) children would become free at twenty-five years of age. The state also passed discriminatory laws forbidding free blacks to vote, serve on juries, or marry whites.

Both New York and New Jersey freed African Americans who served in the army, but these states were slow to enact antislavery laws. New York’s legislature rejected gradual emancipation in 1777. Eight years later, a freedom bill supported by the New York Manumission Society, whose membership included Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr, was defeated. In 1785, New York prohibited the sale and importation of slaves and allowed masters to manumit (free) their slaves, but only if they guaranteed that they would not require public assistance. The next year, New Jersey passed similar laws. In 1788, New York declared that slaves would no longer be judged or punished under standards different from those used to judge whites. Although slave auctions ended in both states by 1790, New York did not pass an emancipation bill until 1799. The bill allowed owners to free their slaves regardless of age or condition but permitted them to keep boys until twenty-eight years of age and girls until the age of twenty-five. In 1804, New Jersey became the last of the original Northern states to end slavery legally. Neither state allowed free African Americans the right to vote.

The 1807 Bill

Although these northeastern states had ended slavery, the invention in 1793 of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney had made cotton a more profitable crop by greatly increasing the speed at which seeds could be separated from the picked cotton, thus increasing plantation owners’ desire for more cotton pickers. It has been estimated that no fewer than twenty thousand new slaves were imported in Georgia and South Carolina in 1803.

In December, 1805, Senator Stephen R. Bradley of Vermont introduced legislation that would prohibit the slave trade beginning in 1808, but the bill was stalled for some months. A similar bill was offered in the House of Representatives by Barnabas Bidwell of Massachusetts, again to no effect. Later that year, President Thomas Jefferson urged passage of the bill in his message to Congress. On March 2, 1807, Congress enacted a law specifying a twenty-thousand-dollar fine and forfeiture of ship and cargo for importing slaves, as well as other penalties for acts ranging from equipping a slave ship to knowingly buying an imported slave. The disposition of illegally imported slaves was left to the states, however. Enforcement of the law was delegated first to the secretary of the treasury and later to the secretary of the navy.

Antislavery forces rejoiced in this new and symbolically important law, but enforcement proved weak. An exhaustive census of the slave trade estimated that 1.9 million slaves were imported illegally between 1811 and 1870; more recent research has called that estimate low. Although more than one hundred slave vessels were seized and their officers arrested in the years between 1837 and 1862, and nearly as many cases were prosecuted, convictions were difficult to obtain, and judges often gave light sentences. Another weakness of the 1807 law was that it permitted the continuation of slave traffic between states. An owner could take his slaves into another slave state or, according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, into a western territory south of 36°30′.

Bibliography

Burin, Eric. "The Slave Trade Act of 1819: A New Look at Colonization and the Politics of Slavery." American Nineteenth Century History 13.1 (2012): 1–14. Print.

Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Frost, J. William. "Quaker Antislavery: From Dissidence to Sense of the Meeting." Quaker History 101.1 (2012): 12–33. Print.

Martinez, Jenny S. "Human Rights and History." Harv. L. Rev. F. 126 (2012): 221. Print.

Roberts, Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.