Dismantling Slavery

As Pennsylvanians took part in fashioning a new nation, they ordained, through their legislators, that slavery would have no long-term existence in their state. The gradual abolition act of 1780 was a cautious document that protected the property rights of slaveholders and freed no slaves. But by prohibiting all slave importation and consigning children to servitude rather than perpetual slavery, the law and its amendments mandated that the institution would cease to expand and eventually expire. With this act the legislature implicitly adopted the abolitionist message that slavery was sin. The cancer of slavery, threatening the moral life of the body politic, would slowly atrophy rather than grow. In the heat of Revolution, the state took steps against slavery similar to those Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had taken during its reformation in the 1750s, when Friends first declared slavery unrighteous in the Epistle of Caution and Advice of 1754 and then forbade members from importing or buying blacks in 1758.

Body politic · Institution · Legislature · Political science · Politics · Property (philosophy) · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

• Free Health Care for the Poor

  Open Access•William Pencak, William Pencak William Pencak•The Pennsylvania Magazine of…•2012

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