Free Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich

visceral. A Vermont judge named Theophilus Harrington declared in a written opinion that he would accept nothing less than “a bill of sale from God Almighty” as proof of one man’s ownership of another. Before the Revolution, such intensely personal reactions were rare. By the last decade of the century, societies advocating emancipation existed in almost every state, North and South, and they attracted the support of many eminent figures. The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was led by Benjamin Franklin, who earlier in life had bought and sold slaves himself. The president of Yale University, Reverend Ezra Stiles, chaired the “Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Holden in Bondage,” which claimed to reflect the sentiments of a large majority of the state’s citizens. In New York, prominent men including Alexander Hamilton, Governor George Clinton, Mayor James Duane of New York City, future Chief Justice of the United States John Jay, and many Quakers, met at the Coffee House to organize the New York Manumission Society, naming Jay—who owned five slaves—its president. This was not unusual. In contrast to the abolitionists of a later day, such societies typically included slave owners and promoted only gradual emancipation, in the hopeful belief that masters could be persuaded to peacefully relinquish their human property.
    Around the end of the century, a spate of state legislation made it appear that the momentum of history was on the side of emancipation. Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia all prohibited the importing of African slaves, a trend encouraged by those who believedthat ending the transatlantic slave trade was virtually the same as terminating slavery itself. (South Carolina would reverse itself and import thirty-nine thousand more Africans before federal legislation finally put an end to the legal overseas slave trade, in 1808.) By the end of the century, most Northern states had enacted laws mandating gradual emancipation. State legislatures also revised their laws to make it easier for masters to free their slaves. Hundreds did so: between 1790 and 1810, Quaker and Methodist lobbying reduced Pennsylvania’s slave population by more than half, from 8,887 to 4,177. In Delaware, the number of free blacks would grow from 30 percent of the state’s black population to more than 75 percent between 1790 and 1810, and in Maryland from about 7 percent to more than 23 percent. Many who supported abolition in principle were less committed in actual practice, however. When one of George Washington’s slaves fled to New Hampshire, the president wrote to the local authorities asking for his return, gracefully explaining, “However well disposed I might be to gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of people (if the latter was in itself practicable) at this moment it would neither be politic nor just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference, and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow serv’ts, who, by their steady attachment, are far more deserving than herself of favor.” Washington did, however, free his slaves upon his death, in his will, in 1799; Jefferson never did. But to Jefferson and others like him, the end of slavery seemed to be only a matter of time. “The spirit of the master is abating,” he confidently asserted, “that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”
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    The handiwork of a Yankee tinkerer in the summer of 1792 changed everything. Eli Whitney was a genius of a type who would become familiar in the course of the next century, like Robert Fulton, John