Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The 1780 Gradual Abolition Act was part of the social and political revolution associated with the rebellion that led to American independence. Emancipation dovetailed with the stated claims of the American Revolutionaries, and structurally the 1780 act resembles the Declaration of Independence. Each has a two-paragraph preamble, which sets out the document's purpose. The Declaration is not a statute but rather a series of statements justifying independence. The 1780 act, as a statute, becomes less dramatic after the preamble, because it must explain how emancipation is to work.

In addition to this structural resemblance to the Declaration of Independence, the statute can be seen as a legislative implementation of the Declaration. That document asserts, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Clearly, slavery was incompatible with these ideals.

Section 1

The Pennsylvania legislature surely understood the relationship of slavery to the Declaration, thus the author notes that slavery “deprived” slaves “of the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to.” Beyond this, the preamble ignores the general assertions of liberty in the Declaration, and it instead focuses on the specific harms of slavery and the relationship of slavery to the Revolution. Equally intriguing is the deistic approach to this issue.

The preamble (Section 1) begins by noting the difficulties of the Revolution. In comparison with subsequent wars—especially the U.S. Civil War and the massive conflicts of the twentieth century—the approximately 4,500 military deaths in the Revolution seem relatively small in number. But for the emerging American states these were painful losses that affected communities across the new nation. The Revolution was costly in treasure and blood, and the people of Pennsylvania understood that. By 1780 they also knew that even though the war was not over, it was likely that sooner or later they would gain independence. For five years they had held off the greatest military power in the world. The horrible and bloody struggle for independence leads to another parallel with the Declaration.

In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson avoided any reference to a particular faith or even to the generally shared notions of what today might be called a Judeo-Christian tradition or shared views of the Bible. Thus, Jefferson used phrases like “their creator” and “nature's God” when making claims to liberty based on natural law. Similarly, the authors of the 1780 act marveled at the accomplishment of independence and, while not specifying any particular faith or religion, ascribed their success to Divine Providence. The opening sentence of the preamble to the statute reflects the secular religiosity of the age. The Pennsylvania legislators came from a variety of religious backgrounds and had no interest in asserting allegiance to a particular faith or sect. At the same time, they understood a sense of Divine Providence. Thus, the statute's preamble later refers to the “Almighty Hand” in explaining the differences among the races. Faith, but not denomination, church, or sect, is important to the legislators, but only as it reflects and supports their larger social goal.

This goal, of course, is ending slavery. The statute's authors assert they have no more right to own slaves than England has a right to rule them. This is surely the logic of the Revolution and a logic that had been discussed in Pennsylvania and elsewhere since the early 1770s. Just as the Americans in 1776 (in the Declaration of Independence) felt they had to explain to the world why they were rebelling against England, so too did the Pennsylvania legislators have to explain why they were taking the radical step of ending slavery. The natural law arguments in the preamble of the Declaration (“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”) were not sufficient to convince the world or even a significant number of Americans that a rebellion was necessary. Thus the Congress, in 1776, asserted in the Declaration that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” This led to a long list of reasons for the rebellion that constituted the bulk of the Declaration of Independence.

While not explicitly stating it the way the Declaration does, the Pennsylvania statute follows the same logic. Having asserted the moral argument for emancipation, the legislators turned to defusing arguments against it while elaborating the reasons for the law. First the 1780 preamble explains that there is a moral obligation to bring freedom to slaves, just as the colonists are being delivered from English rule. However, many Americans doubted that blacks were like white people and even deserved freedom. The Pennsylvania legislature dismissed this, using an argument that appealed to both religion and science: “It is not for us to enquire why, in the creation of mankind, the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion. It is sufficient to know that all are the work of an Almighty Hand.”

The legislature simply refused to be drawn into a debate over race. All men were created by “the Almighty Hand” and thus no person had a right to question the reasons why some had a different skin color. Indeed, because the “Almighty Hand” had delivered Pennsylvania from British tyranny, the legislature felt an obligation to help deliver others from bondage.

Section 2

Having dealt with the race issue, the legislators reminded readers about the horrors of slavery. Section 2 of the act, which is a second preamble, sets out what became one of the most powerful arguments against slavery: It leads to “an unnatural separation and sale of husband and wife from each other and from their children; an injury, the greatness of which can only be conceived by supposing that we were in the same unhappy case.” Few people in Pennsylvania, at least, could argue against the idea that separating families was deeply immoral. The last part of this sentence is also a blow against racial thinking. By suggesting that white Pennsylvanians could understand the suffering of slaves only by “supposing that we were in the same unhappy case,” the legislators in effect asked whites to imagine they were black slaves.

Having asserted why the act was proper, the legislature then turned to the far more difficult task of setting out how slavery in the state should be terminated. This was not easy. Even as they condemned slaveholding, the legislators knew they could not simply take property away from those who owned it. If the Revolution was about liberty, it was also about property. Indeed, the key slogan of the period before the Revolution, “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” underscored the extent to which this was a revolution of middle-class property owners who believed that liberty and property went hand in hand.

Section 3

There was no perfect answer to the problem of how to give freedom to one person without taking property away from someone else. In the end, the Pennsylvania legislature solved the problem by not, in fact, freeing anyone while still ensuring a relatively speedy end to all slavery in the state. The legislature provided that all slaves living in the state would remain slaves for the rest of their lives or for as long as their masters chose to keep them in bondage. For all the rhetoric of liberty in the preamble, no one actually gained his or her freedom under the law. Therefore no one in the state could complain that he or she had lost property under the law.

What, then, did the law accomplish? The key provision is Section 3 of the act, which asserts that every child born in Pennsylvania after the passage of the act, even if the child of slave woman, would be born free. Since the status of slavery passed through the mother, the ultimate result was obvious. As the existing slaves died off there would be no new slaves to replace them. Quite literally, slavery would soon die out in Pennsylvania. This provision is reinforced by Section 10 of the law, which prohibits anyone from bringing slaves into the state except on temporary visits.

Section 5

Section 5 of the law requires that all slaveholders register each slave with a local court, giving the slave's name, age, and gender. Each registration would be accompanied by a two-dollar fee—not a large sum, but enough money to make some master try to avoid paying it. Any blacks not registered under this provision by November 1, 1780, were considered free people. The Pennsylvania courts interpreted these rules strictly. In Wilson v. Belinda (1817) the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the slave woman Belinda, then about forty years old, was free because in 1780 her master had neglected to list her gender on the registration form. The master clearly believed the name Belinda could indicate only a female, but the court disagreed. The registration had to be accurate to prevent fraud, and a strict interpretation of the law favored freedom. In Respublica v. Blackmore (1797) the court ruled that slaves owned by citizens of Pennsylvania could not be registered if they were not living in Pennsylvania at the time the act went into effect. In this case Blackmore lost her slaves because she and her husband had not brought them into the state before the law went into effect; merely owning them in Maryland was not sufficient.

The registration process, the generally hostile climate toward slavery in the state, and the dislocations of the Revolution clearly had an effect on slaveholding. In 1765, a decade before the Revolution began, there were about fourteen hundred slaves in Philadelphia and one hundred free blacks out of a total population of twenty-four hundred. By 1790 Philadelphia had about 28,500 people, but fewer than four hundred of them were slaves, and about two thousand were free blacks. In the rest of the state the process of emancipation was slower but still significant. Before the Revolution almost all of the blacks in Pennsylvania were slaves. By 1790 there were more than 6,500 free blacks in the state and just 3,700 slaves. A decade later there were just seventeen hundred slaves and more than fourteen thousand free blacks in the state. By 1820 there were only about two hundred slaves in the state but more than thirty thousand free blacks. In forty years slavery in Pennsylvania had all but disappeared.

Section 4 and Sections 6 to 14

The ending of slavery was not, however, a simple factor of letting slavery die out. The legislators understood that slavery was a complex institution, with many human issues in what was a very inhumane system. The status of the children of slaves posed a serious problem for the gradual abolition process. Under slavery, masters had a huge financial interest in the children of their slave women. Every child born to a slave woman was a financial asset. The child of a slave woman born under a gradual abolition scheme became a financial liability. The child would be born free, and the master, as the owner of the mother, would have to pay to raise the child. Furthermore, general society would face a growing population of children of former slaves who would have few skills and might become burdens on the entire society.

The legislators understood that if the children of slaves were not trained and educated for freedom they would not succeed in a free society. To solve this problem, the legislature used two tactics. First the law declares that the children of slave women, while born free, would be subject to an indenture until age twenty-eight. This would enable the master to recover the full cost of raising such children and actually give the masters a decent profit on each child. Modern economists have estimated that masters were handsomely compensated for raising the children of slaves if they kept them as servants until age twenty-eight. During this indenture period, masters were required to educate their black servants and prepare them for freedom. There was a strong incentive for doing so, because, under Section 6 of the law, masters were financially responsible for any blacks who could not take care of themselves. However, if masters freed their servants before age twenty-eight, they were not responsible for them. This incentive, combined with the growing public hostility toward slavery, probably accounts for the steep decline of slavery and bondage in Philadelphia. However, in the rural areas of the state, especially along the Maryland and Virginia border, slaveholding lingered into the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

The act also allows free blacks, including those indentured until age twenty-eight, to testify against their masters or any other white person. This was an enormously important step in guaranteeing equal justice for blacks in the state. As indentured servants, the children of slave women had a number of legal rights and protections, and this provision of the law allowed them to vindicate those rights. This provision also served as a warning to masters not to abuse or mistreat the children of their female slaves, who would one day be free.

When Pennsylvania passed its abolition act, slavery was legal in all of the thirteen new states. Pennsylvania's goal was not to make war with its neighbors. Thus the 1780 act contains a number of provisions to protect the interests of out-of-state slaveholders, such as allowing visitors to bring slaves into the state for up to six months. This provision led to controversies, as opponents of slavery tried to manipulate the law to free slaves who had not yet been in the state for six months. Just as the courts were strict on the registration procedures, so too were they strict on this provision. The courts rejected the argument that the six months could be cumulative, asserting that it had to be one continuous six-month period, unless there was a fraudulent attempt to evade the law by moving a slave back and forth across the border on a regular basis. Similarly, when abolitionists claimed that six lunar months would satisfy the law, the court summarily rejected the freedom suit. In another attempt to ensure sectional harmony, the 1780 act allows masters to recover runaway slaves who escaped into Pennsylvania. Seven years before the Constitutional Convention provided for the return of fugitive slaves, Pennsylvania did so.

The act also allows members of Congress and other government officials, as well as foreign ambassadors, to keep slaves indefinitely in the state. At the time, Philadelphia was the nation's capital, and this rule was absolutely necessary for national harmony. Even after the capital had moved to Washington, the courts held that congressmen could move slaves into the state for indefinite periods of time. During the War of 1812, Langdon Cheves, a congressman from South Carolina, stayed in Philadelphia with his slaves for more than six months, and the state supreme court upheld his right to do so. However, when Pierce Butler, another southerner, stayed in the state after his term expired, he lost his slave.