The remaining New England states–New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island–adopted gradual emancipation schemes modeled on Pennsylvania’s statute in the mid-1780s, and the United States Congress abolished slavery in future states north of the Ohio River in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Massachusetts was the first to abolish slavery outright, doing so by judicial decree in 1783. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery when it adopted a statute that provided for the freedom of every slave born after its enactment (once that individual reached the age of majority). In 1776, slavery existed in all of the thirteen colonies (though apparently not in Vermont, which was then officially part of New York). Ultimately, the fear on the part of the white population of the slave states that the free states were no longer committed to the preservation of their “peculiar institution” led to the dismemberment of the Union and a bloody four-year war to reassemble it.įor the first portion of the antebellum period, the free-state versus slave-state description was more general than precise, as African slavery was initially a continental phenomenon. However, as Professor Idleman’s recent post on Alabama’s 1819 admission to the Union noted, an even more fundamental distinction in pre-Civil War America was the divide between “slave” states and “free” states. ![]() In recent years, commentators have talked incessantly about the United States being divided between “red” states and “blue” states.
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