A History of the American People

and their distribution spread during and immediately after the conflict. It is a melancholy fact
that the number of slaves in Virginia actually doubled between 1755 and the end of the war in

1782. That was mainly through natural increase and longevity-though this in itself testified to the
      healthy and in some ways comfortable conditions they enjoyed in the South: slaves lived there
      twice as long as in Africa and 50 percent longer than in South America. Despite this, most of the
      South emerged from the war impoverished as a result of military occupation, naval attacks, civil
      war between patriots and Tories, war with the Indians, and the flight of thousands of slaves to the
      British Army and freedom. Many Southerners felt the only way they could restore their fortunes
      was by the strict restoration of slavery and its rapid expansion. That is indeed what happened.
      Slave-owners, pushing westwards, as they could now do with increasing freedom, took their
      slaves with them into Kentucky and Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. So, even before the
      great cotton revolution, the slave South was expanding. With the demand for slaves rising, more
      were imported direct from Africa-100,000 in the years 1783-1807.
      On the other hand, the new climate of liberty and even equality undoubtedly caused many
      people, especially in the North, to look afresh at the extraordinary anomaly of holding men and
      women in perpetual slavery in a land which had just won its freedom. The movement to end
      slavery in some states began even before the crisis. In 1766 Boston instructed its representatives
      in the Assembly to move for a law to prohibit the importation and purchasing of slaves for the future,' and other towns in New England did the same. In 1771 a prohibitory law did pass, but Governor Hutchinson would not sign it. However, in December that year Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice, delivered in London his famous ruling that slavery wasso odious' an institution that
      nothing could be suffered to support it but positive law.' That made slavery unlawful in England under the common law, and since most American colonies adhered to the common law too, the legal drift was plainly against it. In 1773 Pennsylvania (under the influence of Quakers) and in 1774 Rhode Island and Connecticut passed laws prohibiting the slave trade. The General Articles of Association adopted by the First Continental Congress in 1774 had an anti-slave-trade clause which pledged the membersneither [to] import nor purchase any slave imported after the first
      day of December next,' after which time it was agreed wholly [to] discontinue the slave trade' andneither [to] be concerned in it ourselves' nor to hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.' Laws permitting manumission or removing existing restraints on it were passed by five states between 1786 and 1801, and these included slave states like Kentucky and Tennessee. Virginia had allowed manumission even before, in 1782, and 10,000 were freed almost immediately. Maryland followed in 1783 and a generation later over 20 percent of its blacks were free. During the Revolutionary War, and as a direct result of the climate it produced, all the Northern states except New York and New Jersey, following Britain's lead, took steps to outlaw slavery itself. In 1780 Pennsylvania enacted the first (gradual) emancipation law in American history and others followed, New Jersey being the last to do so before the Civil War. In addition to positive laws, the common law worked in favor of the slaves during these years, as it had in England. In 1781, in Brom and Bett v. John Ashley, Elizabeth Freeman, called Bett, argued that a phrase in the new 1780 Massachusetts constitution saying that all individuals wereborn free and
      equal' applied just as much to blacks as to whites. She won the case, and this and other decisions
      brought slavery in Massachusetts to an end. On top of all this, the constitutional struggle and the
      war gave birth to mass agitation in England, which soon spread to America and elsewhere, in the
      organized antislavery movement, led by Samuel Wilberforce and the `Clapham Sect.' They