In 1794, Dr. Rush declared:  “Domestic slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity.  It prostrates every benevolent and just principle of action in the human heart.  It is rebellion against the authority of a common Father.  It is a practical denial of the extent and efficacy of the death of a common Savior.  It is an usurpation of the prerogative of the great Sovereign of the universe, who has solemnly claimed an exclusive property in the souls of men.”

In 1795, Mr. Fiske, then an officer of Dartmouth College, afterward a Judge in Tennessee, said, in an oration published that year, speaking of slaves:  “I steadfastly maintain, that we must bring them to an equal standing, in point of privileges, with the whites!  They must enjoy all the rights belonging to human nature.”

When the petition on the abolition of the slave trade was under discussion in the Congress of ’89, Mr. Brown. of North Carolina, said, “The emancipation of the slaves will be effected in time; it ought to be a gradual business, but he hoped that Congress would not precipitate it to the great injury of the southern States.”  Mr. Hartley, of Pennsylvania said, in the sane debate, “He was not a little surprised to hear the cause of slavery advocated in that house.” WASHINGTON, in a letter to Sir John Sinclair, says, “There are, in Pennsylvania, laws for the gradual abolition of slavery which neither Maryland nor Virginia have at present, but which nothing is more certain than that they must have, and at a period NOT REMOTE.”  In 1782, Virginia passed her celebrated manumission act.  Within nine years from that time nearly eleven thousand slaves were voluntarily emancipated by their masters.  Judge Tucker’s “Dissertation on Slavery,” p. 72.  In 1787, Maryland passed an act legalizing manumission.  Mr. Dorsey, of Maryland, in a speech in Congress, December 27th, 1826, speaking of manumissions under that act, said, that “The progress of emancipation was astonishing, the State became crowded with a free black population.”

The celebrated William Pinkney, in a speech before the Maryland House of Delegates, in 1789, on the emancipation of slaves, said, “Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice, no master in the state has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a single hour.  I would as soon believe the incoherent tale of a schoolboy, who should tell me he had been frightened by a ghost, as that the grant of this permission (to emancipate) ought in any degree to alarm us.  Are we apprehensive that these men will become more dangerous by becoming freemen?  Are we alarmed, lest by being admitted into the enjoyment of civil rights, they will be inspired with a deadly enmity against the rights of others?  Strange, unaccountable paradox!  How much more rational would it be, to argue that the natural enemy of the privileges of a freeman, is he who is robbed of them himself!  Dishonorable to the species is the idea that they would ever prove injurious to our interests—­released from the shackles of slavery, by the justice of government and the bounty of individuals—­the want of fidelity and attachment would be next to impossible.”