“Your memorialists, fully believing that slavery is not only an odious degradation, but an outrageous violation of one of the most essential rights of human nature, and utterly repugnant to the precepts of the gospel, lament that a practice so inconsistent with true policy and the inalienable rights of men, should subsist in so enlightened an age, and among a people professing, that all mankind are, by nature, equally entitled to freedom.”

About the same time a Society was formed in New Jersey.  It had an acting committee of five members in each county in the State.  The following is an extract from the preamble to its constitution: 

“It is our boast, that we live under a government wherein life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are recognized as the universal rights of men; and whilst we are anxious to preserve these rights to ourselves, and transmit them inviolate, to our posterity, we abhor that inconsistent, illiberal, and interested policy, which withholds those rights from an unfortunate and degraded class of our fellow creatures.”

Among other distinguished individuals who were efficient officers of these Abolition Societies, and delegates from their respective state societies, at the annual meetings of the American convention for promoting the abolition of slavery, were Hon. Uriah Tracy, United States’ Senator, from Connecticut; Hon. Zephaniah Swift, Chief Justice of the same State; Hon. Cesar A. Rodney, Attorney General of the United States; Hon. James A. Bayard, United States’ Senator, from Delaware; Governor Bloomfield, of New-Jersey; Hon. Wm. Rawle, the late venerable head of the Philadelphia bar; Dr. Caspar Wistar, of Philadelphia; Messrs. Foster and Tillinghast, of Rhode Island; Messrs. Ridgely, Buchanan, and Wilkinson, of Maryland; and Messrs. Pleasants, McLean, and Anthony, of Virginia.

In July, 1787, the old Congress passed the celebrated ordinance abolishing slavery in the northwestern territory, and declaring that it should never thereafter exist there.  This ordinance was passed while the convention that formed the United States’ constitution was in session.  At the first session of Congress under the constitution, this ordinance was ratified by a special act.  Washington, fresh from the discussions of the convention, in which more than forty days had been spent in adjusting the question of slavery, gave it his approval. The act passed with only one dissenting voice, (that of Mr. Yates, of New York,) the South equally with the North avowing the fitness and expediency of the measure on general considerations, and indicating thus early the line of national policy, to be pursued by the United States’ Government on the subject of slavery.