President Edwards, the younger, said, in a sermon preached before the Connecticut Abolition Society, Sept. 15, 1791:  “Thirty years ago, scarcely a man in this country thought either the slave trade or the slavery of negroes to be wrong; but now how many and able advocates in private life, in our legislatures, in Congress, have appeared, and have openly and irrefragably pleaded the rights of humanity in this as well as other instances?  And if we judge of the future by the past, within fifty years from this time, it will be as shameful for a man to hold a negro slave, as to be guilty of common robbery or theft.”

In 1794, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church adopted its “Scripture proofs,” notes, and comments.  Among these was the following: 

“1 Tim. i. 10.  The law is made for manstealers.  This crime among the Jews exposed the perpetrators of it to capital punishment.  Exodus xxi. 16.  And the apostle here classes them with sinners of the first rank.  The word he uses, in its original import comprehends all who are concerned in bringing any of the human race into slavery, or in retaining them in it. Stealers of men are all those who bring off slaves or freemen, and keep, sell, or buy them.”

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 Saviour.  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 same 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.”