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.”

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 bandage for a single hour...  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!”

Hon. James Campbell, in an address before the Pennsylvania Society of Cincinnati, July 4, 1787, said, “Our separation from Great Britain has extended the empire of humanity.  The time is not far distant when our sister states, in imitation of our example, shall turn their vassals into freemen.”  The Convention that formed the United States’ constitution being then in session, attended on the delivery of this oration with General Washington at their head.

A Baltimore paper of September 8th, 1780, contains the following notice of Major General Gates:  “A few days ago passed through this town the Hon. General Gates and lady.  The General, previous to leaving Virginia, summoned his numerous family of slaves about him, and amidst their tears of affection and gratitude, gave them their FREEDOM.”