Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated end.  Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever consistency might require.  How could they justly continue to hold men in bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the right of all men to be free?  Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the question.  Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation.  Indeed Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island in a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in Anglo-America was “without the express sanction of civil government,” and censured the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the maintenance of the wrongful institution.

As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming statehood for its community framed a constitution with a bill of rights asserting the inherent freedom of all men and attaching to it an express prohibition of slavery.  The opposition of New York delayed Vermont’s recognition until 1791 when she was admitted as a state with this provision unchanged.  Similar inherent-liberty clauses but without the expressed anti-slavery application were incorporated into the bills of rights adopted severally by Virginia in 1776, Massachusetts in 1780, and New Hampshire in 1784.  In the first of these the holding of slaves persisted undisturbed by this action; and in New Hampshire the custom died from the dearth of slaves rather than from the natural-rights clause.  In Massachusetts likewise it is plain from copious contemporary evidence that abolition was not intended by the framers of the bill of rights nor thought by the people or the officials to have been accomplished thereby.[5] One citizen, indeed, who wanted to keep his woman slave but to be rid of her child soon to be born, advertised in the Independent Chronicle of Boston at the close of 1780:  “A negro child, soon expected, of a good breed, may be owned by any person inclining to take it, and money with it."[6] The courts of the commonwealth, however, soon began to reflect anti-slavery sentiment, as Lord Mansfield had done in the preceding decade in England,[7] and to make use of the bill of rights to destroy the masters’ dominion.  The decisive case was the prosecution of Nathaniel Jennison of Worcester County for assault and imprisonment alleged to have been committed upon his absconded slave Quork Walker in the process of his recovery.  On the trial in 1783 the jury responded to a strong anti-slavery charge from Chief Justice Cushing by returning a verdict against Jennison, and the court fined him L50 and costs.

[Footnote 5:  G.H.  Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, pp. 181-209.]

[Footnote 6:  Ibid., p. 208.  So far as the present writer’s knowledge extends, this item is without parallel at any other time or place.]