[Footnote 7:  The case of James Somerset on habeas corpus, in Howell’s State Trials, XX, Sec.548.]

This action prompted the negroes generally to leave their masters, though some were deterred “on account of their age and infirmities, or because they did not know how to provide for themselves, or for some pecuniary consideration."[8] The former slaveholders now felt a double grievance:  they were deprived of their able-bodied negroes but were not relieved of the legal obligation to support such others as remained on their hands.  Petitions for their relief were considered by the legislature but never acted upon.  The legal situation continued vague, for although an act of 1788 forbade citizens to trade in slaves and another penalized the sojourn for more than two months in Massachusetts of negroes from other states,[9] no legislation defined the status of colored residents.  In the federal census of 1790, however, this was the only state in which no slaves were listed.

[Footnote 8:  Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII, 386.]

[Footnote 9:  Moore, pp. 227-229.]

Racial antipathy and class antagonism among the whites appear to have contributed to this result.  John Adams wrote in 1795, with some exaggeration and incoherence:  “Argument might have [had] some weight in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of labouring white people, who would no longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury ...  If the gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps ...  The common white people, or rather the labouring people, were the cause of rendering negroes unprofitable servants.  Their scoffs and insults, their continual insinuations, filled the negroes with discontent, made them lazy, idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters, to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of economy."[10]

[Footnote 10:  Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII, 402.]

Slavery in the rest of the Northern states was as a rule not abolished, but rather put in process of gradual extinction by legislation of a peculiar sort enacted in response to agitations characteristic of the times.  Pennsylvania set the pattern in an act of 1780 providing that all children born thereafter of slave mothers in the state were to be the servants of their mothers’ owners until reaching twenty-eight years of age, and then to become free.  Connecticut followed in 1784 with an act of similar purport but with a specification of twenty-five years, afterward reduced to twenty-one, as the age for freedom; and in 1840 she abolished her remnant of slavery outright.  In Rhode Island an act of the same year, 1784, enacted that the children thereafter born of slave mothers were to be free at the ages of twenty-one for males