and eighteen for females, and that these children were meanwhile to be supported and instructed at public expense; but an amendment of the following year transferred to the mothers’ owners the burden of supporting the children, and ignored the matter of their education.  New York lagged until 1799, and then provided freedom for the after-born only at twenty-eight and twenty-five years for males and females respectively; but a further act of 1817 set the Fourth of July in 1827 as a time for the emancipation for all remaining slaves in the state.  New Jersey fell into line last of all by an act of 1804 giving freedom to the after-born at the ages of twenty-five for males and twenty-one for females; and in 1846 she converted the surviving slaves nominally into apprentices but without materially changing their condition.  Supplementary legislation here and there in these states bestowed freedom upon slaves in military service, restrained the import and export of slaves, and forbade the citizens to ply the slave trade by land or sea.[11]

[Footnote 11:  E.R.  Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, pp. 77-85; B.C.  Steiner, Slavery in Connecticut, pp. 30-32; Rhode Island Colonial Records, X, 132, 133; A.J.  Northrup, “Slavery in New York,” in the New York State Library Report for 1900, pp. 286-298; H.S.  Cooley, “Slavery in New Jersey” (Johns Hopkins University Studies, XIV, nos. 9, 10), pp. 47-50; F.B.  Lee, New Jersey as a Colony and as a State (New York, 1912), IV, 25-48.]

Thus from Pennsylvania eastward the riddance of slavery was procured or put in train, generally by the device of emancipating the post nati; and in consequence the slave population in that quarter dwindled before the middle of the nineteenth century to a negligible residue.  To the southward the tobacco states, whose industry had reached a somewhat stationary condition, found it a simple matter to prohibit the further importation of slaves from Africa.  Delaware did this in 1776, Virginia in 1778, Maryland in 1783 and North Carolina in 1794.  But in these commonwealths as well as in their more southerly neighbors, the contemplation of the great social and economic problems involved in disestablishing slavery daunted the bulk of the citizens and impelled their representatives to conservatism.  The advocacy of abolition, whether sudden or gradual, was little more than sporadic.  The people were not to be stampeded in the cause of inherent rights or any other abstract philosophy.  It was a condition and not a theory which confronted them.

In Delaware, however, the problem was hardly formidable, for at the time of the first federal census there were hardly nine thousand slaves and a third as many colored freemen in her gross population of some sixty thousand souls.  Nevertheless a bill for gradual abolition considered by the legislature in 1786 appears not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no action in the premises was taken thereafter.  The retention of slavery seems to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states.  Because of her border position and her dearth of plantation industry, the slaves in Delaware steadily decreased to less than eighteen hundred in 1860, while the free negroes grew to more than ten times as many.