[Footnote 12:  J.R.  Brackett, “The Status of the Slave, 1775-1789,” in J.F.  Jameson ed., Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States, 1775-1789 (Boston, 1889), pp. 300-302.]

In Maryland various projects for abolition, presented by the Quakers between 1785 and 1791 and supported by William Pinckney and Charles Carroll, were successively defeated in the legislature; and efforts to remove the legal restraints on private manumission were likewise thwarted.[13] These restrictions, which applied merely to the freeing of slaves above middle age, were in fact very slight.  The manumissions indeed were so frequent and the conditions of life in Maryland were so attractive to free negroes, or at least so much less oppressive than in most other states, that while the slave population decreased between 1790 and 1860 from 103,036 to 87,189 souls the colored freemen multiplied from 8046 to 83,942, a number greater by twenty-five thousand than that in any other commonwealth.

[Footnote 13:  J.R.  Brackett, The Negro in Maryland (Baltimore, 1899), pp. 52-64, 148-155.]

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that anti-slavery men were as scarce to the southward of Chesapeake Bay as they were common to the north of it, while in Maryland, and still more in Virginia, the bulk of the people approved the doctrine and a respectable minority were ready to adopt it in practice, “a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against the greater number who have not the courage to divest their families of a property which, however, keeps their conscience unquiet.”  Virginia, he continued, “is the next state to which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression, a conflict in which the sacred side is gaining daily recruits from the influx into office of young men grown and growing up.  These have sucked in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother’s milk, and it is to them that I look with anxiety to turn the fate of the question."[14] Jefferson had already tried to raise the issue by having a committee for revising the Virginia laws, appointed in 1776 with himself a member, frame a special amendment for disestablishing slavery.  This contemplated a gradual emancipation of the after-born children, their tutelage by the state, their colonization at maturity, and their replacement in Virginia by white immigrants.[15] But a knowledge that such a project would raise a storm caused even its framers to lay it aside.  The abolition of primogeniture and the severance of church from state absorbed reformers’ energies at the expense of the slavery question.

[Footnote 14:  Jefferson, Writings, P.L.  Ford ed., IV, 82-83.]

[Footnote 15:  Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, various editions, query 14.]