have been made against you as rational and moral creatures, and remove many of the difficulties which have occurred in the general emancipation of such of your brethren as are yet in bondage.

With hearts anxious for your welfare, we commend you to the guidance and protection of that Being who is able to keep you from all evil, and who is the common Father and Friend of the whole family of mankind.

    Theodore Foster, President.  Philadelphia, January 6th, 1796. 
    Thomas P. Cope, Secretary.

The general impulse for liberty which prompted the Revolution and the early Abolition societies naturally found some reflection in formal legislation.  The declarations of the central government under the Confederation were not very effective, and for more definite enactments we have to turn to the individual states.  The honor of being the first actually to prohibit and abolish slavery really belongs to Vermont, whose constitution, adopted in 1777, even before she had come into the Union, declared very positively against the system.  In 1782 the old Virginia statute forbidding emancipation except for meritorious services was repealed.  The repeal was in force ten years, and in this time manumissions were numerous.  Maryland soon afterwards passed acts similar to those in Virginia prohibiting the further introduction of slaves and removing restraints on emancipation, and New York and New Jersey also prohibited the further introduction of slaves from Africa or from other states.  In 1780, in spite of considerable opposition because of the course of the war, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act forbidding the further introduction of slaves and giving freedom to all persons thereafter born in the state.  Similar provisions were enacted in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784.  Meanwhile Massachusetts was much agitated, and beginning in 1766 there were before the courts several cases in which Negroes sued for their freedom.[1] Their general argument was that the royal charter declared that all persons residing in the province were to be as free as the king’s subjects in Great Britain, that by Magna Carta no subject could be deprived of liberty except by the judgment of his peers, and that any laws that may have been passed in the province to mitigate or regulate the evil of slavery did not authorize it.  Sometimes the decisions were favorable, but at the beginning of the Revolution Massachusetts still recognized the system by the decision that no slave could be enlisted in the army.  In 1777, however, some slaves brought from Jamaica were ordered to be set at liberty, and it was finally decided in 1783 that the declaration in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights to the effect that “all men are born free and equal” prohibited slavery.  In this same year New Hampshire incorporated in her constitution a prohibitive article.  By the time the convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States met in Philadelphia in 1787, two of the original thirteen states (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) had positively prohibited slavery, and in three others (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) gradual abolition was in progress.