There was, in the North, a steadily growing moral sentiment against the system.  Massachusetts abandoned it in 1780.  In the same year, Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation.  New Hampshire, where there had been only a handful, Connecticut with a few thousand domestics, and New Jersey early followed these examples.  New York, in 1799, declared that all children born of slaves after July 4 of that year should be free, though held for a term as apprentices; and in 1827 it swept away the last vestiges of slavery.  So with the passing of the generation that had framed the Constitution, chattel servitude disappeared in the commercial states, leaving behind only such discriminations as disfranchisement or high property qualifications on colored voters.

=The Growth of Northern Sentiment against Slavery.=—­In both sections of the country there early existed, among those more or less philosophically inclined, a strong opposition to slavery on moral as well as economic grounds.  In the constitutional convention of 1787, Gouverneur Morris had vigorously condemned it and proposed that the whole country should bear the cost of abolishing it.  About the same time a society for promoting the abolition of slavery, under the presidency of Benjamin Franklin, laid before Congress a petition that serious attention be given to the emancipation of “those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.”  When Congress, acting on the recommendations of President Jefferson, provided for the abolition of the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, several Northern members joined with Southern members in condemning the system as well as the trade.  Later, colonization societies were formed to encourage the emancipation of slaves and their return to Africa.  James Madison was president and Henry Clay vice president of such an organization.

The anti-slavery sentiment of which these were the signs was nevertheless confined to narrow circles and bore no trace of bitterness.  “We consider slavery your calamity, not your crime,” wrote a distinguished Boston clergyman to his Southern brethren, “and we will share with you the burden of putting an end to it.  We will consent that the public lands shall be appropriated to this object....  I deprecate everything which sows discord and exasperating sectional animosities.”

=Uncompromising Abolition.=—­In a little while the spirit of generosity was gone.  Just as Jacksonian Democracy rose to power there appeared a new kind of anti-slavery doctrine—­the dogmatism of the abolition agitator.  For mild speculation on the evils of the system was substituted an imperious and belligerent demand for instant emancipation.  If a date must be fixed for its appearance, the year 1831 may be taken when William Lloyd Garrison founded in Boston his anti-slavery paper, The Liberator.  With singleness of purpose and utter contempt for all opposing opinions and arguments, he pursued his