History of Slavery in Pennsylvania - Resistance and Abolition

Resistance and Abolition

By the time of the French and Indian War, the number of slaves in the state was at its highest. More had been imported as fewer people from the British Isles were willing to come to the colonies as indentured servants when the economy improved in England. Given continued immigration to the colony, though, slaves as a percentage of the total population decreased over time. By the time of the American Revolution, slavery had decreased in importance as a labor source in Pennsylvania. The Quakers disapproved of the practice on religious grounds, as did Methodists and Baptists, active in the Great Awakening. In addition, the wave of recent German immigrants opposed it based on their religious and political beliefs. The Scots-Irish, also recent immigrants, generally settled in the backcountry on subsistence farms and, as a group, were too poor to buy slaves. In the late colonial period, people found it economically viable to pay for free labor. Another factor against slavery was the rising fervor of revolutionary ideals about the rights of man.

Religious resistance to slavery and the slave-import taxes led the colony to ban slave imports in 1767. Slaveholders among the state's Founding Fathers included: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Robert Morris, Edmund Physick and Samuel Mifflin. Franklin and Dickinson both gradually became supporters of abolition and personally freed their slaves after the Revolution.

In 1780 Pennsylvania passed the first state Abolition Act in the United States. It followed Vermont's abolition of slavery in its constitution of 1777. The Pennsylvania law ended slavery through gradual emancipation, saying:

That all Persons, as well Negroes, and Mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves; and that all Servitude for Life or Slavery of Children in Consequence of the Slavery of their Mothers, in the Case of all Children born within this State from and after the passing of this Act as aforesaid, shall be, an hereby is, utterly taken away, extinguished and for ever abolished.

This act repealed the acts of 1700 and 1726 that had established separate courts and laws specific to Negroes. At this point, slaves had the same rights as bound servants; and free Negroes had, in theory, the same rights as free Whites. The law did not free those approximately 6,000 persons who were already slaves in Pennsylvania. Children born to slave mothers had to serve as indentured servants to their mother's master until they were 28 years old. (Such indentures could be sold.)