Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: According to American public memory, slavery in the United States was peculiar to the South.Unless explicitly reminded of the North's history of slavery, most Americans associate the North with abolitionists rather than slaveholders.Alongside this public memory is the work of professional historians that recognizes that slavery existed in the North during the colonial era but asserts that it was abolished during the late eighteenth century.According to such scholarship, as the Revolutionary War brought ideas of natural rights to the forefront of the American consciousness and as economic realities made Northern slavery increasingly unprofitable, states north of Maryland eliminated slavery through a series of legal measures.Some scholars who advance this narrative portray the abolition measures adopted by most Northern states as immediate and comprehensive, as though these measures effectuated the near-instantaneous eradication of slavery in each state that adopted them.'In fact, though the number of slaves in the North declined after the Revolutionary War, slavery continued to exist there well into the nineteenth century?Between 1777 and 1804, all of the states north of Maryland did take steps that would eventually doom slavery within their borders.But only in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire were slaves emancipated relatively swiftly, and even in these states abolition measures 1. See, e.g., LORENZO JOHNSTON GREENE, THE NEGRO IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND 76-77 (Atheneum 1968) (1942) (reporting that "[b]y 1790 all of the New England states had abolished both slavery and the slave trade").2.
Source: The Yale Law Journal
DOI: 10.2307/797518
Author: David Menschel
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1870516280