A Social History of the American Negro - Being a History of the Negro Problem in the United States. Including - A History and Study of the Republic of Liberia by Benjamin Brawley
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page 87 of 545 (15%)
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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. [Footnote 1: See Williams: _History of the Negro Race in America_, I, 228-236.] The next decade was largely one of the settlement of new territory, and by its close the pendulum seemed to have swung decidedly backward. In 1799, however, after much effort and debating, New York at last declared for gradual abolition, and New Jersey did likewise in 1804. In general, gradual emancipation was the result of the work of people who were humane but also conservative and who questioned the wisdom of thrusting |
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