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An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, March 1, 1780, Pennsylvania State Archives. An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the Fifth Pennsylvania General Assembly on 1 March 1780, prescribed an end for slavery in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. It was the ...
Franklin and Dickinson both gradually became supporters of abolition. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the first state Abolition Act in the United States under the leadership of George Bryan. It followed Vermont's abolition of slavery in its constitution of 1777. The Pennsylvania law ended slavery through gradual emancipation, saying:
West Virginia did not abolish slavery in its first proposed constitution of 1861, though it did ban the importation of slaves. [40] In 1863, voters approved the Willey Amendment, which provided for gradual abolition of slavery, with the last enslaved people scheduled to be freed in 1884. [ 41 ]
At the time of the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, and its ratification in 1789, slavery was banned by the states in New England and Pennsylvania and by the Congress of the Confederation in the Northwest Territory, by the Northwest Ordinance. Though slaves were present in other states, most were forced to work in agriculture in the South.
Four other Northern states adopted policies to at least gradually abolish slavery: New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1783, and Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. The Republic of Vermont had already limited slavery in its original constitution (1777), before it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791.
Eventually support for abolition was enough to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, which abolished slavery everywhere in the United States, freeing more than 50,000 people still enslaved in Kentucky and Delaware, in 1865 the only states in which slavery still existed.
Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. (16 Pet.) 539 (1842), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 precluded a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited Blacks from being taken out of the free state of Pennsylvania into slavery. The Court overturned the conviction of slavecatcher Edward Prigg as a result ...
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18.