Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/454

 of slaves, except with the previous consent of the individual owners; nor were immigrants to be prohibited from bringing with them "such persons as may be deemed slaves by the law of any one of the United States."

In 1799, the legislature of New York passed a law for the gradual extinguishment of slavery, a measure which Governor Jay had much at heart, and which, after three previous unsuccessful attempts, was now at last carried. Those who were slaves at the passage of the act were to continue so for life; but all their children born after the 4th of July then following were to be free, to remain, however, with the owner of the mother as apprentices, males till the age of twenty-eight, and females till the age of twenty-five. The exportation of slaves was forbidden under a pecuniary penalty, the slave upon whom the attempt was made to become free at once. Persons removing into the state might bring with them slaves whom they had owned for a year previously; but slaves so brought in could not be sold.

In 1799, a convention met in Kentucky to revise the constitution of that growing state. An attempt was made to introduce a provision for the gradual abolition of slavery, which was supported by Henry Clay, a recent immigrant from Virginia, a young lawyer, who commenced a political career of half a century by holding a seat in this convention. The attempt met, however, with very feeble support, and, so far as related to the subject of slavery, the constitution underwent no change.

A similar proposition for the gradual abolition of slavery had been introduced a short time before into the Maryland assembly, but it found so little encouragement there as to be withdrawn by the mover. Even in Pennsylvania, a proposition introduced into the assembly for the immediate and total abolition of slavery, though supported by the earnest efforts of the Pennsylvania abolition society, failed of success. The contemporaneous act of the state of New York for the gradual abolition of slavery has been already mentioned.

On the 2d of January, 1800, a petition from certain free colored inhabitants of the city and county of Philadelphia was presented to congress by Waln, the city representative, setting forth that the slave-trade to the coast of Guinea, for the supply of foreign nations, was clandestinely carried on from various ports of the United States; that colored freemen were seized, fettered, and sold as slaves in various parts of the country; and that the fugitive law of 1793 was attended in its execution by many hard and distressing circumstances. The petitioners, knowing the limits of the authority of the general government, did not ask for the immediate emancipation of all those held in bondage; yet they begged congress to exert every means in its power to undo the heavy burdens, and to prepare the way for the oppressed to go free. Attention had recently been drawn to slavery and the slave-trade, not only by alleged violations of the act forbidding American vessels to assist in the supply of foreign slave-markets, but much more forcibly by a recent conspiracy, or alleged conspiracy in Virginia, which had produced a great alarm, resulting in the execution of several slaves charged as having been concerned in it. A great clamor was excited by Wain's motion to refer this petition to a committee already raised