Sub Project to Slaves freed in America before the Emancipation Proclamation

Freed in Pennsylvania before January 1, 1863

Notable Quotes

• "In Penn's new city of Philadelphia, African slaves were at work by 1684, and in rural Chester County by 1687. Between 1729 and 1758, Chester County had 104 slaves on 58 farms, with 70 percent of the slaveowners likely Quakers. By 1693, Africans were so numerous in the colony's capital that the Philadelphia Council complained of "the tumultuous gatherings of the Negroes in the town of Philadelphia."
  
• "The law for gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania passed on February 1780, and that's when the Mason-Dixon line began to acquire its metaphoric meaning as the boundary between North and South. But the law was no proclamation of emancipation. It was deeply conservative. The 6,000 or so Pennsylvania slaves in 1780 stayed slaves. Even those born a few days before the passage of the act had to wait 28 years before the law set them free. This allowed their masters to recoup the cost of raising them.
• "There were 795 slaves in Pennsylvania in 1810, 211 in 1820, 403 or 386 (the count was disputed) in 1830, and 64 in 1840, the last year census worksheets in the northern states included a line for "slaves." See Resource No.1 below

Resources

1. Slavery in Pennsylvania
2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2713436.pdf

Timeline

1834: Race Riots in Columbia, Lancaster Co. (see several documents) There were restrictive anti-Black resolutions of October 1834

stray notes

~• from William Hart Davis' Bucks county:
July 4, 1794, William Bennett, (11) "late of Northampton Township, Bucks county, blacksmith, but now of Long Island," executed an instrument under seal setting free his negro woman, Sarah, about twenty-seven years of age, acknowledged before Samuel Benezet, and witnessed by him and Isaac Hicks.
see: http://files.usgwarchives.net/pa/bucks/history/local/davis/davis21.txt