Why Pennsylvania still had slaves until the Civil War

Lumenarium

Commenting on Central Pennsylvania African American history--The voice of the Afrolumens Project on the net.

Critics constantly take me to task for stating that Pennsylvania still had a few slaves up until the Civil War, and actually had hundreds in the decade prior to the war. Armed with rudimentary knowledge of the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, they apply simple arithmetic to conclude that slavery disappeared in this state by the late 1820s or early 1830s.

What they forget to do is factor in human greed.

The 1780 Gradual Abolition Act set March 1, 1780 as the cut-off point. Anyone born prior to that date would remain a slave for the rest of their life. Anyone born of a slave mother after that date would be enslaved until their twenty-eighth birthday. It sounds very simple, and it was intended to phase out slavery within a generation, while protecting the human property interests of slaveholders.

So, assuming that a slave born just prior to the cut-off date bore children into her mid-twenties (let's say in the year 1805), those children, indentured until age 28, would be freed no later than the year 1833. Decreasing numbers of slaves enumerated in the federal censuses in Pennsylvania for 1830 and 1840 seem to support these calculations.

This is where the first point of contention usually arises. I count the children of slaves, those held to servitude for 28 years, as slaves. The term favored by the courts of the time, indentured servant, doesn't cut it. To me, an indentured servant is someone serving a term, usually less than seven years, to pay off debt or to learn a trade. It was the second lowest class of labor in colonial America, next only to slavery, and to all of those, white and Black, who suffered through an indentured servitude, often the difference in treatment from slaves was negligible. Still, it was not quite slavery; the terms were significantly shorter and usually the servant was erasing a debt, or learning a trade.

Legally, however, those Blacks who were manumitted under the 1780 law were considered indentured servants. But what did they have to show for it? Twenty eight years at hard labor generally used up a person's best years and often destroyed their spirit. Three decades of forced labor, with no power to control your own life, to me, is slavery. The accepted terminology for this class of labor now is "term slave," to distinguish it from lifelong slavery. Because census takers were instructed to record these term slaves as servants, their true numbers are lost to us. They recorded as "slaves" only those aging persons who were born prior to 1780. Naturally, then, the number of slaves in the official records were dropping rapidly.

In 1850 the ability of census takers to record slaves in Pennsylvania was cut to zero: for the first time there was no column for slaves on the census form. Most other states had columns to records slaves, but not Pennsylvania. As a result, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania recorded zero slaves for the first time in its history. Of course there were still slaves around--this was only 70 years after passage of the Gradual Abolition Act. Most county histories have anecdotes about aged former slaves dying at grand old ages well into the 1880s. Regardless of the truth in those stories, it is clear that the existence of slaves in Pennsylvania during the two decades prior to the Civil War was ignored or, worse, covered up.

The second point of contention stems from a failure to understand how, in the 1830s and 1840s, there were still so many term slaves around. By my estimate, there were still thousands of Pennsylvania term slaves in the early 1830s and at least several hundred through the 1840s. If you take the example in the paragraph above and assume most slaves were freed by 1833, my estimates seem preposterous. But wait! We must still factor in human greed.

Slaveholders registered, as required by law, the children born to their slaves for life. But when that generation of term slaves grew up and began bearing children, many slaveholders then kept on registering those children as term slaves as well. This was clearly illegal, as it violated not just the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well. By this practice, slaveholding in Pennsylvania could be sustained indefinitely with each generation.

Fortunately the courts eventually caught on and put a stop to the practice, but not before many hundreds of children had been unjustly condemned to years of slavery. The courts also addressed only the cases that were brought before them. How many legally free Black children were enslaved by unscrupulous slaveholders because their parents and family were ignorant of the law?

More than forty years ago this subject was well researched by Penn State college professor Stanley I. Kutler for an article published in the scholarly journal Pennsylvania History. "Pennsylvania Courts, the Abolition Act, and Negro Rights" documented case after case of slaveholders who attempted to keep their human property well beyond what the law allowed. Writing in 1963, in an era when African Americans were fighting to establish their constitutional rights, Dr. Kutler showed the painfully slow development of Black legal and human rights in an earlier century.

Among the abuses documented by Dr. Kutler was the practice of bringing young slaves from other states into Pennsylvania, manumit them into a term of servitude until age 28, and sell their terms to Pennsylvania owners. It's a practice I have documented several times on the pages of the website. It also greatly increased the numbers of young slaves in the commonwealth, slaves who were not counted as such on census forms, for reasons already explained.

There were other ways to keep a person beyond the original limit, some legal, some very illegal. In all, they highlight the very dark and seamy side of our early history; a side that is more comfortably left unexamined, for many folks.

George Nagle

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, US