whites were few and the blacks many, the problem
of negro enlistments became at once more pressing and more delicate. Henry
Laurens of South Carolina proposed to General Washington in March, 1779,
the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.
Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and Madison more
guardedly. Congress recommended it to the states concerned, and pledged
itself to reimburse the masters and to set the slaves free with a payment
of fifty dollars to each of these at the end of the war. Eventually Colonel
John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of
the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in general
possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played
off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage. In
actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected
only so far as the master race determined.

[Footnote 4: G.W. Williams, _History of the Negro Race in America_ (New
York [1882]), I, 353-362.]

Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and
universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated
end. Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever
consistency might require. How could they justly continue to hold men in
bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the
right of all men to be free? Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund
Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the
question. Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials
were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation. Indeed Samuel
Hopkins of Rhode Island in a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in
Anglo-America was "without the express sanction of civil government," and
censured the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the
maintenance of the wrongful institution.

As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming statehood
for its community framed a constitution with a bill of rights asserting the
inherent freedom of all men and attaching to it an express prohibition of
slavery. The opposition of New York delayed Vermont's recognition until
1791 when she was admitted as a state with this provision unchanged.
Similar inherent-liberty clauses but without the expressed anti-slavery
application were incorporated into the bills of