om other states,[9]
no legislation defined the status of colored residents. In the federal
census of 1790, however, this was the only state in which no slaves were
listed.

[Footnote 8: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XLIII, 386.]

[Footnote 9: Moore, pp. 227-229.]

Racial antipathy and class antagonism among the whites appear to
have contributed to this result. John Adams wrote in 1795, with some
exaggeration and incoherence: "Argument might have [had] some weight in
the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the
multiplication of labouring white people, who would no longer suffer the
rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury ... If the
gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people
would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps ...
The common white people, or rather the labouring people, were the cause of
rendering negroes unprofitable servants. Their scoffs and insults, their
continual insinuations, filled the negroes with discontent, made them lazy,
idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters,
to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of
economy."[10]

[Footnote 10: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XLIII, 402.]

Slavery in the rest of the Northern states was as a rule not abolished, but
rather put in process of gradual extinction by legislation of a peculiar
sort enacted in response to agitations characteristic of the times.
Pennsylvania set the pattern in an act of 1780 providing that all children
born thereafter of slave mothers in the state were to be the servants of
their mothers' owners until reaching twenty-eight years of age, and then to
become free. Connecticut followed in 1784 with an act of similar purport
but with a specification of twenty-five years, afterward reduced to
twenty-one, as the age for freedom; and in 1840 she abolished her remnant
of slavery outright. In Rhode Island an act of the same year, 1784, enacted
that the children thereafter born of slave mothers were to be free at the
ages of twenty-one for males and eighteen for females, and that these
children were meanwhile to be supported and instructed at public expense;
but an amendment of the following year transferred to the mothers' owners
the burden of supporting the children, and ignored the matter of their
education. New York lagged until 1799, and then provided freedom