s a bill for gradual abolition considered by the
legislature in 1786 appears not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no
action in the premises was taken thereafter. The retention of slavery seems
to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of
political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states. Because of
her border position and her dearth of plantation industry, the slaves in
Delaware steadily decreased to less than eighteen hundred in 1860, while
the free negroes grew to more than ten times as many.

[Footnote 12: J.R. Brackett, "The Status of the Slave, 1775-1789," in J.F.
Jameson ed., _Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States,
1775-1789_ (Boston, 1889), pp. 300-302.]

In Maryland various projects for abolition, presented by the Quakers
between 1785 and 1791 and supported by William Pinckney and Charles
Carroll, were successively defeated in the legislature; and efforts
to remove the legal restraints on private manumission were likewise
thwarted.[13] These restrictions, which applied merely to the freeing of
slaves above middle age, were in fact very slight. The manumissions indeed
were so frequent and the conditions of life in Maryland were so attractive
to free negroes, or at least so much less oppressive than in most other
states, that while the slave population decreased between 1790 and 1860
from 103,036 to 87,189 souls the colored freemen multiplied from 8046 to
83,942, a number greater by twenty-five thousand than that in any other
commonwealth.

[Footnote 13: J.R. Brackett, _The Negro in Maryland_ (Baltimore, 1899), pp.
52-64, 148-155.]

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that anti-slavery men were as scarce to the
southward of Chesapeake Bay as they were common to the north of it, while
in Maryland, and still more in Virginia, the bulk of the people approved
the doctrine and a respectable minority were ready to adopt it in practice,
"a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against
the greater number who have not the courage to divest their families of
a property which, however, keeps their conscience unquiet." Virginia,
he continued, "is the next state to which we may turn our eyes for the
interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression, a
conflict in which the sacred side is gaining daily recruits from the influx
into office of young men grown and growing up. These have sucked in the
principles of liberty