about 20 percent of the entire population (Collier and Collier 22-23). In the North, according to the 1790 census, 31,008 of the Africans were free and 49,257 were slaves. In the South, 32,357 were free and 657,527 were slaves, where the latter accounted for 57 percent of the value of Southern wealth (Sisson 30). The largest black populations were in Virginia (292,627), South Carolina (107,094), Maryland (103,036) and North Carolina (100,763) (Franklin and Moss 98).
The Revolutionary War and its aftermath had significant effects on the institution and the attitudes of Americans toward it. In the South, Smith said the growing reliance on profitable staple crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo "served to inspire and subsequently entrench race-based slavery" (3). Due principally to the nature of their economies, in the Middle Atlantic states, such as Pennsylvania, "slavery was never really successful" (Franklin and Moss 75). In New England, the same was true, except that, as Franklin and Moss pointed out, "up until the War for Independence the slave trade was vital to the economic life of New England," because of the involvement in it of Yankee merchants and shippers (76).
New England as well as Pennsylvania produced many of the earliest advocates of abolition. In 1764 patriot James Otis of Boston pointed out the logical inconsistency of opposing British tyranny and oppressing blacks. A black sailor and runaway slave, Crispus Atticus, was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Blacks fought against the British during the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Quakers and pastors of several Protestant sects, such as the Congregationalists, Methodists and Baptists, primarily in the North but also in the South, took up the abolitionist cause during and after the Revolutionary War. However, Franklin and Moss said "the majority of the articulate colonists paid little attention to slavery" (86). In her analysis of patriot propa...