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Between 1764 and 1774, seventeen slaves appeared in Massachusetts courts to sue their owners for freedom. [45] In 1766, John Adams' colleague Benjamin Kent won the first trial in the United States (and Massachusetts) to free a slave (Slew vs. Whipple). [5] [46] [47] [6] [7] [48] There were three other trials that are noteworthy, two civil and ...
In this manner, slavery lost any legal protection in Massachusetts, making it a tortious act under the law, effectively abolishing it within the Commonwealth. [10] In 1976 by amendment Article CVI, this article was amended to change the word "men" to "people".
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions in Walker v. Jennison and Commonwealth v. Jennison established the basis for ending slavery in Massachusetts on constitutional grounds. Still, no law or amendment to the state constitution was passed. Instead, slavery gradually ended "voluntarily" in the state over the next decade.
Evolution of the enslaved population of the United States as a percentage of the population of each state, 1790–1860. Following the creation of the United States in 1776 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, the legal status of slavery was generally a matter for individual U.S. state legislatures and judiciaries (outside of several historically significant exceptions ...
There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to their owner. Enforcement of these ...
The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure, did not apply to all slaves, and might be reversed by peacetime courts; an amendment would be slavery's end. [40] The Thirteenth Amendment [ a ] – which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime – easily passed the Senate but failed in the House in June ...
In 1850, Brown founded his first militant, anti-slavery organization – The League of the Gileadites – in Springfield, to protect escaped slaves from 1850s Fugitive Slave Act. Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionism – particularly the progressive cities of Boston and Springfield – and contributed to subsequent actions of the state ...
The Massachusetts State Monument on the Antietam Battlefield. In all, 12,976 servicemen from Massachusetts died during the war, about eight percent of those who enlisted and about one percent of the state's population (the population of Massachusetts in 1860 was 1,231,066). [38] Official statistics are not available for the number of wounded.