During the year that the New York Abolition Society was formed, Watts, of England, had so far perfected the steam engine as to use it in propelling machinery for spinning cotton; and the year the Pennsylvania Society was organized witnessed the invention of the power loom. The carding machine and the spinning jenny having been invented twenty years before, the power loom completed the machinery necessary to the indefinite extension of the manufacture of cotton.
The work of emancipation, begun by the four States named, continued to progress, so that in seventeen years from the adoption of the constitution, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey, had also enacted laws to free themselves from the burden of slavery.
As the work of manumission proceeded, the elements of slavery expansion were multiplied. When the four States first named liberated their slaves, no regular exports of cotton to Europe had yet commenced; and the year New Hampshire set hers free, only 138,328 lbs. of that article were shipped from the country. Simultaneously with the action of Vermont, in the year following, the cotton gin was invented, and an unparalleled impulse given to the cultivation of cotton. At the same time, Louisiana, with her immense territory, was added to the Union, and room for the extension of slavery vastly increased. New York lagged behind Vermont for six years, before taking her first step to free her slaves, when she found the exports of cotton to England had reached 9,500,000 lbs.; and New Jersey, still more tardy, fell five years behind New York; at which time the exports of that staple—so rapidly had its cultivation progressed—were augmented to 38,900,000 lbs.
Four years after the emancipations by States had ceased, the slave trade was prohibited; but, as if each movement for freedom must have its counter-movement to stimulate slavery, that same year the manufacture of cotton goods was commenced in Boston. Two years after that event, the exports of cotton amounted to 93,900,000 lbs. War with Great Britain, soon afterward, checked both our exports and her manufacture of the article; but the year 1817, memorable in this connection, from its being the date of the organization of the Colonization Society, found our exports augmented to 95,660,000 lbs., and her consumption enlarged to 126,240,000 lbs. Carding and spinning machinery had now reached a good degree of perfection, and the power loom was brought into general use in England, and was also introduced into the United States. Steamboats, too, were coming into use, in both countries; and great activity prevailed in commerce, manufactures, and the cultivation of cotton.
But how fared it with the free colored people during all this time? To obtain a true answer to this question we must revert to the days of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
With freedom to the slave, came anxieties among the whites as to the results. Nine years after Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had taken the lead in the trial of emancipation, Franklin issued an appeal for aid to enable his society to form a plan for the promotion of industry, intelligence, and morality among the free blacks; and he zealously urged the measure on public attention, as essential to their well-being, and indispensable to the safety of society. He expressed his belief, that such is the debasing influence of slavery on human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils; and that so far as emancipation should be promoted by the society, it was a duty incumbent on its members to instruct, to advise, to qualify those restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty.
How far Franklin's influence failed to promote the humane object he had in view, may be inferred from the fact, that forty-seven years after Pennsylvania passed her act of emancipation, and thirty-eight after he issued his appeal, one-third of the convicts in her penitentiary were colored men; though the preceding census showed that her slave population had almost wholly disappeared—there being but two hundred and eleven of them remaining, while her free colored people had increased in number to more than thirty thousand. Few of the other free States were more fortunate, and some of them were even in a worse condition—one-half of the convicts in the penitentiary of New Jersey being colored men.
But this is not the whole of the sad tale that must be recorded. Gloomy as was the picture of crime among the colored people of New Jersey, that of Massachusetts was vastly worse. For though the number of her colored convicts, as compared with the whites, was as one to six, yet the proportion of her colored population in the penitentiary was one out of one hundred and forty, while the proportion in New Jersey was but one out of eight hundred and thirty-three. Thus, in Massachusetts, where emancipation had, in 1780, been immediate and unconditional, there was, in 1826, among her colored people, about six times as much crime as existed among those of New Jersey, where gradual emancipation had not been provided for until 1804.
The moral condition of the colored people in the free States, generally, at the period we are considering, may be understood more clearly from the opinions expressed, at the time, by the Boston Prison Discipline Society. This benevolent association included among its members, Rev. Francis Wayland, Rev. Justin Edwards, Rev. Leonard Woods, Rev. William Jenks, Rev. B. B. Wisner, Rev. Edward Beecher, Lewis Tappan, Esq., John Tappan, Esq., Hon. George Bliss, and Hon. Samuel M. Hopkins.
In the First Annual Report of the Society, dated June 2, 1826, they enter into an investigation "of the progress of crime, with the causes of it," from which we make the following extracts: