section_path: Effects of the revolution/Status of African Americans
section_name: Status of African Americans
paragraph_text: Status of African Americans
  
  During the revolution, the contradiction between the Patriots' professed ideals of liberty and the institution of slavery generated increased scrutiny of the latter. As early as 1764, the Boston Patriot leader James Otis, Jr. declared that all men, "white or black", were "by the law of nature" born free. Anti-slavery calls became more common in the early 1770s. In 1773, Benjamin Rush, the future signer of the Declaration of Independence, called on "advocates for American liberty" to oppose slavery. Slavery became an issue that had to be addressed. As historian Christopher L. Brown put it, slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before," but the Revolution "forced it to be a public question from there forward."
  
  In the late 1760s and early 1770s, several colonies, including Massachusetts and Virginia, attempted to restrict the slave trade, but were prevented from doing so by royally appointed governors. In 1774, as part of a broader non-importation movement aimed at Britain, the Continental Congress called on all the colonies to ban the importation of slaves, and the colonies passed acts doing so.
  
  In the first two decades after the American Revolution, state legislatures and individuals took actions to free slaves, in part based on revolutionary ideals. Northern states passed new constitutions that contained language about equal rights or specifically abolished slavery; some states, such as New York and New Jersey, where slavery was more widespread, passed laws by the end of the 18th century to abolish slavery by a gradual method. By 1804, all the northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or over time. Indentured servitude (temporary slavery), which had been widespread in the colonies (half the population of Philadelphia had once been bonded servants) dropped dramatically, and disappeared by 1800.
  
  No southern state abolished slavery, but for a period individual owners could free their slaves by personal decision. Numerous slaveholders who freed their slaves cited revolutionary ideals in their documents; others freed slaves as a reward for service. Records also suggest that some slaveholders were freeing their own mixed-race children, born into slavery to slave mothers. The number of free Blacks as a proportion of the Black population in the upper South increased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790 and 1810 as a result of these actions. Nevertheless, slavery continued in the South, where it became a "peculiar institution", setting the stage for future sectional conflict between North and South over the issue.
  
  Thousands of free Blacks in the northern states fought in the state militias and Continental Army. In the south, both sides offered freedom to slaves who would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the American Revolution.