"Just what is the light in which we are to regard the slaves?" wondered James Wilson in the course of the debate. "Are they admitted as citizens?" he asked; "then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property? then why is not other property admitted into the computation?" Such questions and others to which they gave rise were to trouble more heads than his in the course of the coming years, and all because a great nation did not have the courage to do the right thing at the right time.
In spite, however, of the power crystallized in the Constitution, the moral movement that had set in against slavery still held its ground, and it was destined never wholly to languish until slavery ceased altogether to exist in the United States. Throughout the century the Quakers continued their good work; in the generation before the war John Woolman of New Jersey traveled in the Southern colonies preaching that "the practice of continuing slavery is not right"; and Anthony Benezet opened in Philadelphia a school for Negroes which he himself taught without remuneration, and otherwise influenced Pennsylvania to begin the work of emancipation. In general the Quakers conducted their campaign along the lines on which they were most likely to succeed, attacking the slave-trade first of all but more and more making an appeal to the central government; and the first Abolition Society, organized in Pennsylvania in 1775 and consisting mainly of Quakers, had for its original object merely the relief of free Negroes unlawfully held in bondage.[1] The organization was forced to suspend its work in the course of the war, but in 1784 it renewed its meetings, and men of other denominations than the Quakers now joined in greater numbers. In 1787 the society was formally reorganized as "The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race." Benjamin Franklin was elected president and there was adopted a constitution which was more and more to serve as a model for similar societies in the neighboring states.
[Footnote 1: Locke: _Anti-Slavery in America_, 97.]