[Footnote 1:  New Jersey Archives, XXIII, 438.]

[Footnote 2:  MS. among the probate records at Charleston.]

The liberal philosophy of the Revolution, persisting thereafter in spite of reaction, not only wrought the legal disestablishment of slavery throughout the North, but prompted private manumissions far and wide.[3] Thus Philip Graham of Maryland made a deed in 1787 reciting his realization that the holding of his “fellow men in bondage and slavery is repugnant to the golden law of God and the unalienable right of mankind as well as to every principle of the late glorious revolution which has taken place in America,” and converting his slaves into servants for terms, the adults to become free at the close of that year and the children as they reached maturity.[4] In the same period, upon his coming of age, Richard Randolph, brother of the famous John, wrote to his guardian:  “With regard to the division of the estate, I have only to say that I want not a single negro for any other purpose than his immediate liberation.  I consider every individual thus unshackled as the source of future generations, not to say nations, of freemen; and I shudder when I think that so insignificant an animal as I am is invested with this monstrous, this horrid power."[5] The Randolph estate, however, was so cumbered with debts that the desired manumissions could not then be made.  At Richard’s death in 1796 he left a will of the expected tenor, providing for a wholesale freeing as promptly as it could legally be accomplished by the clearance of the mortgage.[6] In 1795 John Stratton of Norfolk, asserting his “full persuassion that freedom is the natural right of all men,” set free his able-bodied slave, Peter Wakefield.[7] Robert K. Moore of Louisville mingled thrift with liberalism by setting free in 1802 two pairs of married slaves because of his conviction that involuntary servitude was wrong, and at the same time binding them by indenture to serve him for some fourteen years longer in consideration of certain small payments in advance and larger ones at the ends of their terms.[8]

[Footnote 3:  These were restricted for a time in North Carolina, however, by an act of 1777 which recited the critical and alarming state of public affairs as its occasion.]

[Footnote 4:  MS. transcript in the file of powers of attorney, I, 243, among the county records at Louisville, Ky.]

[Footnote 5:  H.A.  Garland, Life of John Randolph of Roanoke (New York, 1851), I, 63.]

[Footnote 6:  DeBow’s Review, XXIV, 285-290.]

[Footnote 7:  MS. along with many similar documents among the deed files at Norfolk, Va.]

[Footnote 8:  MSS. in the powers of attorney files, II, 118, 122, 127, at Louisville, Ky.]