At the conclusion of the American Revolution, the country faced a very peculiar predicament in what to do with all the slaves. Many had fought alongside their Masters with hopes of being freed, so long as they could survive the war. After all, Crispus Attucks was the "first to die for freedom", during the Boston Massacre. However, a closer look would reveal Crispus Attucks was a black man put on a pedestal during the production of a distorted history of the United States, to allow everyone to have a hero, a black hero, who died for freedom. Much like the Jessica Lynch story of a female soldier going down fighting in a valiant blaze of bullets aimed at Sadaam's Feddayhin Iraqi supporters. At the close of the American Revolution many slaves felt they too would be given their freedom. It was a fight for liberty of all mankind, right? So, slaves, slave masters, and government officials alike were all left dumbfounded regarding what to do next. By 1808, slavery had been outlawed in every Northern state, but the abolition of slavery did not mean equality for freed slaves. There would be a long hard road of progress and backtracking that would set a deep racial and status divide between the people of America.
Emancipation in Northern states meant the furthest thing from equality between black and white Americans. After the complete abolition of slavery in all Northern states was complete in 1808, many states hardly abided by the law. According to the Harvard census report of 1810, the state of New Jersey still held an extraordinary 10,851 slaves in captivity. While New York for that matter was worse off with 15,017! Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island compiled a total of 1,213 people still held in bondage. While Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont were recorded as holding 0 slaves. States in the North did not have an economy that demanded such a need for agricultural slavery as say Maryland did with 111,502 slaves in 1810.
