Did anyone oppose slavery during the founding of the USA and try to make it illegal from the start?

by Teherow
xykerii

It's not clear who you are including among the "anyone [who] opposed[d] slavery during the founding of the USA," but I'll assume you are limiting this to those that had the political power, given the large democratic deficit, to make slavery illegal.

Around the time of the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), there were many abolitionist societies. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (a.k.a. the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) was arguably the first of these major societies, and was eventually presided over by Benjamin Franklin. Although enmeshed in the slave system for much of his life, Franklin eventually came to believe that slavery ought to be abolished gradually and legally. Franklin himself had owned slaves, run ads in his Pennsylvania Gazette to secure the return of fugitive slaves, and came to the defense of slaveholding revolutionaries. By 1781, however, Franklin had divested himself of direct ownership of slaves. He also went further than most of his contemporaries by signing a petition to the First Federal Congress in 1790 for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.

It should be noted that the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was mostly made up of Quakers, who generally opposed slavery on religious grounds. Quakers had mostly eradicated slavery among themselves in the 18th century. By the time of the American Revolution, Quakers in the colonies were told to either give up slavery or Leave the Society of Friends.

Thomas Jefferson, although a pretty major slaveholder himself, condemned the injustice of the slave trade and, by implication, slavery in the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence. But he also blamed the presence of enslaved Africans in North America on avaricious British colonial policies, so it was really more of a jab at the politics of the British Empire at the time. He pushed for the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territories as well as the prohibition of foreign slave imports. But this was to serve his own interest as a slaver --- by limiting the foreign supply, the slavers of Virginia and Maryland slaveholders could then sell their own surplus slaves to the southwest at higher prices.

John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were among the founders of the New York Manumission Society in 1785, which established the New York African Free School in 1787. John Jay had tons of slaves, but claimed his ownership was a means to a beneficial end: “I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution.” Gouverneur Morris, called slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed.”

From Brittanica:

Nevertheless, the Founders, with the exception of those from South Carolina and Georgia, exhibited considerable aversion to slavery during the era of the Articles of Confederation (1781–89) by prohibiting the importation of foreign slaves to individual states and lending their support to a proposal by Jefferson to ban slavery in the Northwest Territory. Such antislavery policies, however, only went so far. The prohibition of foreign slave imports, by limiting the foreign supply, conveniently served the interests of Virginia and Maryland slaveholders, who could then sell their own surplus slaves southward and westward at higher prices. Furthermore, the ban on slavery in the Northwest tacitly legitimated the expansion of slavery in the Southwest.

Generally speaking, the tiny federal government wanted to avoid regional/sectarian debates on slavery, and so it fell on states to regulate. Vermont's legislature prohibited slavery in 1777, and Pennsylvania started abolishing slavery in 1780. In this case, the importation of slaves was prohibited -- none were freed at first, only the slaves of masters who failed to register them with the state, along with the "future children" of enslaved mothers. Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went into effect were not freed until 1847. In 1782, the Massachussetts Supreme Court case of Commonwealth v. Nathaniel Jennison reaffirmed the case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley, which held that even slaves were people that had a constitutional right to liberty. This gave freedom to slaves, effectively abolishing slavery in MA. Pretty much every Northern state had found to a way to begin abolishing slavery in their respective state by 1804.

AtomicTanAndBlack

Yes, absolutely. Perhaps the biggest example is in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.

An oft-forgotten bit of history is the fact that slavery was originally included in the Declaration of Independence as an argument to break away from the Crown. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself who detested the practice, originally wrote (emphasis mine):

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Many of the Founding Fathers detested slavery, but the practice was so entwined into both the economy and the business/economic practices of the time that it was not simply a matter of giving up slaves, it had to be eliminated legally in its entirety. The Founding Fathers decides to include this in the Declaration of Independence and hoped to establish a new country without the practice of slavery.

However, the delegates from South Carolina, refused to take part in the independence movement if the prohibition of slavery was included. Additionally, other supporters of the Independence movement feared the economic ramifications of the US were to ban slavery, for it would alienate the new country from Europe and potentially leave the new country economically and diplomatically isolated.

So in the Second Continental Congress, they agreed that in order to best prepare the Colonies for war with Britain, they needed to ensure that had a unified front and needed to ensure that they would have support in the event they win the war. To do so, they eliminated this banishment of slavery in the Declaration of Independence.

Remember, this is before the invention of the Cotton Gin. Most people in power at this time, especially those who opposed slavery, thought slavery was going to fade out in its own. However, once the Cotton Gin was invented, slavery became significantly more economically successful and significantly more tied to the economy. While many in the time thought slavery would be abolished soon after independence, once the Cotton gin was invented it became much more difficult to do so.

My sources for this are a few papers I wrote on the topic and the many books and articles referenced in those, but I have found some consolidated sources that help display the above information: