<P> In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson and some of his contemporaries had plans to abolish slavery . Despite the fact that Jefferson was a lifelong slaveholder, he had included strong anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but other delegates removed it . Benjamin Franklin, also a slaveholder for most of his life, was a leading member of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first recognized organization for abolitionists in the United States . Massachusetts took a much more radical position . Its Supreme Court ruled in 1783, that a black man was, indeed, a man and therefore free under the state's constitution . </P> <P> States with a greater economic interest in slaves, such as New York and New Jersey, passed gradual emancipation laws . While some of these laws were gradual, these states enacted the first abolition laws in the entire "New World". </P> <P> All of the other states north of Maryland began gradual abolition of slavery between 1781 and 1804, based on the Pennsylvania model . By 1804, all the northern states passed laws to abolish it . Some slaves continued in servitude for two more decades, but most were freed . In addition, individual slaveholders, particularly in the upper South, freed slaves, sometimes in their wills . Many noted they had been moved by the revolutionary ideals of the equality of men . The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population increased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent from 1790 to 1810 in the upper South as a result of these actions . </P> <P> The institution remained solid in the South, and that region's customs and social beliefs evolved into a strident defense of slavery in response to the rise of a stronger anti-slavery stance in the North . In 1835 alone, abolitionists mailed over a million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the South . </P>

What effect did the abolitionist movement have on the united states in the 1800s