Instead, the slave system grew stronger than ever and threatened to expand into new territories and states. Many of the nation's Founding Fathers, including those who were themselves slaveholders, had anticipated that slavery would die out, a relic from a less enlightened past. Tragically, however, slavery in these same years became ever more entrenched in the economy and society of the southern United States. How, they asked, could slaveholders maintain the virtue needed to maintain a free government when they exercised tyrannical control over other human beings? Many people increasingly viewed slavery as an inherently evil system that endangered the republican experiment itself. Most northern states abolished slavery in this period and antislavery societies sprang up throughout the nation. In the years following the Revolution, slavery indeed became a "Peculiar Institution" out of step with the ideals of a new American society. Nowhere was the radical and transforming power of the American Revolution clearer than on the issue of slavery. Struggle for Freedom : A Peculiar Institution (c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. Turns of the Centuries Exhibit > African Americans 1780-1820 > Struggle for Freedom
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