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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On March 1, 1780, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed An Act for the Abolition of Slavery.1 Representative George Bryan,former vice president of the Supreme Executive Council, authored the bill and shepherded it through the Assembly. A friend of Bryan’ s referred to the new statute as “the law for freeing of Negroes hereafter born”—a prosaic description of the legislation, albeit a more accurate one.2 This law, the first abolition legislation in the United States, “freed not a single slave; it held in lifelong bondage all children born before the law became effective;and it consigned to twenty-eight years of servitude every child born of a slave after March 1, 1780.”3 The law also required slave owners to register their property; unregistered slaves would be eligible for their freedom upon reaching maturity, regardless of their date of birth. In Northampton County, thirty-four citizens registered fifty slaves.4 Michael Hart, who operated a hotel and general store in Easton, kept two slaves.One of them was a young female named Phillis.In October 1780,the Hart’ s housekeeper, a woman named Mrs.Brills, discovered that Phillis was pregnant and informed her mistress. Mrs. Hart spoke privately with Phillis, who acknowledged her condition and, when pressed, stated that Mr. Hart was the father of the child.These are the essential points of Phillis’s deposition subscribed to by Robert Levers on November 6, 1780. Save for whispered innuendos and caustic glances aimed at Mr. Hart, Phillis’s plight would have gained little notice in the Pennsylvania backcountry prior to the Revolution. In fact, 150 years later a scholarly study of eighteenth-century documents concluded that in colonial Pennsylvania slaves were well fed, were not overworked, had time of their own (which they were not too tired to enjoy), had certain days off, and were trusted and treated like members of the family.5 Which brings us back to Michael Hart. Mr. Hart’ s dalliance with his slave was no secret, although Mrs. Brills and Mrs. Hart may have been the last to learn of it. How did Phillis come to be deposed by Robert Levers? Did Mrs. Hart arrange the meeting with the magistrate? If so, did she contemplate suing her husband for divorce? Or did Phillis herself, aided by Mrs.Brills, arrange for the deposition, having been told that a sympathetic court might grant her immediate freedom? Or did “The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race” hear of Phillis’s case and come to her aid? And what of the child? Did Mr. Hart send Phillis out of the state so that her child would not be born on free territory ?Or did he permit her to have the child in Pennsylvania, knowing that the children of registered slaves would become servants until they were twenty-eight years of age? The fate of the child is unknown, but Phillis remained with the Hart household as a bound servant.6 Phillis’s words are as fresh and telling now as they were on the day she appeared in Robert Levers’s office. Her deposition provides the raw diction of how one master systematically raped his slave: The examination of Phillis, a Negro slave, the property of Michael Hart of the Town of Easton . . . shopkeeper, came before me, the subscriber, one of the Justices of the Peace in and for the County of Northampton. And first the said Negro Phillis says that about three years ago, when the said Michael Hart kept shop in Easton in the house opposite Meyer Hart’s [father of Michael], and the same house that the subscriber now lives in, that he, the said Michael Hart, used to call the said Negro Phillis to light him in the stable, he used to promise her ribbons and blow out the candle and make her stay with him in the stable, and then made her lay down in the stable, he used to pull up her clothes, and put into her his xxxxx and had carnal knowledge of her body.7 And at other times whilst the said Michael Hart lived in the same house, he would get up in the night whilst Mrs. Hart was in bed,and go down stairs as if he wanted a drink of water, and then call her, the said Phillis, from up stairs out of her bed...

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