“The emancipation of slaves in New England, beginning around 1780, was a gradual process, whether by post nati statute [laws freeing enslaved people born after a certain date], as in Rhode Island and Connecticut, or by effect, as in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where ambiguous judicial decisions and constitutional interpretations discouraged slaveholding without clearly outlawing it. The gradual nature of the process encouraged Whites to transfer a language and set of practices shaped in the context of slavery to their relations with a slowly emerging population of free people of color. The rhetoric of antislavery and revolutionary republicanism fostered this transfer, undergirding Whites’ assumptions that emancipated slaves, likely to be dependent and disorderly, would constitute a problem requiring firm management in the new republic. . . .

“Even more problematic was the promise implicit in antislavery rhetoric that abolition, by ending ‘the problem’—the sin of slavery and the troublesome presence of slaves—would result in the eventual absence of people of color themselves. In other words, Whites anticipated that free people of color, would, by some undefined moment (always imminent), have disappeared.