Fifty-one petitioners "conceive it to be our duty to call the attention of our Representatives once more to the situation of the People of Colour among us." They argue that the "recent calamities in the West-Indies" and "the alarms which have disquieted the minds of our brethren in the Southern States and rendered property less secure, are motives we believe sufficiently strong to induce such steps as may lead to a gradual Abolition of Slavery." They further "desire that a review of those Laws may take place, as from recent and melancholy experience we are constrained to declare, that they have not been found sufficient to prevent unprincipled men from the practice of a traffic disgraceful to a land where liberty which should be a common blessing is denied to only one class of unhappy and degraded men."
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Repository: Delaware State Archives, Dover, Delaware
