An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

[1] The 1780 Act specifically exempted members of the U.S. Congress, allowing those elected officials to continue their enslavement of children and adults for their own purposes.

[5] The 1780 Act initially allowed non-resident slaveholders visiting Pennsylvania to hold enslaved people in bondage within the commonwealth for up to six months; however, a loophole was soon identified and exploited.

It enabled non-resident slaveholders to void this residency requirement by taking the individuals they were enslaving out of Pennsylvania before the six-month deadline took effect.

This meant that the residency requirement could be easily voided by simply relocating enslaved individuals to neighboring states for one day before returning them to Pennsylvania.

When United States Attorney General Edmund Randolph was required by Pennsylvania law to manumit the individuals he had been enslaving, he conveyed this advice to President George Washington through the president's secretary, Tobias Lear: This being the case, the Attorney General conceived, that after six months residence, your slaves would be upon no better footing than his.

[6]Washington argued privately that his presence in Philadelphia was solely a consequence of the city being the temporary national capital, and that he remained a citizen of Virginia and subject to its laws on slavery.

[7] It was thought that he followed Randolph's advice and knowingly and repeatedly violated the state's 1788 Amendment by rotating the enslaved Africans in his presidential household into and out of Pennsylvania.

[9] Philadelphia's hostile environment for slaveholders was one of the reasons that the Constitution was written to give Congress exclusive control "over such District... as may... become the seat of the government of the United States".

Although slavery steadily declined in Pennsylvania, the state that had initially led the way toward abolition tolerated it for decades after it ended in Massachusetts.