The advocacy of abolition, whether sudden or gradual, was little more than sporadic.
The people were not to be stampeded in the cause of inherent rights or any other abstract philosophy.

It was a condition and not a theory which confronted them.
In Delaware, however, the problem was hardly formidable, for at the time of the first federal census there were hardly nine thousand slaves and a third as many colored freemen in her gross population of some sixty thousand souls.

Nevertheless a bill for gradual abolition considered by the legislature in 1786 appears not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no action in the premises was taken thereafter.

The retention of slavery seems to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states.

Because of her border position and her dearth of plantation industry, the slaves in Delaware steadily decreased to less than eighteen hundred in 1860, while the free negroes grew to more than ten times as many.
[Footnote 12: J.R.Brackett, "The Status of the Slave, 1775-1789," in J.F.
Jameson ed., _Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States, 1775-1789_ (Boston, 1889), pp.