General Discussion

When the Constitution was ratified. I mean, not anywhere close to as many as there were in the south, and that number decreased from 1787 onward, but emancipation went very slowly in the north (most of the laws were something along the lines of like "no one born after *this date* is a slave" or similar, which meant that current ones were often kept in bondage), taking some of them sixty years to become fully free states.

That was another bone of contention between some of the southern slave holding states and the hardcore abolitionists (rather than the folks like Lincoln who sought to hold the line on expansion of slavery), given they were often calling for immediate abolition. The slaveholding south thought those people were being hypocrites since the northern states had started with a much smaller population and it still took some of them multiple generations to free them all.