Likewise, legislators in Pennsylvania recognized as early as 1780 that the institution tore apart families. In the preamble to its emancipation law of that year, they acknowledged the “unnatural separation and sale of husband and wife from each other and from their children, an injury, the greatness of which can only be conceived by supposing that we were in the same unhappy case.”28 Abolitionists hammered the South for engaging in the practice, and shamed the churches not only for tolerating it in society, not only for refusing to discipline their slaveholding members who engaged in it, but
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