The gradual emancipation efforts in these northern states were so compromised and feeble that they freed fewer slaves than were voluntarily manumitted in southern states like Virginia and Maryland during the same decades. Worse, northerners during the graduation period often availed themselves of the window of opportunity to sell their slaves to the South rather than assume a financial loss by freeing them. By one modern reckoning, New Yorkers sold possibly twice as many slaves to the South than they emancipated. Another broadens the scope: “[I]t is probable that, to a substantial degree, the
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