February 12
In 1817, the New York legislature voted a complete end to bondage—with all enslaved people to be freed by 1827. (The law did not affect citizens of other states, who could still bring enslaved people to New York for nine months at a time. When the state rescinded this nine-month rule in 1841, New York was free of people in bondage.)
After twenty-eight years of slow and painful progress, Emancipation Day dawned on July 4, 1827. Reverend William Hamilton welcomed the day with a special sermon at the African Zion Church. James McCune Smith, by then a leading civil rights activist, also spoke. Some ten thousand human beings in New York State had been freed. [4]
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