A Just and True Return (JTR) is a database of Pennsylvania’s surviving county slave registries. These documents, collected from more than a dozen repositories in three states, are evidence of gradual abolition’s routinization, of American familial relationships, and of the historical value of studying slavery wherever it existed.
Browse registrations by county. Colors indicate the number of registration records per county.
It is true that in 1780 Pennsylvania became the first U.S. state to pass a law for the abolition of slavery (although the independent republic of Vermont wrote an abolition clause into its constitution three years earlier). It is also true that most U.S. states that joined Pennsylvania in pursuing abolition copied its gradual, legislative approach (although Massachusetts and New Hampshire achieved similar results through constitutional interpretation).
Still true but less appreciated is the fact that Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition program created a vast archive of slavery—seemingly vaster than any of its northeastern neighbors. Of the five states that legislated gradual abolition programs in the early US republic, Pennsylvania required the most paperwork. It was Pennsylvania—and only Pennsylvania—that required both the registration of individuals born before the law’s passage and those born after.