New Hampshire and Vermont embodied the principle of prospective emancipation in their new constitutions. In 1790 there were 158 slaves in New Hampshire. In 1840 there was still _one_! Rhode Island passed a law in 1784, that no person born after that year should continue a slave. Connecticut embodied in the revision of her laws, in 1784, a law providing that all children born of slave parents after March 1st of that year, should be free at twenty-five years of age. In 1797 the term of servitude was reduced to twenty-one years for all born after August 1st of that year. Slavery was not actually abolished by law until June 12th, 1848; when the census shows there were no fewer than seventeen slaves in the State; and how old and worthless they must have been, appears from the fact that the youngest of them must have been born before March 1st, 1784.[73] [Footnote 73: Rep. of C. J. Hoadly, State Librarian of Connecticut.] In New York, the laws for slaves were more severe than in the Southern States, and the African slave trade was zealously encouraged during the whole colonial period. The slave could not testify, even to exculpate a slave. Three justices, with a sort of jury of five freeholders, could try capitally, and inflict any sentence, _inclusive of burning alive_.[74] It was not until 1799 that the State commenced a system of laws for the gradual abolition of slavery. Every slave child born after July 4th of that year was to be free, the males after twenty-eight, and the females after twenty-five years. In 1810, the benefit of freedom was also extended to those born before July 4th, 1799, to take effect July 4th, 1827, the date at which the earliest born of those freed by previous law reached their majority of twenty-eight years.[75] Still the census of 1830 found 75 slaves! The Revised Statutes of New York, after 1817, provided a penalty for those carrying them out of the State for sale; showing that the tendency to do so existed. [Footnote 74: Chancellor Kent.] [Footnote 75: Idem.]