1791
Slave insurrection in the French colony of St. Domingue begins the bloody process of founding the nation of Haiti, the first independent black country in the Americas.more than 4000 white colonists are killed and hundreds of sugar plantations destroyed. Refugees flee to America, many coming to Philadelphia, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in America with the largest northern free black community.
1787
Congress reached a compromise to have an Electoral College and to count black Englishmen as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state for legislative and taxing purposes.
1786
Publication in London of An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, by Thomas Clarkson. Quickly reprinted in the United States, it is the single most influential antislavery work of the late 18th century.
1797
In the first black initiated petition to Congress, Philadelphia free blacks protest North Carolina laws re-enslaving blacks freed during the Revolution.
1796
John Gabriel Stedman publishes The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The book includes depictions of the cruelty of slavery, vividly illustrated by William Blake, but is not an avowedly abolitionist text.
1795
As the war with revolutionary France intensifies, public interest in the slave trade diminishes throughout Britain. The Abolition Society stops meeting.