On March 1, 1780, with the outcome of the American War of Independence in doubt, the Pennsylvania legislature passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, making it the first legislature in world history to take steps to abolish the institution of holding human beings in bondage. Quakers and other religious migrants to the colony had protested slavery from the colony’s beginnings, founding the first abolitionist society in North America in 1775, and the 1780 act was a culmination of these efforts. The act was drawn up by George Bryan, at the time a judge on the revolutionary colony’s Supreme Court and a member of the Pennsylvania legislature. Bryan was considered a political radical, and his legislation reflected his politics. Nonetheless, his bill was modified to take the interests of slaveholders into account. Slavery was not made immediately illegal—slaveowners were required to reregister the people they enslaved as property every year—but the newly enslaved were to be set free over time. Once freed, provisions were to be made to eradicate discrimination against African Americans, recognizing them as new citizens, free and equal, of the state of Pennsylvania.