Slavery as an institution was hard to kill in the rebellious British American colonies, regardless of the hypocrisy of its maintenance when colonists were in revolt for their own freedom from Britain. In 1780 the Pennsylvania legislature became the first colonial legislature—in fact, the first governmental institution in the world—to pass a law abolishing slavery within its purview. The law was very mild and gradual in implementation; it merely allowed African slaves born after 1780 to obtain their freedom after they had remained in bondage for twenty-eight years of their lives. Yet even this was too radical for many slaveholders in Pennsylvania. A mere year after its passage, a newly elected set of legislators in Pennsylvania began debating the idea of repealing abolition. The current law called on all slaveholders to register their slaves with the Pennsylvania government, and many slaveholders had failed to do so, thus freeing their slaves; the slaveholders therefore called for the Pennsylvania Assembly to revoke the law for at least two more years. Pennsylvania was hardly a hotbed of slavery; the rebel colony had a sizeable free Black population, and the 1780 law had granted them equal rights with their white counterparts. To that end, many African Americans petitioned the Assembly to reject any move to repeal abolition.