d. Vermont
George Mason‘s draft hat posited that all men were “born equally free and independent” and could not yield their natural rights, but the delegates at the convention out of the phrase to make it clear that those rights were retained only by those who “enter into a state of society”, which was understood to exclude those living in slavery. Framers of the Vermont constitution, on the other hand, took the occasion to outlaw slavery explicitly when they drafted their constitution in 1777. Vermont was the first government to abolish slavery in the Americas, and its constitution was the first of the original state-building documents in the United States to extend the rhetoric of equality across racial lines. The enactment was significant, and it was also the only one.