"The emancipation of slaves in New England, beginning around 1780, was a gradual process, whether by post nat statute flaws freeing enslaved people born after a certain date), as in Rhode Island and Connecticut, or by effect, as in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where ambiguous judicial decisions and constitutional interpretations discouraged
slaveholding without clearly outlawing it The gradual nature of the process encouraged Whites to transfer a language and set of practices shaped in the context of slavery to their
relations with a slowly emerging population of free people of color. The rhetonic of antislavery and revolutionary republicanism fostered this transfer, undergirding Whites'
assumptions that emancipated slaves, likely to be dependent and disorderly, would constitute a problem requiring firm management in the new republic
...
"Even more problematic was the promise implicit in antislavery rhetoric that abolition, by ending the problem—the sin of slavery and the troublesome presence of slaves-would
result in the eventual absence of people of color themselves in other words, Whites anticipated that free people of color, would, by some undefined moment (always imminent),
have disappeared
Joanne Pope Melish, historian Disowning Slavery. Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, published in 1998
The author makes which of the following arguments in the excerpt about the perceptions Whites maintained regarding emancipated people in the North?