George Mason Quotes
The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.
Mason, George. Address to the Constitutional Convention. 22 Aug. 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Farrand, vol. 2, Yale University Press, 1911, p. 370.
Indian and Black slaves were outlawed very early in Connecticut, not on moral grounds of concern for the Indians and Blacks, but because of the negative effects on the white poor. Why would anyone pay the poor any more than the amortization costs of a slave? Therefore there was no way a poor white could make a living wage if slavery were to coexist.
Miller was the first Black American admitted to a Graduate Program—Johns Hopkins—in Mathematics
The cotton industry and slavery were a very important part of the economy of Providence, RI. The Rhode Island cotton mills were supplied by Southern cotton produced by slaves and carried from the South on Rhode Island ships. Many of the southern slaves were kidnapped from Africa from Rhode Island slave trading ships. When the slave trade was made illegal, Brown was the first slave trader prosecuted. His brother, Moses Brown, a vehement abolitionist was one of the men who brought the prosecution.
This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.
George Mason IV was an American planter, politician and delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution. His writings, including substantial portions of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and his Objections to this Constitution of Government (1787) opposing ratification, have exercised a significant influence on American political thought and events. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason principally authored, served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights, a document of which he has been deemed a father.
