Credit Counseling Quotes
The Brown family were very wealthy. John was involved in many speculative enterprises, owned slaves, and had been in the slave trade, and then it had been outlawed in large part by the efforts of his brother, Moses Brown who was a staunch abolitionist and an officer of the Rhode Island Abolition Society. The quotation is important because one theory is that the only reason that the slave trade became illegal was because it was not very profitable due to the high cost and loss ratio and the competition from slaves who were born of slave mothers. So the slave trade was outlawed but not slavery which was so profitable. However, this quotation illustrates how profitable the slave trade was and the early legislation was therefore motivated by ethical and moral concerns.