"CURSE OF HEAVEN"

"Slavery was the original sin in which the nation was conceived. Gouverneur Morris and Rufus King knew it, and said so. John Dickinson and William Livingston knew it; they freed their slaves. The delegates who belonged to abolition societies--Franklin, Hamilton , Livingston --certainly knew it. Oliver Ellsworth , who steadfastly stood by his Southern allies, reminded the delegates that if the matter were viewed 'in a moral light,' then every slave should be freed; he knew it. Roger Sherman called the slave trade iniquitous; he knew it. Each of these ambivalent Virginians --Mason and Madison and Randolph and the General himself--all knew it. The men from South Carolina surely knew it. Charles Pinckney said he would vote against the slave trade within his own state; John Rutledge would not discuss the morality of slavery, an argument he knew he could only lose .... "When southern guns fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, a grandson of John Adams wrote in his diary, 'We the children of the third and fourth generation are doomed to pay the penalties of the compromises made by the first.'" P. 204, 206, "The Curse of Heaven ," THE SUMMER OF 1787 by David O. Stewart (2007)