No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Book 18)

by Sean Wilentz

“Prior to the great revolution,” John Jay would observe to his British abolitionist counterparts, the great majority of Americans “had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.”23