Comparing the costs and benefits of owning a slave, he concluded that it made no sense. “The introduction of slaves,” he wrote, was one of the things that “diminish a nation.” But he mainly focused on the ill effects to the owners rather than the immorality done to the slaves. “The whites who have slaves, not laboring, are enfeebled,” he said. “Slaves also pejorate the families that use them; white children become proud, disgusted with labor.”
