Jefferson on Outlawing Slavery

Whatever may have been the circumstances which influenced our forefathers to permit the introduction of personal bondage into any part of these states, and to participate in the wrongs committed on an unoffending quarter of the globe, we may rejoice that such circumstances, and such a sense of them, exist no longer. It is honorable in the nation at large that their Congress availed themselves of the first practicable moment for arresting the progress of this great moral and political error. (Thomas Jefferson)