[Footnote 23:--"The remaining sixteen" were Nathaniel Gorham, Massachusetts; Alex. Hamilton, New York; William Livingston and David Brearly, New Jersey; Benjamin Franklin, Jared Ingersoll, James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris, Pennsylvania; Gunning Bedford, John Dickinson, and Jacob Broom, Delaware; Daniel, of St. Thomas, Jenifer, Maryland; John Blair, Virginia; Richard Dobbs Spaight, North Carolina; and John Rutledge and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, South Carolina.] [Footnote 24:--"The only distinction between freedom and slavery consists in this: in the former state, a man is governed by the laws to which he has given his consent, either in person or by his representative; in the latter, he is governed by the will of another. In the one case, his life and property are his own; in the other, they depend upon the pleasure of a master. It is easy to discern which of the two states is preferable. No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free rather than slave.... Were not the disadvantages of slavery too obvious to stand in need of it, I might enumerate and describe the tedious train of calamities inseparable from it. I might show that it is fatal to religion and morality; that it tends to debase the mind, and corrupt its noblest springs of action. I might show that it relaxes the sinews of industry and clips the wings of commerce, and works misery and indigence in every shape."--HAMILTON, _Works_, vol. 2, pp. 3, 9. "That you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of _liberty_ to those unhappy _men_, who, alone in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and _justice_ toward this distressed race; and that you will step to the _very verge_ of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men."--Philadelphia, Feb. 3rd, 1790. _Franklin's Petition to Congress for the Abolition of Slavery._