The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.

As quoted in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 19:101-2 - Philo Camillus no. 2 (1795)