QUOTE : Surprisingly, the most passionate voice calling for an immediate end to the “infernal traffic” in captive Africans came from the Virginia delegation. George Mason, a wealthy plantation owner and brilliant lawyer who personally owned more than two hundred slaves, had come to see slavery as “a slow Poison…daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our People.” He argued that holding slaves would “bring the judgment of heaven on a Country…As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.