Great Freemasons: William Pinkney (March 17, 1764 – February 25, 1822)

The generous mind, that has adequate ideas of the inherent rights of mankind and knows the value of them, must feel its indignation rise against the shameful traffic that introduces slavery into a country which seems to have been designed by providence as an asylum for those whom the arm of power had persecuted and not as a nursery for wretches stripped of every privilege which heaven intended for its rational creatures, and reduced to a level with—nay, become themselves—the mere goods and chattels of their masters. 3
Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice, no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a single hour; but the law of the land, which (however oppressive and unjust, however inconsistent with the great groundwork of the late Revolution and our present frame of government) we can not in prudence or from a regard to individual rights abolish, has authorized a slavery as bad or perhaps worse than the most absolute, unconditional servitude that ever England knew in the early ages of its empire, under the tyrannical policy of the Danes, the feudal tenures of the Saxons, or the pure villanage of the Normans.
William Pinkney (March 17, 1764 – February 25, 1822)

http://www.bartleby.com/268/8/19.html

William Pinkney (March 17, 1764 – February 25, 1822) was an American statesman and diplomat, and the seventh U.S. Attorney General.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pinkney
(Amanda Lodge 12, Annapolis, MD)