Magni Formica Laboris

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

A mobile army of metaphors,  metonyms , and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral [or Extra-moral] Sense

Although Pennsylvania had begun an  abolition  of slavery in 1780, it permitted slaveholders from other states to hold slaves in the state for up to six months. After that time, slaves would gain their freedom. Members of Congress were exempt from Pennsylvania's  Gradual Abolition Act , but not officers of the executive and judicial branches. Washington and other slaveholders  rotated their slaves out of the state  to prevent the slaves from establishing the 6-month residency needed to qualify for  manumission . His slave  Oney Judge  escaped from captivity in Philadelphia, and he gradually replaced most of his slaves in Philadelphia with  indentured servants   who were German immigrants. "This being the case, the Attorney General conceived, that after six months residence, your slaves would be upon no better footing than his. But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretense whatever, be car...