the slavery driven economy? I'm sure they have and I'm not aware. Perhaps that was just a factor of more Europeans needing more labor and the massive importation of people from Africa out of that necessity. But I don't know really when it ramped up or what sort of discussion or concern there was at the time over the morality of slavery or its future in America.

In retrospect, my history classes both in high school and at UVA tended to focus on the time that slavery was a fact and entrenched and eventually abolished rather than the forces that moved early America in that direction.