Status Updates From The Overthrow of Colonial S...

It was calculated that the average annual output of a slave on a plantation was 850 kilos of sugar; at the going rate of duty each slave thus contributed 420 francs to the Treasury per annum, enough to entitle them to vote or stand for the Chamber had they been free citizens of France.

Rise like Lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep hath fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few

The General Assembly of the new state voted to give Bolivar a million dollars in recognition of his services. He would only accept the money on condition that it was used to purchase the freedom of 1,000 slaves. The money was never paid.

"The Church as well as the state believed that the slaveholder needed tutelage; slaveholders in New Spain could be denounced to the Inquisition for ill-treating their slaves and there were a few cases of this sort."

"Popular resistance to bondage reflected not simply an anxiety to avoid becoming a slave but also a fear of the outsize power which slaveholders could wield in dealings with free persons"