The Three-fifths Compromise was hardly the last word on slavery in the young American republic. While it served as a model for similar political bargains made in the first half of the nineteenth century, the moral debate raged on. Benjamin Banneker, a skilled surveyor and amateur scientist born in Maryland to free Black parents, challenged Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s views on slaveholding in a 1791 letter. He used the primary author of the Declaration of Independence’s own rhetoric to underline its ethical inconsistencies regarding the treatment of enslaved people. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, leveled similar criticisms at slaveowners in a 1793 address, citing biblical verses to justify abolition. Fellow Methodist minister and former slave Prince Hall likewise employed Christian- based arguments against the inherent violence of slavery in a 1792 speech he gave to Black members of the Masonic lodge he founded in.