The Anti-Slavery Crusade [17]
to the southwest. When Lundy and Birney discovered these plans, their desire to husband and extend the direct political influence of abolitionists was greatly stimulated. To this end they maintained a moderate and conservative attitude. They took care that no abuse or misrepresentation should betray them into any expression which would diminish their influence with fair-minded, reasonable men. They were convinced that a clear and complete revelation of the facts would lead a majority of the people to adopt their views. The debate in the Virginia Legislature in the session which met three months after the Southampton massacre furnishes a demonstration that the traditional anti-slavery sentiment still persisted among the rulers of the Old Dominion. It arose out of a petition from the Quakers of the State asking for an investigation preparatory to a gradual emancipation of the slaves. The debate, which lasted for several weeks, was able and thorough. No stronger utterances in condemnation of slavery were ever voiced than appear in this debate. Different speakers made the statement that no one presumed to defend slavery on principle--that apologists for slavery existed but no defenders. Opposition to the petition was in the main apologetic in tone. A darker picture of the blighting effects of slavery on the industries of the country was never drawn than appears in these speeches. Slavery was declared to be driving free laborers from the State, to have already destroyed every industry except agriculture, and to have exhausted the soil so that profitable agriculture was becoming extinct, while pine brush was encroaching upon former fruitful fields. "Even the wolf," said one, "driven back long since by the approach of man, now returns, after the lapse of a hundred years, to howl over the desolations of slavery." Contrasts between free labor in northern industry and that of the South were vividly portrayed. In a speech of great power, one member referred to Kentucky and Ohio as States "providentially designated to exhibit in their future histories the differences which necessarily result from a country free from, and a country afflicted with the curse of slavery." The debate was by no means confined to industrial or material considerations. McDowell, who was afterwards elected Governor of the State, thus portrays the personal relations of master and slave "You may place the slave where you please--you may put him under any process, which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being--you may do all this, and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality--it is the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach--it is a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of the Deity, and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man." Various speakers assumed that the continuance of slavery involved a bloody conflict; that either peaceably or through violence, slavery as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end; that the agitation against it could not be suppressed. Faulkner drew a lurid picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in which he referred to the utterances of two former speakers, one of whom had said that, unless something effective was done to ward off the danger, "the throats of all the white people of Virginia will be cut." The other replied, "No, the whites cannot be conquered--the throats of the blacks will be cut." Faulkner's rejoinder was that the difference was a trifling one, "for the fact is conceded that one race or the other must be exterminated." The public press joined in the debate. Leading editorials appeared in the Richmond Enquirer urging that effective measures be instituted to put an end to slavery. The debate aroused much interest throughout the South. Substantially all the current abolition arguments appeared in the speeches of the slave-owning members of the Virginia Legislature. And what was done about it? Nothing at all. The petition was not granted; no action looking towards emancipation