Virginia history as the record proves him to be, or as charity compels us to assume that he is. Eighteen hundred and eight is his date for the disappearance of all thought of emancipation in Virginia. Selecting from a mass of documents, he might have read two of Mr. Jefferson's letters—one to Mr. Coles, another to Mr. Jared Sparks—urging his views, and plans for emancipation and deportation to Sierre Leone, etc., one dated August 25, 1814; the other February 4, 1824. (See Volume IV., Jefferson's Correspondence.) But chiefly, and utterly overthrowing all title he may have to credit when writing of these subjects, we have, and he might have had, Mr. Thomas W. White's volume, published in 1832, containing the great Deportation and Emancipation Debate in the Virginia Legislature in January and February of that year; the debate enlisting the strongest speakers of the State and consuming a great part of those two months. A debate pending, which, as will be remembered, the Virginia House of Delegates under date of January 25, 1832, passed its resolution declaring it "expedient to adopt some legislative enactments for the abolition of slavery"; and made in that behalf a most vigorous movement, which was finally defeated by a very small majority, and that only because no man could say where the necessary means to deport the free blacks could be found, and none could suggest any other wise and safe disposition to be made of the slaves when set free. The recent Southampton insurrection had strengthened the hands, and added to the number of those who wished to get rid of the negroes altogether. It is to be observed that the Virginia arguments were not of the hypocritical, sentimental variety, nor were they the vehicles to covert hatred for anybody. They expressed the views long held by the leaders of public opinion here as to the best social and economic conditions for Virginia and Virginians. It is further to be said, and that with great emphasis, that the character and conduct of free State populations as exhibited in our subsequent history, and the strongly contrasted character and conduct of our Southern people, bring into the very gravest doubt the wisdom of our fathers in these opinions, which opinions we admit, and (as against Mr. Fiske's statements) claim that they held and acted upon long after his date of 1808.
