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 confl