|  |
Primary source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1788.
Caption: Jefferson questioned the effects of slavery and slaveholding, and foretold its end.
|
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!. . . I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.
|
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18 from Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788) at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch18.html, at American Studies at the University of Virginia.
Courtesy of American Studies at the University of Virginia.
|
| |
