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 was taken.This was indeed a turning-point.
Men do not continue to denounce in public their own conduct unless their action results in some effort toward corrective measures.
Professor Thomas Dew, of the chair of history and metaphysics in William and Mary College and later President of the College, published an essay reviewing the debate in the Legislature and arguing that any plan for emancipation in Virginia was either undesirable or impossible.This essay was among the first of the direct pro-slavery arguments.Statements in support of the view soon followed.In 1885 the Governor of South Carolina in a message to the Legislature said, "Domestic slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice." Senator Calhoun, speaking in the Senate two years later, declared slavery to be a positive good.W.G.Simms, Southern poet and novelist, writing in 1852, felicitates himself as being among the first who about fifteen years earlier advocated slavery as a great good and a blessing.Harriet Martineau, an English author who traveled extensively in the South in 1885, found few slaveholders who justified the institution as being in itself just.But after the debates in the Virginia Legislature, there were few owners of slaves who publicly advocated abolition.The spirit of mob violence had set in, and, contrary to the utterances of Virginia statesmen, free speech on the subject of slavery was suppressed in the slave States.This did not mean that Southern statesmen had lost the power to perceive the evil effects of slavery or that they were convinced that their former views were erroneous.
It meant simply that they had failed to agree upon a policy of gradual emancipation, and the only recourse left seemed to be to follow the example of James G.Birney and leave the South or to submit in silence to the new order.
