Ebook Review of the Debate the Abolition of in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832

Since the revolution, France, Spain and Portugal, large owners of colonial possessions, have not only not abolished slavery in their colonies, but have not even abolished the slave trade in practice.

In our Southern slave-holding country, the question of emancipation has never been seriously discussed in any of our legislatures, until the whole subject, under the most exciting circumstances, was, during the last winter, brought up for discussion in the Virginia Legislature, and plans of partial or total abolition were earnestly pressed upon the attention of that body. It is well known, that during the last summer, in the county of Southampton in Virginia, a few slaves, led on by Nat Turner, rose in the night, and murdered in the most inhuman and shocking manner, between sixty and seventy of the unsuspecting whites of that county. The news, of course, was rapidly diffused, and with it consternation and dismay were spread throughout the State, destroying for a time all feeling of security and confidence; and even when subsequent developement had proved, that the conspiracy had been originated by a fanatical negro preacher, (whose confessions prove beyond a doubt mental aberration,) and that this conspiracy embraced but few slaves, all of whom had paid the penalty of their crimes, still the excitement remained, still the repose of the Commonwealth was disturbed, - for the ghastly horrors of the Southampton tragedy could not immediately be banished from the mind - and Rumour, too, with her thousand tongues, was busily engaged in spreading tales of disaffection, plots, insurrections, and even massacres, which frightened the timid and harassed and mortified the whole of the slave-holding population. During this period of excitement, when reason was almost banished from the mind, and the imagination was suffered to conjure up the most appalling phantoms, and picture to itself a crisis in the vista of futurity, when the overwhelming numbers of the blacks would rise superior to all restraint, and involve the fairest portion of our land in universal ruin and desolation, we are not to wonder, that even in the lower part of Virginia, many should have seriously inquired, if this supposed monstrous evil could not be removed from our bosom. Some looked to the removal of the free people of colour by the efforts of the Colonization Society, as an antidote to all our ills.