When he incorporated this provision in his draft of the ordinance,
Jefferson was but little in advance of the opinion of the day on the
effects of employing slave labour. Never until its death was the system
so near dissolution as in the organising days between the birth of the
republic and the invention of the cotton-gin. State after State in
forming its constitution, or by special enactment, arranged for
immediate abolition or gradual emancipation. Even in slaveholding
Virginia and North Carolina, few could be found to defend the system
from an economic standpoint, although they had to admit the necessity
of its use in the rice swamps of South Carolina and Georgia.
Lafayette was urging Washington to employ his recently acquired leisure
in transforming slaves into free tenants. "Such an example as yours,"
he wrote from Cadiz, "might render it a general practice."
"Would to God a like spirit might diffuse itself generally into the minds
of the people of this country," replied the Virginia farmer, "but I
despair of seeing it. To set the slaves afloat at once would, I really
believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief, but by degrees
it certainly might and assuredly ought to be effected; and that too by
legislative authority.
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