"Your attention is earnestly invited to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave trade with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied that this trade is still in part carried on by means of vessels built in the United States and owned or navigated by some of our citizens."

The foregoing recitals will serve to illustrate the uncompromising attitude of hostility on the part of leading Virginians toward the African slave trade. They sought by Federal statutes and concerted action with foreign nations to drive the pernicious traffic from the seas. They denounced the trade as inhuman, because it stimulated men to reduce free men to slavery and then entailed upon slaves the horrors and dangers of the "middle passage." They resolutely opposed any addition to the slave population of America because profoundly convinced that every such importation was fraught with menace to the social, economic and moral well-being of the nation and rendered more difficult the emancipation of those who had already been brought to her shores. As we have seen, her representatives at the first meeting of the Continental Congress had defined Virginia's position in the notable memorial which declared:

"The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But, previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa."[[47]]

This was the philosophy of the situation as defined by the great statesmen of the Revolutionary period and to their views their ablest successors in Virginia adhered down to the outbreak of the Civil War.

[37] Annals of Congress, Vol. I, col. 336.
[38] Suppression of the Slave Trade, DuBois, p. 80.
[39] Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 2nd section, part I, pp. 442-3.
[40] Suppression of the Slave Trade, DuBois, p. 120, Note 3.
[41] Annals of Congress, 17th Congress, second session, pp. 435 and 928.