"After the adjournment of the Legislature in 1833, the question was discussed before the people fairly and squarely, as one of the abolition of slavery. I was re-elected on that ground in my county. The feeling extended rapidly from that time in Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri until Northern abolitionism reared its head. Southern abolition was reform and an appeal to the master; Northern abolition was revolution and an appeal to the slave. One was peaceful and the other mutually destructive of both races by a servile insurrection. The Southern people feared to trust to the intervention of persons themselves exempt by position from the imagined dangers of the transition."[[66]]
VIEWS OF PROMINENT VIRGINIANS
George Tucker, Professor of Political Economy, in the University of Virginia, in his work, The Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth, published in 1843, referring to the subject, writes:
"This is not the place for assailing or defending slavery; but it may be confidently asserted that the efforts of Abolitionists have hitherto made the people in the slaveholding states cling to it more tenaciously. Those efforts are viewed by them as an intermeddling in their domestic concerns that is equally unwarranted by the comity due to sister states, and to the solemn pledges of the Federal compact. In the general indignation which is thus excited, the arguments in favor of negro emancipation, once open and urgent, have been completely silenced, and its advocates among the slaveholders, who have not changed their sentiments, find it prudent to conceal them.... Such have been the fruits of the zeal of Northern Abolitionists in those states in which slavery prevails; and the fable of the Wind and the Sun never more forcibly illustrated the difference between gentle and violent means in influencing men's wills."[[67]]
In 1847, Dr. Henry Ruffner, President of Washington College, delivered an address upon the subject of slavery in Virginia which attracted widespread attention. In this speech, made in the midst of the growing controversy, he refers to the reactionary influence of the Abolitionists as follows:
"But this unfavorable change of sentiment is due chiefly to the fanatical violence of those Northern anti-slavery men usually called Abolitionists.... They have not, by honourable means, liberated a single slave, and they never will by such a course of procedure as they have pursued. On the contrary they have created new difficulties in the way of all judicious schemes of emancipation by prejudicing the minds of slaveholders, and by compelling us to combat their false principles and rash schemes in our rear; whilst we are facing the opposition of men and the natural difficulties of the case in our front."[[68]]
If it be thought, that Mr. Randolph, Professor Tucker, and Dr. Ruffner were influenced by their environment and a desire to shift from the people of Virginia to the Abolitionists responsibility for the growth in the state of reactionary sentiments, with regard to slavery, it may be well to quote the contemporary views of prominent anti-slavery men of the North.
VIEWS OF CHANNING
Dr. William Ellery Channing, writing in 1835, said:
"The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by success. From the beginning it created alarm in the considerate and strengthened the sympathies of the free states with the slaveholder. It made converts of a few individuals but alienated multitudes.