If it be urged that Virginia had reached the conclusion that without the dispersion or colonization of the whole or a large portion of her slave population emancipation was impracticable, it may be acknowledged that to a qualified extent this was true. The position, however, did not involve an abandonment of the principle of emancipation, but rather the insistence that with emancipation should go the work of solving the race problem by a method which gave some assurance of complete success.
That this attitude of Virginia cannot be regarded as wholly unreasonable or reactionary will appear when we consider the views of some of the leading friends of negro emancipation. From the number of those whose sanity kept pace with their zeal, we select Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.
VIEWS OF JEFFERSON AND CLAY
Mr. Jefferson in 1820 wrote:
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain than that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion, have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."[[98]]
Writing to Jared Sparks, President of Harvard College, in 1824, he said:
"In the disposition of these unfortunate people there are two rational objects to be distinctly kept in view. First, the establishment of a colony on the coast of Africa, which may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life and the blessings of liberty and science. By doing this, we may make them some retribution for the long course of injuries we have been committing on their population.... Second object, and the most interesting to us, as coming home to our physical and moral characters, to our happiness and safety, is to provide an asylum to which we can, by degrees, send the whole of that population from among us, and establish them under our patronage and protection, as a separate, free, and independent people, in some country and climate friendly to human life and happiness."[[99]]
VIEWS OF CLAY
Mr. Clay's attitude with respect to the institution of slavery will appear from his oft-quoted declaration:
"Those who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of the Colonization Society, they must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return—they must blot out the moral lights around us—they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason and the love of liberty."[[100]]