Richard Henry Lee, speaking in the Virginia House of Burgesses 1772, in support of a bill prohibiting the slave trade, said:
"Nor, sir, are these the only reasons to be urged against the importation. In my opinion not the cruelties practised in the conquest of South America, not the savage barbarity of a Saracen, can be more big with atrocity than our cruel trade to Africa. There we encourage those poor ignorant people to wage eternal war against each other; ... that by war, stealth or surprise, we Christians may be furnished with our fellow-creatures, who are no longer to be considered as created in the image of God as well as ourselves and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of Nature, but they are to be deprived forever of all the comforts of life and to be made the most wretched of the human kind."[[110]]
Patrick Henry, writing on the 18th day of January, 1773, said:
"Is it not a little surprising that Christianity, whose chief excellency consists in softening the human heart, cherishing and improving its finer feelings, should encourage a practice so totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong? What adds to the wonder is that this abominable practice has been introduced in the most enlightened ages....
"Would any one believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it.... I believe the time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we can do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence for slavery."[[111]]
At another time he wrote: "Our country will be peopled. The question is, shall it be with Europeans, or Africans?... Is there a man so degenerate as to wish to see his country the gloomy retreat of slavery?"[[112]]
George Washington, writing in 1786, to Robert Morris, of Philadelphia, after alluding to an Anti-slavery Society of Quakers in that city and suggesting that unless their practices were discontinued, "None of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it," continues:
"I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people, who are the subjects of this letter, in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it. But there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by legislative authority; and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting."
Writing in the same year to John F. Mercer, he said:
"I never mean, unless some particular circumstance shall compel me to it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law."[[113]]