"My feelings and instincts were in opposition to slavery in every shape; to the subjugation of one man's will to that of another; and, from the time I read Clarkson's celebrated pamphlet, I was, I am afraid, as mad as Clarkson himself. I read myself into this madness, as I have read myself into some agricultural improvements; but, as with these last, I worked myself out of them.... The disease will run its course. It has run its course in the Northern States; it is beginning to run its course in Maryland. The natural death of slavery is the unprofitableness of its most expensive labor."[[123]]
Replying to a Northern member in Congress, in 1826, he said: "Sir, I envy neither the head nor the heart of the man from the North who arises here to defend slavery upon principle."[[124]]
Francis W. Gilmer, writing to William Wirt, from England in July, 1824, said:
"I begin to be impatient to see Virginia once more. It's more like England than any other part of the United States—slavery non obstanti. Remove the stain—blacker than the Ethiopian's skin, and annihilate our political schemers and it would be the fairest realm on which the sun ever shone."[[125]]
John Marshall, writing in 1826, said:
"I concur with you that nothing portends more calamity and mischief to the Southern States than their slave population. Yet, they seem to cherish the evil, and to view with immovable prejudice and dislike everything which may tend to diminish it. I do not wonder that they should resent any attempt, should one be made, to interfere with the rights of property, but they have a feverish jealousy of measures which may do good without the hazard of harm, that I think very unwise."[[126]]
James Monroe, speaking in the Virginia Constitutional Convention on the 2nd of November, 1829, said:
"What has been the leading spirit of this state ever since our independence was attained? She has always declared herself in favor of the equal rights of man. The Revolution was conducted on that principle. Yet there was at that time a slavish population in Virginia. We hold it in the condition in which the Revolution found it, and what can be done with this population?... As to the practicability of emancipating them, it can never be done by the state itself, nor without the aid of the Union....
"Sir, what brought us together in the Revolutionary War? It was the doctrine of equal rights. Each part of the country encouraged and supported every other part. None took advantage of the other's distresses. And if we find that this evil has preyed upon the vitals of the Union and has been prejudicial to all the states where it has existed, and is likewise repugnant to their several state constitutions and Bills of Rights, why may we not expect that they will unite with us in accomplishing its removal?"[[127]]
Benjamin Watkins Leigh, speaking in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-30, said: