"In the language of the wise and prophetic Jefferson, 'you must approach it, you must bear it, you must adopt some plan of emancipation, or worse will follow.'"[[134]]
James McDowell, speaking as a representative from Rockbridge County, on the 21st of January, in the same debate, said:
"Sir, you may place the slave where you please—you may dry up to your uttermost the fountains of his feelings, the springs of his thought—you may close upon his mind every avenue of knowledge and cloud it over with artificial night—you may yoke him to your labors as the ox which liveth only to work and worketh only to live—you may put him under any process, which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being—you may do this and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality—it is the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach; it is a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of the Deity and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man."[[135]]
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, speaking as a representative from Albemarle County, on the 21st of January, in the same debate, said:
"Does slavery exist in any part of civilized Europe? No, sir, in no part of it. America is the only civilized Christian nation that bears the opprobrium. In every other country where civilization and Christianity have existed together they have erased it from their codes."[[136]]
Philip A. Bolling, speaking as a representative from Buckingham County, on the 25th of January, in the same debate, said:
"Mr. Speaker, it is vain for gentlemen to deny the fact that the feelings of society are fast becoming adverse to slavery. Moral causes which produce that feeling are on the march and will on until the groans of slavery are heard no more in this else happy country. Look over this world's wide page—see the rapid progress of liberal feelings—see the shackles falling from nations who have long writhed under the galling yoke of slavery. Liberty is going over the whole earth, hand in hand with Christianity."[[137]]
| [130] | Virginia Slavery Debate, 1832, White, Speech of Thomas Marshall, p. 6. |
| [131] | Idem, Speech of J. A. Chandler, p. 3. |