Philip A. Bolling, of Buckingham County, said:
"If we turn our eyes to that part of the country which lies below the mountains, and particularly below the falls of the rivers, it seems as if some judgment from Heaven had poured over it and scarred it; fields once cultivated are now waste and desolate; the eye is no longer cheered by the rich verdure that decked it in other days; no, sir, but fatigued by an interminable wilderness of worn out, gullied, piney old fields."[[189]]
VIEWS OF McDOWELL AND HARRISON
James McDowell, in the same debate, said:
"Sir, it is true of Virginia, not merely that she has not advanced, but that in many respects she has greatly declined; and what have we got as a compensation for this decline? As a compensation for this disparity between what Virginia is and what she might have been? Nothing but the right of property in the very beings who have brought this disparity upon us. This is our pay; this is what we have gotten to remunerate us for our delinquent prosperity; to repay us for our desolated fields; our torpid enterprise; and in this dark day of our humbled importance, to sustain our hopes and to soothe our pride as a people."[[190]]
Jesse Burton Harrison, in an article published in the American Quarterly Review, December, 1832, sets out at length the poverty of Virginia, and the disastrous effects of slavery upon her industrial development.
"What," says Mr. Harrison, "is now the productive value of an estate of lands and negroes in Virginia? We state as a result of extensive inquiries, embracing the last fifteen years, that a very great portion of the larger plantations, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, actually bring their proprietors in debt at the end of the short term of years, notwithstanding what would once, in Virginia, have been deemed very sheer economy; that much the larger part of the considerable land-owners are content if they barely meet their plantation expenses without a loss of capital, and that those who make any profit, it will, in none but rare instances, average more than one to one and a half per cent, on the capital invested. The case is not materially varied with the smaller proprietors. Mr. Randolph of Roanoke, whose sayings have so generally the raciness and truth of proverbs, has repeatedly said in Congress that the time was coming when the masters would run away from their slaves, and be advertised by them in the public papers.... Of the white emigrants from Virginia, at least half are hard working who carry away with them little beside their tools and a stout heart of hope. The mechanics' trades have failed to give them bread. Commerce, she has little, shipping none, and it is a fact that the very staple of the state, tobacco, is not exported by her own capital. The state does virtually a commission business in it. All the sources of prosperity, moral and economical, are deadened; there is general discontent with one's lot; in some of the first settled and choicest part of her territory symptoms are not wanting of desolate antiquity. And all this in youthful America, and in Virginia too, the fairest region of America and with a race of people inferior to none in the world in its capacity to constitute a prosperous nation."
VIEWS OF HENRY RUFFNER
In the address of Dr. Henry Ruffner, President of Washington College, delivered in 1847, heretofore quoted from, the author by a mass of statistics shows how slavery had injured the state by decimating its white population, paralyzing its agriculture and almost destroying its manufacturing and commercial interests.
"We esteem it," says Dr. Ruffner, "a sad, a humiliating fact which should permeate the heart of every Virginian, that from the year 1790 to this time, Virginia has lost more people by emigration than all the old free states together. Up to 1840, when the last census was taken, she had lost more by near three hundred thousand.... She has sent, or we should rather say, she has driven from her soil, at least one-third of all the emigrants who have gone from the old states to the new.... It is in the last period of ten years from 1830 to 1840, that this consuming plague of slavery has shown its worst effects in the old Southern States.... East Virginia actually fell off twenty-six thousand in population; and with the exception of Richmond and one or two other towns, her population continues to decline. Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she was also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction."