Virginia's Attitude
But it is charged that while slavery was unprofitable in Virginia, as a system of labor, yet the state had become a "breeding ground" where slaves were reared and sold for profit and that the advantages accruing from this traffic had destroyed all sentiment in favor of emancipation, and so lowered the moral standards of the people that, in 1861, they stood ready to fight for the maintenance of slavery and the inter-state slave trade.
Mr. Fiske says:
"The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 had increased the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the very idea of emancipation faded out of memory."[[197]]
The biographers of Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, say:
"The condition of Virginia had become anomalous; it was little understood by the North and still less by her own citizens.... She still deemed she was the mother of Presidents: whereas she had degenerated into being like other Border States, the mother of slave breeders and of an annual crop of black-skinned chattels to be sold to the cotton, rice, and sugar planters of her neighboring commonwealths.... However counterfeit logic or mental reservations concealed it, the underlying feeling was to fight, no matter whom, and little matter how, for the protection of slavery and slave property."[[198]]
CHARACTER OF VIRGINIANS, 1860
Let us apply to these charges what in lieu of a better term we will call the law of probabilities. Is it probable that the anti-slavery sentiments alluded to as being so strong in Virginia immediately succeeding the Revolution would have perished as early as 1808, simply because slaves had appreciated in value? While Washington and Henry and Mason died prior to 1808, yet their great compatriots Jefferson, Marshall, Madison and Monroe lived to dates long subsequent, filling the highest positions in the gift of the state and nation.
Will it be seriously urged that these men and others, of only less prominence, lost their influence with their countrymen because of the debasing influences of the domestic slave trade?
Again, it may be questioned whether between the date indicated, and the outbreak of the Civil War, the Virginians had so further degenerated as to stand ready to fight for slavery and property in slaves. While Virginia, in the period of the Civil War, presented no statesmen comparable to those of the Revolution, yet in all the elements of inspiring manhood, valor, sacrifice and devotion, her people were not one whit behind their ancestors. The debasing effects of "slave breeding" had not corrupted the great body of her people: if so, how can we account for the bearing of Virginians at Gettysburg, and on other fields of test only less heroic? Speaking of their part in that historic battle, Charles Francis Adams says: