He continues, in his plan for a Constitution for Virginia:
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free."
In a letter to Dr. Gordon, on Lord Cornwallis's invasion of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson says:
"He carried off also about thirty slaves, (Jefferson's.) Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from small-pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp."
I conclude here my citations from the united voices of some of the best men of the country, before and after the Revolution, against slavery as an evil, and a great national sin, not that I have exhausted their utterances, but that my time admits of no more.
The Republican party proclaims no doctrine so ultra as theirs, uses no language so strong as that of those Southern statesmen from whom it gains so much information, and whose views, to a great extent, it conscientiously accepts. We desire only to confine it within its present limits; we ask that it shall not pollute territory now free; we know the utter folly of appealing to the morality or humanity of a pro-slavery party, where the rights of a black man are involved; but when you insist on taking slaves into a free Territory, and smiting the land with this blighting, withering curse, we plant ourselves on our constitutional rights, and say, thus far shall you go, and no further.
The learned gentleman from Alabama, [Mr. Curry,] in alluding to the opinion of the fathers of the Republic, said:
"These, however, were but mere speculations."
Was it a mere speculation when Madison said, "we have seen a mere distinction of color made the ground of the most oppressive dominion of man over man?" Was it as a mere speculation that Jefferson wrote, that Cornwallis would have been right, had he carried away his (Jefferson's) slaves to free them? Was it a mere speculation, a wild fancy, that the framers of the Constitution would not admit that there could be such a thing as property in man? A mere speculation, was it, of Patrick Henry, when he said "that slavery is detested; we feel its fatal effects; we deplore it?" when he declared it would "rejoice his very soul, were all his fellow beings emancipated?" Was it a mere speculation when Jefferson wrote, and his colleagues signed, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal?" No one then doubted the truth of this declaration. More than a generation passed away before any man dared raise his voice against it. No, sir; this was no mere speculation, but the acknowledgment of a great "humanitarian fact." True then, it is true now; and must remain indisputable and eternal—a pillar of fire by night, a cloud by day, to guide and guard nations yet unborn in the path of honor, of safety, of moral and political grandeur.
But the learned gentleman does not pause upon these "speculations." He proceeds to tell us that circumstances are changed; that there was then little more than half a million slaves, and scarce a pound of cotton exported. Does the gentleman believe, or does he but attempt to lead us to believe, that the ethics of those men "without fear and without reproach" had no sounder foundation than this: that while slaves were few and cotton scarce, slavery might be a wrong, but with four million slaves and four million two hundred thousand bales of cotton, it becomes just, humane, moral?—that while negroes and cotton fill one side of the scales, Christian truth must kick the beam on the other, and slavery thus becomes a great "humanitarian fact?"