Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832

Insurrection

The slavery debate was a response to the bloodiest slave rebellion in U.S. history. On August 21, 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner and well-nigh sixty other men killed l-eight white men, women, and children in Southampton County. They threw some bodies into bonfires and left others for the wolves. They ransacked houses and stole or destroyed possessions, but they did not engage in rape or sexual violence. Governor John Floyd mobilized the state militia, which, joined by units from North Carolina, halted the rebellion and executed about 120 African Americans without trial. Turner was captured on October 30 and hanged on November 11.

The insurrection sent shockwaves of fright throughout Virginia. It brought to many minds images of the bloody slave revolt in Haiti (1791–1804) and Gabriel'southward foiled plans to burn Richmond (1800). By the terminate of September and into early on October, discussions of slavery began to appear in newspapers such equally the Richmond Enquirer and the Richmond Ramble Whig. Letter writers raised concerns about the condom of Virginians with and so many African Americans, both enslaved and gratis, in their midst. Others wanted to censure black preachers and white ones, too, particularly if, as ane person wrote to the Whig, they discoursed "with a ranting cant about equality."

Legislative Petitions

By October, citizens began circulating petitions related to slavery. About xl in all, signed by approximately ii,000 Virginians, mostly men, were submitted to the Firm of Delegates. Several chosen for the gradual emancipation of slaves, some for colonization. Many were concerned nearly the state'due south free blacks and their negative influence on the contentment of slaves and on general constabulary and order.

A number of petitions proposed emancipation. The Virginia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Charles Urban center Canton, in a petition dated December fourteen, 1831, asked the Firm of Delegates to consider slavery "an evil in our Country[,] an evil which has been of long continuance, and is at present of increasing magnitude." Not only should slavery be abolished, the petitioners alleged, only there should be a "restoration of the African race to the inalienable rights of homo." A petition from Buckingham County, dated December 16, also suggested emancipation, but not out of fealty to the principles underlying the Declaration of Independence; rather, the signers worried that the state'southward blackness population was growing likewise fast and its white population not at all. This would leave the land unstable and at the mercy of slavery'southward "menace."

A petition from Loudoun County, dated December thirty, went a stride further and, after advocating gradual emancipation, called for "the removal of the entire colored population," including those who had been gratis, from Virginia. Another petition, from a group of Augusta County women, dated Jan 19, 1832, decried "the bloody monster, which threatens us," and urged the assembly to "remove it, ye protectors of our persons, ye guardians of our peace!"

Most a third of the petitions specifically called for the removal of all free blacks. Petitioners from Northampton County noted their "anomalous" position in order—gratuitous blacks were neither enslaved nor fully free, and therefore of questionable loyalty. Suspecting them of engaging in "dangerous intrigues with our slaves," the Northampton men proposed that gratis blacks be exiled to Republic of liberia. A petition from Washington County, dated December 17, conceded that free blacks "may not be more decumbent to appoint in insurrectionary movements than slaves:—just they are mostly a great nuisance to our guild." A cursory petition from Fauquier County asked that the assembly "appropriate coin to transport free persons of Colour to the coast of Africa, and also, the power to purchase slaves and ship them likewise."

Petitioners from Culpeper Canton, meanwhile, claimed that slaves were monopolizing the trades and recommended that no enslaved or free blackness man be "placed as an apprentice in whatsoever manner whatsoever to learn a trade or fine art under astringent and onerous penalty."

Female petitioners from Fluvanna Canton spoke for many when they declared that "a blight now hangs over our national prospects, and a cloud dims the sunshine of domestic peace throughout our Country. Our ears have heard the wailings of distress, and a mysterious dread mingled with fearful suspicion, disturbs the sacred quiet of our homes. … We cannot conceal from ourselves that an evil is among us, which threatens to outgrow the growth and eclipse the brightness of our national blessings."

Prelude to the Debate

Eyes turned to the General Assembly'south new session, ready to begin on December five. On November 17, shortly after the hanging of Nat Turner, the Constitutional Whig urged legislators to have the courage to human activity: "Every man feels the force of Mr. Jefferson's metaphor, that we have the wolf by the ears, and its increasing truth. There is a general acknowledgement that something ought to exist, and must be washed."

The public debate reminded Virginians of longstanding differences between those living in the eastern and in the western parts of the state. Voters eastward of the Blueish Ridge Mountains owned a majority of the state'southward enslaved population and vigorously defended their rights as slaveholders. Those west of the Blueish Ridge generally favored emancipation. They depended less on slave labor and believed that eastern slaveholders enjoyed unfair privileges, among them counting their slaves toward representation in Congress. The Richmond Enquirer suggested that separation of East and West was not out of the question. "We tin can find no substantial reasons for continuing the connexion between countries geographically divided by nature, inhabited by people of different origin, habits and principles, having no intercourse, and whose legislative history from its commencement, displays incessant disagreement and collision," the paper wrote on December 2.

Four days later, Governor Floyd issued a message to the Full general Associates, outlining his own preferences and priorities for the upcoming session. He thanked all those involved in putting down Turner's insurrection and warned lawmakers that "negro preachers" accept been chief amid those "stirring upward the spirit of revolt." Later railing against "inflammatory pamphlets" distributed by abolitionists and meddling northerners, the governor recommended that Virginia's slave laws be revised in order "to preserve in due subordination the slave population of our state." Finally, he echoed others' concerns about the dangers posed by free blacks and alleged it to be "indispensably necessary for them to withdraw from this community."

Floyd, a native of western Virginia, made no mention of emancipation, but privately he was working toward that stop. In his diary he wrote, "before I leave this Government I volition have contrived to have a police passed gradually abolishing slavery in this State, or at all events to brainstorm the work past prohibiting slavery on the Westward side of the Blue Ridge Mountains."

In the Committee

The Business firm of Delegates established a thirteen-human being select committee to consider the governor's suggestions and to respond to denizen petitions referred from the full Firm. On Dec 12, the House besides assigned the committee to investigate the possibility of colonizing gratuitous blacks.

Ii days later, committee member William H. Roane, a delegate from Hanover County and the grandson of Patrick Henry, presented to the Firm two petitions and moved they be read aloud: the Quaker petition calling for the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, and one from Hanover calling for voluntary emancipation and colonization. William Goode, of Mecklenburg County, and his conservative allies, quickly requested a suspension of the reading and moved that the House non refer the petitions to the select committee. (Goode was not a member of the committee.) Laying groundwork for the debate to come, he then revised his motion to debate that both memorials be rejected because emancipation was "irrelevant" to the select committee'due south charge to consider the governor's message and the colonization of free blacks.

The select committee's chairman, William H. Brodnax, of Dinwiddie County, was a brigadier full general of the country militia and had allowable the forces that quelled Turner's rebellion. He responded by defending a debate on the petitions. Other states had rid themselves of slavery, he said; "they mainly removed, and, in some cases, entirely eradicated information technology, by the same or near the same plan that was recommended by Mr. Jefferson. They did not object to bear upon the subject; but met it boldly, and are reaping the benefits of their measures. Does whatsoever man incertitude that Slavery is an evil?" Brodnax went on to betoken out the deleterious economical furnishings of slavery, asserting that information technology was responsible for the "decay of our prosperity, and the retrograde movement of this one time flourishing Commonwealth."

While his specific arguments may non have won wide approving, Brodnax'due south desire for open fence did. The Business firm of Delegates voted 93 to 27 to refer the Quaker petition to the select committee.

On Dec 17, Thomas Miller, of Powhatan County, requested the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe from 1802 be sent to the committee. After the discovery of conspiracies led by the slave Gabriel in 1800 and the slave Sancho in 1802, then-president Jefferson and then-governor Monroe discussed the possibility of cooperation in a plan to colonize the country'southward black population. On Jan 2, Charles J. Faulkner, of Berkeley County, resolved that the committee recommend to the Business firm a scheme for gradual emancipation, while also guaranteeing to slaveholders either the right to hold their current slaves or to receive "adequate compensation for their loss."

The Richmond Enquirer, in perhaps the virtually influential editorial of the session, published on January vii, 1832, worried that the assembly was fugitive the real trouble. "Information technology is probable from what we hear," the newspaper'south editor, Thomas Ritchie, wrote, "that the Committee on the colored population will report some plan for getting rid of complimentary people of colour—Simply is this all that can be washed? Are we forever to suffer the greatest evil, which can scourge our country, non only to remain, merely to increase in its dimensions?"

Ritchie went on to propose gradual emancipation as a ways to reduce "the mass of evil." The Whig echoed Ritchie, asserting that it would "fight by his side in this holy cause."

Debate Begins

Until at present, the fence over slavery had been breezy—held in the delegates' back rooms and parlors—or express largely to questions framed by the governor: Should black preachers be banned? Should slave laws be rewritten? Should free blacks exist removed from the state? Referral of the Quaker petition had been a victory for emancipationists, just it had not yet sparked a total-fledged debate. And then William Goode, peradventure unwittingly, helped to do just that.

On Jan 10, he asked after the committee's progress, and Chairman Brodnax replied that it was because two modes of action: one, the removal of free blacks, and ii, the "gradual extinction of slavery." This second betoken prompted Goode to press the matter. The side by side mean solar day he proposed to the Business firm that the select committee should "be discharged from the consideration of all petitions, memorials and resolutions, which accept for their object, the manumission of persons held in servitude under the existing laws of this commonwealth, and that it is not expedient to legislate on the subject field." He warned that the "serenity" of the community was in jeopardy and went on to criticize "the Public Printing at Richmond" for encouraging abolitionism.

Goode's resolution presented the assembly's pro-emancipation members with the opportunity they were seeking. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, of Albemarle County, moved that Goode's resolution be amended so that it instead called for legislation that would submit to a public vote a gradual emancipation and colonization programme, inspired by his grandfather Thomas Jefferson and by Randolph's friend Edward Coles.

Debate over these ii resolutions would at final establish a focused consideration of emancipation itself, an ironic outcome for Goode, as Governor Floyd wryly noted: "the slave party … have produced the very debate they wished to avoid, and besides, have entered upon information technology with open doors."

By "open doors," Floyd alluded to the House's decision to open up its galleries for these debates, allowing the public to hear the various arguments and newspapermen to transcribe and print the speeches. The Enquirer, in a January 12 editorial, historic that the "silence" was "broken," and that bug of "Conscience, whose 'minor, still vox' we must hear," would finally be aired. The Whig also thrilled at the open debate, writing nine days afterward that "multitudes throng to the Capitol, and take been compensated past eloquence which would have illustrated Rome or Athens."

Arguments on Emancipation

On January 11, Samuel McDowell Moore, of Rockbridge Canton, rose to speak on behalf of abolition. He pointed out the "evil consequences of slavery" on slaveholders, who, for fright of their slaves, could never know "happiness, peace, and freedom from apprehension." Slavery, he argued, had a tendency "to undermine and destroy everything similar virtue and morality in the community," promoting ignorance, primarily in the slaves themselves. Because of the taint that accompanied black men working the soil, free men scoffed at such labor and were instead "gradually wasting abroad their small patrimonial estates and raising their families in habits of idleness and extravagance." As a result, he claimed, Virginia trailed backside other states economically. Moore also suggested that a large slave population might interfere with Virginia'south ability to fend off foreign aggression, and that it might interfere with the growth of the white population.

The next day, James H. Gholson, of Brunswick Canton, responded with an entreatment to the rights of property owners every bit delineated in the U.S. Constitution. Citing the Fifth Subpoena, which prohibits the government from taking private holding for public use without just compensation, he wondered, "if private holding be not now secure in the hands of its owner, I know of no vigilance or caution, which could shield it from rapacity or usurpation." He also worried that if gratis men were so willing to sacrifice their property, they might soon sacrifice other rights, too.

Suggesting that slavery was neither his peers' invention nor their fault, Gholson noted that their only responsibility was to "brand it subservient to the best purposes of society." And toward that terminate, he observed "that the slaves of Va. are equally happy a laboring form every bit exists upon the habitable globe … they are content today, and have no care or feet for tomorrow." Gholson and others, in effect, argued that slavery was a positive good, protecting black men and women from their own ignorance and from atmospheric condition that were worse, even for free men, in Europe. (John C. Calhoun more famously made the same statement in a speech before the U.Southward. Senate in 1837.)

Governor Floyd's nephew, William B. Preston, of Montgomery County, took up the question of property rights, arguing that slaves "are property under statute, and they must remain property until that statute is repealed." Enslaved men and women, he said, were born with the rights of human beings, and those rights could be restored by the state. Others argued that a state in jeopardy—such every bit that occasioned past slavery—had an obligation to seize such property for the purposes of its own defense. Yet other delegates wondered whether unborn slaves should exist considered property and, if so, whether any emancipation scheme, no thing how ingenious, was possible.

On January 16, the select commission submitted its report to the House, declaring it "inexpedient for the nowadays to make any legislative enactments for the abolition of slavery." Preston offered an amendment replacing "inexpedient" with "expedient." This led to a shift in the debate from Goode's subpoena to Preston'south, but the arguments still focused on the morality of slavery, the workability of emancipation, the limits of property rights, and the nature of freedom.

Debate Ends

On Jan 25, the House rejected Preston's amendment, and to the commission'southward report added a preamble, proposed past Archibald Bryce Jr., of Goochland County: Profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the coloured population of this republic: induced by humanity, as well as policy, to an firsthand effort for the removal in the get-go place, as well of those who are now free, as of such as may future go free: believing that this effort, while it is in only accordance with the sentiment of the community on the subject field, volition absorb all our present means; and that a further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more than definite development of public stance. The preamble's vague wording was crafted to mollify both sides, although information technology seemed to please the pro-emancipation delegates more than. An assay of its narrow approval, according to the historian Eva Sheppard Wolf, demonstrates that in that location was "significant involvement in antislavery policies and a broad consensus that the gratis black population ought to exist reduced, only the debate ended in victory for the conservatives who opposed emancipation, since the legislature decided non to consider any abolition scheme and never broached the bailiwick again."

A bill calling for the involuntary removal of free blacks from Virginia was amended to require the consent of those leaving. Information technology failed in the Senate, however, making for a "ludicrous finale," in the words of the Constitutional Whig. A "police bill" did manage to pass both houses. It forbade both free and enslaved African Americans from preaching and prohibited slaves from attending dark religious meetings unless accompanied by their white masters. It also barred free blacks from participating in trades and handicrafts if they refused the opportunity to be removed to Republic of liberia.

Writing in 1941, the historian Joseph Clarke Robert described the 1832 debate in Virginia every bit the "final and most brilliant of the Southern attempts to abolish slavery." That it ended in what was largely the status quo did non seem to overly concern pro-emancipationists such every bit Thomas Jefferson Randolph. He told the Business firm that the "friends of abolition take gained all they asked." William D. Sims, of Halifax County, worried that the mere discussion of such matters would "lead public opinion" in the wrong direction. In fact, public stance, at least in the Piedmont and Tidewater regions, turned more firmly against abolition, equating information technology with northern agitation. More than anything, however, the debates demonstrate just how divided Virginia was over slavery.

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Source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-slavery-debate-of-1831-1832-the/

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