people to adopt their views.

The debate in the Virginia Legislature in the session which met
three months after the Southampton massacre furnishes a
demonstration that the traditional anti-slavery sentiment still
persisted among the rulers of the Old Dominion. It arose out of a
petition from the Quakers of the State asking for an
investigation preparatory to a gradual emancipation of the
slaves. The debate, which lasted for several weeks, was able and
thorough. No stronger utterances in condemnation of slavery were
ever voiced than appear in this debate. Different speakers made
the statement that no one presumed to defend slavery on
principle--that apologists for slavery existed but no defenders.
Opposition to the petition was in the main apologetic in tone.

A darker picture of the blighting effects of slavery on the
industries of the country was never drawn than appears in these
speeches. Slavery was declared to be driving free laborers from
the State, to have already destroyed every industry except
agriculture, and to have exhausted the soil so that profitable
agriculture was becoming extinct, while pine brush was
encroaching upon former fruitful fields. "Even the wolf," said
one, "driven back long since by the approach of man, now returns,
after the lapse of a hundred years, to howl over the desolations
of slavery." Contrasts between free labor in northern industry
and that of the South were vividly portrayed. In a speech of
great power, one member referred to Kentucky and Ohio as States
"providentially designated to exhibit in their future histories
the differences which necessarily result from a country free
from, and a country afflicted with the curse of slavery."