The debate was by no means confined to industrial or material
considerations. McDowell, who was afterwards elected Governor of
the State, thus portrays the personal relations of master and
slave "You may place the slave where you please--you may put him
under any process, which, without destroying his value as a
slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being--you may do
all this, and the idea that he was born to be free will survive
it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality--it is the
ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach--it is
a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of the Deity, and never
meant to be extinguished by the hand of man."

Various speakers assumed that the continuance of slavery involved
a bloody conflict; that either peaceably or through violence,
slavery as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end;
that the agitation against it could not be suppressed. Faulkner
drew a lurid picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in
which he referred to the utterances of two former speakers, one
of whom had said that, unless something effective was done to
ward off the danger, "the throats of all the white people of
Virginia will be cut." The other replied, "No, the whites cannot
be conquered--the throats of the blacks will be cut." Faulkner's
rejoinder was that the difference was a trifling one, "for the
fact is conceded that one race or the other must be
exterminated."

The public press joined in the debate. Leading editorials
appeared in the Richmond Enquirer urging that effective measures
be instituted to put an end to slavery. The debate aroused much