interest throughout the South. Substantially all the current
abolition arguments appeared in the speeches of the slave-owning
members of the Virginia Legislature. And what was done about it?
Nothing at all. The petition was not granted; no action looking
towards emancipation was taken. This was indeed a turning-point.
Men do not continue to denounce in public their own conduct
unless their action results in some effort toward corrective
measures.

Professor Thomas Dew, of the chair of history and metaphysics in
William and Mary College and later President of the College,
published an essay reviewing the debate in the Legislature and
arguing that any plan for emancipation in Virginia was either
undesirable or impossible. This essay was among the first of the
direct pro-slavery arguments. Statements in support of the view
soon followed. In 1885 the Governor of South Carolina in a
message to the Legislature said, "Domestic slavery is the
corner-stone of our republican edifice." Senator Calhoun,
speaking in the Senate two years later, declared slavery to be a
positive good. W. G. Simms, Southern poet and novelist, writing
in 1852, felicitates himself as being among the first who about
fifteen years earlier advocated slavery as a great good and a
blessing. Harriet Martineau, an English author who traveled
extensively in the South in 1885, found few slaveholders who
justified the institution as being in itself just. But after the
debates in the Virginia Legislature, there were few owners of
slaves who publicly advocated abolition. The spirit of mob
violence had set in, and, contrary to the utterances of Virginia
statesmen, free speech on the subject of slavery was suppressed
in the slave States. This did not mean that Southern statesmen