together with the Society of Friends in Hanover and 347 women, prayed for the abolition of slavery, some on the post nati plan and others without specification of details.[84] The House of Delegates responded by devoting most of its session of that winter to an extraordinarily outspoken and wide-ranging debate on the many phases of the negro problem, reflecting and elaborating all the sentiments expressed in the petitions together with others more or less original with the members themselves.  The Richmond press reported the debate in great detail, and many of the speeches were given a pamphlet circulation in addition.[85] The only tangible outcome there and elsewhere, however, was in the form of added legal restrictions upon the colored population, slave and free.  But when the fright and fervor of the year had passed, conditions normal to the community returned.  On the one hand the warnings of wiseacres impressed upon the would-be problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of silence, particularly while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon the general Southern regime were so active.  On the other hand the new severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old ones had been, to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for emergency use, out of sight and out of mind in the daily routine of peaceful industry.

[Footnote 84:  The Letter of Appomattox to the People of Virginia:  Exhibiting a connected view of the recent proceedings in the House of Delegates on the subject of the abolition of slavery and a succinct account of the doctrines broached by the friends of abolition in debate, and the mischievous tendency of those proceedings and doctrines (Richmond, 1832).  These letters were first published in the Richmond Enquirer, February 4, 1832 et seqq.]

[Footnote 85:  The debate is summarized in Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston, 1872), I, 190-207.]

In the remaining ante-bellum decades, though the actual outbreaks were negligible except for John Brown’s raid, the discoveries, true or false, and the rumors, mostly unwarranted, were somewhat more frequent than before.  Revelations in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835 shortly before July 4, told of a conspiracy of whites and blacks scheduled for that day as a ramification of the general plot of the Murrell gang recently exposed.[86] A mass meeting thereupon appointed an investigating committee of thirteen citizens with power to apply capital punishment; and several whites together with ten or fifteen blacks were promptly put to death.[87]

[Footnote 86:  See above, pp. 381, 382.]

[Footnote 87:  The Liberator (Boston, Mass.), Aug. 8, 1835, quoting the Clinton, Miss., Gazette of July 11.]