When writing his Notes on Virginia in 1781 Jefferson denounced the slaveholding system in phrases afterward classic among abolitionists:  “With what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half of the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies ...  And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?  That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?  Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."[16] In the course of the same work, however, he deprecated abolition unless it were to be accompanied with deportation:  “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state...?  Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race ...  This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.  Many of their advocates while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty.  Some of these, embarrassed by the question ’What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only.  Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort.  The slave when made free might mix without staining the blood of his master.  But with us a second is necessary unknown to history.  When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."[17]

[Footnote 16:  Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query 18.]

[Footnote 17:  Ibid., query 14.]

George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes was that some plan might be adopted “by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”  But he noted in the same year that some abolition petitions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a reading.[18]

[Footnote 18:  Washington, Writings, W.C.  Ford ed., XI, 20, 62.]

Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St. George Tucker, professor of law in William and Mary College, inquired of leading citizens of Massachusetts in 1795 for data and advice, and undaunted by discouraging reports received in reply or by the specific dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate plan for extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen without expense to the state by merely making their conditions of life unbearable.  This was presented to the legislature in a pamphlet of 1796 at the height of the party strife between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently dismissed from consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project, reprinted his “dissertation” as an appendix to his edition of Blackstone in 1803, where the people and the politicians let it remain buried.  In public opinion, the problem as to the freedmen remained unsolved and insoluble.