[Footnote 19:  St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery, with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1796, reprinted New York, 1860).  Tucker’s Massachusetts correspondence is printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII (Belknap papers), 379-431.]

Meanwhile the Virginia black code had been considerably moderated during and after the Revolution; and in particular the previous almost iron-clad prohibition of private manumission had been wholly removed in effect by an act of 1782.  In spite of restrictions afterward imposed upon manumission and upon the residence of new freedmen in the state, the free negroes increased on a scale comparable to that in Maryland.  As compared with an estimate of less than two thousand in 1782, there were 12,866 in 1790, 20,124 in 1800, and 30,570 in 1810.  Thereafter the number advanced more slowly until it reached 58,042, about one-eighth as many as the slaves numbered, in 1860.

In the more southerly states condemnation of slavery was rare.  Among the people of Georgia, the depressing experience of the colony under a prohibition of it was too fresh in memory for them to contemplate with favor a fresh deprivation.  In South Carolina Christopher Gadsden had written in 1766 likening slavery to a crime, and a decade afterward Henry Laurens wrote:  “You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery....  The day, I hope is approaching when from principles of gratitude as well as justice every man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to comply with the golden rule.  Not less than twenty thousand pounds sterling would all my negroes produce if sold at public auction tomorrow....  Nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery.  Great powers oppose me—­the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen.  What will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate?  These are difficulties, but not insuperable.  I will do as much as I can in my time, and leave the rest to a better hand.  I am not one of those ... who dare trust in Providence for defence and security of their own liberty while they enslave and wish to continue in slavery thousands who are as well entitled to freedom as themselves.  I perceive the work before me is great.  I shall appear to many as a promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines; it will therefore be necessary to proceed with caution."[20] Had either Gadsden or Laurens entertained thoughts of launching an anti-slavery campaign, however, the palpable hopelessness of such a project in their community must have dissuaded them.  The negroes of the rice coast were so outnumbering and so crude that an agitation applying the doctrine of inherent liberty and equality to them could only have had the effect of discrediting the doctrine itself.  Furthermore, the industrial prospect, the swamps and forests calling for conversion into prosperous plantations, suggested an increase rather than a diminution of the slave labor supply.  Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, were more inclined to keep open the African slave trade than to relinquish control of the negro population.  Revolutionary liberalism had but the slightest of echoes there.