is a singular thing that he should
without comment have read, and his listeners without comment have heard,
a recital that slavery was abolished in their territory. It emphasizes
the fact that at this time there was throughout the West no very strong
feeling on the subject of slavery, and what feeling there was, was if
anything hostile. The adventurous backwoods farmers who composed the
great mass of the population in Tennessee, as elsewhere among and west
of the Alleghanies, were not a slave-owning people, in the sense that
the planters of the seaboard were. They were preeminently folk who did
their work with their own hands. Master and man chopped and ploughed and
reaped and builded side by side, and even the leaders of the community,
the militia generals, the legislators, and the judges, often did their
share of farm work, and prided themselves upon their capacity to do it
well. They had none of that feeling which makes slave-owners look upon
manual labor as a badge of servitude. They were often lazy and
shiftless, but they never deified laziness and shiftlessness or made
them into a cult. The one thing they prized beyond all others was their
personal freedom, the right of the individual to do whatsoever he saw
fit. Indeed they often carried this feeling so far as to make them
condone gross excesses, rather than insist upon the exercise of even
needful authority. They were by no means entirely logical, but they did
see and feel that slavery was abhorrent, and that it was utterly
inconsistent with the theories of their own social and governmental
life. As yet there was no thought of treating slavery as a sacred
institution, the righteousness of which must not be questioned. At the
Fourth of July celebrations toasts such as "The total abolition of
slavery" were not uncommon. [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, July 17,
1795, etc. See also issue Jan. 28, 1792.] It was this feeling which
prevented any manifestation of surprise at Blount's apparent
acquiescence in a section of the ordinance for the government of the
Territory which prohibited slavery.

Dulness of the Public Conscience about Slavery.

Nevertheless, though slaves were not numerous, they were far from
uncommon, and the moral conscience of the community was not really
roused upon the subject. It was hardly possible that it should be
roused, for no civilized people who owned African slaves had as yet
abolished slavery, and it was too much to hope that the pat