the few Africans they have freed, and whom they find it impracticable to
educate and elevate, how much greater would be the evil the slave States
must bring upon themselves by letting loose a population nearly twelve
times as numerous. Such an act, they argued, would be suicidal--would
crush out all progress in civilization; or, in the effort to elevate the
negro with the white man, allowing him equal freedom of action, would
make the more energetic Anglo-Saxon the slave of the indolent African.
Such a task, onerous in the highest degree, they could not, and would
not undertake; such an experiment, on their social system, they dared
not hazard; and in this determination they were encouraged to
persevere, not only by the results of emancipation, then wrought out at
the North, but by the settled convictions which had long prevailed at
the South, in relation to the impropriety of freeing the negroes. This
opinion was one of long standing, and had been avowed by some of the
ablest statesmen of the Revolution. Among these Mr. Jefferson stood
prominent. He was inclined to consider the African inferior "in the
endowments both of body and mind" to the European; and, while expressing
his hostility to slavery earnestly, vehemently, he avowed the opinion
that it was impossible for the two races to live equally free in the
same government--that "nature, habit, opinion, had drawn indelible lines
of distinction between them"--that, accordingly, emancipation and
"deportation" (colonization) should go hand in hand--and that these
processes should be gradual enough to make proper provisions for the
blacks in a new country, and fill their places in this with free white
laborers.[2]

Another point needs examination. Notwithstanding the well-known opinions
of Mr. Jefferson, it has been urged that the Declaration of Independence
was designed, by those who issued it, to apply to the negro as well as
to the white man; and that they purposed to extend to the negro, at the
end of the struggle, then begun, all the privileges which they hoped to
secure for themselves. Nothing can be further from the truth, and
nothing more certain than that the rights of the negro never entered
into the questions then considered. That document was written by Mr.
Jefferson himself, and, with the views which he entertained, he could
not have thought, for a moment, of conferring upon the negro the rights
of American citizenship. Hear him further upon this subject and