then
judge:

"It will probably be asked, why not retain and incorporate the blacks
into the State, and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of
white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? 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. To
these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are
physical and moral"[3]

Now it is evident, from this language, that Mr. Jefferson was not only
opposed to allowing the negroes the rights of citizenship, but that he
was opposed to emancipation also, except on the condition that the
freedmen should be removed from the country. He could, therefore, have
meant nothing more by the phrase, "all men are created equal," which he
employed in the Declaration of Independence, than the announcement of a
general principle, which, in its application to the colonists, was
intended most emphatically to assert their equality, before God and the
world, with the imperious Englishmen who claimed the divine right of
lording it over them. This was undoubtedly the view held by Mr.
Jefferson, and the extent to which he expected the language of the
Declaration to be applied.[4] Nor could the signers of that instrument,
or the people whom they represented, ever have intended to apply its
principles to any barbarous or semi-barbarous people, in the sense of
admitting them to an equality with themselves in the management of a
free government. Had this been their design, they must have enfranchised
both Indians and Africans, as both were within the territory over which
they exercised jurisdiction.

But testimony of a conclusive character is at hand, to show that quite
a different object was to be accomplished, than negro equality, in the
movements of the colonists which preceded the outbreak of the American
Revolution. They passed resolutions upon the subject of the slave trade,
it is true, but it was to oppose it, because it increased the colored
population, a result they deprecated in the strongest language. The
checking of this evil, great as the people considered it, was not the
principal object they had in view, in resolving to crush out the slave
trade. It wa