; at Long
Island, Newport, and Monmouth, they had held their ground against the
stubborn columns of the Ministerial army. They had journeyed with the
Pilgrim Fathers through eight years of despair and hope, of defeat and
victory; had shared their sufferings and divided their glory. These
recollections made difficult an unqualified acceptance of the doctrine
of the divine nature of perpetual slavery. Reason downed sophistry,
and human sympathy shamed prejudice. And against prejudice, custom,
and political power, the thinking men of the South launched their best
thoughts. Jefferson said: "The hour of emancipation is advancing in
the march of time. It will come, and whether brought on by the
generous energy of our own minds, or by the bloody process of St.
Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present enemy
[Great Britain], if once stationed permanently within our country and
offering asylum and arms to the oppressed [Negro], is a leaf in our
history _not yet turned over_." These words, written to Edward Coles,
in August, 1814, were still ample food for the profound meditation of
the slave-holders. In his "Notes on Virginia" Mr. Jefferson had
written the following words: "_Indeed, I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever._
That, considering numbers, nature, and natural means, only a
revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among
possible events. That it may become probable by _supernatural
interference_. _The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with
us in such a contest._"[10]

The eloquence of Patrick Henry and the logic and philosophy of Madison
and Jefferson rang in the ears of the people of the slave-holding
States, and they paused to think. In forty years the Negro population
of Virginia had increased 186 per cent.--from 1790 to 1830,--while the
white had increased only 51 per cent. The rapid increase of the slave
population winged the fancy and produced horrid dreams of
insurrection; while the pronounced opposition of the Northern people
to slavery seemed to proclaim the weakness of the government and the
approach of its dissolution. In 1832, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, a
grandson of Thomas Jefferson, lifted up his voice in the Legislature
of Virginia against the institution of slavery.

Said Mr. Jefferson:--"There is one circumstance to which we are
to look as inevitable in the fulness of time--_a dissolu