s to avoid work and escape the whip, was
necessarily only one remove from semi-civilization.

It was not easy to indoctrinate such a people, more arrogant than
intelligent, with new ideas. By the same token it might be possible to
lead them into new ways before they would find out whither they were
going. Mr. Madison hoped to change the wretched system of plantation
commerce by a port bill, which he brought into the Assembly. Imposts
require custom-houses, and obviously there could not be custom-houses
nor even custom-officers on every plantation in the State. The bill
proposed to leave open two ports of entry for all foreign ships. It
would greatly simplify matters if all the foreign trade of the State
could be limited to these two ports only. It would then be easy enough
to enforce imposts, and the State would have something to surrender to
the federal government to help it to a revenue, if, happily, the time
should ever come when all the States should assent to that measure of
salvation for the Union. Not that this was the primary object of those
who favored this port law; but the question of commerce was the
question on which everything hinged, and its regulation in each State
must needs have an influence, one way or the other, upon the possibility
of strengthening, even of preserving, the Union. Everything depended
upon reconciling these state interests by mutual concessions. The South
was jealous of the North, because trade flourished at the North and did
not flourish at the South. It seemed as if this was at the expense of
the South, and so, in a certain sense, it was. The problem was to find
where the difficulty lay, and to apply the remedy.

If commerce flourished at the North, where each of the States had one or
two ports of entry only, why should it not flourish in Virginia if
regulated in the same way? If those centres of trade bred a race of
merchants, who built their own ships, bought and sold, did their own
carrying, competed with and stimulated each other, and encroached upon
the trade of the South, why should not similar results follow in
Virginia if she should confine her trade to two or three ports? If the
buyer and the seller, the importer and the consumer, went to a common
place of exchange in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and prosperity
followed as a consequence, why should they not do the same thing at
Norfolk? This was what Madison aimed to bring about by the port bill.
But it was impossib