ril 22, 1820, he wrote: "This
momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me
with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A
geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and
political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will
never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and
deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is
a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a
general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and
with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by
the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in
one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a "question having just
enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the
people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of
Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them
fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a
coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the
removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their
numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them
over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future
emancipation more practicable."

These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to
Jefferson's advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he
then had "one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;" but
it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his
prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England
clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had
somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of
intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He
never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially
ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made
these predictions: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate
than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two
races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."

History has justified the second as well as the first of