re so precarious a condition." It was
evident, he thought, that something must be done; and although
measures for the removal of this evil might not, perhaps be arrived
at immediately yet some plan for its gradual eradication would
probably be hit upon. A system might be concocted by degrees to
embrace the whole subject and it was therefore necessary to consider
it in all its bearings.[35]

Mr. Chandler said that he in common with his constituents looked
forward to the passage of a law for the removal of the free blacks. He
was also in favor of the consideration of any plan which might remove
entirely at some future time, the greatest curse that had ever been
inflicted upon this State. He would look upon the day on which the
deliverance of the commonwealth from the burden of slavery should be
accomplished as the most glorious in the annals of Virginia since the
fourth of July, 1776.[36] Mr. Moore did not wish to entangle the
committee on the subject of getting rid of the free black population
of this State. That population, he knew, was a nuisance which the
interests of the people required to remove, but there was another and
a greater nuisance, slavery itself. He wished that it should be
considered and if it were possible to devise any plan for the ultimate
extinction of slavery, he would rejoice.[37]

Mr. Bolling rose in his remarks to a height of moral sublimity. "We
talk of freedom," said he, "while slavery exists in this land; and
speak with horror of the tyranny of the Turk. We foster an evil which
the highest interests of the community require should be removed,
which was denounced as the bans of our happiness by the Father of the
Commonwealth and to which we trace the cause of the lamentable
depression of Eastern Virginia. Every intelligent individual admits
that slavery is the most pernicious evil with which a body politic can
be afflicted."[38]

Mr. Randolph, the grandson of Thomas Jefferson, said that it was the
dark, the appalling, the despairing future that had awakened the
public mind rather than the Southampton Insurrection. He asked whether
silence would restore the death-like apathy of the Negro's mind. It
might be wise to let it sleep in its torpor; "but has not," he asked,
"its dark chaos been illumined? Does it not move, and feel and think?
The hour of the eradication of the evil is advancing, it must come.
Whether it is affected by the energy of our minds or by the bloody
scenes of Southampton a