and affectionate friendship and respect.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLII.--TO JOHN HOLMES, April 22, 1820

TO JOHN HOLMES.

Monticello, April 22, 1820.

I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send
me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is
a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read
newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were
in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore
from which I am not distant. But 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. It is hushed, indeed, for
the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. 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. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on
earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this
heavy reproach, in any practicable way. 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. Of one thing I am certain, that as
the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a
slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their
diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier,
and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation,
by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors. An
abstinence, too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy
excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the
different descriptions of men composing a State. This certainly is the
exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution has
taken from them, and given to the General Government. Could Congress,
for example, say, that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen,
or that they shall not emigrate into any other State?

I regret that I am now to di