l our civil and social rights, appears to me to rest upon a similar
foundation. The experiment so far as it has been already made among us,
proves that the emancipated blacks are not ambitious of civil rights. To
prevent the generation of such an ambition, appears to comport with
sound policy; for if it should ever rear its head, its partizans, as
well as its opponents, will be enlisted by nature herself, and always
ranged in formidable array against each other. We must therefore
endeavour to find some middle course, between the tyrannical and
iniquitous policy which holds so many human creatures in a state of
grievous bondage, and that which would turn loose a numerous, starving,
and enraged banditti, upon the innocent descendants of their former
oppressors. _Nature_, _time_, and _sound policy_ must co-operate with
each other to produce such a change: if either be neglected, the work
will be incomplete, dangerous, and not improbably destructive.

[Footnote 20: The number of slaves in the United States at the time of
the late census, was something under 700,000.]

[Footnote 21: Mr. Jefferson most forcibly paints the unhappy influence
on the manners of the people produced by the existence of slavery among
us. The whole commerce between master and slave, says he, is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism
on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children
see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This
quality is the germ of education in him. From his cradle to his grave he
is learning what he sees others do. If a parent had no other motive
either in his own philanthropy or his self love, for restraining the
intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a
sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not
sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the
lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller
slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions; and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what
execrations would the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the
citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms them
into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the