laws of France emancipated her.

6. EMINENT STATESMEN, THEMSELVES SLAVEHOLDERS, HAVE CONCEDED THIS POWER.
Washington, in a letter to Robert Morris, dated April 12, 1786, says:
"There is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see
a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery; but there is only one
proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is
by _legislative_ authority." In a letter to Lafayette, dated May 10,
1786, he says: "It (the abolition of slavery) certainly might, and
assuredly ought to be effected, and that too by _legislative_
authority." In a letter to John Fenton Mercer, dated Sept. 9, 1786, he
says: "It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which
slavery in this country may be abolished by _law_." In a letter to Sir
John Sinclair, he says: "There are in Pennsylvania, _laws_ for the
gradual abolition of slavery, which neither Maryland nor Virginia have
at present, but which nothing is more certain than that they _must
have_, and at a period not remote." Speaking of movements in the
Virginia Legislature in 1777, for the passage of a law emancipating the
slaves, Mr. Jefferson says: "The principles of the amendment were agreed
on, that is to say, the freedom of all born after a certain day; but it
was found that the public mind would not bear the proposition, yet the
day is not far distant, when _it must bear and adopt it_."--Jefferson's
Memoirs, v. 1, p. 35. It is well known that Jefferson, Pendleton, Mason,
Wythe and Lee, while acting as a committee of the Virginia House of
Delegates to revise the State Laws, prepared a plan for the gradual
emancipation of the slaves by law. These men were the great lights of
Virginia. Mason, the author of the Virginia Constitution; Pendleton, the
President of the memorable Virginia Convention in 1787, and President of
the Virginia Court of Appeals; Wythe was the Blackstone of the Virginia
bench, for a quarter of a century Chancellor of the State, the professor
of law in the University of William and Mary, and the preceptor of
Jefferson, Madison, and Chief Justice Marshall. He was author of the
celebrated remonstrance to the English House of Commons on the subject
of the stamp act. As to Jefferson, his _name_ is his biography.

Every slaveholding member of Congress from the States of Maryland,
Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, voted for the
celebrated ordinance of 1787, which _abolished_ the slavery then