preservation of their rights and liberties, among which that of
personal freedom is greatest, must be willing to extend a like liberty
to others.[156] Similar agitation and legislation were going on in
almost all the Northern and Middle States under the stimulus of the
spirit of freedom of the time.[157]

It is easy to note a change in the mental atmosphere as we pass to the
States farther south. The Assembly of Delaware tabled indefinitely a
bill of 1785 for the gradual abolition of slavery, and Maryland in her
declaration of rights adopted in 1776 restricted the enjoyment of
certain rights _to freemen only_. A petition introduced in the House
of Burgesses of Virginia in 1785, asking for general emancipation on
the ground that slavery was contrary to the principles of religion and
the ideas of freedom on which the government was founded, was read and
rejected without an opposing voice; Washington remarked in a letter to
Lafayette that it could hardly get a hearing.[158] In fact, there is
evidence for believing that, while leading men such as Jefferson,
Madison, Washington, Mason and Pinkney saw the evil of slavery and
wished heartily to rid their States of it, the mass of the citizens of
Maryland and Virginia did not wish to do away with the institution
either because of social habits and economic interests, or because
they felt unable to cope with the problem of an emancipated black
population. It must be remembered that in Maryland there were three
slaves to five whites, in Virginia and Georgia the numbers were about
equal, in South Carolina there were two slaves to one white, while in
Massachusetts there were sixty whites to one slave.[159] In the States
farther south, the Carolinas and Georgia, no change or attempted
change in the status of the slave seems to have occurred. The force
of social and economic habits was already too strong for the movings
of the spirit of freedom to affect the status of the slave.

The leaders of the time realized this only too well. Patrick Henry,
writing to a Quaker in 1773, said that slavery was "as repugnant to
humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of
liberty. Every thinking honest man rejects it as speculation, but how
few in practice from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that
I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? _I am drawn along by the
general inconvenience of living without them._"[160] Jefferson in a
letter written in 1815 expressed