ict; that either peaceably or through violence, slavery
as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end; that the
agitation against it could not be suppressed. Faulkner drew a lurid
picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in which he referred to
the utterances of two former speakers, one of whom had said that, unless
something effective was done to ward off the danger, "the throats of all
the white people of Virginia will be cut." The other replied, "No, the
whites cannot be conquered--the throats of the blacks will be cut."
Faulkner's rejoinder was that the difference was a trifling one, "for
the fact is conceded that one race or the other must be exterminated."

The public press joined in the debate. Leading editorials appeared in
the Richmond Enquirer urging that effective measures be instituted to
put an end to slavery. The debate aroused much interest throughout the
South. Substantially all the current abolition arguments appeared in the
speeches of the slave-owning members of the Virginia Legislature. And
what was done about it? Nothing at all. The petition was not granted;
no action looking towards emancipation was taken. This was indeed a
turning-point. Men do not continue to denounce in public their own
conduct unless their action results in some effort toward corrective
measures.

Professor Thomas Dew, of the chair of history and metaphysics in William
and Mary College and later President of the College, published an essay
reviewing the debate in the Legislature and arguing that any plan for
emancipation in Virginia was either undesirable or impossible.
This essay was among the first of the direct pro-slavery arguments.
Statements in support of the view soon followed. In 1885 the Governor of
South Carolina in a message to the Legislature said, "Domestic slavery
is the corner-stone of our republican edifice." Senator Calhoun,
speaking in the Senate two years later, declared slavery to be a
positive good. W. G. Simms, Southern poet and novelist, writing in 1852,
felicitates himself as being among the first who about fifteen years
earlier advocated slavery as a great good and a blessing. Harriet
Martineau, an English author who traveled extensively in the South in
1885, found few slaveholders who justified the institution as being in
itself just. But after the debates in the Virginia Legislature, there
were few owners of slaves who publicly advocated abolition. The spirit
of mob violence had se