as it were with their mother's milk, and it is to
them that I look with anxiety to turn the fate of the question."[14]
Jefferson had already tried to raise the issue by having a committee for
revising the Virginia laws, appointed in 1776 with himself a member, frame
a special amendment for disestablishing slavery. This contemplated a
gradual emancipation of the after-born children, their tutelage by the
state, their colonization at maturity, and their replacement in Virginia
by white immigrants.[15] But a knowledge that such a project would raise
a storm caused even its framers to lay it aside. The abolition of
primogeniture and the severance of church from state absorbed reformers'
energies at the expense of the slavery question.

[Footnote 14: Jefferson, _Writings_, P.L. Ford ed., IV, 82-83.]

[Footnote 15: Jefferson, _Notes on Virginia_, various editions, query 14.]

When writing his _Notes on Virginia_ in 1781 Jefferson denounced the
slaveholding system in phrases afterward classic among abolitionists: "With
what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half of
the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those
into despots and these into enemies ... And can the liberties of a nation
be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction
in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That
they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep
forever."[16] In the course of the same work, however, he deprecated
abolition unless it were to be accompanied with deportation: "Why not
retain and incorporate the blacks into the state...? Deep rooted prejudices
entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the
injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which
nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into
parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the
extermination of the one or the other race ... This unfortunate difference
of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the
emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates while they wish to
vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its
dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question 'What
further is to be done with them?' join themselves in opposit