ion with those
who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans, emancipation
required but one effort. The slave when made free might mix without
staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary
unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of
mixture."[17]

[Footnote 16: Jefferson, _Notes on Virginia_, query 18.]

[Footnote 17: _Ibid_., query 14.]

George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes was that some
plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and
imperceptible degrees." But he noted in the same year that some abolition
petitions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a
reading.[18]

[Footnote 18: Washington, _Writings_, W.C. Ford ed., XI, 20, 62.]

Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St. George Tucker, professor of law in
William and Mary College, inquired of leading citizens of Massachusetts in
1795 for data and advice, and undaunted by discouraging reports received in
reply or by the specific dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate
plan for extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen
without expense to the state by merely making their conditions of life
unbearable. This was presented to the legislature in a pamphlet of 1796
at the height of the party strife between the Federalists and
Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently dismissed from
consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project, reprinted his
"dissertation" as an appendix to his edition of Blackstone in 1803, where
the people and the politicians let it remain buried. In public opinion, the
problem as to the freedmen remained unsolved and insoluble.

[Footnote 19: St. George Tucker, _A Dissertation on Slavery, with a
proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia_
(Philadelphia, 1796, reprinted New York, 1860). Tucker's Massachusetts
correspondence is printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society
_Collections_, XLIII (Belknap papers), 379-431.]

Meanwhile the Virginia black code had been considerably moderated during
and after the Revolution; and in particular the previous almost iron-clad
prohibition of private manumission had been wholly removed in effect by an
act of 1782. In spite of restrictions afterward imposed upon manumission
and upon the residence of new freedmen in the state, the free negroes
increased on a scale comparable to that in Maryland. As compared with an