in its splendid galaxy of
talents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turned
their eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it would
adopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character of
its members and of the age in which they lived. I need not say how deep
and bitter was our disappointment. Western Virginia indeed spoke on that
occasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity.
But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned away
to listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph,
as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that system
of oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial of
the citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave-
holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before the
convention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrust
aside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved.

"In a political point of view," says the memorial, "we esteem slavery an
evil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us,
and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden of
removing it. We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as our
proposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with that
of the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and the
general depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and is
producing?"

I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper. The
memorialists state their belief

"That the labor of slaves is vastly less productive than that of freemen;
that it therefore requires a larger space to furnish subsistence for a
given number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of the
former necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence our
population, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and would
under other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty to
a square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a source
of endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on the
farm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt of
steady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt induces
idleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; that
the waste of the products of the land, n