ustice and the love of
country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a
moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in
vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear
not much serious willingness to relieve them and ourselves from
our present condition of moral and political reprobation.... I
had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their
early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in
every breast, and had become, as it were, the vital spirit of
every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous
to the motion of the blood, and above the suggestions of avarice,
would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved
their love of liberty beyond their own share of it. But my
intercourse with them since my return (from Europe) has not been
sufficient to ascertain that they had made towards this point the
progress I had hoped.[120]

The hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It
will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our
own minds; or by the bloody process of St. Domingo, excited and
conducted by the power of our present enemy (England), if once
stationed permanently within our country, and offering asylum and
arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned
over.[121]

From those of the former generation who were in the fulness of
age when I came into public life, which was while our controversy
with England was on paper only, I soon saw that nothing was to be
hoped. Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the
degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of those unfortunate
beings, not reflecting that that degradation was very much the
work of themselves and their fathers, few minds have yet doubted
but that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their
horses and cattle. The quiet and monotonous course of colonial
life had been disturbed by no alarm, and little reflection on the
value of liberty. And when alarm was taken at an enterprise on
their own, it was not easy to carry them to the whole length of
the principles which they invoked for themselves.[122]

As to the method by which this difficult work is to be effected,
if permitted to be done by ourselves, I have see