es generally would excite infinite indignation in all the
States north of Maryland. The sacrifice must fall on the States
alone which hold them; and the difficult question will be how to
lessen this so as to reconcile our fellow citizens to it.
Personally, I am ready and desirous to make any sacrifice which
shall ensure their gradual but complete retirement from the
State, and effectually, at the same time, establish them
elsewhere in freedom and safety.[126]

I concur entirely in your leading principles of gradual
emancipation, of establishment on the coast of Africa, and the
patronage of our nation until the emigrants shall be able to
protect themselves.[127]

Jefferson saw in the extension of slavery that which had given the
institution a new aspect in lessening the difficulty by dividing it.

I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth
who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this
heavy reproach in any _practicable_ way. The cession of that kind
of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would
not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general
emancipation and _expatriation_ could be effected; and,
gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as
it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him,
nor safely let him go. Justice is in the one scale and
self-preservation in the other.[128]

Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one
State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being
who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater
surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally
facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing
the burden on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence, too,
from this act of power would remove the jealousy excited by the
undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the
different descriptions of men composing a State, which nothing in
the Constitution has taken from them and given to the General
Government. Could Congress, for example, say that the non-freemen
of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate
into any other State?[129]

During the closing years of his life he expressed little hope of
seeing his plan of gr