The effect of these acts facilitating and encouraging manumissions at
length began to appear. At the close of the Revolution there were less
than three thousand free negroes in Virginia.[54] In the ten years
next succeeding, they reached thirteen thousand, and the census of
1810 records their number at thirty thousand, five hundred and
seventy. Here was a new problem—the presence in a state dominated by
white men of a considerable body of negroes possessing neither the
privileges of the whites nor amenable to the restrictions imposed upon
the great mass of the blacks. As a result of these conditions, acts
were passed in 1806 providing that no slaves thereafter manumitted
should remain in Virginia. In 1819 an act was passed authorizing the
County Courts to permit such as were "sober, peaceful, orderly and
industrious to remain in the state."[55] Later, it was provided by
statute that all slaves thereafter manumitted should leave the state
within twelve months from the date of their emancipation.
Thenceforward slaveholders were accorded the right to manumit their
slaves, subject to the claims of their creditors and to the obligation
upon the former slaves of going beyond the state within twelve months
following their manumission.
While these last mentioned statutes embarrassed the work of
emancipation, they stimulated the sentiment in favor of colonization.
However, despite the difficulties which confronted them, slaveholders
still continued to emancipate their slaves and hostility to the
institution of slavery—the conviction that it was a burden upon the
commonwealth—became more and more widespread among the people. The
growth of these sentiments continued until the year 1832. The Rev.
Philip Slaughter, a writer with pro-slavery sympathies, records:
"That was the culminating point—the flood tide of anti-slavery
feeling which had been gradually rising for more than a century in
Virginia was then precipitated upon us before its time by the
Southampton convulsion."[56]
To the disastrous effects upon public sentiment of this tragic event
which occurred in August, 1831, must be added the reactionary
influence of the Abolitionists, who now began their work of agitation
and their arraignment, not simply of slavery nor of slaveholders, but
of the morality and civilization of every community in which the
institution existed. The failure, too, of the General Assembly of
Virginia at its session of 1832 to adopt any plan for the gradual
abolition of slavery or for the removal beyond the state of the free
negroes then within her borders was also strongly reactionary. Despite
the ability and influence of the anti-slavery leaders in that body no
remedial legislation was adopted and thousands of the people accepted
the result as proof of the fact that the practical difficulties in the
way of emancipation were such as to shut out the hope of its
accomplishment.
-----
Footnote 48:
_Hening's Statutes_, Vol. IV, p. 132.
Footnote 49:
_Hening's Statutes_, Vol. XI, p. 39.
Footnote 50:
_Hening's Statutes_, Vol. XII, p. 182.
Footnote 51:
_Hening's Statutes_, Vol. XII, pp. 611 and 613.
Footnote 52:
_Idem_, p. 531.
Footnote 53:
_History of Slavery in Virginia_, Ballagh, p. 123.
Footnote 54:
_History of Slavery in Virginia_, Ballagh, p. 121.
Footnote 55:
_Idem_, p. 125.
Footnote 56:
_The Virginian History of African Colonization_, Slaughter, p. 55.