How far a conscientious regard for the moral and physical well-being
of the slaves entered into the considerations of the time as a
deterrent cause against their emancipation, cannot be determined.
Undoubtedly such sentiments existed among many earnest men favorable
thereto.
From the mass of facts and medley of voices certain conclusions can be
drawn.
Thus it may be affirmed that the slaves in Virginia were better off as
a result of their training and experience in servitude than they would
have been had their ancestors never set foot upon her soil. It is
equally true that theirs was but a partial development and that
freedom was necessary to the complete man. As the time comes in the
life of a child when the privileges and dangers of self-expression and
self-control must supplant the restraints of the home and the
school-room, so in the life of these children of larger growth,
freedom with its awesome dangers and soul-inspiring possibilities was
essential to any well-rounded and continuous advance.
Again, freedom was a help in the development of those who had made a
certain measure of progress in their moral, intellectual and physical
being; yet for those who were not thus prepared, its untimely coming
might prove the dawn of a darker day, unless accompanied by wise
nurture and sympathetic guidance of the feet, trained only for the
paths of dependence.
Mr. Jefferson doubtless expressed the sentiments of a large class of
thinkers when he said: "As far as I can judge from the experiments
which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather to abandon,
persons whose habits have been formed in slavery, is like abandoning
children."[228]
Experience with respect to emancipations made prior to the Civil War
strongly tended to confirm these views. The conditions, moral,
intellectual and physical, of the free negroes of Virginia contrasted,
as a rule, most unfavorably with that of their brethren still in
bonds.