But casting aside these tragic warnings, the question of what would be
the result of the great experiment, stood unanswered. What place in
the life of the commonwealth were these people to fill? Should they be
trained for the obligations of freedom and then denied its privileges?
Should they be accorded the right of suffrage? If not, how would its
denial comport with the genius of our institutions and the aspirations
of our people? If entrusted with the suffrage how was the well-being
of communities to be assured where, having the majority, they would
become political masters? Had negroes ever, in the world's history,
ruled in peace and order a community largely populated by whites? Was
the race to be kept in a state of quasi-dependence—beholden for their
social and economic privileges to the very people with whom they must
come in competition? What provision for the pauperism, the vagrancy,
the lunacy and the crime which would certainly follow the removal of
the restraints of slavery? What measure and character of education for
the young and by whom provided? These and many more like them were the
questions, which, from the close of the Revolution, had confronted the
people of Virginia. What should be the relations, political and
social, of the two races after emancipation? Speaking in September,
1850, in Congress, on the Wilmot Proviso, Gov. James McDowell, of
Virginia, said:
"Physical amalgamation? ... ruinous, if it were possible....
Political and civil amalgamation just as impossible.... Emancipation
with rights of residence and property, but exclusion from social,
civil and political equality, would conduce, sooner or later, to a
war of colors."[234]