Delegates and was "rejected without dissent; but not without an avowed
patronage of its principles by sundry respectable members," as Madison
informed Washington. "A motion was made to throw it under the table,
which was treated with as much indignation on one side as the petition
itself was on the other."

Jefferson had been disappointed at an earlier time because no
emancipation provision had been incorporated in the Constitution of
Virginia.

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!" he wrote in
this connection, "who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and
death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment be deaf
to all those motives whose power supported him thro' his trial and inflict
on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery
than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

An interesting commentary on the industrial progress of the country
is afforded by comparing these early views of Southern statesmen upon
the slavery system with those held by a later generation.

Public sentiment in Virginia was not ready to follow the champions of
individual freedom to the emancipation point, and it refused as
strenuously to be coerced as it did in later years. When the Quakers
of Philadelphia attempted to secure by law the freedom of a body-servant
whom a neighbour of Washington had taken with him on a visit to that
city, the General wrote to his friend, Robert Morris, the wealthy
merchant of Philadelphia, "If the practice of this society, of which
Mr. Dalby speaks, is not discountenanced, none of those whose
_misfortune_ it is to have slaves as attendants, will visit the city