Beverley B. Munford

“ If the people of the North thus regarded their few negroes as a dangerous and perplexing element, how much more should the people of Virginia hesitate in face of the conditions and problems which confronted them? If Indiana and Illinois, with populations of over three million 173 whites and less than twenty thousand blacks, felt constrained to deny free negroes the right to enter their states, how much more should their sister, Virginia, with only one million whites and nearly a half million black slaves, fear to add to her already large free negro population? ”

“ Is our posterity doomed to endure forever not only all the ills flowing from the state of slavery, but all which arise from incongruous elements of population, separated from each other by invincible prejudices and by natural causes? Whatever may be the character of the remedy proposed, we may confidently pronounce it inadequate, unless it provides efficaciously for the total and absolute separation, by an extensive space of water or of land, at least of the white portion of our population from that which is free of the colored. ”

“ I shall never wish 90 that I had been born out of Virginia—but I wish that Providence had spared my country this moral and political evil. It is supposed that our slave labor enables us to live in luxury and ease, without industry, without care. Sir, the evil of slavery is greater to the master than to the slave. He is interested in all their wants, all their distresses, bound to provide for them, to care for them, to labor for them, while they labor for him, and his labor is by no means the less severe of the two. ”

“ I have not considered it a part of my duty as a representative from the South, to deny, as has been done by this new school, the natural freedom and equality of man; to contend that slavery is a positive good; that it is inseparable from the condition of man; that it must exist in some form or other in every political community; and that it is even an essential ingredient in Republican government. ”

“ Henry A. Wise, in the canvass of 1856, preliminary to his election to the office of Governor, depicted the financial and industrial conditions then existing in Virginia.
"Commerce," said he, "has long ago spread her sails and sailed away from you. You have not, as yet, dug more than coal enough to warm yourselves at your own hearths; you have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough in the way of manufacture to clothe your own slaves. You have no commerce, no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone upon the single power of agriculture—and such agriculture! ”

“ Could the Federal Government deny to six millions of people the boon of independence which they were seeking by orderly and peaceful methods, and still remain true to the principles of the great Declaration, to maintain which the Fathers of the Republic had fought and won the battles of the Revolution? Have people the right to determine for themselves their political destiny? Are the just powers of governments to be measured by the consent of the governed? ”

“ Clay's attitude with respect to the institution of slavery will appear from his oft-quoted declaration:
"Those who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of the Colonization Society, they must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return—they must blot out the moral lights around us—they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason and the love of liberty." ”

“ 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? ”

“ If a slave could, by passing from New York into Massachusetts, absolve himself from slavery with no remedy for the master except the grace of the latter state, in which the institution was not recognized, then not only were the rights of the slaveholding citizens of New York dependent upon the laws of Massachusetts, but such conditions would doubtless engender strife and reprisals between the different states of the Union. ”

“ To strip the slaveholding counties of their political power, to admit on an equal basis to the suffrage every white man in the commonwealth, and to accord to the electorate thus constituted the privilege of electing every high state official did not indicate the growth of pro-slavery sentiment. These achievements of the Convention were confessedly the most signal victories for liberty and progress which had marked the history of Virginia since her liberation from British rule. ”

“ I have met many of the great men of my time, but Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a grander mould, and made of different and of finer metal than all other men. He is stamped upon my memory as a being apart and superior to all others in every way; a man with whom none I ever knew, and very few of whom I have read, are worthy to be classed. I have met but two men who realized my ideas of what a true hero should be; my friend, Charles Gordon was one, General Lee was the other. ”

“ Is it to be supposed that the men who fought the battles of the Revolution for community independence, terminated their great efforts by transmitting posterity to a condition in which they could only gain those rights by force? If so, the blood of the Revolution was shed in vain; no great principles were established; for force was the law of nature before the battles of the Revolution were fought. ”

“ The wisdom of their secession might be denied, the morality of their action might be questioned, the disastrous consequences to the Union might be admitted, but still no right existed in any body of men to invade their country and defeat their aspirations by the sword.
Had not a people as numerous and united as those of the Cotton States the inherent right, in the language of the 292 Declaration of Independence, "To assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitled them?" ”

“ North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina and Georgia be at liberty to import. The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands; and will fill that country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. ”

“ They have built up through their wisdom and patriotism monuments which have eternized their names. You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally grand, equally sublime, quite as full of glory and immortality; you have to snatch from ruin a grand and glorious Confederation, to preserve the Government and to renew and invigorate the constitution. If you reach the height of this great occasion your children's children will rise up and call you blessed. ”

“ In his message to Congress, December, 1860, President Buchanan writes:
"The incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question through the North for the last quarter of a century has at last produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehension of servile insurrection. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning." ”

“ Here are a people descended from the very centre of civilization and free institutions of Europe, bearing with them the full tide of liberal principles, and the very cap and essence of liberty, and boasting not only of their descent, but that they are more than worthy of their ancestors, that have sanctioned slavery in its most abject form, and now, by actual enumeration, have upwards of three millions of them. ”

“ Thus the daily precepts of slavery,—obedience, submission and reverence for the white man,—must not be dissipated by public discussions in which the rightfulness of slavery was questioned and the glories of freedom held up before the eyes of the wondering blacks. San Domingo sent its warnings, the horrors of the Nat Turner Insurrection were still fresh in the minds of men, and so the imperilled slave-holders denounced as the enemies of their race white men who indulged in academic discussions as to the advantages of emancipation. ”

“ But it was slavery in its citadel—the existence of the institution in the slave states—that aroused their fiercest antagonism and rallied their forces to a battle which should never end but with its complete destruction. From this body of militant agitators and reformers, the slaveholders of Virginia could expect no quarter, and the commonwealth no surcease from the agitations so destructive of her peace. ”

“ When Thomas Jefferson came to write the Declaration of Independence and to epitomize the grounds of indictment which the colonists presented against the British King, it was the latter's veto of the laws passed by Virginia to suppress the slave trade, and the active aid lent by his Government to force the captives of Africa upon his defenseless subjects, that evoked the fiercest arraignment in that historic document. ”

“ In the more than one hundred and fifty years of her colonial existence—despite protests, appeals and statutes—the inflowing tide from Africa had continued, so that out of a population of some six hundred thousand souls, over two-fifths were negro slaves. It was amid such conditions that Virginia met the problems incident to her birth into statehood, bore her part in founding the Republic, furnished her quota of soldiers to resist the armies of Great Britain, and held with fixed determination her ever advancing border line against the craft and courage of the Red Men. ”

“ Having failed in their first mode of action by denunciatory pamphlets and newspapers, and by petitions to Congress, the most violent class of Abolitionists have now formed themselves into a political party aiming to subvert the Federal Constitution which guarantees the rights of slaveholders, and to destroy the Federal Union which is the glory and safeguard of us all. Thus they have armed against themselves every American patriot ”

“ What of the spirit and bearing of the great body of Virginia soldiers who followed Lee, and what place shall they and their commander take in the estimation of the world's best thought and conscience? President Roosevelt says:
"The world has never seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee, and their leader will undoubtedly rank as, without any exception, the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth." ”

“ The cause of the Abolitionists has had such a halo shed around it by the course of events, which they themselves in reality did very little to shape, that it has been usual to speak of them with absurdly exaggerated praise. Their courage and, for the most part, their sincerity, cannot be too highly spoken of, but their share in abolishing slavery was far less than has commonly been represented; any single, non-abolitionist politician, like Lincoln or Seward, did more than all the professional Abolitionists combined really to bring about its destruction. ”

“ If such were the character of the Virginians of the Civil War period, is it reasonable to speak of their "degeneracy" under the debasing influence of "slave breeding" and "the slave trade?" "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?"
Again, how was it possible that this system of breeding slaves for market could have so established itself in Virginia, and inspired the great body of her citizenship with a willingness to fight for its maintenance, in view of the existence of a public opinion which pursued with relentless ostracism the men who engaged in the traffic? ”

“ Our towns are stationary, our villages almost everywhere declining and the general aspect of the country marks the course of a wasteful, idle, reckless population, who have no interest in the soil, and care not how much it is impoverished. Public improvements are neglected, and the entire continent does not present a region for which Nature has done so much and art so little. If cultivated by free labor, the soil of Virginia is capable of sustaining a dense population among whom labor would be honourable, and where the busy hum of men would tell that all were happy and that all were free. ”

“ Sir, you may place the slave where you please—you may dry up to your uttermost the fountains of his feelings, the springs of his thought—you may close upon his mind every avenue of knowledge and cloud it over with artificial night—you may yoke him to your labors as the ox which liveth only to work and worketh only to live—you may put him under any process, which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being—you may do this and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. ”

“ If the morality of secession may be questioned, if South Carolina acted with undue haste and without sufficient provocation, if certain of the Southern politicians desired emancipation for themselves, that they might continue to enslave others, it can hardly be denied that the action of Virginia was not only fully justified, but beyond suspicion.... ”

“ James McDowell, in the same debate, said:
"Sir, it is true of Virginia, not merely that she has not advanced, but that in many respects she has greatly declined; and what have we got as a compensation for this decline? As a compensation for this disparity between what Virginia is and what she might have been? Nothing but the right of property in the very beings who have brought this disparity upon us. This is our pay; this is what we have gotten to remunerate us for our delinquent prosperity; to repay us for our desolated fields; our torpid enterprise ”