A.C.’s Emancipation Plan

This clip from the June 2, 1790, issue of the Virginia Independent Chronicle, and General Advertiser is the closing paragraph of a gradual emancipation plan. The author, only identified as A.C., argued that all enslaved people should be made immediately free, but with the condition that they must “remain with their owners, their heirs, and assigns, under the character of servants for and during the term of ninety-nine years.” In this paragraph A.C. wrote:

“sure I am if nothing else but the dictates of the christian mind has influence—if some pecuniary advantages over one another are not fought for by those who stile themselves friends to liberty, this, better than any other scheme, will answer the intended purpose! —thus the master will not be deprived of his servant—the value of him will not be lessened—the friends to liberty will sleep quiet on their downy pillows, having found the philosophers stone sooner than they expected, and the poor negroes will be put on a better footing than if they were let to wander up and down the country by whole families as free for forty years without land to seat on—houses to dwell in—money to subsist on—or clothes to cover them. A.C.”