Background
In the decades following the Revolutionary War, Virginia saw growing, though limited, efforts to gradually abolish slavery. The Revolution’s rhetoric of liberty and natural rights prompted some leaders and reformers to question the morality of the institution, while changes in the economic structure of Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia—where labor-intensive tobacco cultivation had declined—made some hopeful that slavery would become less central to the regions’ prosperity. Northern states were also beginning to adopt gradual emancipation laws, setting an example that influenced debate. In 1782, the Virginia legislature passed a law allowing enslavers to free their enslaved laborers without permission of the General Assembly, which resulted in a wave of manumissions. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, petitions and legislative proposals reflected both moral concerns and economic and political calculations about the role of slavery in Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson’s Plan
Thomas Jefferson was the first to publish a plan for gradual abolition. Jefferson’s plan for the slow end of slavery in Virginia was published in his seminal 1785 work, Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s plan would emancipate all enslaved people born after the passage of his act but would require them to live with their still-enslaved parents. As they reached adulthood, they would be taught “tillage, arts, or sciences” and then colonized to an unspecified location outside of Virginia.
Jefferson was certain that white and Black people could not peaceably coexist because of “[d]eep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
Jefferson’s plan was unique among late eighteenth-century proposals for gradual abolition because he was the only one to suggest that Black people—both enslaved and free—might be “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Worried about the consequences of miscegenation—an ironic fear given his long-standing relationship with his enslaved servant Sally Hemings—Jefferson devised a scheme that would slowly end slavery while ensuring the separation of the races through colonization.
Jefferson’s ideas about racial inequality distinguished him from other would-be abolitionists in Virginia. As Robert Pleasants, a Quaker who founded the Virginia Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, wrote to St. George Tucker in reference to Notes on the State of Virginia, “I am of a very different opinion too from those who suppose the people of Africa as an inferior species of mankind.”
A.C.’s Plan
The next gradual abolition plan for Virginia came from a still-unidentified author who published under “A.C.” in the June 2, 1790, issue of The Virginia Independent Chronicle, and General Advertiser. A.C. entreated the General Assembly to “make an act declaring all men, women and children who are now in slavery to be free and entirely emancipated, and that thereafter slavery shall be for ever abolished within the limits of their jurisdiction.” A.C. was less concerned about miscegenation than Jefferson and therefore saw no need to remove Black people from the state. Yet A.C. was wary of immediately ending unfree labor in Virginia. Citing Biblical precedent, A.C. stipulated that it was morally acceptable, and economically desirable, for enslavers to retain their formerly enslaved laborers as civilly unequal indentured servants for a period of ninety-nine years. Thus, slavery itself would end immediately, but actual bondage would decline only gradually.
Unlike Jefferson, however, A.C. asserted the fundamental racial equality of Black people and white people. Although Robert Pleasants commended A.C.’s rejection of Jeffersonian racial inequality, he again emerged as a chief critic of the plan. He wrote in The Virginia Independent Chronicle that he could not, in good conscience, support a pro-bondage plan. He noted that while the Hebrew Bible recounted the Israelites’ enslavement, their Egyptian captors suffered divine punishment for their misdeeds, revealing God’s displeasure with enslavement. When paired with “the self-evident truths contained in divers publications and declarations, not long since esteemed in America as undeniable; particularly the bill of rights, which declare all mankind by nature equally entitled to freedom,” Pleasants concluded that there was no moral justification for a plan of indentured servitude.
Ferdinando Fairfax’s Plan
Ferdinando Fairfax, another wealthy enslaver, contributed his “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States” nine months later in the American Museum, or, Universal Magazine. Fairfax, a follower of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose writings inspired Robert Carter III to manumit more than 500 of his enslaved laborers, shared with A.C. and Robert Pleasants a belief in the racial equality of Black and white people. He believed that in a perfect world, racial equality should translate into civil equality because equal persons should have equal rights and liberties. Fairfax was acutely aware, however, of the racial prejudices held by many white Virginians and suspected that they would never grant freed Black people “all the privileges of citizens.” He argued that the only realistic path to ending slavery was for enslavers to voluntarily manumit their enslaved laborers with inducements from the federal government and send them to a colony in Africa created by the government. There, they would enjoy the full rights and liberties that white Americans possessed in the United States, with the two races physically separate but civilly equal.
Fairfax’s proposal met with mixed reactions, even within his own family. His father, Bryan Fairfax, a conservative Anglican, expressed doubts that Black people deserved any form of civil equality. But his uncle Thomas Fairfax, another disciple of Swedenborg, used the plan as a model for voluntary manumission. In 1798, he freed his enslaved laborers, had them educated in a trade, and sent them to a colony for formerly enslaved people in Liberia. Ferdinando Fairfax freed some of his enslaved laborers in his lifetime and included a gradual abolition plan in his will to free some of his enslaved people and their descendants.
St. George Tucker’s Plan
Fairfax noted that his plan was “only intended to suggest the idea” of gradual abolition and said it might “be improved by some abler hand.” St. George Tucker, a law professor at the College of William and Mary, who had been considering gradual abolition since about 1790, provided that hand in his A Dissertation on Slavery (1796). Tucker’s plan for gradual abolition was both thoroughly researched—he outlined the history of slavery and wrote to scholars and lawyers, including Jeremy Belknap of Massachusetts, to gather information about the abolition process in other states—and relied on the most sophisticated mechanism that was proposed for gradual abolition. It was also well publicized. He sought out a Philadelphian printer—Matthew Carey, who also published Fairfax’s plan—to ensure that his plan would have a wide audience in the northern states.
Tucker proposed that after the passage of his plan, all female children born to enslaved women would be free but subject to a twenty-eight-year indenture. Their children would be free but subject to a twenty-one-year indenture. Male children born to enslaved women would not be freed. Thus, most Black men would remain enslaved, and slavery would persist in Virginia for generations—Tucker estimated that it would take a century to eradicate slavery. Once formerly enslaved people were freed, Tucker proposed they be denied basic civil liberties—including the right to vote, serve on juries, or own land—to create conditions so intolerable that they would leave the state of their own accord and settle in the “immense unsettled territory on this continent.” While Tucker disavowed racial inequality, he thought Virginia had too many enslaved people to free without producing disastrous results, referencing the recent slave revolt in Haiti.
Tucker’s plan did find its way before the Virginia Senate, where Ludwell Lee assured him, “You certainly judge rightly in supposed that to an enlightened Legislature no object can be more grateful than to restore upon a plan not injurious to Society; the Freedom to a part of our Fellow man, which the God of nature gave them.” The House of Delegates, however, where bills originated, was less receptive to Tucker’s ideas. As Tucker told Jeremy Belknap, “The book was suffered to lie on the table … though even that civility was attempted to be denied it.” The proposal was dead on arrival. The inability of the most thorough gradual abolition plan to find support in the House of Delegates was significant. If it could not find backers, then gradual abolition seemed a lost cause.
The End of Abolition
Only one more gradual abolition plan was published after Tucker’s failed effort—by his cousin George Tucker in the wake of the failed Gabriel’s Conspiracy slave uprising in 1800. In a “Letter to a Member of the General Assembly of Virginia” (1801), Tucker called slavery “unproductive and uneconomical.” He recommended a tax on enslavers to establish a colony for the formerly enslaved west of the Mississippi River. Having witnessed the threat of slave rebellion, George Tucker’s plan accounted for the desires of the enslaved for the first time, pointing out that “the negroes would never rest satisfied with anything less than perfect equality.” Although this plan had no chance of becoming policy, it voiced the truth that plans for emancipation would remain just that until they took seriously the wants of those whom they affected most.
The issue of gradual emancipation would return as a source of heated debate in the House of Delegates during its 1831–1832 session following Nat Turner’s Rebellion. About forty petitions calling for outright emancipation or colonization, signed by more than 2,000 Virginians, urged the House of Delegates to address the issue of slavery. It considered two proposals: one to reject all petitions calling for emancipation and another to put an emancipation proposal before the voters. After vigorous debate, the assembly tabled the issue of abolition to “await a more definite development of public opinion.” This would be the final attempt to abolish slavery in Virginia, as pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist opinion hardened in the following years.
