Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, sparked discussions about slavery nationwide. In Virginia, the General Assembly debated whether to gradually abolish slavery in the state. Arguments for and against abolition flooded the legislature. Although they never mentioned Nat Turner by name, women in Augusta County indicated the ways in which his revolt had intensified their fears, and they concluded that eliminating slavery was the only way to ensure their safety. Slavery proponents had no more forceful advocate than Thomas Dew, president of the College of William and Mary, who argued that slavery was beneficial for slaves and their owners. The Virginia legislature took no action on the issue of emancipation and instead passed laws that further restricted free and enslaved blacks in Virginia.
| 10.2 | Memorial of the Ladies of Augusta to the Virginia General Assembly, January 19, 1832 |
We pretend not to conceal from [you], our fathers & brothers, our protectors . . . , the fears which agitate our bosoms, and the dangers which await us, as revealed to us by recent tragical deeds; our fears, we admit, [are] great, but we do not concede that they are the effects of blind & unreflecting cowardice: we do not concede that they spring from the superstitious timidity of our sex. Alas! . . . we appeal to your manly reason, to your more matured wisdom, to attest the justice & propriety of our fears, when we call to your remembrance the late slaughter of our sisters & their little ones in certain parts of our land, & the strong probability, that that slaughter was but a partial execution of a widely projected scheme of carnage. We know not, we cannot know the right, nor the unguarded moments, by day or by night, which is pregnant with our destruction & that of our husbands & brothers, & sisters & children; but we do know that we are at every moment, exposed to the means of our own excision & of all that is dear to us in life. The bloody monster which threatens us is warmed & cherished on our own hearths. O hear our prayer & remove it, ye protectors of our persons, ye guardians of our peace!
Our fears teach us to reflect & reason: and our reflections & reasonings have taught us that the peace of our homes, the welfare of society, the prosperity of future generations call aloud & imperatively for some decisive & efficient measure—and that measure cannot, we believe, be decisively efficient, or of much benefit if it have not, for its ultimate object, the extinction of slavery from amongst us.
Source: Virginia General Assembly, Legislative Petitions: Petition of the Females of Augusta County, 19 January 1832, Accession 36121, State Records Collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
| 10.3 | Thomas Dew | The Proslavery Argument, 1832 |
Every one acquainted with southern slaves knows that the slave rejoices in the elevation and prosperity of his master; and the heart of no one is more gladdened at the successful debut of young master or miss on the great theatre of the world than that of either the young slave who has grown up with them and shared in all their sports, and even partaken of all their delicacies—or the aged one who has looked on and watched them from birth to manhood, with the kindest and most affectionate solicitude, and has ever met from them all the kind treatment and generous sympathies of feeling, tender hearts. Judge Smith, in his able speech on Foote’s Resolutions in the Senate, said, in an emergency, he would rely upon his own slaves for his defence—he would put arms into their hands, and he had no doubt they would defend him faithfully. In the late Southampton insurrection, we know that many actually convened their slaves and armed them for defence, although slaves were here the cause of the evil which was to be repelled.
Source: William Harper, James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Roderick Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853), 457–58.
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