“Is it not amazing that, at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty, in such an age, we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive of liberty? Every thinking, honest man rejects it in speculation, but how few in practice, from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I cannot, justify it; however culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my want of conformity to them.”
This merely theoretical kind of anti-slavery spirit lost all aggressive force, as those whose pecuniary interests and domestic habits were identified with slavery grew more defiant and exacting. In 1785 Washington complained in a letter to Lafayette that “petitions for the abolition of slavery, presented to the Virginia legislature, could scarcely obtain a hearing.” While the prohibition of slavery northwest of the Ohio by the Ordinance of 1787 proceeded from Southern statesmen, the slave-holding interest kept all the land south of the Ohio firmly in its grasp.
At the period of the elections for the convention called to revise the Constitution of Kentucky, the philosophical anti-slavery spirit of the Revolution survived in that state only in a comparatively
