Jefferson famously summarizes his frustration in a letter to politician John Holmes (April 22, 1820): “The cessation of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if…a general emancipation and ex-patriation could be effected, and gradually and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. We have the wolf by the ears: and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
