Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southerners should be left alone to solve the problem of slavery at their own pace, in their own way. In his younger years, he had considered gradual emancipation and colonization to be the solution. His gradualism turned into procrastination. In his final years, Jefferson said that “on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.” Slavery had become too lucrative, to too many slaveholders, for emancipation to be Jefferson’s
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