Madison was impressed by Lafayette’s position on slavery, telling Jefferson that the view “does him real honor as it is a proof of his humanity.”8 That one slave-owning Virginia planter could comment to another that it was honorable for a non-slave-owning foreigner to care about manumission says much about how Madison and Jefferson thought about slavery.9 The principle of abolition might be good, but the reality was not to be taken seriously. In the same vein, Madison could tell Edmund Randolph that he wished over the course of his career “to depend as little as possible on the labor of
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