Slavery was perhaps the only issue as emotionally and politically charged in Virginia as religion. Jefferson’s experience with the question of emancipation in the General Assembly affirmed the tragic view that he had come to when he had earlier failed to make progress against slavery in the House of Burgesses—a view further validated when the delegates to the Continental Congress had cut his attack on the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence. At the General Assembly, as part of the revisal of the laws, Jefferson and his allies prepared an amendment stipulating “the freedom of all
...more
