Recalling the episode in his retirement at Monticello after he served as president, Jefferson wrote, “It was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition [of emancipation and deportation], nor will it bear it even at this day.”36 Jefferson took a bleak view. “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow,” he wrote in retirement, reflecting on the General Assembly days.37 “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the
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