the fact that the Constitution allowed for Congress to prohibit the external slave trade after a twenty-year period, beginning in 1808, which is often held up as proof of the anti-slavery sentiment of the framers, can be seen in some respects as self-serving. At the time the Constitution was written, enslaved Black people accounted for about 40 percent of the population in Virginia, and in many places in the colony, the enslaved outnumbered white people. Many white Virginians fretted that continuing to import Africans would produce a frighteningly dangerous ratio for a white population well
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