A Confederate Officer Recounts the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832
by Ron Coddington
Life on the Civil War Research Trail
A presentation requested by Dale Coberly about what could have happened if Virginia had followed suit in freeing the slaves pre-Civil War. A Slavery debate in the 1830s.
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In his 1910 memoirs, Randolph Harrison McKim, a Confederate officer who served on the staffs of Stonewall Jackson and George H. Steuart, recalled stopping by the home of Thomas Jefferson Randolph on a January day in 1864. Randolph, grandson of our third President and a Virginia legislator, told McKim about the state’s great slavery debate in 1832 to consider the question of emancipation of enslaved people in Virginia. Here’s McKim’s account of the meeting and his opinions of why it did not pass—and what might have happened if it did.
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Interesting history. Thanks for posting.
As a ‘son of the South’,* I’m surprised I never heard of this before. McKim’s claim that the legislature’s fee-fees were so badly injured that they reversed themselves on such a consequential issue strikes me as implausible and self-serving. More likely, just like present-day oligarchs, the slave-owning oligarchs of antebellum Virginia saw the threat to their financial investments in human capital and made sure the legislature knew who they were actually working for.
*Well, I was raised in the South, but have never considered myself a cultural Southerner.
Joel
I suspect that abolitionists referring to their “fee-fees” might have influenced them to say “go to hell.”
Yes, no doubt the question was going to be decided in favor of the economic system they knew and had known for 200 years if not forever and not the morality they wished they had. But people are likely to surprise you by the extent to which they react emotionally when they feel attacked or insulted.
But then they did not have the advantage of the last hundred years of enlightenment that you have.
Bill
thanks for publishing it. You did a much better job introducing it than I would have.
For what it is worth I was hoping in would shed some light on present day politics.
aparently it did, judging by the comments, but not in the way i expected.
So, the idea got quashed because people are unwilling to be pressured into doing what they would have done anyway?
On the other hand, it sounded like one solution was to free the slaves if they could then be forced to leave the state.
Arne
even Lincoln entertained that idea for a while. But Lincoln was both a political and moral genius. He could see that it would not work, and it was not a good idea, so he changed his mind. An experience that few of us have.
Instead of feeling morally superior to people who lived two hundred years ago…and learned to change their minds because of the moral leadership of a few, we might try to learn something about human nature, perhaps even our own.
Mathematically, half the race is morally superior to the other half. I imagine most people in both halves believe they are in the superior half.
One of my recent learnings (or perhaps realizations) is that sometimes people don’t learn to change their minds, but only learn to keep their opinions to themselves. trump has encouraged people to speak up regardless of which half they are in.
doesn’t sound very mathematical to me.
to be sure the Trump has given the people who believe in brute force permission to come out and try to get the kind of government they want, believing that they will be on the winning team. but using “half” in this context is a little like my using half when I said half the country agrees with Trump, and Dobbs accused me of believing that the election was stolen… a figure of speech is not mathematical.