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Claire Oh Nette

(2,636 posts)
11. It's never good to assume, Hugh
Wed May 5, 2021, 02:10 AM
May 2021

The Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan.

Read up.

It's wrong to view the Constitution as a strictly North-South thing, when it was a large state, small state issue.

Go to Jefferson's own writings, he of the All men are created equal brilliance.

At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition. In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of African slaves. In 1784, he wrote an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories (Big Ten country).

But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation.

To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.

Although Jefferson continued to advocate for abolition, the reality was that slavery was becoming more entrenched. The slave population in Virginia skyrocketed from 292,627 in 1790 to 469,757 in 1830. Jefferson had assumed that the abolition of the slave trade would weaken slavery and hasten its end. Instead, slavery became more widespread and profitable. In an attempt to erode Virginians’ support for slavery, he discouraged the cultivation of crops heavily dependent on slave labor—specifically tobacco—and encouraged the introduction of crops that needed little or no slave labor—wheat, sugar maples, short-grained rice, olive trees, and wine grapes. But by the 1800s, Virginia’s most valuable commodity and export was neither crops nor land, but slaves-home grown, born right here.





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