Notes on the State of Virginia
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is a book written by the American statesman, philosopher, and planter Thomas Jefferson.
He expressed his beliefs in the separation of church and state, constitutional government, checks and balances, and individual liberty.
He first had it published anonymously in Paris by Philippe Denis Pierres in 1785 while Jefferson serving the U.S. government as a trade representative.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever....The biographer Joseph J. Ellis noted that Jefferson thought that the work would be unknown in the United States since he did not publish it in North America and kept his authorship anonymous in Europe.
[citation needed] His predecessor, John Adams, had angrily counterattacked the press and his vocal opponents by passing chilling Alien and Sedition Acts.
[8] Jefferson later lamented the anguish caused by his political enemies but never denied their charges, including those in Notes on Virginia, and he never gave up his fight for "Republican principles" to shield the common man from state or religious oppression.
However, millions of slaves still remained in bondage in the South, and freedmen faced high levels of racism in the North.
[11] In "Laws", Jefferson wrote: It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.Some slaveowners feared race wars could ensue upon emancipation least because of natural retaliation by blacks for the injustices under their long period of slavery.
Jefferson may have thought his fears to be justified after the Haitian Revolution, which was marked by widespread violence in the mass uprising of slaves against white colonists and free people of color in their fight for independence.
Thousands of white and free people of color came as refugees to the United States in the early 1800s, many of whom brought their slaves.
Jefferson and some other slaveholders embraced the idea of "colonization" by arranging for transportation of free blacks to Africa, including those born in the United States.
Jefferson included a warning about the potential for slave rebellions if slavery was not abolished, writing "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
The section would be used by the Federalist William Loughton Smith to embarrass Republican anti-navalists during debate in 1796 over whether to continue the construction of the original six frigates of the United States Navy.
The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.
In Article IV of his Appeal (1830), Walker stated that free blacks considered colonization to be the desire of whites to remove free blacks: from among those of our brethren whom they unjustly hold in bondage, so that they may be enabled to keep them the more secure in ignorance and wretchedness, to support them and their children, and consequently they would have the more obedient slave.
