Eight residents of Buckingham County exclaim that "the Southhampton massacre, with the number of conspiracies, prove that our fears are well founded." They further aver that the growing numbers of slaves and free people of color will overwhelm the white people, especially when planters in the southwest quit buying Virginia's slaves; the petitioners predict that when this occurs, the state's large slaveholders will be forced to purchase the land of the small- and non-slaveholders in order to find work for the excess slaves, forcing the non-slaveholding whites to leave the state, further diminishing the white population. To prevent such an eventuality, the petitioners recommend the plan suggested by Thomas Jefferson: "emancipating the afterborn, leaving them on due compensation with their mothers, until their services are worth their maintenance, and then putting them to industrious occupations until a proper age for deportation." They further speculate with "the estimated value of the new born infant [being] so low (say twelve dollars and fifty cents), that we do not see how masters can object to give them up, who have the welfare of their country and families at heart."
Result: Referred to committee on slaves.
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Repository: Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
