No Peaceful Settlement of the Question
 
From: bernhard1848@att.net
 
Despite Nat Turner’s massacre of innocents in Southampton in 1831, antebellum Virginians were voluntarily freeing their slaves; John Randolph and George W. P. Custis freed 400 and 300 slaves in 1833 and 1857 respectively. The fanatic abolitionists of the North were blind to peaceful efforts to abolish slavery, and only made things worse by their unrelenting hatred of anything South of Mason and Dixon’s line. They proffered no peaceful solutions to slavery, only bloodshed.
 
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net 
 
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No Peaceful Settlement of the Question:
 
“In addition to the Southampton massacre and the failure of the legislature to enact any effective legislation, the contemporary rise of the Abolitionists in the North came as an even more powerful factor to embarrass the efforts of the Virginia emancipators.
 
Unlike the antislavery men of former years, this new school not only attacked the institution of slavery, but the morality of the slaveholders and their sympathizers. In their fierce arraignment not only were the humane and considerate linked in infamy with the cruel and intolerant, but the whole population of the slaveholding States, their civilization and their morals, were the object of unrelenting and incessant insults.”
 
(Beverly Mumford, Confederate Veteran Magazine, February 1921, page 58)