"CAN THESE BE THE SONS OF THEIR FATHERS?"
A New Look at the Debate on Slave Property in the Virginia House of Delegates
December 1831- January 1832

Christopher Curtis
Emory University

The 1832 Virginia slavery debate affords a rare opportunity to examine candidly expressed ideas of property relations. This paper reconsiders that debate by examining these discussions of property relations that were instrumental to the outcome of the legislative debate and engendered a fundamental transformation in subsequent proslavery discourse. To varying degrees, previous historians of the Virginia debate have understood this failure to abolish slavery as an ideological movement away from the enlightened, "Jeffersonian" liberalism of the Revolutionary era and toward a contradictory, essentially aristocratic proslavery ideology. By considering the 1832 effort at abolition a mere extension of previous antislavery sentiments, these studies have created a perception of sharp discontinuity between Virginia's revolutionary and proslavery ideologies. Such historical interpretations, however, are inconsistent with the contemporary understanding of the significance of the legislative debate.

In an essay summarizing the recently transpired events of the 1831-32 legislative session, Benjamin Watkins Leigh noted that the effort to abolish slavery had constituted the beginnings of "a direct attack" upon the very principle of property itself. Leigh, an eminent legal theorist and social commentator argued that this assault, if successful, signaled an end to republican government in Virginia. Leigh's detailed critique largely has been discounted as a mere proslavery jeremiad. Yet, his defense of slavery notwithstanding, an examination of the speeches made during the legislative debate supports Leigh's basic premise that an effort was being made to re-conceptualize property.

During the legislative debate, antislavery delegates rejected the traditional Lockean conception of property upon which government in Virginia had been based, and instead, advanced Rousseauian ideas of property and society. This new antislavery discourse suggests a fundamental movement away from the ideological orthodoxy of liberal republicanism, and instead, signaled the advancement of an alternative liberal vision where the constitutive principle of political equality trumped that of civil liberty.