I still find it very hard to believe that the state with the largest slave population, subsequently with the most wealth built off the back of said slaves, didn't want to keep slaves. Wouldn't it be a trip for them to backroom deal with places like Georgia in an attempt to get what they want without exposing themselves politically. Just, you know, loom in the background of that debate where they would benefit if they kept slavery.
I understand it's hard to believe, but in the late 18th century, among many of the Virginia elite slavery was seen as a "necessary Evil", one they had inherited and couldn't just do away with without causing more harm to both the slaves and themselves than continuing slavery would do*, and they expected that over the next few decades or so that slavery would die out as both uneconomical and immoral, based on the then present economic and ideological trends.
For instance, George Mason, one of the Virginia Founders and grandfather of the Bill of Rights had this to say regarding slavery even as a slave owner himself:
[Slavery is] that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the Dignity of Man, which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes. Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds. And in such an infernal School are to be educated our future Legislators & Rulers. The Laws of impartial Providence may even by such Means as these, avenge upon our Posterity the Injury done a set of Wretches, whom our Injustice hath debased almost to a Level with the Brute Creation. These Remarks may be thought Foreign to the design of the annexed Extracts – They were extorted by a kind of irresistible, perhaps an Enthusiastick Impulse; and the author of them conscious of his own good Intentions, cares not whom they please or offend.
And this is but one of the
many, MANY condemnations of slavery Mason wrote. Mason is an often forgotten Founder, but he was one of the most intellectual influential, and his influence is most keenly remembered in the US Bill of Rights, which in many respects was directly modeled on the Virginia Bill of Rights which he wrote (and is still in effect to this day as part of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia).
George Washington has a more
complex relationship to slavery than Mason, his views not quite so firebrand as his neighbor's (Mason's plantation was just down the Potomac from Washington's), but as he grew older he grew more and more disapproving of the institution and hoped to see it abolished, though he felt it had to be abolished through proper legal measures.
It should also be noted that the first prohibition of the importation of slaves in the English speaking world was passed not in England, nor in New England, but in
Virginia... in 1777. Proposed by and signed into law by then Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.
To say Virginia has a complicated history with slavery is an understatement, and while many of the Virginia Founders and Framers were anti-slavery in effect, by the middle 19th century many of those attitudes had changed due to
John Calhoun and his ideals. In fact, Calhoun's ideals are still very much believed and taught today, though in a twisted way. You might in fact recognize some of them, the idea that the US economically was entirely built by slaves even going back to the colonial period, that the US owed its growth and wealth exclusively to slavery, and that all whites were served by the continuing enslavement of minority populations... it's just he thought these were good things while his intellectual inheritors like the 1619 project believe it to be evil.
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* Bear in mind that just freeing the slaves would then put a large amount of people with no property, no housing, and some with limited skills into the population. These newly freed slaves would have limited economic options, limited places to go, and no seed money to even head to the frontier and set up their own farmsteads. No government in America could afford to pay to provide that seed money to people, not any of the State governments nor the Federal. You might immediately think to liquidate the estates that owned them... but to whom would those be sold? Further, remember that government taking in the US required just compensation, so if you force the plantation owners to both liberate their slaves AND liquidate their property they have to legally be compensated for their loss and again... who pays... who could AFFORD to pay? There was no economically feasible way to immediately liberate all slaves held in the US, this was even shown after the Civil War when it was done it literally destroyed the economy of the US South for generations (in fact, some Southern states did not economically recover to the point they were at before the Civil War until the last few DECADES). Hence why the Founders and Framers hoped for gradual dying out of slavery and perhaps some plan for gradual emancipation that minimized the economic damage while maximizing the chance for the slaves to build their own lives. None of them foresaw the rise of the Textile Industrial Revolution, the invention of the Cotton Gin, and the emergence of King Cotton that would turn slavery from a slowly waning institution into the core of a Commodity driven economic boom that makes the modern oil cartels look small in comparison (no, seriously, cotton in it's heyday was a LARGER, more valuable, and larger percent of the WORLD economy than oil is or has been).
