The government of Virginia was unquestionably actuated, in prohibiting the slave trade, by a sincere sense of its intrinsic injustice and cruelty. Mr. Jefferson, a representative man, in his "Notes on Virginia," had given indignant expression to this sentiment. And the reprobation of that national wrong, with regret for the presence of the African on the soil, was the universal feeling of that generation which succeeded the Revolution; while they firmly asserted the rightfulness of that slavery which they had inherited. But human motives are always complex; and along with the moral disapprobation for the crime against Africa, the Burgesses felt other motives, which, although more personal, were right and proper. They were sober, wise and practical men, who felt that to protect the rights, purity, and prosperity of their own country and posterity, was more properly their task, than to plead the wrongs of a distant and alien people, great although those wrongs might be. They deprecated the slave trade, because it was peopling their soil so largely with an inferior and savage race, incapable of union, instead of with civilized Englishmen. This was precisely their apprehension of the enormous wrong done the colony by the mother country. They understood also the deep political motive which combined with the lust of gain to prompt the relentless policy of the Home Government. With it, the familiar argument was: "Let us stock the plantations plentifully with Africans, not only that they may be good customers for our manufactures, and producers for our commerce; but that they may remain dependent and submissive. An Englishman who emigrates, becomes the bold assertor of popular and colonial rights; but the negro is only fit for bondage." For the same reason, the colonies felt that the forcing of the Africans upon them was as much a political as a social wrong. But that righteous Providence, whose glory it is to make the crimes of the designing their own punishment, employed African slavery in the Southern colonies as a potent influence in forming the character of the Southern gentleman, without whose high spirit, independence, and chivalry, America would never have won her freedom from British rule.