"But their residence among us is yet more objectionable on other accounts. It is incompatible with the tranquility of society; their apparent exemption from want and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting--and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and visionary, but disgusting and annoying. "We would not be cruel and unchristian--but we must take care of the interests and morals of society, and of the peace of mind of the helpless in our families. It is indispensable to the happiness of the latter, that this cause of apprehension be removed. And efforts to this end are, we firmly believe, sanctioned by enlightened humanity toward the ill-fated class to whom we allude. They can never have the respect and intercourse here which are essential to rational happiness, and social enjoyment and improvement. But in other lands they may become an orderly, sober, industrious, moral, enlightened and christian community; and be the happy instruments of planting and diffusing those blessings over a barbarous and benighted continent. "Your petitioners will not designate a plan of legislative operation--they leave to the wisdom and provident forecast of the General Assembly, the conception and the prosecution of the best practicable scheme--but they would respectfully and earnestly ask that the action of the laws passed to this effect be decisive, and the means energetic--such as shall, with as much speed as may be, free our country from this bane of its prosperity, morality and peace."--_The Richmond Enquirer_, Oct. 21, 1831. [23] _The Journal of the House of Delegates_, 1831, pp. 1-123. [24] _The Journal of the House of Delegates_, 1831, pp. 41, 56, 119. [25] _Ibid._, 1831, p. 93. [26] _The Journal of the House of Delegates_, 1831, p. 93. [27] _Ibid._, p. 93. [28] _Ibid._, p. 125. [29] _The Richmond Enquirer_, Jan. 7, 1832. [30] Drewry, _The Southampton Insurrection_, p. 165. [31] _The Richmond Enquirer_, Dec. 17, 1831. [32] _Ibid._, Nov. 18, 1831. [33] _The Journal of the House of Delegates_, 1831, p. 110. [34] Before the insurrection free men of color voted in North Carolina and at least one well-authenticated case exists of a colored voter in Virginia prior to 1830. A native of Virginia long a resident of Massachusetts is an authority for the statement that the facilities for higher education of the Negro were quite as good in Richmond as in Boston at that time. There was published in a paper of the time an account of the celebration of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1827, by the free people of color of the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The orator of the day was Isaac N. Carey.