In Notes on the State of Virginia, a distressed Thomas Jefferson penned an indictment of slavery that reverberated for decades, causing Southerners no end of pain, anger, and soul searching:

Jefferson had predecessors for his anxiety over slavery's effects on masters. Educated Southerners knew Locke's psychological portrait of children as natural seekers of dominion. And they knew Montesquieu's critique of the master's unlimited authority, which Jefferson, in effect, paraphrased. The slaveholder, Montesquieu wrote, “insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel.” The Reverend David Rice, father of western Presbyterianism, and other late eighteenth-century emancipationists assailed slavery for undermining the moral and political virtue of the white community, especially of its young men. In the 1760s, George Mason of Virginia denounced slavery for impairing the morals of whites, much as it had impaired the morals of the Romans and led to the decay of ancient civilization. Mason returned to the theme at the federal Constitutional Convention: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.” Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut taunted him: If so, Mason and other Virginians should free their slaves. Ebenezer Hazard of Philadelphia described southern gentlemen in 1778: “Accustomed to tyrannize from their infancy, they carry with them a disposition to treat all mankind in the same manner they have been used to treat their Negroes.”