By Miles Smith
In 1781 Thomas Jefferson left the office of governor of Virginia and wrote the sole book-length work attributed to him. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson reflected on what he knew was the great moral failure his society maintained and perpetuated: chattel slavery. He worried that slavery made masters worrisomely despotic. Slaveholding families were “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny.” He never proposed a solution to what he clearly knew was the problem of slavery, he believed that the moral weight of such a monstrously immoral system did not escape divine notice. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep.”
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