"Even the wolf," said one, "driven back long since by the approach of man, now returns, after the lapse of a hundred years, to howl over the desolations of slavery." Contrasts between free labor in northern industry and that of the South were vividly portrayed.

In a speech of great power, one member referred to Kentucky and Ohio as States "providentially designated to exhibit in their future histories the differences which necessarily result from a country free from, and a country afflicted with the curse of slavery." The debate was by no means confined to industrial or material considerations.

McDowell, who was afterwards elected Governor of the State, thus portrays the personal relations of master and slave "You may place the slave where you please--you may put him under any process, which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being--you may do all this, and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all.

It is allied to his hope of immortality--it is the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach--it is a torch lit up in his soul by the hand of the Deity, and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man." Various speakers assumed that the continuance of slavery involved a bloody conflict; that either peaceably or through violence, slavery as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end; that the agitation against it could not be suppressed.

Faulkner drew a lurid picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in which he referred to the utterances of two former speakers, one of whom had said that, unless something effective was done to ward off the danger, "the throats of all the white people of Virginia will be cut." The other replied, "No, the whites cannot be conquered--the throats of the blacks will be cut." Faulkner's rejoinder was that the difference was a trifling one, "for the fact is conceded that one race or the other must be exterminated." The public press joined in the debate.