This was indeed a turning-point.

Men do not continue to denounce in public their own conduct unless their action results in some effort toward corrective measures.
Professor Thomas Dew, of the chair of history and metaphysics in William and Mary College and later President of the College, published an essay reviewing the debate in the Legislature and arguing that any plan for emancipation in Virginia was either undesirable or impossible.
This essay was among the first of the direct pro-slavery arguments.
Statements in support of the view soon followed.

In 1885 the Governor of South Carolina in a message to the Legislature said, "Domestic slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice." Senator Calhoun, speaking in the Senate two years later, declared slavery to be a positive good.

W.G.Simms, Southern poet and novelist, writing in 1852, felicitates himself as being among the first who about fifteen years earlier advocated slavery as a great good and a blessing.

Harriet Martineau, an English author who traveled extensively in the South in 1885, found few slaveholders who justified the institution as being in itself just.