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The Poisonous Fruit in the Virginia Garden
Slavery discredited all arguments that pastoral virtue had been attained. In 1771 a writer declared in the Virginia Gazette, "we should have manifested a more genuine abhorrence of slavery." The irony is that although it blocked the path to rural virtue, it freed Virginia's leaders from farming and positioned them to read and theorize -- in the manner of the ancients and their European disciples -- about matters of state. |