The slave when made free might mix without staining the blood of his master.

But with us a second is necessary unknown to history.

When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."[17] [Footnote 16: Jefferson, _Notes on Virginia_, query 18.] [Footnote 17: _Ibid_., query 14.] George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes was that some plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees." But he noted in the same year that some abolition petitions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a reading.[18] [Footnote 18: Washington, _Writings_, W.C.Ford ed., XI, 20, 62.] Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St.George Tucker, professor of law in William and Mary College, inquired of leading citizens of Massachusetts in 1795 for data and advice, and undaunted by discouraging reports received in reply or by the specific dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate plan for extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen without expense to the state by merely making their conditions of life unbearable.

This was presented to the legislature in a pamphlet of 1796 at the height of the party strife between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently dismissed from consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project, reprinted his "dissertation" as an appendix to his edition of Blackstone in 1803, where the people and the politicians let it remain buried.

In public opinion, the problem as to the freedmen remained unsolved and insoluble.
[Footnote 19: St.George Tucker, _A Dissertation on Slavery, with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia_ (Philadelphia, 1796, reprinted New York, 1860).