Eventually Colonel John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in general possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage.

In actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected only so far as the master race determined.
[Footnote 4: G.W.Williams, _History of the Negro Race in America_ (New York [1882]), I, 353-362.] Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated end.

Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever consistency might require.

How could they justly continue to hold men in bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the right of all men to be free?
Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the question.

Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation.