[85]
The only tangible outcome there and elsewhere, however, was in the form of
added legal restrictions upon the colored population, slave and free. But
when the fright and fervor of the year had passed, conditions normal to the
community returned. On the one hand the warnings of wiseacres impressed
upon the would-be problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of
silence, particularly while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon
the general Southern regime were so active. On the other hand the new
severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old ones had been,
to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for emergency use, out of
sight and out of mind in the daily routine of peaceful industry.
[Footnote 84: _The Letter of Appomattox to the People of Virginia:
Exhibiting a connected view of the recent proceedings in the House of
Delegates on the subject of the abolition of slavery and a succinct account
of the doctrines broached by the friends of abolition in debate, and the
mischievous tendency of those proceedings and doctrines_ (Richmond, 1832).
These letters were first published in the Richmond _Enquirer_, February 4,
1832 et seqq.
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