I N the winter of I820-I82I, Virginia's prominent jurist St. George Tucker attempted to complete the Revolution he and his generation had begun many decades before. In his Williamsburg study, Tucker penned a series of revisions to an emancipation proposal he had published twenty-five years earlier.1 While the Missouri crisis raged to the west, the sixty-seven-year-old judge revisited his plan in the hope that the nation could still wipe the stain of slavery from the land. Only then, he felt, could the United States truly fulfill the principles for which he and so many others had fought. For Tucker, an emigre from Bermuda, the American Revolution represented the supreme achievement of a free and enlightened people, the triumph of reason and natural rights over superstition and oppression. Yet before this magnificent triumph could be complete, slavery had to go. As Tucker struggled over the years to realize these revolutionary goals, he also educated his two beloved sons, Henry St. George and Nathaniel Beverley, known to family members by his middle name, about the rebellion's larger meaning. Yet Tucker's abiding love for his children raised the thorny-and ultimately conflicting-issue of family interest. As the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, many Virginia planters realized that the Tidewater's tobacco-based economy had grown dangerously unstable. In these uncertain circumstances, family love and devotion meant preserving familial property, including human property, for future generations. Thus, from the end of the Revolution until the Missouri crisis, St. George Tucker, like many members of the Revolutionary gentry, faced conflicting loyalties: he wished to eliminate slavery to fulfill the Revolution's ideological promise, but he also wanted to safeguard his family's property to preserve its wealth, power, and prestige.
Read full abstract
Jul 1, 2004
Lorri Glover 
Open Access