Many thoughtful men in the colony viewed the situation with alarm, not only because the importation of so many blacks was drying up the stream of white immigrants from England, but because it was driving out of the colony poor men who did not want to compete with slave labor. And the planters had reason to dread slave insurrections. Some of the Africans were docile enough, but a few resented their bonds fiercely. In 1710 a conspiracy was discovered in Surry and James City Counties, in which the Negroes planned to rise, kill all who opposed them, and escape out of the colony. Several were tried in the General Court, convicted and executed.[23]
There was much satisfaction when the Assembly, in the revenue act of 1723, tried to stem the tide by placing a duty on the importation of slaves. But when the act came before the Lords of Trade, the merchants opposed it vigorously. John Gary, who had lived in Virginia, and later went to England to enter the tobacco trade, when summoned before the Board, argued against it. It would ruin the poor planters, he said, because it would run up the cost of slaves, and they would not be able to buy enough to cultivate their plantations.[24] This argument, as we have seen, was not entirely misleading, but it ignored the predicament of the thousands who could afford not even one, no matter how cheap, and so sank into great poverty, became "poor white trash." Yet the Board sided with Cary and his fellow merchants, and in January, 1724, advised the King to veto the act.
The Assembly, greatly disappointed, five years later made another attempt, placing a duty of forty shillings a head on the importation of slaves. Gooch gave them his full support. The merchants would not be injured by the law, he argued, since the purchasers had to pay the tax.[25] But the importers did not see it that way, and at their urging the King disallowed the act.
How bitterly these vetoes were resented in Virginia is shown by a statement of Thomas Jefferson in his "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," written in 1774. "The abolition of slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. But previously to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this, by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, having been hitherto defeated by his Majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States, and the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice. Nay, the single interposition of an interested individual against a law was scarcely ever known to fail of success, though, in the opposite scale, were placed the interests of a whole country."[26]