Slavery Trivia Question

I'm sitting here reading State v. Will, an opinion by Justice Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court (and the arguments of counsel with it), for a short paper on slave trials.  I see that the prosecutor quotes without attribution someone to this effect: "the world when best peopled, was not a world of freemen, but of slaves."  That's a very common sentiment in the old South.  But here's the question: whom was he quoting?  And -- and this is what really interests me -- where did the prosecutor most likely get that quotation?  I think there's a pretty exciting (if unsurprising) story in intellectual history in the way that quotation made it into the prosectuor's mind.  It is further evidence of the influence of University faculty in the promulgation of proslavery ideas.

Gaston, long-time readers of this blog may recall, is someone I'm deeply interested in.  The illustration is the grave monument of B.F. Moore in Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery.  Moore argued the case for Will.

Comments

[Marc Roark]

It sounds like a theologian. I'll go with John Weseley, since he has Southern roots.

[Bill Turnier]

Robert Wallace in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind?

[Alfred Brophy]

Very, very good Bill -- now, the question is how did it make it from Wallace into the arguments of counsel? Therein lies a pretty interesting story, I think -- involving a history professor, no less.

[Bill Turnier]

Via Thomas Dew a former President of W&M, historian and defender of slavery as an institution who quoted Wallace in his defense of slavery. I must confess that I can only do this with the aid of Google.

[Alfred Brophy]

That's exactly correct, Bill -- and is further evidence of how far Dew's work was traveling. The argument of counsel did not cite Dew, but quoted Wallace whom Dew also quoted -- and then some of the rest of the argument echoes other parts of Dew (like the emphasis on other societies that had slavery).

[Wendy]

Great.
p.s. Thank you for all the links, Bill