Jefferson framed slavery as a dilemma between justice and self-preservation

Evidence

The Missouri Question had roused Jefferson “like a fire bell in the night,” as he told Massachusetts congressman John Holmes on April 22, 1820. “I considered it at once,” he wrote, “the knell of the union.” He gave Holmes his stump speech on emancipation: no man wanted it more than him, but no workable plan for compensating owners and colonizing the freed had been put forth. “As it is,” he said, “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” What could be done? “Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 405