I'm inclined to think Jefferson had this letter in mind when he wrote this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism....Our children see this, and learn to imitate it....The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances."
And no more than the Romans did Jefferson or the Virginians every actually attempt to suppress slavery.
I'm inclined to think Jefferson had this letter in mind when he wrote this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism....Our children see this, and learn to imitate it....The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances."
And no more than the Romans did Jefferson or the Virginians every actually attempt to suppress slavery.