charges of atheism and the charges of an affair with a 15-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, published in newspapers by Federalists supporters put his belief in a free press and free speech to the test. His predecessor, John Adams, had angrily counterattacked the press and his vocal opponents by passing chilling Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson, in contrast, worked tirelessly to overturn what he viewed as tyrannical limits on free speech and free press except for when he asked Thomas McKean, the governor of Pennsylvania, to have Federalist newspapermen indicted for libel by claiming that it was necessary to prevent licentious abuses of free speech. Jefferson later lamented the anguish caused by his political enemies but never denied their charges, including those in Notes on Virginia, and he never gave up his fight for "Republican principles" to shield the common man from state or religious oppression. Slavery In "Laws" (Query XIV-14), Jefferson redirected questions about slavery by focusing the discussion to Africans by referring to what he called "the real distinctions which nature has made" between people of European descent and people of African descent. He later expressed his opposition to slavery in "Manners" (Query XVIII-18). Jefferson's proposal for resettling freed blacks in a colony in Africa expressed the mentality and anxieties of some American slaveholders after the American Revolutionary War, which contrasted with the rising sentiment among some other American slave owners to emancipate their slaves because of the hypocrisy in fighting for independence while they held thousands of blacks in bondage. Numerous northern states abolished slavery altogether. Several southern states, including Virginia in 1782, made manumissions easier. So many slaveholders in Virginia freed slaves between the 1780s and the 1800s, sometimes in their will and others during their lifetime, that the number of free blacks in Virginia rose from about 1,800 in 1782 to 30,466, or 7.2% of the total black population in 1810. In the Upper South, more than 10% of blacks had been free by 1810. In the North, more than three quarters of blacks. However, millions of slaves still remained in bondage in the South, and freedmen faced high levels of racism in the North. The South would keep slavery until after the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. In "Laws", Jefferson wrote: It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying,