Pauline Maier, discussing Revolutionary Founders in Reviews in American History, writes:

Melvin Patrick Ely's essay on "Richard and Judith Randolph, St. George Tucker, George Wythe, Syphax Brown, and Hercules White: Racial Equality and the Snares of Prejudice" is among the most thought-provoking in the book. In 1796 Richard Randolph, a member of one of the state's most illustrious families, wrote a will that included a "blistering attack on slavery," provided for the emancipation of the slaves he had inherited, and allocated to them land from his estate so they could support themselves as free men. Since those slaves were mortgaged to creditors, it took some fifteen years before his wife, Judith, the heroine of Ely's story, could fulfill his wishes.  Then she promptly bought a few more slaves as household servants.

St. George Tucker, who influenced Randolph, wrote a dissertation proposing a scheme of gradual emancipation for Virginia, but noted that deep-seated prejudice would obstruct its adoption. Nonetheless, two of Randolph's emancipated slaves, Syphax Brown and Hercules White, prospered and even received justice against white men in the courts.  And on "Israel Hill," the slave lands carved from the Randolph estate, free black men sometimes "settled down with white wives" and one family even moved west with a group of whites. Many more ex-slaves and their descendants stayed put, allowing the black community there to survive on into the twentieth century. This complex, human story reveals both the possibilities and limits of revolutionary antislavery, destroys simplistic assumptions about a monolithic South, and helps explain why the Founders did not, and probably could not, simply end American slavery.