The Virginia General Assembly debated the future of slavery the following spring. Some urged gradual emancipation, but after Virginia's leading intellectual, Thomas R. Dew, President of the College of William and Mary, published "a pamphlet defending the wisdom and benevolence of slavery, and the folly of its abolition", the pro-slavery side prevailed. The General Assembly passed legislation making it unlawful to teach reading and writing to either enslaved or free blacks and restricting all blacks from holding religious meetings without the presence of a licensed white minister. Other slave-holding states in the South enacted similar laws restricting activities of both enslaved and free blacks. Across Virginia and other Southern states, legislators made criminal the possession of abolitionist publications by either whites or blacks.