The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

by Taylor, Alan

  Her eloquence may have moved Randolph, but it did nothing to stop her sale and separation from her children. If more honest than the later sentimental defense of slavery, the trope of the internal enemy proved nearly as effective at preserving the slave system. Immediately after recalling the slave mother’s vivid eloquence, Randolph collected himself to launch a fiery defense of slavery: “The question of slavery, as it is called, is to us a question of life and death. . . . You will find no instance in history where two distinct races have occupied the soil except in the relation of master and slave.” Although sensitive to the evils of slavery, Randolph ultimately insisted that his race must triumph in an ongoing war against the black enemy within. Most Virginians dared not emancipate because they dreaded free blacks as even more menacing because less supervised than slaves.9

  Virginians argued that they could remain free only by keeping blacks enslaved. If freed by the thousands, surely the emancipated would try to destroy their former masters. Patrick Henry asserted, “Our country will be peopled. The question is, shall it be with Europeans or with Africans.” Colonel John Taylor feared that freedom for blacks within Virginia would pit “two nations of distinct colours and features on the same theatre to contend . . . for wealth and power” until one crushed the other. Thomas Jefferson agreed that the races were perpetual enemies who could never coexist in freedom but instead would wage a brutal war, culminating in “the extermination of the one or the other race.” Abandoning his usual optimism about human progress, Jefferson denied that different races could learn to live together as equals. He dreamed of gradually emancipating Virginia’s slaves over two generations, but only if they could be deported across the Atlantic as colonists in Africa.10

  Mass deportation of freed slaves, however, was prohibitively expensive and economically ruinous for Virginia, so the Virginians felt stuck with their profitable but dangerous internal enemy. Jefferson famously declared of slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Virginians had become trapped in a system of beliefs and behavior where neither their material interest nor their cultural convictions would permit them to escape from a terrible fear. Allowing themselves no way out, Virginians wove a cocoon of dread that became even more claustrophobic when the British threatened to make a common cause with the enslaved during the War of 1812.11

  The pervasive dread ignored the considerable evidence that black people wanted equality and opportunity rather than revenge. When free, they offered to defend the state and nation that distrusted them so much. The Philadelphia journalist William Duane corrected his friend Jefferson, who had miscast blacks as alien and perpetual enemies. On the contrary, Duane reported, “The American born blacks, even in the Southern states where slavery is yet suffered, feel a sentiment of patriotism and attachment to the U.S. Those who doubt it know very little of human nature, and the force of habit on the human mind.” Blacks wanted to be American citizens rather than to murder them.12

  The war soured many Virginians on the Union because the national government did precious little to defend them and to prevent their slaves from escaping. After the war, Virginia’s leaders cultivated a staunch states’ rights position that informed their militant response to the Missouri crisis of 1819–1820. When northern congressmen proposed to restrict the western expansion of slavery, angry Virginians expressed a visceral dread of being trapped in a region with a restive black majority. They insisted that their own safety and prosperity required diffusing the threat of their internal enemy through the sale and migration of slaves westward. That insistence fed on their recent wartime experience with hundreds of runaways who had returned as British marines to attack their former masters. The war gave some substance to their long-standing fear of the internal enemy, and that southern fear put the Union in peril.

  But the Union would not collapse until 1861, in part because the War of 1812 also generated a brand of racialized nationalism that could serve the South’s interests. In newspapers and pamphlets, American writers demonized the British as race traitors who allied with savage Indians on the frontier and fomented bloody slave uprisings in the South. By arming and encouraging the supposedly barbaric red and black peoples, the British betrayed the white Americans, who claimed a unique capacity to enjoy freedom and sustain a republic. Fearing a persistent coalition of Indians, slave rebels, and British manipulators, the Americans pursued a more aggressive postwar expansion westward. They justified that expansion as essential to defend the republic from containment and subversion. So long as the conquests and cessions opened new lands to settlement by masters and their slaves, southern leaders could support the Union, even as they watched it more jealously for signs of being turned against them, for if they ever lost national power, Virginians dreaded a massive uprising by the internal enemy of their nightmares.13

  Peter Francisco’s Gallant Action with Nine of Tarleton’s Cavalry, engraving by D. Edwin, 1814. Widely circulated during the War of 1812, this engraving reminded Virginians of a great hero of the revolution, a powerful blacksmith who single-handedly repelled a British troop of mounted men. By depicting slaves cringing behind Francisco, the artist linked the defense of liberty for white men to the preservation of slavery for blacks. During the War of 1812, Francisco organized a special unit of older men, the “Silver Greys,” dedicated to patrolling Richmond to prevent a slave uprising. (Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society)

  1

  REVOLUTION

  Whilst America hath been the land of promise to Europeans and their descendants, it hath been the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa.

  —ST. GEORGE TUCKER, 17961

  IN JULY 1774, on the island of Bermuda, Colonel Henry Tucker wrote to his son, St. George Tucker, a law student in Virginia. A leading merchant, the elder Tucker sympathized with the American Patriots, who resisted new British taxes levied by Parliament without the consent of elected colonial legislatures. Tucker assured his son, “I think the Collonies ought to hazard every thing rather than to Submit to Slavery, . . . for if the Parliament of great Britain have a right to dispose of the Americans’ property as they please, call it by what name you will there can be no greater marks of Slavery.” The American Patriots sought to protect both liberty and property, which they understood as interdependent. But the property of the colonists included thousands of people held as perpetual slaves deprived of their own liberty. In Virginia, a leading Patriot, Richard Henry Lee, staged a protest by parading his slaves around a courthouse while carrying banners that denounced Parliament’s taxes as “chains of slavery.” Masters like Lee and Tucker had a very weak sense of irony. Colonel Tucker might have seen greater marks of slavery had he looked at his own slaves.2

  The tension between liberty and property became glaring in 1776, when the Patriots declared independence and sought to elevate their cause by embracing universal human rights. In Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Congress announced that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” including liberty. Similarly, Virginia’s new state constitution announced “that all Men are born equally free and independent.” Reconciling such sweeping promises with the practice of slavery would fall, in no small measure, to Colonel Tucker’s son, St. George Tucker, who became a leading judge in Virginia thanks to the Revolution.3

  Virginia

  In 1771 Tucker had left home in Bermuda, at the age of nineteen, to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, then the capital of the royal colony of Virginia. Gregarious, bright, handsome, and clever, young Tucker readily made friends and shrewdly cultivated patrons among the Virginia elite: the proud gentlemen who governed the colony because they owned thousands of acres and scores of slaves. Tucker also impressed George Wythe, the learned lawyer and great moralist who opposed slavery and taught law at the college. As a young man, Tucker sought to navigate between the allure of power as a Virginia gentle
man, on the one hand, and the appeal of Wythe’s self-denying principles, on the other.4

  Williamsburg lay in Virginia’s longest-settled region, the Tidewater. Founded during the seventeenth century by English colonists, the Tidewater counties stretched around Chesapeake Bay: a vast estuary replenished by the many rivers of a humid climate. The bay extended about two hundred miles from south to north. On the western shore, the navigable Appomattox, James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers formed low-lying peninsulas thrusting into the bay. The narrower Eastern Shore had shorter, smaller rivers on a long peninsula pinched between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Chesapeake Bay to the west.5

  The long, hot summers featured sudden and dramatic shifts in temperature and humidity, for Virginia lay at the volatile intersection of warm, moist air from the south and the colder, drier winds from the west and north. A thick haze usually covered the summer sky so that, a visitor noted, when the sun rose, “its disk was amplified & the whole sky, as it were, suddenly burst into a sheet of flame.” During prolonged midsummer droughts, that fierce sun scorched the fields. Then a sudden thunderstorm might smash the plants with gales of wind and hail while filling the streams and rivers with torrents of rain, sweeping away riverside mills and crops. Thunderous and flashing with lightning, the storms terrified. Colonel Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Thomas Jefferson’s grandson) owned thousands of acres and scores of slaves but dreaded any approaching thunderstorm. A slave recalled that Randolph would bellow, “Bring in the niggers!” and order them to crowd around him until the storm passed. The slaves “attributed it to his fear of God, on account of his sins.”6

  In 1775, Tidewater Virginia hosted only two significant towns: Williamsburg and Norfolk. While Williamsburg served as the colonial capital and home to 1,200 people, Norfolk provided the colony’s lone major seaport. Located at the mouth of the Elizabeth River and near the ocean’s entrance into Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk sustained 3,000 inhabitants and much of the colony’s trans-Atlantic shipping. Although a vibrant place of business, Norfolk struck visitors as a swampy, hot, and humid sinkhole of ramshackle houses, narrow and muddy streets, and open, reeking sewage ditches. Annual outbreaks of malaria competed with frequent fires to afflict the town. White men owned the wharves, stores, and shops, but they slept fitfully owing to the hordes of mosquitoes and a dread of revolt by their slaves.7

  View of Norfolk from Town Point, 1798. In this watercolor, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a British visitor and artist, depicts Virginia’s leading port busy with shipping. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society)

  Rippon Lodge, Prince William County, 1796. Latrobe here depicts the home of Colonel Thomas Blackburn, a prosperous planter. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society)

  The colonists exploited the long growing season (about 200 days) and the fertile soil to raise tobacco, which found a profitable market in Great Britain. They also benefited from the ready transportation offered by the sheltered bay and its web of navigable rivers. During the early eighteenth century, the wealthiest planters converted their profits into impressive mansions, often of brick, that loomed on bluffs beside the rivers. Their poorer white neighbors lived in log cabins with stone chimneys and wooden floors, while their slaves dwelled in log huts with stick-and-clay chimneys and earthen floors.8

  By 1775, however, six generations of erosion and tobacco cropping had depleted the Tidewater soil, reducing harvests and curtailing profits. Unable to pay their debts to British merchants for imported tools and luxuries, the planters struggled to maintain grand appearances. Close inspection revealed, a visitor reported, “the shabbiness of their mansions,” many with broken window panes stuffed with old newspapers. The common whites had even less to fall back on. A traveler described the Tidewater farms as “miserably poor. Here and there a hovel and the inhabitants of them look half starved.”9

  The Tidewater counties suffered by comparison to the newer, more vibrant settlements to the west, in the rolling hills of the Piedmont, where the well-drained soils sustained fewer mosquitoes, so the people suffered less from malaria. During the 1760s, the Tidewater population shrank as people moved west to exploit the fertility of newly cleared lands in the Piedmont, where the new farms and plantations tended to raise more wheat and corn and less tobacco, save in the southern portion, known as the Southside, between the James River to the north and the North Carolina boundary on the south.10

  The marketing and milling of wheat promoted commercial towns along the Fall Line, where the Piedmont met the Tidewater. Millers tapped the waterpower in the rapids, and they loaded boats with barrels of flour bound downstream to the trans-Atlantic ships based at Norfolk. The new towns included Petersburg on the Appomattox; Richmond on the James; Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock; and Alexandria on the Potomac. Each developed a paved main street and a central square surrounded by the elegant brick townhouses built for leading merchants and lawyers. But the rough fringes of town featured muddy lanes, wooden shacks, dance halls, and many taverns, which hosted cockfights and bearbaiting. During the 1780s, Richmond became the center for Virginia’s political, banking, publishing, and legal establishments. While the Tidewater represented Virginia’s colonial past, the Piedmont anticipated the republican and commercial future.11

  Beyond a few market towns, Virginia remained thoroughly rural and agricultural. The colony had dozens of counties, each with a court of local notables, who conducted local government, supervised the churches, regulated commerce, and administered justice. Every county had a small village where a cluster of shops and taverns surrounded a courthouse. Business surged once a month when circuit-riding lawyers and judges arrived to adjudicate disputes and try criminals. Court sessions drew curious crowds of rustic folk to gape, trade, gossip, drink, race horses, and wrestle. Their farms and plantations lay in the broad and woody countryside beyond the courthouse village. A visitor reported, “Now & then a solitary farm house was to be seen, a narrow wood building, two stories high, with gable ends & a small portico over the central door. A cluster of small, miserable negro huts, a canoe & a brood of little negroes paddling in the mud completed the landscape.” Most of the houses were new, small, and hastily built of logs or planks. “It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable,” Thomas Jefferson declared. Zigzag fences of wooden rails surrounded the fields, while cattle and pigs roamed freely in the surrounding forest.12

  People and goods moved more easily along the rivers and the bay than over land. The roads lacked signs, and the locals often proved misinformed about the best way out, so travelers got mired and lost along the muddy roads. Bridges were few and the ferries unreliable and unsafe. The bad roads discouraged foot traffic and carriages, so free people usually traveled on horseback. During a journey of 566 miles across Virginia, one traveler saw a single stagecoach and a lone carriage on the road. One weary traveler insisted that Virginia had “the very worst Roads in the U.S.”13

  The outside world of events, ideas, and news seemed distant, late, and elusive for the gentlemen who lived or sojourned in rural Virginia. In Amelia County in the Piedmont, Benjamin Henry Latrobe reported, “I felt myself almost out of the World. I found it impossible to get a letter to Richmond though only 32 Miles distant. Our latest Newspapers were a fortnight old.” John Randolph lamented, “After you have read your old books (if you have them to read), you can get no new ones.” But few common Virginians complained, for most wanted to be left alone by the outside world. While they welcomed visitors with warm and generous hospitality, the rural Virginians distrusted political decisions made beyond their own county. They could barely tolerate their own elected state legislature, and they dreaded the centralizing power of any government beyond Virginia.14

  Somerset

  In 1774 a crisis in the British Empire closed the courts of Virginia and threatened St. George Tucker’s prospects as a new lawyer. During the 1760s and early 1770s, Parliament imposed new taxes and regulations which alarmed planters already strug
gling to pay their debts owed to British merchants. Jefferson complained that debts “had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” Jefferson had inherited such a debt incurred by his father-in-law, John Wayles, to buy slaves from a British firm. With hyperbole but sincerity, planters argued that they faced impending “slavery” from imperial taxes and mounting debts. George Washington insisted that the British meant to “make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Living among slaves, planters dreaded lapsing into dependency on a powerful and distant empire.15

  While defending their liberty, the masters also fought to preserve the slavery of two-fifths of Virginia’s population. Initially imported from Africa, the slave numbers had surged during the first half of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, natural increase by enslaved families sufficed to fill the demand in Virginia for their labor. By 1765, nine-tenths of the slaves had been born in Virginia. The planters’ sense of a slave surplus grew as many diversified their crops, shifting from a reliance on tobacco, a labor-intensive crop, to more wheat and corn, which required fewer workers. By the 1760s, Virginia’s leaders worried that they had more than enough slaves for the economy and too many for their security from revolt. To discourage more slave imports, the colony’s legislature levied a heavy tax, but the imperial government vetoed it in defense of the interests of British traders. The imperial veto enabled the Virginians to claim a moral high ground and to feel threatened by British rule.16