by Taylor, Alan
Consider three letters received by Captain Benjamin Brand, a merchant in Hanover County. On January 6, 1809, John W. Tomlin could no longer control a restive slave and sought to sell him to an agreeable buyer: “Lewis says he will not live with me but will run away if I attempt to keep him; this is a considerable disappointment to me, as I have missed hiring [someone] else while depending on him. . . . He says several men want him, & as he appears to be an impertinent & obstinate fellow, I am willing to . . . let him apply to some of those who want him, which may save some trouble & satisfy the fellow.” Lewis had won, for Tomlin doubted that a whipping could reclaim him. Elkanah Talley felt differently about Ned, who rambled into the village to spend Sunday nights, annoying both his master and Captain Brand. On September 10, 1809, Talley wrote, “Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than for you or aney other person in town to give him a pretty severe correction every time he is caught in town of a Sunday evening. There is two [sic] maney negroes resorting [to] that place of a Sunday & I think there ought a stop be put to such conduct.” Finally, on May 7, 1810, Benjamin Lipscomb assured Brand that he had levied an execution on a debtor by seizing his “very likely young negro Fellow” and cast him “into prison for safe keeping” pending his sale at a public auction. In the three letters we see a defiant slave prevailing; another slave set up for a flogging; and a third converted into cash to settle a debt. The key variables in the three cases were the individual personalities, of both the slaves and the masters, and the volatile economic circumstances of the latter.63
Virginia slavery consisted of thousands of such diverse stories. But even at its “best” the system left every slave vulnerable to the whims of a master, the vagaries of the market, and the twists of fate. A master’s death or bankruptcy could set her or his slaves adrift into cruel new uncertainties. Contrary to the apologists for slavery, the system provided far less security than did freedom.
In 1815 in Powhatan County, a pregnant slave named Jenny took her three young children down to the river and drowned them. The county magistrates convicted her of murder, but they delayed the hanging until she could give birth. In the interim, the magistrates considered conflicting testimony about her sanity: Was she crazy to kill three children to spare them from a life of slavery? Witnesses described a defiant woman who had often refused to work for her master, Peter Stratton, who “believed he had given her a thousand lashes on account of her neglecting her work.” Some witnesses considered Jenny “a fool,” but a jail guard “conceived her to be a very shrewd and sensible negro.” Favoring her sanity and execution, Stratton offered in evidence that after she gave birth, he took away her baby as his property, and “she seemed to be much affected, and shewed a considerable degree of attachment to the Child.” After this last loss, Jenny may have welcomed the noose.64
In November 1818 in Albemarle County, on a plantation near Monticello, a proud black man hanged himself in shame after receiving a whipping. The suicide shocked a neighbor, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. (Jefferson’s son-in-law), who had admired the “very sensible, lively, and likely young mulatto man.” The unnamed young man had scrupulously avoided “any misconduct,” but a new overseer “concluded that fear would be [a] safer security for good conduct than any determination to do right.” To show that no slave could escape the whip, the overseer flogged the young man for leaving his tools behind in a field. He then “hung himself, 30 feet from the ground, in a tree near his Master’s door, the same night.” The death especially shocked because Randolph esteemed both the master and his overseer as “humane men” of “moral worth” who had whipped from a sense of duty. If they were not to blame, something bigger was. Randolph concluded, “What a hideous monster, among the various phaenomena of the social state, is our Southern system!”65
The suicide revealed to Randolph a terribly powerful social system that distorted the morality and justice of otherwise decent men. Slavery could not have endured without the support of attentive husbands, good fathers, pious church-goers, and conscientious citizens. Sobered by the death, Randolph sought to alter the monstrous system that held good men, as well as their slaves, captive. But the best he could do, upon becoming governor of Virginia, was to promote his father-in-law’s very gradual emancipation program linked to the colonization of the freed in distant Africa: a non-starter in Virginia.66
Otherwise honorable men sustained an exploitative and encompassing economic system dedicated to property in humans, the pursuit of profit, the rights of creditors, and the interests of heirs. Seeing no other choice, most Virginians maintained slavery as their duty. One master confessed, “Surely, the Virginians are not barbarians. Habit may make them forget the situation of these poor wretches, who tremble under their hands, and even reconcile them, in spite of themselves, to the daily horrors which pass under their eyes.” It is too easy for modern readers to feel superior by blaming slavery on the “bad people” of another time and region. Slavery reveals how anyone, now as well as then, can come to accept, perpetuate, and justify an exploitative system that seems essential and immutable. After all, we live with our own monsters.67
St. George Tucker, 1807, engraving by Charles B. J. F. de Saint-Memin. (Courtesy of the Tucker-Coleman Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and Mary)
3
BLOOD
In the afternoon I passed by a field in which several poor slaves had lately been executed on the charge of having an intention to rise against their masters. A lawyer who was present at their trials at Richmond, informed me that on one of them being asked, what he had to say to the court in his defence, he replied, in a manly tone of voice: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause: and I beg, as a favour, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have pre-determined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial?”
—ROBERT SUTCLIFF, SEPTEMBER 25, 18041
ON A SUNNY DAY in March 1798, blood fell from the sky onto an open book containing a code of laws for the state of Virginia. A jury in Culpeper County had convened in an open field outside of the courthouse, when the district attorney, a Mr. Voss, opened the book to instruct the jurors on their duty. At least forty bloody drops spattered the tome, splashing onto his clothing. Looking up into a clear blue sky, the jurors could see no source for the rain of blood. “Struck with the Miracle,” the spooked jurors desisted from pursuing the inquest. Most were Quakers, which was unusual given their small numbers in Virginia and the official animus against them for their antislavery convictions.2
This “Curious Incident” survives in a notebook kept by St. George Tucker, who heard the story directly from Voss, a respected lawyer, in the presence of a former governor, a leading lawyer, and another judge. This apparently providential wonder fits oddly in Tucker’s notebook, which he filled with scientific observations. A rationalist, Tucker adhered to deism, a tepid form of Christianity deprived of miracles and adapted to the Enlightenment science of the eighteenth century. Ordinarily, Tucker did not seek signs of divine prodigies and supernatural wonders.3
Tucker added no explanation or interpretation for the unusual entry of a bloody miracle, but he lived in an age of sudden and shocking revolutions. In addition to the American revolt against British rule, the French had recently toppled and executed their royal family, and, during the early 1790s, in Saint-Domingue, the slave majority had overthrown their white masters. That massive slave revolt compounded the powerful dread held by white Virginians that they lived among an “internal enemy” who might, at any moment, rebel. Haunted by Saint-Domingue, Thomas Jefferson declared, “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man. . . . It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac) will have to wad
e through and try to avert them.”4
Masters considered slavery an ongoing cold war that could turn hot on some dark night when a simmering plot would suddenly erupt into bloody retribution—perhaps with divine assistance. Although a slaveholder, George Mason conceded, “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country.” Jefferson expected “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” And he feared that the whites would lose. “Indeed, I tremble for my country,” he added, “when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Blood from the sky was an ominous sign for slaveowners like Jefferson and Tucker. In 1798, Tucker especially worried about a bloody slave revolt because the legislature had rejected his plan for the gradual emancipation of Virginia’s slaves.5
Plan
In a book, but not in the legislature, Jefferson had proposed gradually to emancipate the slaves and to deport those freed to an overseas colony. Most Virginians, however, recognized that colonization was a fantasy. Even if they could afford to dispense with slave labor, which they could not, the masters blanched at the logistical and financial challenges of shipping thousands of people thousands of miles away. Committed to low taxes and minimal government, Virginians lacked the means to finance or administer a massive project of overseas colonization. Tucker calculated that Jefferson’s colonization scheme would annually cost Virginia at least five times its revenue, and a fivefold increase in taxation was unthinkable.6
In 1796, Tucker proposed an alternative plan for emancipation without state-sponsored colonization. Like Jefferson, Tucker regarded slavery as incompatible with republican government, and he also dreaded that a bloody slave revolt would destroy their beloved Virginia. Unlike Jefferson, however, Tucker insisted that whites and freed blacks could coexist within Virginia as unequals. Bowing to white racial prejudice, Tucker proposed that the freedmen become lower-caste tenants without the rights to own land, bear arms, vote, hold office, or marry a white person. He expected that inferior status would pressure blacks gradually to migrate southwestward to the frontier, saving Virginians the cost of sending them to Africa.7
Tucker proposed a complex plan sufficiently gradual to avoid undermining the property rights of the living. He promised to perform a great magic trick: slowly to abolish slavery in Virginia “without the emancipation of a single slave [then living]; without depriving any man of the property which he possesses; and without defrauding a creditor who has trusted him on the faith of that property.” His plan would free every enslaved female born after the legislature adopted it, but not until she turned twenty-eight, and no boys would ever be freed from the emerging generation. In the following generation, the children of the freed women, both boys and girls, would become free at twenty-eight, after serving a prolonged unpaid apprenticeship. Tucker predicted that it would take three generations (about a century) for Virginia to get rid of slavery under his plan, which he pitched as the rational “middle course, between the tyrannical and iniquitous policy which holds so many human creatures in a state of grievous bondage, and that which would [suddenly] turn loose a numerous, starving, and enraged banditti, upon the innocent descendants of their former oppressors.”8
Tucker published his plan in Philadelphia and, in November 1796, submitted copies to both houses of the Virginia legislature. He naively believed that “a large majority of slave-holders among us would cheerfully concur in any feasible plan for the abolition of [slavery].” In fact, the House of Delegates abruptly and angrily rejected the plan. Because all legislation had to begin in that house, the State Senate could do nothing. The president of the senate, Ludwell Lee, politely assured Tucker, “You certainly judge rightly in supposing that, to an enlightened Legislature, no object can be more grateful than to restore, upon a plan not injurious to Society, the Freedom to a part of our Fellowman, which the God of Nature gave them.” Lee expressed the ambivalence of Virginia gentlemen toward emancipation: they supported it in principle but could never discover “a plan not injurious to Society.” Indeed, the rejection of Tucker’s plan throttled any further appetite among the legislators for antislavery reforms. In 1799 a liberal legislator sadly concluded, “In truth the emancipation fume has long evaporated, and not a word is now said about it.”9
A proud and sensitive elitist, Tucker had expected careful consideration of his plan by legislators deferential to his intellect, education, and high standing. Instead, he got a rude rejection because most legislators feared any public debate of emancipation no matter how gradual and incomplete. In 1790 a newspaper explained that “slaves have understanding enough to know, when so much noise is made by a part of the community about their emancipation, that the time perhaps may come when they shall be free—and that the time being spun out longer than they have patience to wait for, will be the cause of much bloodshed, by insurrections.” Virginia’s leaders insisted that white silence and black ignorance alone could spare both races from a bloodbath. But Tucker suspected that speaking no evil of slavery would instead hasten the bloody day of reckoning: “Actual suffering will one day, perhaps, open the oppressors’ eyes. Till that happens, they will shut their ears against argument.” As a consequence, he scanned the skies for signs of coming bloodshed.10
Alarm
In May 1792, alarming rumors insisted that in Northampton County (on the Eastern Shore) hundreds of slaves had accumulated an arsenal of muskets, spears, and clubs for a revolt. Allegedly they acted in concert with slave plotters across Chesapeake Bay who meant to “blow up the magazine in Norfolk, and massacre the inhabitants.” In Mathews County (on the western shore) a magistrate alerted the governor to the “defenceless situation of most of the Counties in this State, & particularly those who have the Blacks in the greatest number.” He begged for a shipment of weapons to enable the whites to “suppress their wrong intentions by a shew of force.”11
In Northampton County, the magistrates arrested and whipped a dozen supposed ringleaders but found insufficient evidence to convict them at trial. At most, a few slaves had denounced their masters and the slave patrollers, while many more blacks had attended nocturnal meetings for evangelical worship. On May 21, Colonel Smith Snead informed the governor that “only a few manifested by their conversation a desire of insurrection, but had no fixed plan of operation or time for execution; they had furnished themselves neither with arms nor ammunition.” Nonetheless, rash talk could not be tolerated, so the magistrates ordered the dozen flogged and had three sold to distant Cuba as a warning to others. The magistrates also increased the number and repressive zeal of their slave patrols.12
The crackdown produced a backlash from defiant slaves, apparently encouraged by some white evangelicals. In July, Colonel Snead boasted that his slave patrols “prevented” the slaves from “meeting and strolling about from one place to another.” But he added, “These measures were extremely irksome to the slaves, and abridged them of those privileges which they had been taught by many white people of this County to believe they were entitled to, and [the slaves] were determined if possible to prevent the activity of Patrollers, and destroy those enemies to their liberty.” Armed with clubs, six black men ambushed a patrol, wounding one white man and bending his bayonet. The next day an overwhelming force of armed whites arrested five suspects, and the county court convicted three, who were hanged. “This I hope will be a sufficient terror, and teach them wisdom,” Snead concluded.13
The alarm revealed the stark alternation in white attitudes toward slave revolt. Virginians ordinarily seemed inert and averse to any collective activity. “No people are more patriotic than the Virginians,” announced a newspaper editor, “but they are characterized by a fatal apathy—the result of indolent habits, which . . . defeats the operations of their acknowledged talents.” John Randolph agreed that “we have quickness of parts enough among us in Virginia, but we want application.” In addition to the debilitating heat and humidity, the Virginians felt pre
occupied by their families, farms, and needy crops. Usually lax and inconsistent in enforcing restrictions on the slaves, Virginia’s whites could suddenly burst into frenetic repression when they suspected a plot to rebel. The emotional volatility resembled the Virginia climate, where long, sultry stretches suddenly broke into thunder and lightning.14
Every crisis revealed that the Virginians were poorly armed, for during the long lulls most militiamen sold their guns or allowed them to rust. And local stocks of gunpowder had moldered away or been spent for hunting. When an alarm came, terrified militiamen suddenly begged their state government for arms and ammunition to stave off their peril. Once the alarm passed, however, the state leaders again curtailed expenditures and reassured voters that they should fear no new taxes to arm the militia. White men returned to tending their farms and families, indifferent to any larger, community effort. Once again the patrols dwindled, the arms rusted, and the slaves resumed their nocturnal roaming.15
During the long inert periods of relative security, tension slowly accumulated in the minds of white men until it erupted into alarm over something a slave said. In 1802 in Williamsburg a slave insulted a white man in the street, which led a witness to conclude “that an insurrection was in agitation.” Surely only an impending revolt could embolden a slave to express such insolence. Terrifying rumors spread of covert, mass meetings to elect commanders, stash stolen arms, and mobilize a widespread network of preachers to coordinate a far-flung uprising.16
Springing into action, the county’s magistrates and militia officers increased slave patrols and begged for more guns in anxious letters sent to the state leaders in Richmond. Meanwhile, the patrollers arrested, whipped, and interrogated enslaved men considered too bold and too outspoken. Pain and leading questions could elicit details from the suspects to confirm and elaborate on the dire suspicions. Peer pressure demanded that every young white man assist the patrols and take turns in whipping the suspects, which helped unite the majority in support of repression.17
