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

by Taylor, Alan

  Slaves longed for freedom but also to remain among their family and friends. In the dispersed slavery of postrevolutionary Virginia, few families belonged entirely to the same master; therefore, the freed would suffer exile far from their enslaved kin left behind in Virginia. Manumitted without his wife and children, John Winston moved to Pennsylvania, which he soon regretted. Petitioning the legislature for permission to return to his family in Virginia, Winston explained that he could no longer “sacrifice . . . his domestic happiness” for his “love of liberty.” Many blacks also balked at living among strangers in the northern states, where prejudice and discrimination prevailed. Masters rationalized that true humanity kept their slaves at home in Virginia instead of casting them adrift as free people in the cold uncertainty of the North.43

  Ultimately the new law worked in tandem with a decisive shift in public opinion against freeing any more slaves. As a boy in Bedford County, Jeremiah Bell Jeter grew up with slavery: “Slaves were my nurses and the companions of my childhood and youth. To many of them I formed a strong and enduring attachment.” He despised the harsh treatment inflicted by his neighbors on their slaves: “They were poorly fed, thinly clothed, hardly worked, cruelly chastised for slight or imaginary offenses, and in some cases, murdered.” Bolstered by his evangelical faith, Jeter vowed never to own another human, but he married a woman who had inherited slaves. He then decided that blacks were unsuited for freedom: unable “to support themselves, . . . the free negroes were, in general, in a worse condition than the slaves.” Moreover, his slaves wanted to stay in Virginia: “If sent, they must be forced to leave their wives and children, belonging to other masters, to dwell in a strange land.” Jeter concluded that he had to keep them: a decision shared by thousands of other Virginians.44

  Virginia’s leaders rallied around the new consensus that slavery was wrong in principle but essential in practice. Colonel John Taylor deemed slavery “incapable of removal. . . . To whine over it, is cowardly; to aggravate it, criminal; and to forbear to alleviate it, because it cannot be wholly cured, foolish.” In sum, masters had a duty to rule their slaves with an iron fist within a velvet glove. While providing better housing, clothing, and food, masters demanded steadier work and longer hours.45

  Trade

  During the late 1790s in national politics, most southerners rallied to the Republican opposition led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who denounced the expansion of national power by the Federalist administration of John Adams. Although the Federalists did not challenge southern slavery, many southerners worried about the future uses of federal power if state sovereignty eroded. The Federalists also offended southerners by defending trade with the rebels in Saint-Domingue.46

  In 1800, Jefferson won the presidency, and the Republicans captured control of Congress thanks primarily to southern voters. Jefferson won 82 percent of the electoral votes in the South compared to only 27 percent in the North. Southerners also comprised most of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that convened in early 1801. Virginia provided more than a quarter of the Republicans in that house: twice as many as from any other state. Attentive to those who had elected him, Jefferson refused, as president, to meddle with slavery, reasoning “that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.” In 1805, he noted having “long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us.” He helped to defeat a proposal in Congress to restrict slavery in the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase. His administration also sought to isolate and impoverish the new republic of Haiti (the renamed Saint-Domingue), which he dreaded as a dangerous example to American slaves: “The existence of a negro people in arms, occupying a country which it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations.”47

  In 1802 Jefferson’s postmaster general, Gideon Granger, dismissed the free blacks employed in his department, reasoning that they threatened the security of the slave states. He assured a southern congressman,

  After the scenes which St. Domingo has exhibited to the world, we cannot be too cautious in attempting to prevent similar evils. . . . Everything which tends to increase their knowledge of natural rights, of men and things, or that affords them an opportunity of associating, acquiring and communicating sentiments, and of establishing a chain and line of intelligence, must increase your hazard. . . . By traveling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people, they must, [and] they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his colour.

  Having concluded that blacks must not discover that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson’s postmaster general persuaded Congress to restrict postal work to white men.48

  Jefferson and other southern Republicans did push to ban the importation of more Africans as slaves. They reasoned that the natural increase in the current slave population sufficed for expanding the plantation economy westward, and they feared that new slaves from Africa were especially prone to revolt. In March 1807, acting on Jefferson’s recommendation, Congress outlawed the import slave trade, effective January 1, 1808: the first year the Federal Constitution permitted such a ban. The overwhelming vote, 113 to 5, in the House of Representatives attested to broad support in the South as well as the North. But the new law manifested no commitment to antislavery within the nation and no bar to the booming interstate trade in slaves. Indeed, by eliminating foreign competition, Virginians could sell more slaves to the lower South. The sellers also expected to sleep more securely as the domestic slave trade diffused their surplus slaves at higher prices to the south and west. By banning the import slave trade while expanding the interstate slave trade, the Virginians hoped to render slavery safer and more profitable.49

  Poison

  In the spring of 1806, shortly after the state legislature limited manumissions, a murder shocked the people of Richmond. On Sunday, May 25, 1806, George Wythe became violently ill after drinking his morning coffee. It had been laced with arsenic. The same poison gripped his black cook and housekeeper, Lydia Broadnax, and a mixed-race boy, Michael Brown. A liberal who lived by his principles, Wythe had freed both and readily shared coffee with them despite their darker complexions. Broadnax slowly recovered, but Brown died on June 1, and Wythe on June 8, after two weeks of torment. He was eighty years old.50

  Leading Virginians revered Wythe as the most learned and ethical of men. “He lived in the world,” observed John Randolph, “without being of the world, and . . . was a mere incarnation of justice.” Able, modest, polite, erudite, and principled, Wythe had become the leading lawyer and legal educator in Virginia. Since 1789, he had presided as chancellor over the state’s court of equity.51

  He was a rare Virginian to argue that the races could peacefully live together in freedom as equals. After Wythe’s wife died in 1787, he freed their slaves, a decision made easier by a lack of children expecting an inheritance. To demonstrate the potential of blacks, Wythe adopted and educated Michael Brown as a gentleman. Unable to accept Wythe’s disinterested motives, gossips insisted that he had fathered the boy, with Lydia Broadnax as the mother. In fact, Brown had other parents.52

  Brown and Wythe did share the same murderer, another member of their household: a young white man named George Wythe Sweeney. As Wythe’s grandnephew, Sweeney resented Wythe’s good treatment of Brown. Dissipated and indebted, Sweeney sold books pilfered from Wythe’s library, and he forged Wythe’s signature to fraudulent checks. Fearful that Wythe would discover the frauds, Sweeney poisoned him, Brown, and Broadnax. Shocked Virginians asked who was safe if the best of men could be poisoned by his own relative. Something seemed to have gone badly awry in the postrevolutionary generation.53

  In September 1806 in Richmond, the state attorney general prosecuted Sweeney for murder, but the jury acquitted him for want of a witness who could testify to seeing him put the poison in the coffee. Broadnax had seen the fatal deed, but Virginia law forbade hearing any testimony by a bl
ack against a white. Sweeney killed the most revered of Virginians with impunity because the state refused to consider the truth when spoken by a black person.54

  Wythe’s murder represented the passing of the revolution in Virginia, for thereafter few leading men spoke of natural rights as universal. In his last court case, Wrights v. Hudgins, Wythe had ruled against a master, Houlder Hudgins of Mathews County, and awarded freedom to Jacky Wrights and her three young children. The ruling took both narrow and broad grounds. At a minimum, Wythe regarded the Wrights as properly free because they were light in complexion and descended from an Indian woman who had been unjustly enslaved early in the eighteenth century. But he also advanced a more explosive argument that, in freedom cases, the burden of proof should fall on the master because slavery was unnatural and unjust. Wythe cited Virginia’s bill of rights, which had declared, in his words, that “freedom is the birth-right of every human being.” With this ruling, Wythe tried to reverse the drift in Virginia toward asserting racial inequality as natural and slavery as perpetual. His ruling threatened to expose masters to widespread litigation by slaves seeking their freedom. While burying and honoring Wythe, Virginians hoped that a legal appeal would soon bury his last, dangerous ruling. For that reversal they looked to the presiding judge of the Court of Appeals: St. George Tucker.55

  Race

  After the abrupt rejection of his gradual emancipation plan by the legislature in 1796, Tucker nursed his wounded pride by retreating into a public silence about slavery. Dreading further humiliation, he restricted his antislavery thoughts to private conversations with trusted friends and to letters sent to northern correspondents. In 1797 a Quaker abolitionist solicited Tucker’s support for a renewed appeal to the legislature, but Tucker sadly replied that adding “my name to it, I fear would prejudice rather than serve the cause.” Making peace with slavery, he closed ranks with other Virginia gentlemen, dismissing his emancipation plan as a “Utopian idea” in 1803.56

  Tucker was not about to free his own slaves unilaterally, for he had too much invested in human beings to renounce their value. In December 1796, two days after submitting his ill-fated emancipation plan to the legislature, he hired a slave trader to sell a mother and her three daughters. Pleased with the prices obtained, Tucker did more business with the trader over the ensuing four years. With the proceeds, Tucker bought bank stock, which he reserved as a trust fund for his daughter Anne Frances. In 1815, he appraised his Williamsburg structures, including a rambling mansion ninety-feet long by thirty-two feet wide, at $1,500, but he appraised his fifteen slaves at $3,000: twice the value of his real estate. Few gentlemen could free their slaves without sacrificing their prosperity, social standing, and ability to pass both on to their children. Whenever Tucker deemed any slaves redundant, he sold them, or he gave them to his children. Tucker set aside his antislavery convictions to benefit his heirs.57

  Tucker gradually embraced the consoling fictions that blacks were incapable of freedom and happiest under the benign rule of paternalistic masters. Such slaves were, he explained, “better clothed, lodged, and fed, than if it depended upon themselves to provide their own food, raiment, and houses.” Slavery also restrained them from “falling into vicious habits, which emancipated blacks appear too prone to contract.” His son Nathaniel Beverley Tucker described the family’s mission as “to feel and to act toward these poor creatures as to humble and dependent friends.” By 1806, paternalism rather than emancipation had become the mission of genteel masters in Virginia.58

  As a judge, Tucker dealt with the freedom suits brought by mixed-race slaves seeking liberty by claiming descent from an unjustly enslaved woman: either an Indian or a white indentured servant. Troubled by this litigation, in 1795 the state legislature banned critics of slavery, especially Quakers, from prosecuting such suits on behalf of slaves or from serving on the juries. Thereafter, the number of freedom suits dwindled, but Wythe’s provocative ruling in Wrights v. Hudgins threaten to revive and expand them.59

  As a law professor, Tucker eloquently expounded on the natural rights of all men, and on the injustice of slavery, but as a cautious jurist he felt constrained by statutory law and public opinion. Attentive to his social standing, Tucker could ill afford to alienate the masters of Virginia. In November 1806, as chief justice of the Court of Appeals, he demolished Wythe’s broader ruling that freedom was the birthright of everyone in Virginia:

  I do not concur with the chancellor in his reasoning on the operation of the first clause of the Bill of Rights, which was notoriously framed with a cautious eye to this subject, and was meant to embrace the case of free citizens, or aliens only; and not by a side wind to overturn the rights of property, and give freedom to those very people whom we have been compelled from imperious circumstances to retain, generally, in the same state of bondage that they were in at the revolution, in which they had no concern, agency, or interest.

  With one stroke, Tucker dismissed blacks from any share in the revolution and its fruits: the Bill of Rights and republican citizenship. He rewrote a history in which at least 500 Virginia slaves had fought as soldiers for the Patriot cause. In the process, Tucker renounced the antislavery principles that he had learned as Wythe’s student.60

  While protecting the rights of property over brown and black people, Tucker also sought to liberate any white-appearing people held in slavery by preserving Wythe’s narrower ruling: that the Wrights deserved freedom because of their white skin and Indian maternal ancestor. “This is not a common case of mere blacks suing for their freedom; but of persons perfectly white,” their lawyer reminded the court. Rewriting colonial as well as revolutionary history, Tucker declared, “All white persons are and ever have been FREE in this country. If one evidently white be notwithstanding claimed as a slave, the proof lies on the party claiming to make the other his slave.” Tucker insisted that the burden of proof fell on masters only when the petitioning slaves seemed white in the eye of the judge beholder.61

  Tucker contributed to the emerging pseudo-science of racial difference. Citing his readings in natural history, Tucker offered a guide for how judges could discern black ancestry in cases where skin color seemed ambiguous. When “the characteristic distinction of color either disappears or becomes doubtful,” the descendants of Africans retained “a flat nose and woolly head of hair.” Likening them to animals, he insisted “that a man might as easily mistake the glossy, jetty cloathing of an American bear for the wool of a black sheep, as the hair of an American Indian for that of . . . the descendant of an African.” In the absence of documented ancestry, Tucker concluded that a presiding justice “must judge from his own view. He must discharge the white person and the Indian out of custody . . . and he must deliver the black or mulatto person, with the flat nose and woolly hair to the person claiming to hold him or her as a slave.” The apparently white persons got the benefit of the doubt, while people perceived to have African traits remained enslaved. The other justices supported Tucker’s dual ruling: in favor of freeing the Wrights but against the natural freedom of blacks. The only partial caveat came from Judge Spencer Roane, who doubted that judges could so readily tell race by sight given the many mixed-race people of Virginia: when “these races become intermingled, it is difficult if not impossible, to say from inspection only, which race predominates in the offspring.”62

  In 1796, Tucker had vowed, “The abolition of slavery . . . is now my first, and will probably be my last, expiring wish.” A decade later, he defined a stricter color line meant starkly to demarcate white freedom from black slavery. Joining the reaction against Gabriel’s plot, Tucker helped to redefine slavery in more purely racial terms. Along with Jefferson, Tucker retreated from the revolutionary flirtation with universal human rights. Ultimately, both men converted the scientific reasoning of the Enlightenment from a philosophical call for equality into a biological mandate for inequality.63

  Some Virginians could see the lie. The chief justice’s cousin, George Tucker,
owned slaves, but he still recognized their natural equality as humans. Noting Jefferson’s case for black inferiority, George Tucker lamented, “There is no excuse for his remarks. I am afraid, indeed, that his opinion is but too popular here, as I have heard several masters ready to justify their severity to these poor wretches, by alleging, that they are an inferior race, created only to be slaves. What a horrible doctrine . . . and what a pity that any gentleman of Mr. J’s reputation for talents, should lend it the countenance of his name.” George Tucker might have said the same of his distinguished cousin, but most Virginians followed where Jefferson and St. George Tucker led. Thereafter, slaves could expect little from a people whose revolution had grown cold and hollow. Instead, many of the enslaved would seek freedom from the returning warships of the liberator king. With his ruling in 1806, St. George Tucker increased the prospect that blood would spatter the land of Virginia.64

  Gilbert Hunt (1773–1863). An enslaved blacksmith in Richmond in 1811, Hunt helped to rescue white people caught in the Richmond fire. For his courage, Hunt received freedom and went to Liberia, but he later returned to Richmond. His actions in 1811 belied the myth that slaves set the fire. Taken by an unknown photographer, this image is from the end of his life, during the Civil War. (Courtesy of the Valentine Richmond History Center)

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  WARSHIPS

  In addition to the danger to be apprehended from foreign enemies, we have in the bosom of our Country an enemy more dangerous than any we can expect from the other side of the Atlantick.