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

by Taylor, Alan

  In December 1808, many Virginians expected a revolt during the Christmas holiday, when the slaves enjoyed a five-day release from work and could more freely travel and gather. During that brief annual relaxation in the slave regime, masters chronically worried that the slaves might meet, plot, and rebel. In the Piedmont on December 21, Peggy Nicholas, the wife of Congressman Wilson Cary Nicholas, reported, “Through the mercy of providence we have once more escap’d the horrors of a Massacre. The Negroes have plan’d to rise on Christmas day. A Negro Woman by some means . . . discover’d the secret and gave information against three fellows in Nelson [County] who were immediately secur’d and whip’d. Two of them have confess’d the fact, the third wou’d not, but they say, they are all to be hang’d immediately. The whole Country is in alarm.”52

  Richmond’s magistrates also claimed to have “satisfactory evidence, verbal and written” for “a general insurrection of the Blacks” during the Christmas holiday. The magistrates had discovered an ominous letter dropped in the street and allegedly written by “J. B.,” a supposed slave rebel, to his shadowy commander, “General T. R.” The author claimed to have covertly recruited 100 enslaved men with the promise of plunder “when Richmond shall be ours.” Armed with stolen muskets, old swords, and clubs, the rebels planned to divide into four divisions and then set fires throughout the town. J. B. urged his general, “Keep every thin[g] silent till that fatal night which will show to the world that slavery will no longer exist in Virginia.” The stilted letter reads like the ventriloquism of a white man assuming the role of an imagined slave rebel. Apparently the author sought to shock the magistrates into enforcing the restrictions on black movement and nocturnal meetings—which they did.53

  In May 1810 in Isle of Wight County, a magistrate, Richard W. Byrd, warned the governor of an impending “insurrection of the blacks.” The alarm began when an enslaved boy allegedly told a militia man, “You will all have to use your muskets enough before long, and if you knew what I know it would be well for you.” That cryptic statement sufficed to spook the local whites, who had the boy arrested, flogged, and interrogated. After twenty-five lashes, he confessed to having heard that some North Carolina slaves armed “with clubs, spikes, and axes” were preparing to “come over here to help the Virginia negroes.” Suddenly every unusual black statement heard by whites became pregnant with menace. One slave allegedly said “that there would be an Earthquake here on the same night; that he was entitled to his freedom, and he would be damned if he did not have it in a fortnight.” Another slave told his owner “that if she knew what he did it would make her heart bleed.” But the county court could convict only one slave of conspiracy, and the evidence against him was so flimsy that the governor opted to sell and transport, rather than to execute, the convict.54

  The Isle of Wight alarm spread up the James River to Richmond. On the night of June 9, 1810, a visitor, Elizabeth Kennon, found militiamen “parading all over the City, to preserve the inhabitants from the horrors . . . this eventful night will produce (for this is the night it was said the blacks intended to begin their struggle for liberty).” An astute observer, Kennon did not share the widespread alarm, “for I believe the blacks are, in this City, under more apprehension [of the] consequences which will ensue, than the whites are.” Recalling the bloody suppression of Gabriel’s revolt ten years before, the slaves understood that they paid a heavy price when whites panicked. Kennon aptly expected that “as they know so many men are under arms, they will keep close in their houses, and say to the white people . . . if you will let me alone, I will let you.” No revolt erupted.55

  On the night of December 26, 1811, the worst fear of Virginians seemed realized when a deadly fire consumed the Richmond Theater. The audience of 600 included dozens of fashionable men and women who had gathered to see a new play, Father, or Family Feuds. The flames spread so rapidly through the packed theater that people struggled to escape, trampling and suffocating the slow. Others died or suffered crippling injury by jumping from the windows on the upper floor. John Campbell recalled, “My ears were stun’d with cries & shrieks and screams! . . . I saw numbers that were carried away half burnt up.” Another witness reported seeing “the wretched half burned females . . . crawling on their hands & knees in all directions from the smoking ruins in a state of frenzy.” The seventy-two dead included the state’s governor, George William Smith. “Never, never, in the whole course of my Existence have I been so afflicted by any Event,” Dr. Philip Barraud assured St. George Tucker.56

  According to a witness, the Richmond whites initially believed “that the house was intentionally set on fire” as “the signal for insurrection, and that those who escaped the fury of the flames, might have to encounter an enemy more destructive than fire itself.” The deadly fire had erupted during the Christmas holiday, when masters most feared a slave revolt. Eventually, however, evidence revealed that a candle carelessly placed too close to the stage set had caused the blaze, but Virginians associated the tragedy with their image of a slave revolt: nocturnal flames and the indiscriminate death of women and children. So the theater fire compounded the unease in Virginia as Congress debated declaring war on the British Empire.57

  In most of the suspected plots, we merely hear the careless talk of hopeful slaves seizing upon wishful rumors of outsiders coming to liberate them. White folk, however, dreaded any such talk, lest it eventually embolden slaves to convert hope into action, rumor into rebellion. Far better, they thought, immediately to show their power to punish and thereby force the slaves back into quiet submission rather than to await better evidence. If the plots were flimsy, the fear was real and powerful in the minds of Virginians. During the panic of December 1808, Peggy Nicholas begged her husband to move their family westward: “I am as usual on these occasions terrified almost to death and really believe if I am oblig’d to stay here on Christmas day that I shall die with terror. . . . Gracious God, what is there in this country to make amends for all this terror?” But like most Virginians, Wilson Cary Nicholas was too indebted and entangled in slavery to move away from that terror.58

  Freedom

  In London in 1812, an American diplomat, Jonathan Russell, met with Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign minister. Russell denounced the impressment of white men as a crime far worse than the enslavement of Africans: “as the negro was purchased, already bereft of his liberty, . . . while the American citizen is torn without price, at once, from all the blessings of freedom.” Russell declared “astonishment, that while Great Britain discovered such zeal for the abolition of the traffic in the barbarous and unbelieving natives of Africa, . . . that she should so obstinately adhere to the practice of impressing American citizens, whose civilization, religion, and blood so obviously demanded a more favorable distinction.” Russell argued that a supposed racial superiority should spare white men from a practice that resembled the slavery best reserved for the “barbarous” Africans.59

  British imperialists and American Republicans offered competing stories of freedom, each shaped by a different formula for class and race. The British boasted of their global struggle against Napoléon’s despotic empire and the international slave trade. The Republicans countered that they defended American liberty against the encroaching might of a tyrannical British Empire led by a haughty king and arrogant aristocrats. The Republicans celebrated the equality of white men in their shared superiority over other races. British officials, however, defended their class hierarchy and doubted that common whites were innately superior to Indians and Africans.60

  Republicans denounced impressment as the enslavement of white Americans, which they considered extraordinarily cruel because no people more cherished or deserved freedom. Castigating Britain, an orator demanded, “Does she care about liberty[?] Is it for liberty’s sake, that thousands of men are torn from their homes, their friends, and every thing dear to them, and forced to linger out a miserable existence, in worse than barb[a]rian slavery?” Republicans denou
nced the British for blurring the proper racial line between servitude and freedom. An American mariner complained that British naval officers would “muster the crew, and examine the persons of the sailors as a planter examines a lot of negroes exposed for sale.” In Georgia on the eve of war, a British shore party pursued a white deserter into a store. The owner bellowed, “Why, I declare to god, these Britishers think to treat us like niggers!” Those provocative words rallied a mob that drove off the British party. Although nearly a fifth of American seamen were people of color (including three of the four sailors taken from USS Chesapeake by the British), one would never know it from the Republican rhetoric, which treated sailors as white.61

  Republicans regarded the whipping of impressed white Americans as the greatest of British racial crimes. A mariner complained that impressed sailors “were stripped, tied up, and most cruelly and disgracefully whipped like a negro slave. Can any thing be . . . more humiliating to the feelings of men born and brought up as we all are?” Leading the push for war, slave-state congressmen sought to liberate white men from a bondage, which they deemed fit only for blacks.62

  Republicans warned that, if the United States allowed the British to impress and whip white Americans, the nation would lapse into renewed dependence on the empire: a collective condition they also called “slavery.” In July 1812 in Charlotte County, Virginia, the citizens insisted that accepting British impressment would “be a surrender of National independence” and “immediately preparatory, to Slavery & despotism, not to be endured by free Men.” In August 1812, John Campbell, a Virginia legislator, asserted, “War has been declar’d to save the nation from slavery & disgrace & the sword of vengeance will now drink the blood of those who have been seeking our downfall.” He sought to rescue a republic for white men from a dependence he wished to reserve for blacks.63

  During the War of 1812, the Republicans waged a racial crusade against the British, damned for allying with scalping Indians and rebelling slaves. Republicans denounced the British alliance with Indians and use of black troops as cynical ploys to destroy the white man’s republic in America. The Richmond Enquirer shuddered, “They employ the Indians! They burn down our villages and houses! They train the infatuated blacks to arms!” Republicans insisted that the British inverted the natural racial hierarchy by elevating brutish Indians and blacks at the expense of white Americans and their free government.64

  The racialized pro-war rhetoric outraged African Americans who suffered far worse from the “tyrants of America” than did the sailors impressed by the British. A former slave noted that although “Britain has got three thousand American citizens in slavery on board her ships of war: Has not America, likewise, got in slavery 2,000,000 of the former citizens of Africa?” Masters kept them “almost naked, starved and abused in a most inhuman and brutal manner in her fields & kitchens.” Britain’s sailors received pay and did not suffer from the sale of their loved ones. Reverend Lemuel Haynes, a free black in Vermont, also found hypocrisy when President Madison spoke “feeling[ly] on the subject of the impressment of our seamen. . . . Yet, in his own state, Virginia, there were, in the year 1800, no less than three hundred forty-three thousand, seven hundred ninety-six human beings holden in bondage for life!”65

  British officials claimed to defend “rational liberty” against the fraudulent version practiced in the American republic. Elite Britons insisted that their mixed constitution provided as much freedom as any people could sustain. By contrast, the American republic struck them as a school for demagogues and anarchy. Britain’s rulers sought to fend off reformers who called for a broader electorate and equal political rights. Because British reformers cited the United States as a model, the ruling traditionalists had to discredit the republic.66

  Where Republicans saw Britain as an imperial bully, British leaders insisted that they defended the world’s freedom against Napoléon’s brutal and expansionist dictatorship. Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren assured his sailors that they fought for “the Noblest Cause that ever called for the Efforts of Men, the Preservation of the Liberties, Independence, Religion, and Laws of all the remaining Nations of the World, against the Tyranny and Despotism of France.” By keeping the French despot far from North America, Britons argued that they deserved American gratitude rather than protests and war. One Royal Naval officer castigated the Americans for “declaring war against us at a most critical period, when we were not only making a desperate struggle for our existence as a nation, but also to liberate other powers from the iron grasp of Bonaparte; and fighting in the cause of liberty itself.” The British considered the American declaration of war as a vile betrayal of global freedom by vicious ingrates.67

  The British also cast the American Republicans as canting hypocrites who nattered on about liberty while keeping slaves. Captain William Stanhope Lovell of the Royal Navy noted, “Republicans are certainly the most cruel masters, and the greatest tyrants in the world towards their fellow men. They are urged by the most selfish motives to reduce every one to a level with, or even below themselves, and to grind and degrade those under them to the lowest stage of human wretchedness. But American liberty consists in oppressing the blacks beyond what other nations do, enacting laws to prevent their receiving instruction and working them worse than a donkey.” During the war, a British officer debated a captured Republican, who poured “forth an uninterrupted stream of eloquence in the cause of liberty and equality” until the Briton silenced him by “casting the stubborn fact of domestic slavery in his teeth.” American slavery enabled the British to mock republicanism as tyranny perfected rather than as liberty protected.68

  Of course, the naval officers were inconsistent in their antislavery principles, for some owned West Indian plantations and all held some racial prejudice. Even as they empathized with American slaves, British officers referred to black men as “Sambos” and called their children “pickaninnies.” These officers denounced slavery to discredit the Americans rather than to promote racial equality. But in self-defense, the officers could reply that slavery was less hypocritical when conducted by men who did not pretend to be republicans.69

  Indeed, the British regarded the Americans as doubly damned for owning blacks while preaching the equality of white men. To Britons, it seemed odd that race mattered so much, and class so little, in America. After hearing Jefferson describe blacks as racially inferior, a British diplomat countered that “the black race is, however, as susceptible of refined civilization, and as capable to the full of profiting by the advantages of education as any other of any shade whatever.” Because class mattered as much as race for British leaders, they could consider blacks as potentially the equals of common whites in a society properly ruled by an aristocracy of superior birth, manners, education, and wealth.70

  Rejecting that British critique, American slaveholders insisted that they had inherited a great evil without any responsibility for it. They blamed the British for the mythic original sin of forcing slaves upon reluctant colonists. Therefore, Republicans despised the British criticism as a ploy to instigate slave revolts and thereby destroy the world’s only true republic.71

  Noting the West Indian Regiments, Virginians feared that a British invasion would bring black men in red coats to their shores to provoke a massive slave revolt. In June 1812, William Tatham warned the governor that when the British invaded Virginia with black troops, “I need not shew you that a powerful deluded multitude of domestic Enemies will join them.” Norfolk’s militia commander, Robert Barraud Taylor, warned the governor that the slaves took a suspiciously “deep interest in a rupture between England and this Country.” Richmond’s mayor, Robert Greenhow, worried,

  Unfortunately, we have two enemies to contend with—the one open & declared; the other nurtured in our very Bosoms! Sly, secret & insidious: in our families, at our Elbows, listening with eager attention; and sedulously marking all that is going forward. They know where our Strength lies; and where & in what point we may be most easi
ly assailed. The Standard of Revolt is unfurled! And whenever practicable, those deluded Creatures, regardless of Consequences, have flocked to it and enrolled into military Bands. We perhaps may have a Sanguinary set of desperadoes to contend with.

  In June, the Northampton County militia commander informed the governor, “The inhabitants have lately had their fears much increased by some proofs of an intended insurrection in this place. . . . Our jail is now full of those suspected to have been the leaders & the presumption of their guilt is every day strengthened by additional evidence. Many have been heard to declare that they would be ready to destroy the whites in the event of war.”72 The specter of foreign invasion renewed Virginians’ dread of their “internal enemy.”

  Some British naval officers did regard American slaves as potential allies. In 1807, Admiral Berkeley had assured his superiors that in a war, they could rely on a revolt by the “Slaves and people of Color in Virginia, etc., whose nightly shouts at this moment are ‘God bless King George.’” Looking to the king for liberation, they “only wait the Signal to embody and hoist the British flag.” Berkeley predicted that American troops would be hard pressed “to prevent the explosion of this Volcano in their own bowels.”73

  In London, however, the imperial rulers proved far more cautious. Loath to play with the fire of a slave revolt, they hoped that hints alone would intimidate the southerners, hampering their war effort. In 1812 the imperial rulers did not anticipate that hundreds of runaways would flee to their warships. Nor did they know that the mass flight would demand a British escalation of the war meant to liberate thousands of slaves.

  William Tatham, Sectional Sketch of a Tellegraph on the Lever Principles, 1812. A military advisor and engineer, William Tatham proposed this optical telegraph, based on a French prototype, to convey alarms from the coast to the state government in Richmond. Note that the sixth of the “National Colours” was a symbol for the “Negroe,” indicating their potential threat to Virginia. (From the James Barbour Executive Papers, courtesy of the Library of Virginia)