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

by Taylor, Alan

  As Carter’s widow, Lelia felt overwhelmed by her responsibility for Corotoman, a 7,000-acre estate with about 200 slaves, and Tucker disliked running any plantation: “I never did or could pretend to be any Judge of the proper mode of managing a Virginia estate.” To a son-in-law, Tucker explained, “the complaints of the negroes, waste of every kind, idleness and neglect were beyond calculation. All these things Mrs. Tucker, who suffered a perfect purgatory there, will tell you.” Staying away in distant Williamsburg, Tucker hired a Lancaster County man, George Gresham, to supervise the estate. Given a good harvest, the plantation produced a small profit, but most years yielded disappointing crops and financial losses.4

  Tucker seemed satisfied, so long as he received annual shipments of apples, hams, and other provisions for his household. He also drew on Corotoman for an occasional horse or house slave, brought to work for him in Williamsburg. In 1805 Gresham sent to Tucker a promising young slave named James to become a cook. A realist, Gresham considered James “the best of anay one that is on the Estate tho he can be as ill behaved as anay one on the Estate.” Gresham recognized that the most talented slaves also tended to be the most defiant. If a house slave disappointed, Tucker exiled the culprit to work as a field hand at Corotoman. Tucker wanted the plantation to remain out of sight and out of mind while providing for his material needs.5

  Joseph C. Cabell initiated a revolution at Corotoman after he married into the Tucker household. The son of a prestigious family in Amherst County within the Piedmont, Cabell was a sickly adolescent but precocious student at the College of William and Mary from 1796 to 1798. Two years later, he returned to study law with Judge Tucker, who admired Cabell’s talents and prospects. To improve his precarious health and broaden his horizons, Cabell toured Europe between 1803 and 1806, visiting England, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. In May 1806 he returned to the United States, determined to marry an heiress and launch his career as a Virginia planter and politician. Twenty-seven years old, he had no time to waste. His brother and mentor William H. Cabell exhorted, “It may not be amiss now to tell you that you will stand in need of some addition to your fortune. . . . Some of your old fellow students have hinted [at] a short course; as they suppose you have become too old ever to marry for love & affection, they have recommended your looking out for some rich old maid: the richer & older the better.” Joseph had a more appealing target in mind: a rich young maid he had met as a student in Williamsburg, Polly Carter Tucker.6

  His attentions almost came too late, for Cabell reached Williamsburg in October 1806 to find that a classmate and friend named Brent was calling at the Tucker household as a rival suitor. But to Cabell’s delight, Brent returned to their shared room in a tavern to announce his rebuff by Polly. “My mind at this observation must have resembled the face of a certain ventriloquist in Paris, who I saw smile on one side, and weep on the other,” Cabell reported. Both young men “slept together that night, after taking an oister supper together and parted the next morning in perfect friendship,” as Brent took the stage to Richmond. Cabell then walked up the street to call on Polly at the Tucker house: “In a few minutes all agitation had disappeared & we were all in high talk.”7

  Within three days, Cabell had won Polly’s affection and her mother’s consent, but the judge proved a harder nut to crack. Although he liked Cabell, Tucker doted on Polly and did not like losing her to marriage so soon, for she was not yet twenty-one. The judge also felt protective of her Carter inheritance and did not trust any young gentleman with full control over that property. Tucker promised to approve the match only if Cabell entered into a premarital contract to preserve her Corotoman inheritance intact, negating his power as a husband to sell its slaves or lands. Although Tucker had publicly championed the abolition of entails in Virginia, he privately upheld a version for wealthy young women, for he had seen too many ruined by reckless husbands who squandered estates on drink, gaming, and foolish investments. Regretting the “inequality and injustice of our laws in respect to females,” he observed, “A woman in possession of a fortune in Lands, Slaves, & money Marries. The instant she does so, her slaves and money are Exclusively her Husband’s. If indebted, they go to the payment of his debts, without reserve. If he dies indebted the whole may be taken to pay his debts.” Tucker had imposed such a premarital contract in 1802, when John Coalter had married the judge’s daughter, Anne Frances, so he expected Cabell to follow suit. By acting as his stepdaughter’s protector even after marriage, Tucker resisted the American Revolution’s promotion of greater liquidity for capital and its weakening of patriarchal power over children. By seeking his daughter’s security, Tucker indirectly protected the slave community at Corotoman by, in effect, entailing them to Polly’s children.8

  Cabell, however, expected complete control over his wife’s inheritance. A fiery gentleman of the postrevolutionary generation, he bristled at Tucker’s attempt to impose a patriarchal restriction. Cabell exhorted Tucker to imagine “the feelings with which a young man of spirit and honor ought to be inspired by such a proposition.” Both Tucker and Polly needed to invest an “unbounded confidence” in Cabell’s management of her property, for he would never accept “the appearance of a humiliated dependent.” Instead, he demanded a free hand to “change the nature of her property and wield it to the advantage of our family accordingly as times, circumstances, and views in life might require.” Writing to his older brother, Joseph posed as a young republican resisting an old patriarch who had “made a little aristocratic parade” of his antiquated power. Cabell boasted that if Tucker continued to “resist, it will be in vain; for the girl is mine, by all the thirty thousand gods of the Romans. No two lovers ever felt as we do, ever since the days of Pyramus & Thisbe”—so Cabell wrote a week after initiating the courtship.9

  After the revolution, genteel courtship and marriage assumed a more romantic gloss, which rendered couples more equal in the exchange of emotions. But the sentimentality gave the husband greater power over the household property at the expense of the wife’s protection by her lineage. Cabell defined marriage as “not only a union of affections, but as complete a union of fortunes as the parties can possible effect,” but he made clear that the husband alone would run the estate: “Who could manage the interest of my wife better than myself?” The new ostensibly romantic mode of marriage promoted male control of his wife’s property in a free market.10

  William H. Cabell demanded that his brother hold firm, lest Joseph appear weak in the masculine realm of Virginia politics:

  I am opposed to marriage settlements on principle . . . they are degrading in the estimation of our fellow citizens—and whatever my attachment to any woman might be, I would renounce her, I would renounce even an Angel, if I could only procure her by submitting to terms which are contrary to principle & degrading & humiliating in [the] estimation of myself and others. . . . I had rather you should be deprived of the use of both hands than that you should put either of them to an instrument that would seal your shame.

  A Virginia gentleman had to live by a code of masculine honor policed by his peers. William would share the shame if Joseph submitted to an old-style patriarch entangling a wife’s estate.11

  In early November, Cabell followed Tucker to Richmond, where the judge attended to his duties. They continued their high-stakes game, exchanging polite but firm notes reiterating their property positions at the risk of the marriage. In the end, Tucker accepted a sop: a mere letter from Cabell declaring that should he die before Polly, she could recover her inherited property “as well Slaves & personal Estate, as real, without the forms & Ceremonies of Law . . . in the same manner as if no marriage had taken place between them.” This formula placed no limit on Cabell’s ability to sell her property during his lifetime, so if his investments went bad, there would be no estate for her to recover.12

  On January 1, 1807, in Williamsburg, Joseph and Polly married, and for nearly two years they lived in the rambling Tucker house to the delight
of her parents, but Cabell longed to establish his own household. “My wife and I are rich, and we do not mean to live as if we were poor,” he boasted. Eager to launch a political career, Cabell decided to move to Nelson County, where he had prospering brothers, and the Cabell name carried great clout. During 1808–1809, Cabell built a new home, “Edgewood,” on a plantation near the village of Warminster. In 1809 he won election to represent Nelson in the House of Delegates and, a year later, secured a promotion to the State Senate, where he also represented four other Piedmont counties. During the winter sessions of the legislature, Cabell resided at a Richmond inn, while his wife stayed with her parents in Williamsburg. In the summer, the Tuckers returned the favor, escaping the Tidewater heat to sojourn in the cooler hills at Edgewood. Cabell shrewdly cultivated a close relationship with his mother-in-law, Lelia, who could help him manage the more difficult Tucker.13

  Management

  Cabell toyed with moving to Corotoman, for absentee owners rarely reaped profits, but the plantation lay isolated on a point far from any genteel town. A friend reported, “This place is almost as much out of the world as it would be on the western side of the Allegany [mountains].” Cabell noted, “The theater for farming is the best I ever saw, but the place is insulated, and the society bad.” He concluded, “I fear my little wife has been too much accustomed to town to feel very contented on a plantation with negroes.” The location would also imperil their health with summer fevers. William warned his brother, “I am certain you & Polly would both die in less than six months at Corotoman—suppose you or she should be sick, cut off from all medical aid, & in fact from all the world.”14

  Corotoman also was not yet fully Cabell’s to manage because of Lelia’s lifetime dower right to a third of the plantation and the co-ownership of Polly’s younger brother, Charles. By dividing the estate, Cabell hoped to complete his ownership to at least a third, but that division had to wait until Charles turned twenty-one years and returned from his studies in Europe. While impatiently awaiting Charles Carter’s return, Cabell had to cooperate with Tucker, who controlled both Lelia’s and Charles’s shares in the plantation. And Tucker’s diffidence kept Corotoman in a limbo that generated more uncertainty than profit. In September 1807, when pressed by Cabell for financial information, Tucker revealed how little he knew: “It is utterly impossible for me at present to give you a List of my Receipts for the Corotoman Estate, or even a tolerable estimate of them. . . . My wife, until her marriage with me received almost nothing. . . . For several years, perhaps 8 or 10, I never received any part of the Tobacco made, or received for rents.” To render Corotoman profitable, Cabell wanted to take charge and implement the agricultural reforms of Colonel John Taylor.15

  By rationalizing operations at Corotoman, Cabell meant to maximize the profits from labor and land. In 1807 he began by ousting the seventeen white tenant farmers on part of the estate. Deeming a third of the 206 slaves redundant, Cabell wanted to hire out, remove, or sell the surplus elsewhere. This reduction would then compel more work out of those who remained: “The removal of the superfluous hands is a measure of great importance; for indolence, loss of labor & waste must accompany such a crowd of idlers.” No sentimentalist, Cabell treated slaves as investments, so he shifted and sold them to increase his profits, slighting their family relations as of little concern. When the estate manager, George Gresham, balked at the proposed changes as disruptive, Cabell wanted to fire him.16

  Tucker worried that Cabell’s ambitious plans would aggravate the tenants and slaves and drive away a good manager. Dreading any agitation, Tucker preferred to cultivate a family cocoon of serenity withdrawn from the world of commerce and politics. Tucker expected more trouble under a new steward, for the estate would be “not so well managed, nor the negroes so well taken care of and happy.” So Tucker asked Cabell, “Would it not be better to put up with some Errors rather than part with such a man[?]”17

  Tucker’s waffling irritated Cabell, who confided to a friend, “I have met with substantial opposition in the form of difficulties, inconveniencies, &c., &c., from the same person who came athwart me on a former occasion. . . . He refusing to yield his hold on the soil, at the same time that he never has & never will visit [Corotoman] and personally attend to the management of the property.” With eloquent self-pity, Cabell added, “We parted in Richmond with all the exterior of good humor & friendship, but I fear this affair will be the cause of alienation in the end. . . . Was ever [there a] poor devil, doomed in secret & silence, like me, to contend against unnecessary and capricious difficulties[?]” In January 1808, however, Tucker backed down, endorsing Cabell’s efforts to transform Corotoman.18

  Bad luck and summer droughts had undercut Gresham. After a poor crop in 1806 the next year proved even worse. On July 22, 1807, a prolonged drought suddenly gave way to a succession of thunderstorms through August that, in Tucker’s words, “drown’d nearly the whole Crop of Tobacco & all the Corn that was in the lower parts of the fields.” In early September a driving rain and wind tore the remaining “Corn all to pieces.” The dank conditions spread disease among the slaves, so Gresham lightened his demands for their labor, to Cabell’s disgust. That year Corotoman yielded only 7,000 pounds of tobacco, less than a third of the anticipated crop. Unforgiving, Cabell blasted Gresham as a selfish obstacle to needed reforms: “That the Corotoman estate should bring itself in debt for nearly two years in succession is irreconcilable with anything like tolerable management.” Instead of the weather, Cabell blamed Gresham as a “scoundrel” and his subordinate overseers as “plunderers” who had embezzled their way to prosperity at the owners’ expense.19

  In January 1808, Cabell fired Gresham and promptly removed twenty-three slaves, which he claimed as his wife’s share, deploying them in Nelson County on his own plantation and those of his brothers. Their removal disrupted a previously stable slave community, for he conceded that they consisted “of families taken indiscriminately from many others.” He later recognized, “The insular situation of the Corrottoman estate produced an uncommon attachment among the negroes belonging to them.” The removed slaves also suffered severely from exposure during their long journey in the dead of winter. Their doctor reported, “They were bought up by water in extreme cold & snowy weather & in the course of the Winter I believe every grown one & several of the smaller ones had the Pleuresy.” At Corotoman, Cabell divided the remaining slaves, compelling half to create a separate quarter in the back lands of the estate: a division that further disrupted family ties.20

  As the new manager Cabell hired George Robertson, who came recommended by Colonel Taylor as an improver who would get the most out of slaves, but his arrival and the removal of the “surplus” slaves, provoked, in Tucker’s words, “a rebellious spirit.” Writing to Tucker, Robertson reported that the remaining slaves complained that Cabell had left too few “hands on the plantation to work it and the work would be so hard on them they would not be able to do it and they would not stand it. They would go to you and complain.” Cabell hastened to Corotoman “to prevent the negros from disobeying the manager. They refuse to be ruled by him & wish to get the upper hand.”21

  After apparently restoring order, Cabell left Corotoman on February 1, but the next day, Robertson reported to Tucker that the slaves refused to submit to “correction,” a euphemism for whipping:

  They are determined not to be corrected in any other way but by being overpowerd and when this is the case Tis nothing to be done with them until they are brought to order. Mr. Cabell left Corotoman yesterday and had not been gone more than three hours before one of the men cald tom night went of[f] without being tuched and says he will not be corrected by me. . . . I have been many years in this lin[e] of business but never was so treated by negros before and I do not think they ever [will] be brought to a true sense of their duty until they are severely corrected.

  Rallying to the tough new regime, Tucker said of Tom Night, “We must make an example of him, by sendi
ng him off the plantation as soon as it can be done with convenience.” By sending, Tucker meant selling, the usual means to get rid of a troublesome slave, particularly one named Tom Night, perhaps for nocturnal adventures of the sort that so troubled masters and so thrilled fellow slaves.22

  Ten days later, Tucker reported information apparently derived from a runaway who had fled to Williamsburg to seek redress. One of Robertson’s young and brutal overseers had beaten (and perhaps killed) a young woman as a punishment for lingering too long while visiting her child on another estate: “To strip a poor woman for overstaying her time with her Child a few minutes was a piece of barbarianism perfectly of a Tissue with his subsequent Conduct to her. The story is even worse than I thought it [at first]. I verily believe overseers [are] the greatest Brutes in the Creation.” Tucker likened the beating at Corotoman to a recent murder near Williamsburg of an overseer by infuriated slaves: “Lightfoot, who had been murdering the negroes under his orders was himself murdered last week. So much for there being no person to prosecute him for killing the negroes. And if this young Brute at Corrotoman is not check’d I shall not wonder if he meets with the same fate. I had almost said that I should not lament it, in such abhorrence do I hold a Conduct of the Kind.” But Tucker lacked the backbone to overrule Cabell and overturn the Robertson regime, for he wanted an income from Corotoman without taking responsibility for its management. He assured Cabell, “As to every thing that relates to Robertson, & the arrangements to be made with him, &c., I leave it wholly to yourself. I am no judge of any thing relative to overseers, or plantations & shall be content with whatever you think best.”23