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

by Taylor, Alan

  Disdaining blacks as well as slavery, the colonizationists wanted to whiten America. Madison sought to remove “from our country the calamity of its black population.” Mercer deemed slavery “the blackest of all blots, and foulest of all deformities” on American society, but he regarded free blacks as even worse: a motley set of prostitutes and thieves. An opponent, William Branch Giles, charged the colonizationists with exaggerating the immorality of free blacks for popular effect: “It would be unjust to put down the whole colored population as dissolute and burdensome, but the free people of colour are despised, and there is a rage about getting rid of them. . . . This being the most seductive inducement, it is accordingly the most used by the friends of the project, and to produce its greatest effect, it is greatly exaggerated.” Giles described most of the free blacks as “honest labourers, whose labour adds to the wealth of the State.”27

  Protective of private property, the colonizationists insisted that slaves could be freed only with the consent of their masters; that whites could not coexist peacefully with any large number of free blacks; and that white prejudice was so deep and immutable that free blacks would never escape from poverty and degradation within America. Therefore, the colonizationists reasoned, everyone would benefit from shipping free blacks away to Africa—perhaps to be followed later by the more numerous slaves. Claiming that the republic needed a purely white population, the colonizationists refused to consider the alternative of a multiracial republic of equal citizens. John Randolph declared that the races could never “occupy the same territory, under one government, but in the relation of master and vassal.”28

  The colonizationists spoke and wrote softly about slavery lest they alarm the southern majority averse to any public discussion. One member conceded “that Slavery must be touched with great delicacy and that any attempt to unsettle the state of the Slaves would be considered as kindling a fire of destruction.” Although dread of the internal enemy motivated the colonizationists, that dread also starkly limited what they could say or do, for slaveholders in the Deep South distrusted colonization as a covert abolitionist plot against their property.29

  Most members vaguely hoped that an African colony would encourage more masters to manumit and deport their slaves, but many southern members, including Randolph, supported colonization only as a means to protect slavery by deporting free blacks. And many members continued to own, buy, and sell slaves. In 1821 the president of the national society, Bushrod Washington, sold fifty-four slaves to the Deep South, for he needed the money to pay his debts more than his conscience needed consistency. This younger Washington showed far less principle than his late, great uncle, who had emancipated all of his slaves while providing funds to care for the elderly and train the young. But George Washington had lived and died before the great decay of Virginia’s economy, a downturn that accelerated after 1816, compounding the debts and sapping the scruples of his heirs.30

  The more daring colonizationists sought a government program, either federal or by the states, to emancipate the slaves gradually by compensating their masters and deporting the freed. The reverence for private property ruled out any immediate and uncompensated abolition of slavery. But that solicitude for property also meant that few Americans would tax themselves to raise the massive compensation required to free and transport over a million slaves. And most slaveowners preferred to retain the labor of their slaves and profit from selling their offspring rather than accept any compensation.

  Given the prohibitive cost of deporting the most expensive slaves—those in the prime of their working lives—the gradual emancipation proposals focused on buying infants, particularly girls, as the most cost-effective way to shrink the slave population. The chief proponent of this scheme, Thomas Jefferson, dismissed the suffering that losing children would cause to black families as inconsequential compared to the good of the republic and the superior “happiness” of their children once free in Africa.31

  In fact, Virginia could never afford to purchase and export enough slave children to make a difference. In early 1820, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Jefferson’s son-in-law and the governor of Virginia, urged the legislature to appropriate a third of the state’s revenues to buy and deport slave children, but the legislators balked at spending the taxpayers’ money to get rid of their valuable property. While far too expensive for the legislators, the governor’s program would have bought a mere tenth of the annual increase in the state’s slave population. Even if dedicated entirely to buying and deporting slaves, Virginia’s annual budget could not stop the increase in slave numbers—much less fulfill the fantasy of eliminating black people in America while respecting the property of whites.32

  In addition, very few free blacks wanted to go to Africa: a distant continent that they had never known, for most were third- or fourth-generation Americans. Seeking equal rights in America, they preferred to stay and tough it out rather than take a dangerous leap into the unknown of West Africa. Indeed, the new American colony there, Liberia, was a malarial deathtrap and war zone for the 12,000 who did emigrate. Madison conceded that his slaves had a “horror of going to Liberia.”33

  Mercer and Monroe overplayed their hand by obtaining financial and naval assistance from the federal government to subsidize and protect the shipment of blacks to Liberia. The federal involvement horrified southern conservatives, such as Randolph, who dreaded any intervention by the United States in slavery as setting a precedent dangerous to the South. They feared any expansion of federal power as a slippery slope that could lead to enforced emancipation by the Union. Consequently, the conservatives bolted from the colonization movement during the mid-1820s. Randolph explained, “I am against all colonization, etc. societies—[I] am for the good old plan of making the negroes work, and thereby enabling the master to feed and clothe them well, and take care of them in sickness and old age.” The defection by the states’ rights men reduced the colonization movement to a hollow, pointless shell even before the northern abolitionists renounced it as a fraud during the next decade. There could be, and would be, no consensus solution to the problem of slavery in America.34

  Diffusion

  In 1819 Virginia remained the preeminent slave state, home to nearly a third of the nation’s one and a half million slaves. Virginia’s leaders believed they had too many slaves for their own safety and more than their economy demanded. Rather than free slaves and deport them, Virginians preferred to sell them or to move away with them. By “diffusing” slaves to the new states of the Deep South and the West, Virginians could reduce the annual increase in the number enslaved more effectively and profitably than could any program of overseas colonization. Diffusion cost taxpayers nothing and precluded any role for the federal government. And the proponents could still claim that they opposed slavery in principle because diffusion allegedly benefited the enslaved. They would leave a crowded and depleted country for the western land of milk and honey, where they could be better fed, clothed, and housed by more prosperous owners. In the West, slaves supposedly could live with fewer constraints because the whites there felt more secure in their great majority. Some Virginians even argued that diffusion might prepare white people to embrace emancipation once slaves became small minorities spread evenly across a vast land. “An uncontrouled dispersion of the slaves now in the U.S. was not only best for the nation, but most favorable for the slaves,” concluded Madison.35

  After the War of 1812, southern settlers and their slaves surged westward into the vast and fertile watershed of the Mississippi River. By 1820, the enslaved population west of the Appalachians had doubled during the preceding decade. In 1818, Randolph lamented: “Alibama is at present the loadstone of attraction: Cotton, Money, Whiskey & as the means of obtaining all those blessings, Slaves—the road is thronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcase-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market.” A romantic traditionalist, Randolph rued the outmigration of slaves as a failure of paternalism in Virginia. He wanted V
irginians and their slaves to stay put, but Randolph fiercely opposed any government interference with the rights of masters to buy, sell, or move their human property at will. If the alternative was restriction by federal power, Randolph preferred diffusion.36

  The Virginians in Congress got a rude shock on February 13, 1819, when James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed amendments to a bill to admit Missouri as a new state in the Union. Tallmadge wanted to require Missouri to adopt a constitution barring further slave imports and committed gradually to emancipate slaves born after 1819. Most northern congressmen, Republicans as well as Federalists, supported Tallmadge’s amendments, for they believed that slavery contradicted and, therefore, threatened free government. Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania insisted that slave states were “marred as if the finger of Lucifer had been drawn over them.” By restricting the expansion of slavery, the “retrictionists” sought to preserve the West for free white settlers, who alone could sustain a true republic (so they argued).37

  Restrictionists denounced diffusion as a fraud. John Sergeant of Pennsylvania demanded, “Has any one seriously considered the scope of this doctrine? It leads directly to the establishment of slavery throughout the world.” Restrictionists argued that diffusion thrust slaves into the greater hardships of the frontier and ruptured their families. And far from promoting antislavery sentiment, expansion swelled the western demand for slaves, inflating their value in the Chesapeake states. An abolitionist, Robert J. Evans, asked, “Should this odious privilege of enslaving fellow creatures be extended to the immense region beyond the Mississippi, will there not be a never failing market open for the commerce in human flesh[?]” If so, Virginia would “furnish to this great mart of men, a never ending supply.” If diffused, slaveholding would become predominant and perpetual in the nation.38

  In response, southern congressmen denied that Congress had any legitimate authority to impose restrictions on a new state. Southerners claimed to defend the Federal Constitution and the rights of the states, rather than slavery, by opposing restriction. They denounced restriction as a cunning ploy meant to reduce the South to poverty and dependence within a nation dominated by the North. Rather than any sympathy for slaves or solicitude for free government, the restrictionists manifested, in the words of Spencer Roane (Virginia’s leading judge), “their lust of dominion and power.” Roane insisted that the controversy was “forced upon us by the cruelty and injustice of northern intriguers.” Opposing any restriction on slavery’s expansion, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker declared, “Let this precedent be once established and the power of the southern states is gone forever.” Southern congressmen feared the political implications of the more rapid population growth in the North, which already had 20 percent more free people than the South.39

  The South could ill afford to become a minority region defined by slavery and confined within a geographic line. Restriction would dishonor the South as insufficiently republican because tainted by slavery. National power would accrue to the region that gave shape to western expansion. “It is indeed not a question of freedom or slavery, but a question [of] who shall inherit our rich possession to the west,” Isaac A. Coles explained. The North could claim the nation’s future by preempting that vast and promising region for its own people and institutions. Dabney Carr warned that once empowered by the West, the national North could “draw a cordon round us & when they had cooped us up on every side . . . then should we feel the full weight of their tender mercies!” If restricted, the South would become a claustrophobic corner of growing poverty and weakness in the Union.40

  Virginia already was reeling from a great economic decline. In 1819 the entire nation endured its first massive economic depression, and no state suffered more than Virginia. The depression derived from a sharp downturn in foreign demand for America’s agricultural exports, especially Virginia’s tobacco, flour, and wheat. From 1818 to 1821, Virginia’s exports fell by 56 percent, compared to 42 percent for the nation as a whole. As foreign demand dried up, the price paid for farm produce in Richmond declined by 48 percent between November 1818 and February 1821. Virginians struggled to pay their debts when they could no longer sell their crops for a decent price. Bankruptcies and land sales surged. From Richmond in early 1820, Francis Walker Gilmer mourned, “Things here grow worse & worse—the merchants all failed—the town ruined—the banks broke—the Treasury empty—commerce gone, confidence gone, character gone.”41

  The Missouri crisis erupted when the Virginians already feared for their diminished place in the nation. Restriction threatened to limit the western market for slaves and the West as a haven for slaveholders just when Virginians most needed that outlet. Governor William Branch Giles wanted the West to remain “an almost boundless reservoir for the reception of slaves.”42

  Nothing terrified Virginians more than the prospect of being trapped within a state with a growing black majority in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Spencer Roane bluntly explained that Virginians were “averse to be dammed up in a land of Slaves, by the Eastern people.” Dreading a massive slave revolt, Roane declared that northerners regarded restriction as “an abstract question; but it is, as to us, a question of life or death.” Similarly, John Tyler warned that restriction would increase the “dark cloud” of slavery “over a particular portion of this land until its horrors shall burst.” Only with a vibrant interstate slave trade, and an untrammeled western expansion by slaveholders, could Virginians vent enough slaves annually to release the demographic pressure that, to their minds, threatened an inevitable race war. It was telling that Thomas Jefferson bitterly opposed restriction and declared that the Missouri crisis, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror”—for Virginians associated a fire bell’s alarm with a slave revolt.43

  During the Missouri debates, congressmen from all regions threatened disunion and civil war, but the southerners showed greater unity and passion, for they felt more imperiled in their property and security. Randolph declared, “God has given us the Missouri and the devil shall not take it from us.” In February 1820, alarmed moderates saved the union by crafting a compromise. Maine (previously part of Massachusetts) became a free state, while Missouri joined without any restriction on slavery, thereby maintaining the balance in the Union, and so in the Senate, of eleven free states and eleven slave states. Congress also imposed a line west of Missouri to the Pacific along the 36°30' latitude (an extension of Missouri’s southern boundary), barring slavery to the north, where most of the remaining federal territory lay. While the South got Missouri, it faced a future of many more free states entering the Union.44

  President Monroe and Senator James Barbour (the former governor) supported the compromise as essential to save the Union, but most of Virginia’s congressmen and state leaders angrily opposed any western restriction on slavery. The state legislators voted 142 to 38 to instruct their U.S. senators to reject the compromise. Nineteen of the twenty-two Virginia congressmen voted against the 36º30' restriction line; no state delegation provided more negative votes or more fiercely opposed any compromise.45

  Despite their disgust with the Missouri Compromise, most Virginians were not prepared for secession and civil war as the alternative. In the Richmond Enquirer, Thomas Ritchie grumbled, “We submit. . . . We bow to it, though on no occasion with so poor a grace and so bitter a spirit. The South and the West are wronged, they must bear up patiently.” After 1820, Virginians adopted a selective and conditional nationalism. They supported the nation when it served their interests, as it usually did, for the South enjoyed a political clout disproportionate to the region’s declining share of the nation’s population. That power derived from the greater cohesion of the southern congressmen when compared to their northern counterparts. The defense of slavery and its expansion provided a far tighter bond for southern leaders than antislavery did for the more numerous northern congressmen. Southerners cherished a robust national government that enforced the fugitive slave law in no
rthern states, compensated masters for wartime runaways, and pushed expansion southwestward into Texas. Southerners cheered when the nation acted on the racial dread of an alliance by the British with Indians and blacks. But southern leaders scuttled back to a states’ rights sectionalism at the slightest hint that northerners might deploy federal power to tax slaves or limit slavery. By loudly threatening secession, the southerners could alarm enough northerners, solicitous of the Union, into retreating in Congress.46

  Fear

  While fending off northerners, Virginia’s leaders also faced unrest within the state. Based in the Piedmont and Tidewater, Virginia’s elite confronted discontent from the people living west of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley and Allegheny Mountains. The westerners felt trapped in underdevelopment because neglected by a state government dominated by easterners who enjoyed disproportionate power under Virginia’s antiquated state constitution. The old constitution also imposed a property requirement that disenfranchised the poorer half of the state’s white men.47

  The westerners demanded a convention to draft a new state constitution. In October 1829 in Richmond, they got such a convention, but most of the delegates came from the Piedmont and Tidewater, so it produced only modest changes in the new constitution. The delegates slightly widened the electorate, reducing the disenfranchised to a third of white men. Legislative representation, however, remained skewed in favor of the eastern elites, who insisted that they could not trust the westerners to protect slavery. Appalled by the prospect of majority rule, John Randolph declared, “I would not live under King Numbers.” Thanks to the power of property in Virginia, he did not have to.48