by Taylor, Alan
A recent insurrection alarm had hardened the convictions of the eastern conservatives during the run-up to the convention. In mid-July 1829, panic had rippled through the Tidewater counties, filling the jails with slaves suspected of plotting a bloody rebellion. Once again, the alarm began with the overheard talk of blacks, who had responded to what they heard from whites. During that summer the white folk buzzed with speculation about the fate of slavery under the new state constitution anticipated from the convention scheduled to meet in the fall. In turn, hopeful slaves spoke of gaining freedom from the new order. Then alarmed whites interpreted that wishful thinking as, instead, a plot to seize freedom by bloodshed.49
The scare began in Mathews County, a Tidewater county that had suffered from British raids during the War of 1812. On July 18, 1829, Christopher Tompkins, who figured so prominently in the war, reported to Governor Giles, “About ten days ago information was communicated confidentially by a negro to a widow woman that it was expected generally among the slaves that they were to be free in a few weeks.” Two white apprentices overheard and reported similar chatter by slaves gathered at a blacksmith’s shop. Arrests and interrogations revealed “the general belief among the blacks . . . that the late convention election had exclusively for its object the liberation of the blacks & that the question had been decided by the result of the convention election & that it had been kept secret from them & that their free papers had been withheld improperly but were to be delivered at August court.” The slaves had updated the old myth of emancipation by a liberator king who had been frustrated by selfish masters. In the new version, “King Numbers”—the Virginia voters—had promised freedom. In fact, this American monarch had less substance as a liberator than had the old British king.50
The alarm in Mathews County became contagious, echoing through anxious letters carried across the Tidewater, into the Piedmont, and on to the state government in Richmond. Following the usual script, fearful whites sought to share the news without tipping off the slaves to the panic, but the enslaved could hardly miss the frantic conduct of masters and patrollers. In Hanover County on July 26, Colonel Bowling Starke reported, “The alarms have been of such a character that they could not be concealed from the negroes. They all know it and know our situation,” by which he meant the militia’s lack of guns. The agitation among the whites bred more slave talk, which escalated the alarm. A member of the Council of State noted, “These rumours have been much talk’d of by the slaves themselves & have probably increas’d the spirit of insubordination.”51
The alarm was especially great in Hanover County, where the county court had tried and convicted three slaves of conspiring and killing their master. On June 29, they had ambushed and shot William Boyers after discovering his intent to have “dispersed them over the world by sale or removal.” Virginia slaves did not want to be diffused.52
The more things changed in Virginia, the more they remained the same. After an interlude of security and laxity, Virginians again sprung into agitated alarm and action. In every county, the militia officers rediscovered that their men had neglected, lost, or sold most of their weapons since the last crisis. One colonel observed, “Should this alarm be well founded, we are in a helpless situation for want of arms.” So the local commanders plaintively begged the governor to send new arms and ammunition to their counties.53
The great fear of 1829 derived from the echo chamber of rumors, either wishful or terrifying, exchanged anxiously across the color line. One militia general regarded the talk in Northampton County as the very best proof of an impending race war: “I feel & see; every man here feels and sees that it is absolutely important to place the militia in a state to suppress Insurrection. It is heard from the lips of all. . . . Believe me, sir, the People of this shore are not easily agitated by danger & the present state of the public mind proves that we are in the midst of it.”54
In Virginia, nothing seemed more real and motivating than the fear of an internal enemy, for that dread shaped how delegates spoke and voted in the state convention as well as what militia officers and the governor wrote to one another. The pervasive alarm expressed a fundamental truth: that the exploitation of the slaves made them potential enemies. In Warwick County, Captain William Presson lamented “our Continual exposure to the hatred of those unfortunate & infatuated beings, a hatred existing from & consequent upon their relative situations in society.” Captain Presson did not suffer from the illusion that the slaves loved their masters. After the War of 1812, Virginians did indulge in new notions of happy and docile slaves, but the internal enemy never entirely vanished. Whenever trouble loomed, that haunting fear returned to grip the minds and words of Virginians.55
August 1 passed without the expected revolt, but the nagging dread lingered. In early September, Oliver Cross warned the Council of State, “That Virginia has an internal enemy none will deny I am sure. We have lately been seriously alarmed. We are always more or less alarmed & yet we are without the means of defence. . . . It behooves us all to be on the watch—to put ourselves in a situation to sustain that dreadful calamity. Come it will sooner or later.” The Virginians had woven themselves into a total system of beliefs and behavior enforced by their cultural convictions and material interests. That system sentenced them to a terrible and recurrent fear. Visiting Virginia, the English traveler Morris Birkbeck found that slavery was the “evil uppermost in every man’s thoughts; which all deplore, many were anxious to flee, but for which no man can devise a remedy.” Trapped within a system of their own making, they coped with its terrors by insisting that their greatest danger came from free blacks rather than from slaves.56
Where possible, slaves did conspire, but to escape rather than to murder. And they found their inspiration in the precedents set during the last war, rather than in some fantasy of Saint-Domingue. On the Atlantic side of the Eastern Shore counties of Accomack and Northampton, runaways revived the lessons of the war as learned in the slave quarters. Once again, they organized nocturnal escapes, obtained arms and boats, arranged leadership and sentinels, and fled to freedom. But this time they escaped to the northern states rather than to British warships. Northampton’s leading magistrate, John Eyre, reported that the white people were “much excited by the many evidences of discontent exhibited by our slaves & particularly by the elopement of several boat loads of them well provided with arms for their defence.”57
In adjoining Accomack County, the alarm revived another key player from the war: John G. Joynes. In 1813 and 1814 as a militia captain, Joynes had opposed slave escapes and battled British raiders, with Lieutenant James Scott as his great foil. Fifteen years later, Colonel Joynes commanded the Accomack militia. On August 10, 1829, he reported the “alarming extent to which the elopement of Slaves from this County to the states of New York and Pennsylvania has recently taken place, and the fact of their going off in gangs and armed, bidding defiance to the citizens.” Although a mass slave revolt did not erupt on August 1, there was a big escape from the Eastern Shore: “A boat’s crew eloped from the sea side in this County (which is now the usual mode adopted by them) and after proceeding some distance up the coast, they landed on an Island in the upper part of this county and established a regular camp and placed armed centinels out with orders to shoot down any white man who should approach within 15 yards of them. . . . This is only one of several cases that have taken place.” Seeking new arms from the state, Joynes implied that the runaways were better armed than the local militia, which suggests the destination for some of the lost, stolen, and sold guns from the last war.58
The Noble Virginians Going to Battle. In this crude engraving from 1820, a New England antislavery writer, William Hillhouse, mocks the Virginians as boastful cowards who forced their slaves to fight for them during the recent war. Produced during the peak of the Missouri crisis, the image conveys the New England Federalist attack on Virginia as weakened by slavery—a criticism that especially enraged Virginians. From Pocahontas: A Proclama
tion (1820). (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
Nat Turner
In 1829, Oliver Cross had warned that a bloody slave revolt would come “sooner or later.” It came sooner, on the night of August 21–22, 1831, in Southampton County. A messianic preacher, Nat Turner, finally fulfilled a measure of the great Virginia nightmare: a midnight massacre of men, women, and children in their beds and cribs. The revolt fell short of the fantasy only in its small scale: Turner began with merely six men, and his force grew to sixty as they visited more farms to slaughter families, steal guns, and rally slaves. The rebels killed about sixty whites, most of them women and children. Turner sought to break through to the county seat, then known aptly enough as Jerusalem, to procure more arms before seeking a maroon haven in the Great Dismal Swamp. But his men were too few, their cohesion too weak, and their training with firearms too limited to resist the militia counterattacks during the next day.59
After routing the rebels, the patrollers massacred them, sometimes after inflicting brutal tortures. In the chaotic aftermath, spooked Virginians killed suspects who, in fact, had never had anything to do with Turner. In all, the Virginians butchered about 100 slaves, more than the total of sixty rebels. Indeed, most of the true rebels survived to stand trial. Turner and twenty-two others died on the gallows and the state sold and transported another twenty-one convicts. In retrospect, Turner’s exceptional revolt has served as a distorting prism for interpreting slave resistance in Virginia, for on no other occasion did that resistance involve indiscriminate murder.60
From Southampton County, the terror spread throughout the Tidewater and Piedmont and lingered into the fall. On October 4 in Nelson County, Joseph C. Cabell noted that “the white females in this neighbourhood can scarcely sleep at all in the night,” owing to the rampant rumors of slave uprisings. Three days later in Fluvanna County, John Hartwell Cocke marveled, “We hear of insurrections in every quarter of the State.” In the Northern Neck, a resident reported, “The blowing of a horn or the sight of a few unknown persons in company was quite sufficient to cause a neighborhood panic and call its undisciplined militia to arms.”61
In January 1832 in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the uprising shocked the representatives into breaking the public code of silence on slavery. Dismayed by the debate, William Goode insisted that violating the code courted disaster, for he deemed slaves “an active and intelligent class, watching and weighing every movement of the Legislature.” Discussion would raise their hopes, which when dashed would produce a massive revolt to “the destruction of the country.” Most of the legislators, however agreed to discuss Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s plan for a very gradual emancipation and deportation of Virginia’s slaves.62
Thirty-nine years old in 1832, Randolph was the son of Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., and the grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Radical only by Virginia standards, Randolph’s plan would free no living slave and, indeed, none save those born after July 3, 1840. Becoming state property, those children would be worked for Virginia’s profit until adulthood and then either sold farther south or shipped to Africa. Fearing for whites rather than feeling for blacks, Randolph primarily sought to whiten Virginia rather than to free slaves.63
After a long and frank debate, the legislators voted 73 to 58 against adopting any plan, no matter how slow, to abolish slavery. While the western delegates favored emancipation, virtually all of the Tidewater and Piedmont delegates wanted no further discussion of the troubling issue. Although “an evil, and a transcendent evil,” slavery had become inextricably woven into their society, economy, and culture. John Thompson Brown urged his fellow legislators to put up and shut up about slavery, which he deemed “our lot, our destiny—and whether, in truth, it be right or wrong—whether it be a blessing or a curse, the moment has never yet been, when it was possible to free ourselves from it.” Instead of acting against slavery, the legislators tightened their restrictions on slaves, making it illegal to teach any to read and write.64
In defeat, Thomas Jefferson Randolph anticipated a grim future for Virginia. Without emancipation, he expected that disunion and civil war “must come, sooner or later; and when it does come, border war follows it, as certain as the night follows the day.” Northern invaders would then rally “black troops, speaking the same language, of the same nation, burning with enthusiasm for the liberation of their race.” In that event, he warned Virginians that nothing could “save your wives and your children from destruction.”65
A veteran of the War of 1812 in Virginia, Randolph recognized the prowess of black troops when trained and organized by an invader with a professional military. A better prophet than a legislator, Randolph aptly predicted that during the next generation, the internal enemy would help to shatter slavery in Virginia, but they would wear the blue coats of the Union rather than the red coats of the British. During the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake, the British had never invested more than 4,000 troops, supplemented by 400 armed runaways, and that for only a few months in 1814. Such a limited force and brief incursion could rattle, but never topple, slavery. During the Civil War, however, the Union would invade the South for more than four years with more than a million men, over 180,000 of them African Americans who helped to destroy the slave system.66
George R. Roberts, an undated photograph. A free black from Baltimore, Roberts served on American privateers during the War of 1812. Slaves sought freedom by escaping to, and fighting for, the British, but free blacks often served the United States by enlisting in the navy or on privateers. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society)
EPILOGUE
Never did a finer set of negroes leave an estate than those that left Corrotoman.
—JOSEPH C. CABELL, JANUARY 27, 18241
IN APRIL 1815, St. George Tucker opened a letter from his nephew Henry Tucker, a merchant on Bermuda who announced plans to send a brig to buy provisions in Virginia by drawing on his uncle’s credit. Still reeling from his wartime losses, Tucker was in no mood to advance money for his nephew after discovering the name of his brig: James Cockburn. The name honored the governor of Bermuda and the brother of the admiral, Sir George Cockburn. Mistaking the brig’s name as a tribute to the admiral hated by Virginians, Tucker set his nephew straight: he had no money to spare “in consequence of the depredations committed upon the [Corotoman] Estate in which my wife held her Dower, by the naval force under the command of the person whose name your Vessel bears, by which an Estate which yielded from $1500 to $2,000 per annum to me, has become only a dead weight and expense; (the negroes thereon to the number of seventy of the best hands having been shamefully carried off in the night from a defenceless private property).” Virginians nurtured bitter memories of a destructive war that had threatened the slave system.2
Tucker preferred to blame ungrateful slaves and larcenous Britons, rather than larger market and climatic forces, for the financial woes of his old age. In January 1821 he lamented. “My own private affairs are thrown into a state of uncertainty, and unproductiveness infinitely beyond anything that I had ever calculated upon as possible.” With Corotoman yielding losses and his bank stock nearly worthless, Tucker regarded his judge’s salary as his “last plank in a storm.” The depression and a run of bad crops primarily undercut Tucker’s estate, but he became implausibly fixated on the runaways of 1814 as the fundamental blow to his prosperity.3
Vexation
After the mass escape from Corotoman in April 1814, Joseph C. Cabell had moved almost all of the remaining slaves into the interior. Despite the news of peace in February 1815, Cabell delayed returning them to Corotoman because a deadly epidemic then afflicted the Tidewater. At last, at year’s end, he hired guards to take the slaves by boat down the James River to Richmond and then by schooner to Corotoman. Apparently they proved restive, for Cabell paid the lead guard an extra $4 “for his trouble in starting the negroes from Richmond.”4
In late 1815, Cabell also made peace with his brother-in-law, Charles Carter, res
olving their acrimonious dispute over the division of the estate and its slaves. Initiated in 1812, the division had been postponed by Cabell’s dissatisfaction with his share of the enslaved carpenters and by Carter’s demand for compensation for the death of one slave whom Cabell had unilaterally removed to his Nelson County property before the war. Despite the overt agreement in 1815, Cabell remained privately contemptuous of “the Doctor’s mismanagement of his affairs, his entire ignorance of the proper mode of conducting business, [and] his strange notions—especially as to his own claims & duties.”5
In December 1815, Cabell estimated his debts at $3,000. Disrupted by the war, Corotoman had produced no marketable crops for two years, 1814 and 1815, rendering the estate “a dead weight and expense,” in Tucker’s words. Like any great Virginia planter, however, Cabell had a relentless optimism that the next year would produce a bumper crop to wipe away his losses: “I have a well founded hope that the crops of 1816 & 1817 will deliver me from that worst of evils—a heavy debt.” By restoring the plantation to profitability, Cabell hoped to improve his prospects of finding a buyer for Corotoman: “If I could but get that load from my mind, how well a man I should be!”6
But he picked the wrong years to expect profits. During 1816, the notorious cold year without a summer, the harvests fell short throughout Virginia. The estate manager, John Richeson, lamented that he had “more trouble” with that year’s corn crop “than any 10 crops in my life.” The next year brought better weather but an infestation of the Hessian fly, which afflicted wheat, the major crop harvested at Corotoman. That spring, Richeson also deemed the slaves “more sickley than I ever new them.” The year 1818 brought little improvement: “a very good crop of corn, & a very sorry crop of wheat.” The harvest would, Cabell concluded, “scarcely bear the expences of the place.” And for want of sufficient carpenters, “every thing has been going out of repair.” Unable to sell the estate, except at a great loss, Cabell felt “compelled to keep it.”7
