1831
Page 6
In some ways, the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816 marked an attempt to do something about slavery. Supported by leading statesmen such as President James Monroe, Representative Henry Clay, and Chief Justice John Marshall, the society sought to settle emancipated slaves and free blacks in a West African territory that became Liberia. Believing that blacks could never rise above their condition, colonizationists concerned themselves more with ending the black presence in America than with attacking slavery. “Our society has nothing to do directly with the question of slavery,” admitted the speaker at the annual meeting of the society in 1831. They hoped that gradually, through voluntary emancipation and expatriation, slavery would dwindle away and the race problem would be removed to a foreign shore. As of 1830, nearly two thousand blacks had been transported to Africa. The American Colonization Society stayed in business for decades, providing statesmen from Jefferson to Lincoln with a panacea for the problem of racial harmony in America.47
After 1831, few abolitionists supported colonization. Garrison, once a proponent of gradualism, developed a blistering critique of the concept. In his Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), he condemned the society for not opposing slavery, for not supporting immediate abolition, for being hostile to the black race, and for ignoring the desires of the supposed beneficiaries of colonization. “The moving and controlling incentives of the friends of African Colonization,” he explained, “may be summed up in a single sentence: they have an antipathy against blacks. They do not wish to admit them to an equality. They can tolerate them only as servants and slaves, but never as brethren and friends. They can love and benefit them four thousand miles off, but not at home.”
In cities from Boston to Washington, free black citizens gathered to condemn colonization: “We will resist all attempts made for our removal to the torrid shores of Africa, and will sooner suffer every drop of blood to be taken from our veins than to submit to such unrighteous treatment … . We know of no other place that we can call our true and appropriate home, excepting these United States, into which our fathers were brought, who enriched the country by their toils, and fought, bled and died in its defence, and left us in its possession—and here we will live and die.”48
In fighting removal, these African Americans shared the ordeal of the Southeastern Indian tribes who at that moment also faced forced migration from their homes. For many white Southerners, Turner’s rebels could only be compared to heathen Indians. The revolt and the savagery associated with the insurrection reminded them of earlier incursions by red men upon white settlements. Just as it did not matter that the Indians had accepted Christianity and abandoned traditional ways, so it seemed not to matter that black men had been in Virginia almost as long as whites. Garrison too saw a connection. The masthead of The Liberator showed a slave auction in the Capitol.
5. Masthead from The Liberator (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
Beside the whipping post, to which a slave is chained, “down in the dust, our Indian treaties are seen.” At least one free black recognized the affinity between the two besieged groups. In a letter to Governor Floyd, he warned of his heavenly hopes to “enlist the Indians of Georgia in our common cause.” That alliance, of course, was not to be. In the wake of Turner’s revolt, some of the seventeen hundred free blacks in Southampton County prepared to leave. Blamed for circulating inflammatory publications and inciting the slaves, these artisans and farmers faced further restrictions on their freedom and threats to their lives. “Suffering severely in consequence of the late insurrection,” several hundred free blacks boarded the James Perkins in Norfolk on December 9 and emigrated to Liberia.49
The new recruits thrilled colonizationists who sought to profit further from the upheaval. The “excitement produced by the late insurrection,” reasoned Chief Justice John Marshall, provided an opportunity to raise money and win supporters. To the majority of white Virginians, voluntary removal might have offered a welcome means for eliminating the free black population, but few saw it as a practicable solution to the dilemmas posed by slavery. Indeed, one foreign commentator observed, “Its operations seemed rather calculated to perpetuate than extinguish slavery.” Colonization was not emancipation, and the real issue was not the fate of those who were free but of those who were enslaved. As a result of Turner’s rebellion, the unsettling question of how, if at all, to end slavery filled everyday discussion and led to an extraordinary moment: the Virginia legislature debated the future of slavery in the state.50
The question of abolition did not emerge formally until December 14, when William Henry Roane, Patrick Henry’s grandson, introduced a Quaker antislavery petition calling for legislative action on emancipation. But in political circles, private talk of the need to do something dated from the moment Turner struck. Jane Randolph, the wife of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, spoke for many of the women of the gentry class when she exclaimed that the horrors at Southampton County “aroused all my fears which had nearly become dormant, and indeed have increased them to the most agonizing degree.” She even asked her husband to consider moving west to Ohio. Governor Floyd was also contemplating Virginia’s future. On November 19, he wrote the governor of South Carolina and explained his belief that “the spirit of insubordination … had its origin … from the Yankee population.” He confided that he planned in his annual message to the legislature to recommend laws “to confine the Slaves to the estates of their masters—prohibit negroes from preaching—absolutely to drive from the State all free negroes—and to substitute the surplus revenue in our Treasury annually for slaves, to work for a time upon our Rail Roads etc etc and these sent out of the country, preparatory, or rather as the first step toward emancipation.” Two days later, in his diary, he confessed, “Before I leave this government, I will have contrived to have a law passed gradually abolishing slavery in this State.” And on the day after Christmas: “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.”51
Floyd owned slaves, and his concern over the institution had more to do with the prosperity of the state than with the fate of the enslaved. Like most other Virginians, he believed that any plan of emancipation would have to provide for the eradication of the black presence. Some legislators thought it improper to discuss the issue at all. They believed it fell beyond the scope of the select committee created in response to the governor’s annual message, which called for an examination of “the subject of slaves, free negroes and the melancholy occurrences growing out of the tragical massacre in Southampton.” William Osborne Goode moved that the Quaker petition should not be referred to the committee. Agreeing with another member that the only appropriate question was “how we should get rid of our free black population,” he warned that “agitation” on the question of abolition was “worse than useless.”
The chair of the select committee, William Henry Brodnax, who led the militia during the insurrection, disagreed. The committee’s mandate, he thought, was wide in scope, and a respect for the opinions of constituents necessitated their being heard. Shocked that the august body feared a petition, Brodnax wondered if the legislature wanted the world to believe that Virginia “was not even willing to think of an ultimate delivery from the greatest curse that God in his wrath ever inflicted upon a people.” In asking that the petition be admitted, Brodnax confessed that he did not think the legislature “would take any direct steps toward the emancipation of the slaves.” Another legislator agreed that the appearance of open discussion was necessary to put the public mind at rest. As for slavery, it was an evil, but one “so interwoven with our habits and interests … it was too late to correct it.”52
By a vote of ninety-three to twenty-seven, the House accepted the Quaker petition, and for several weeks the select committee sifted through additional petitions, memorials, and resolutions. William Goode could not tolerate it any longer, and on January 11, 1832, he moved that the committee be discharged and that the body rule that “it is no
t expedient to legislate on the subject” of emancipation. He argued that “a misguided and pernicious course of legislation” had to be arrested, because the legislature was now treading dangerously close to considering whether “they would confiscate the property of the citizens” of Virginia. Talk of emancipation, moreover, only increased the likelihood of future rebellions: “The slaves themselves were not unconscious of what was going forward here … . They are an active and intelligent class, watching and weighing every movement of the Legislature … . By considering the subject [of emancipation], their expectations were raised; expectations that were doomed to disappointment, the effect of which might be the destruction of the country.” Why, Goode wondered, continue the charade of consideration? After all, action was impossible, because the means of carrying any project into effect did not exist, and words caused anxiety, suffering, and, in the long run, even rebellion.
In offering his motion, Goode miscalculated. Others now rose to express their views on the abolition of slavery. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, newly elected as a delegate, presented a substitute motion that provided a specific plan of gradual emancipation: “The children of all female slaves, who may be born in this state, on or after the 4th day of July, 1840 shall become the property of the Commonwealth, the males at the age of twenty-one years, and females at the age of eighteen, if detained by their owners within the limits of Virginia, until they shall respectively arrive at the ages aforesaid, to be hired out until the net sum arising therefrom, shall be sufficient to defray the expense of their removal, beyond the limits of the United States.”
Under the terms of Randolph’s emancipation plan, no slaves currently in bondage would be freed, freedom would come only to those slaves whose masters had not sold them farther south by a certain age, and those eligible for freedom would have to work off the costs of their transportation to Africa. Such was the “plan” that generated passionate discussion and induced the governor to describe the legislature as divided into slave and abolition parties. The slave-party delegates hailed from the Tidewater and Piedmont districts in the east. The abolition party drew its strength from the trans-Allegheny region in the west. Floyd himself had come from there, the first Virginia governor from west of the Alleghenies. House members in the Tidewater and Piedmont owned 1,080 slaves; those from the trans-Allegheny owned a total of ninety-five. Sectional tensions in Virginia had become acute just two years earlier in a battle of reapportionment. The western regions had lost their attempt to have representation based solely on the white population, and as a result the slaveholders of eastern Virginia received an extra seven seats. In some respects, then, the debate over slavery was between easterners opposed to interference with slavery and westerners who wanted to see the institution eradicated one day.
But the ideological differences between the slave and abolition parties were not nearly so severe as the names might signify. Merely being willing to consider some form of future gradual emancipation made one a member of Floyd’s abolition party; it did not make one an abolitionist by any definition of the word a Northern activist might recognize. When the Richmond Enquirer proclaimed that “the seals are broken, which have been put for fifty years upon the most delicate and difficult subject,” the editors were not commenting on Goode’s or Randolph’s motions, but on the astonishing and disturbing opinions being voiced, opinions that had always been whispered in private but almost never shouted in public. Almost no one in 1831-32 believed that the legislature would actually enact a plan that might lead one day to the disappearance of slavery from Virginia. Plans did not pose the danger; speech did. Every Virginian knew that David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison and Nat Turner breathed fire, and every resident of Southampton County knew someone enveloped by the flames. But now a white Virginian rose in the House of Delegates and declared through open doors, “Slavery as it exists among us may be regarded as the heaviest calamity which has ever befallen any portion of the human race … . The time will come, at no distant day, when we shall be involved in all the horrors of a servile war which will not end until … the slaves or the whites are totally exterminated.” A Virginian rose and declared that, based on the principle that all men are by nature free and equal, “it is an act of injustice, tyranny, and oppression to hold any part of the human race in bondage against their consent.”53
The comments shocked James Gholson, who owned twenty slaves. He spoke for the slave party of the Tidewater and the Piedmont. Deprecating a discussion that “from its very nature should never be openly” conducted, he denounced Randolph’s proposal as “monstrous and unconstitutional.” Slaves, he reminded his colleagues, were property and the source of wealth. “Private property is sacred” and could not be appropriated by the state for public use without just compensation. Only under extreme necessity might the legislature consider such an action, and such conditions did not currently apply. Gholson offered his own history of Turner’s revolt: “An ignorant, religious fanatic, conceived the idea of insurrection. He succeeded in involving four or five others, of his immediate neighborhood, in his designs: they commence the massacre—they traverse a region of country containing hundreds of slaves; but neither threats, promises, nor intoxication, could secure more than forty to fifty adherents—they remain embodied something more than twenty-four hours—they disperse without being forced—are taken without resistance—and are at last hung on evidence of persons of their own class and color.” With safety and order quickly restored, “the people of our country again sleep quietly on their pillows, and would, in all probability, have enjoyed uninterrupted repose, had it not been for this false legislative cry of ‘Wolf!’ ‘Wolf!’”
The slaves of Virginia, Gholson asserted, “are as happy a laboring class as exists upon the habitable globe, … contented, peaceful, and harmless.” But if the legislature adopted Randolph’s plan, the slaves would become dangerous. A law that only freed a future generation would create untold resentments: “It argues but little knowledge of human nature to suppose that we reconcile one generation to servitude and bondage by telling it that [the one] to follow shall be free.” Such a scheme not only failed to meet the demands of the putative emergency created by Turner, it threatened to offer the lesson that, “if one insurrection has been sufficient to secure the liberty of succeeding generations, might it not be inferred that another would achieve the freedom of the present?”
Gholson did not wish to argue “the abstract question of slavery, or its morality or immorality.” “Will you believe it,” he chided the legislators from the west, that the “great men of the revolution owned slaves? Yes, actually owned slaves, and worked them too—even died in possession of them, and bequeathed them to their children.” There were no “lights of the age” dating from the Revolution, no beacons of freedom for all. “I have heard of these lights before,” Gholson averred, “but I have looked for them in vain.” Turner thought “he saw them … and now, all his lights and all his inspirations are shrouded in the darkness of the grave.” Northern lights had indeed appeared in the form of incendiary publications, but “these are not lights of the age, or lights from heaven,” but “a darkness visible.” Rather than spreading illumination, this “unjust, partial, tyrannical, and monstrous measure,” meant to commence no less on the Fourth of July, a day made sacred by Randolph’s grandfather, would forever extinguish the “lights of liberty and justice.” 54
John Thompson Brown, from Petersburg, also denounced any scheme of abolition. He warned that, for the government to generate sufficient surplus revenue to purchase and remove the black population, it would have to impose “high duties on imports.” “It is a well known fact,” he added in the midst of South Carolina’s threat to nullify the tariff, that “the burden would rest chiefly on the Southern states. It would be nothing more or less than drawing from the pockets of the slaveholders, by indirect taxation, the money with which their slaves were eventually to be purchased.” “It would be better economy to abandon them at once,” he snorted, “wi
thout compensation, than to go through the troublesome and expensive ceremony of furnishing the means to have them bought.”
An even greater danger lurked beneath the reliance on government surplus revenue. By allowing the federal government a direct role in the disposition of slavery, Southern states would yield their autonomy. “When the general government shall have obtained the control of this subject,” predicted Brown, “and the slave holding states lie defenceless at her feet, you will hear no more of the purchase and removal of slaves. You will be told that they are persons and not things … . The bill of rights will be quoted to prove that they are men and entitled to their freedom. They will be removed and slavery extinguished, but it will be without compensation, and at your expense.” Brown dismissed those who averred that because of slavery “the body politic is languishing under disease.” Slavery, he concluded, “is 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.”55
William Brodnax, who owned twenty-six slaves and chaired the special committee, spoke next. He regretted that matters had come to this, because he believed that the committee’s final report would have recommended against any action on the subject. Brodnax, a representative from Dinwiddie County in the eastern Piedmont district, disagreed with Gholson over whether the subject should be discussed: “The people all over the world are thinking about it, speaking about it, and writing about it. And can we arrest it, and place a seal on the subject? We might as well attempt to put out the light of the sun.” He also disagreed with Gholson and Brown on the perniciousness of slavery: “That slavery in Virginia is an evil, and a transcendent evil, it would be idle, and more than idle, for any human being to doubt or deny.” Calling slavery an “incubus” that sapped the energies of the state and retarded its advancement, he argued that “something should be done to alleviate it or exterminate it … if any thing can be done, by means less injurious or dangerous than the evil itself.”