At least one of Colonel Mallory’s three fugitives was an instance of such ambiguity. Shepard Mallory was the only one described consistently as a mulatto; he was also the only one who claimed the colonel’s surname as his own, as he would continue doing for the rest of his long life. (It is unclear whether he used the Mallory name while still in slavery.) Shepard Mallory was born when Charles King Mallory was in his early twenties, either not long before the colonel’s marriage or not long after it.24 Such facts hint at the possibility—intriguing even if speculative—that in leaving his master, Shepard Mallory might also have been leaving his cousin, his uncle, or maybe even his father.*
In years to come, philanthropic Northerners would be surprised (perhaps in a few cases secretly disappointed) to learn that not all Hampton slaves were lashed daily—and, moreover, that quite a few spoke of their masters as decent, even kindly, people. Some slaves here, as in other places, were left to lead more or less independent lives, working aboard oyster boats on the Bay or practicing trades in town, and simply remitting most of their earnings to their masters. The town’s location also offered them unusual access to information about the outside world. In the decades before the war, a summer resort called the Hygeia Hotel turned Hampton into a popular watering place for wealthy visitors, including men of national prominence. John Tyler, Winfield Scott, and Roger Taney, among others, became familiar faces. Indeed, Tyler and his family purchased a beachfront villa right next door to the Mallory estate; when they arrived each summer they would erect a temporary cabin behind the house to accommodate their retinue of slaves. As these visiting blacks mingled with Hampton’s local Negroes, they must have confided a good deal of inside political news and high-class gossip that James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley would have given their eyeteeth to acquire.25
And yet Hampton’s picturesque, shabby-genteel exterior hid far shabbier, and far less picturesque, realities under its surface. One visiting Northerner, asking an elderly slave if she had a “good” master, was assured that the man was “a kind—a werry kind massa!” And then she added: “Why, bless de Lor’… he nebber put wires in his cowhides in all his life!” The woman, of course, was making a larger point: a whip without metal wires woven into it is still a whip. There was no such thing as a “good” slaveholder; no such thing as a gentle version of bondage.26
In July 1850, an article titled “New Way of Raising Pigs” appeared in a magazine called The American Agriculturalist. “Dr. Mallory, of Hampton,” it began, “has a new way of keeping both pigs and negroes out of mischief.” It went on to explain that the esteemed doctor—he was the colonel’s elder brother, Francis—made a practice of giving each of his slaves one or two piglets every spring to tend and feed throughout the rest of the year. Then, at slaughtering time, half the butchered hog would go to the master, the other half to the slave. It was an efficient way to fatten swine, the article noted—“and besides, it is contrary to negro nature to run away and leave a fat pig.”27
That was how slavery worked in Hampton. As beneficent as a master might be, he ultimately had to treat his Negroes as a type of livestock—a type, moreover, that could be damnably hard to keep from straying off. This was no small matter, as Virginia’s slaves were growing more and more valuable over time. With the Old Dominion’s best soil long since exhausted, its farmers could only gaze enviously southward at the bountiful fields of the Cotton Kingdom. Yet the good fortunes of the Gulf States did not bypass Virginia entirely. The Chesapeake became America’s own Congo River, its new slave coast.28 The higher the price of cotton in New Orleans (and in Lowell and Liverpool, for that matter), the higher the price of Negroes in Richmond. Indeed, it was often said that black folk were Virginia’s only worthwhile cash crop.
The old fortunes of the tidewater stretched thinner and thinner with each new generation. Heirs multiplied; debts multiplied; a gentleman from even one of the finest bloodlines might easily find himself in financial embarrassment. Meanwhile his Negroes had multiplied, too—more mouths to feed; more backs to clothe; more hands to do the same amount of work. Their Increse to him & his heirs for ever. Then one heard about the most remarkable prices being fetched: two thousand dollars for a prime male! It was beyond exorbitant—it was insane; it couldn’t last. It was also, by coincidence, the exact amount of the note of hand that one had imprudently signed two years ago, back when it had seemed, briefly, that grain prices must rise—the note of hand that would fall due next quarter, and nary a cent of cash to pay it with. The slaves’ rations had already been cut to bare subsistence; their annual clothing allowance postponed; but still one’s balance sheet showed an appalling deficit. Perhaps, indeed, they would be better off with a master who could afford to feed and clothe them properly. Surely it would be no sin to sell just one or two, sparing at least the faithful house servants. And come to think, there was that strapping young fellow Billy, on Uncle Jack’s old farm … the one with the unpleasantly truculent look in his eye, as if he were daring you, his master, to show him who was boss.…
And so came the discreet trip upriver, to shamefacedly answer one of those vulgar ads inside the Richmond papers: CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! Well, better that, anyhow, than having one’s ancestral house on King Street—its roof a bit leaky these days, to be sure, but still a handsome old place—seized and auctioned by the sheriff at the courthouse door.
This was how it might have gone with a slaveholder of the very best intentions. There were many whose intentions were a good deal worse.
Back at the turn of the century, no less a Virginian than Thomas Jefferson had recognized the strong financial incentives for a planter to increase his yield of Negro children. The author of the Declaration was always half idealist, half scientist—the two halves often at war with each other. The idealist dreamt of universal emancipation (someday), while the scientist could not help calculating that the offspring of a “breeding woman” at Monticello were worth substantially more than her labor. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law—since, as he explained, “what she produces is an addition to capital.” (A few lines later, he went back to discussing his lofty schemes for the University of Virginia.) By the 1850s, this calculus had given rise to an industry that each year converted tens of thousands of black Virginians into hard cash before sending them south. The Richmond firm of D. M. Pulliam & Co.—one of many competing dealers in the state capital—went so far as to classify its wares into twenty separate categories, from “No. 1 MEN, Extra” down to “Scrubs,” a term for the elderly, the sickly, or the crippled.29
Rare indeed was the black family in Hampton that had not lost one of its members—a sister, a husband, a daughter, a father—to this ever-burgeoning trade. On local farms where slaves were expressly raised for sale, the common practice was to send children to market when they reached the age of eight: old enough to have survived the common diseases of infancy and to be useful in the fields.30
For those not sold, enslavement still often meant a life of sudden disruptions and separations. Hampton was neither quite as placid nor quite as stable as it appeared. The antebellum South had invested heavily in its self-image as a place of changeless order, but in truth, it could sometimes be almost as ruthlessly dynamic as a California gold field or a Manhattan slum. When the more ambitious scions of the old families decided to seek their fortunes in Arkansas or Texas—or even just in another county—the slaves must be equitably divided according to their cash value. Many tidewater field hands, too, were “hired out” annually: slaveholders who possessed more Negroes than they needed rented them to planters short of labor. In Hampton, as in many other places, January 1 was when old rental contracts expired and slaves’ services were auctioned off for the year ahead, sending them to different, often far-flung, plantations. One former slave would recall how each New Year’s Day, “the cries and tears of brothers, sisters, wives, and husbands were
heard in [Hampton’s] streets” as black families were separated—at least for twelve months, but possibly forever.31
In short, enslaved Negroes bore witness to, and suffered, all the unbridled energy and restless change of entrepreneurial America, without ever reaping its benefits. Occasionally, perhaps, a slave might put aside a fistful of seeds at harvest time and plant a little garden behind the kitchen shed, tending and watering it each evening after her long day’s toil in the master’s fields, hoping to raise a few gourds and melons that she could send to town—if she were permitted—on market days. Some pennies here, a silver dime or quarter there, and perhaps one day she might hoard enough to purchase her own freedom or her children’s. But then one morning the arbitrary hand of fate would intervene, dispatching her suddenly to another farm or to another state, leaving the young shoots to wither.
No wonder that so many dreamt of running away, of at last seizing command over their own destinies. Some succeeded; the kindly captain of a Providence schooner might sneak a stowaway aboard on the homeward voyage. But the price of failure could be steep. One June 23, 1859, the clerk of Hampton’s county court—a panel comprising a dozen leading citizens—penned a chilling entry in his minute-book:
It appearing to the Court from satisfactory evidence adduced before it, that certain slaves, the property of the estate of Sarah A. Twine deceased—to wit, Sam Watts, Mary Watts & child Louisa; Ann Riddick, John Riddick, Mariah Becket & her child Georgeanna; Frank Williams and Purdah—are making preparation to abscond to a free State & thereby become a loss to said Estate—It is ordered that Jacob K. Wray personal representative of the estate of Sarah A. Twine dec’d do sell the said slaves in Richmond at a public slave auction for cash.32
Thus the hand of justice dealt with Negroes in antebellum Virginia—Negroes who had not even committed a crime but were simply believed to be considering one.
More surprising is another entry dated five months later, this one an indictment against a white man:
On the 1st of November 1859, Severn Knottingham (or Nottingham) did seditiously speak & utter the following, to wit: He believed that Brown done perfectly right in doing as he did at Harper’s Ferry.
In making this statement, the court continued, Knottingham (or Nottingham) was implicitly “maintaining that owners have not the right of property in their slaves, to the manifest injury of the institution of slavery.”33
Sedition against the institution of slavery. A heinous offense in Virginia—or, indeed, anywhere in the South—just two weeks after John Brown had come on his mission of divine retribution.
And yet Severn Knottingham—whose ultimate sentence, if there was one, is unrecorded—was not alone. Two other white men in the county faced similar criminal charges that day. Jefferson Craven had been overheard saying “that he wished or would be glad if the insurrection would happen to-night.” Most shocking of all, a certain Henry Hawkins had allegedly declared that “he wished all the slaves would rise & kill the whites, & damn Henry A. Wise [the governor of Virginia] & Harper’s Ferry.”34
Nor were Knottingham, Craven, and Hawkins the only white Virginians to feel this seemingly perverse sympathy with the fanatic who had invaded their state and tried to destroy the world they knew. Even Governor Wise himself, along with other Southern political leaders, had come to see Brown immediately after his capture and sat almost mesmerized for three hours as the old man, bleeding from a serious head wound, held forth about human rights, the curse of slavery, and the inexorable judgment of eternity. Wise said afterward: “They are mistaken who take him to be a madman.… He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to say [that]… he inspired me with great trust in his integrity, as a man of truth.” Certainly Wise did not agree with Brown’s position on slavery, to say the least; he yielded to no one in his defense of the peculiar institution. And yet some part of him seems to have responded not just to Brown’s courage but also to the stark grandeur of his moral message. “Black slaves make white slaves,” Wise had once confessed. This lament spoke for many of his fellow Virginians.35
The old Jeffersonian ambivalence about slavery had never disappeared: it had simply gone underground. Within their most private selves, many Southerners—even those with large investments in the institution—had secret thoughts that they would never have spoken aloud; thoughts that, if spoken, would have been crimes. Even in South Carolina; even in the very heart of the rebellion. Mary Chesnut, the most penetrating gazer into the Southern soul, was married to a former United States senator and ardent Confederate, heir apparent to more than five hundred family slaves. (Indeed, James Chesnut was one of the two adjutants who delivered Beauregard’s surrender demand to Fort Sumter.) Publicly, Mary supported her husband when, for instance, he declared on the Senate floor that “commerce, civilization, and Christianity” all went hand in hand to sanctify Negro servitude. Privately, she wrote in her diary in March 1861: “I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. [Charles] Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true.” A few months later she confessed her belief that two-thirds of the slaveholders in the Confederate army inwardly “dislike slavery as much as Mrs. Stowe or Greeley.” And yet, she also recognized, they had just gone off to lay down their lives for it.36
The last time any significant misgivings about slavery had been aired publicly in Virginia was thirty years earlier, in the wake of the terrifying 1831 Negro uprising led by Nat Turner. A month after Turner’s execution—he was flayed, quartered, and beheaded—legislators gathered in Richmond to consider various plans that would have emancipated the state’s slaves and resettled them somewhere beyond the Old Dominion’s borders. The governor, John Floyd (father of the Buchanan administration’s notorious secretary of war), went so far as to write in his diary: “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” But it soon evolved into the same classic debate that would reemerge, in different shapes and colors, at other moments in American history: when threatened from within, should the state reform itself, or clamp down on dissent? In the end, Virginians chose to clamp down. And so sedition laws and slave patrols became indispensible elements of Southern life. Northern publications expressing unorthodox sentiments on the peculiar institution were seized and destroyed by local postmasters. By 1861, the patrols around Hampton paid surprise visits at least weekly to every slave quarter in the county, making sure that no Negroes would “stroll from one plantation to another” or hold “unlawful assemblies,” among other misdeeds. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen checked outbound vessels for fugitives. Order must be heaven’s first law.37
Memories of the Turner rebellion stayed fresh in Hampton. The calamity and its backlash had unfolded just across the James River in Southampton County—formerly just another quiet old corner of the tidewater, another place of small farms and “kind” slaveholders.38 There, in a matter of hours, the time-hallowed relationship between the races had devolved into a nightmare: white children with their brains dashed out, black men’s heads skewered on stakes along the road to deter other would-be conspirators. After that, who was to say that such horrors might not occur without warning elsewhere in the Virginia tidewater—or, indeed, in any town or county of the slave states? This never-ending threat of black violence must be met with a never-ending, and even more forceful, threat of white violence in return. Pieces of Turner’s body were distributed as talismans among the whites; one Southampton man made a change purse from its skin. Eternal vigilance would be the price of Southern liberties. Whites must learn, and must teach their children—as blacks had been doing for centuries—to bear a constant burden of fear. Perhaps even more difficult, they must learn to pretend that this fear did not exist. “There is something suspicious,” noted the sharp-eyed William H. Russell, reporting this time from a South Carolina plantation, “in the constant never-ending statement that ‘we are not afraid of our slaves.’ ”39
&nbs
p; Thus, even if on some deep level slavery was, as Mary Chesnut said, a hated institution, it must be defended unequivocally, unambivalently. (All the more so, in fact, since the slightest crack in the façade, whites feared, might become an invitation to rebellion, to rape, and to murder.) Defended illogically, too: slaveholders must learn to insist that their slaves were happy and affectionate, while insisting in the same breath that even the mildest abolition propaganda might spark a bloody massacre. Yankee voices must be silenced in the South. Negro voices, too, needless to say. Southern voices, meanwhile, became ever more stridently defensive, rising in an awful crescendo with secession.
Little wonder, then, that Mrs. Chesnut, by 1861, would come to call slavery the “black incubus.”
Little wonder, too, that in the front yard of Hampton’s quaint colonial courthouse stood the naked, wizened trunk of an old locust tree: a whipping post.40
WAITING ON THE CAUSEWAY before the front gate of Fortress Monroe was a man on horseback. He wore the blue-and-green uniform coat of the 115th Virginia Militia and the white-plumed hat of an officer.41
He was Major John Baytop Cary—in civilian life, the principal of Hampton Academy and promulgator of heavenly order among the local youth, but now commander of the Virginia Artillery company of the 115th. Colonel Mallory, he explained, was “absent,” and had sent Cary to represent him. In truth, Mallory himself probably could have found his way there if he had wished. After all, those three prime field hands represented as much as 10 percent of his net worth.42 But it would have been humiliating, going to beg these Yankees for something you knew was yours by law and by right. And the balding, purse-lipped Mallory would have looked more or less like what he was: a lawyer on horseback. The splendid Cary, on the other hand—silver-gray whiskers, erect bearing, haughty tilt of chin—appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.43
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