Dark Bargain

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Mason's paper protesting George Ill's Proclamation of 1763 prohibiting western expansion was his first foray into politics, but his real political career began on December 23,1765. Outraged by the Stamp Act, like most of his fellow Americans, he tried to both avoid and undermine the hated legislation.

  Mason's December broadside contained a strategy for allowing courts to function in property actions while avoiding issuing or accepting any documents that would require stamps. This tract, Mason's first important public paper, began not with a denunciation of the Stamp Act, but with an attack on slavery.

  "The policy of encouraging the Importation of free People & discouraging that of Slaves has never been duly considered in this colony," he wrote, "or we should not at this Day see one Half of our best Lands in most Parts of the Country remain unsettled & the other cultivated with Slaves; not to mention the ill Effect such a Practice has upon the Morals & Manners of our People.

  One of the first Signs of the Decay, & perhaps the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed was the Introduction of Great Numbers of Slaves—an Evil very pathetically described by Roman Historians."18

  George Mason

  This passage was the first of many instances in the coming years in which Mason would issue scathing condemnations of slavery.19 In 1773, he ratcheted up his rhetoric still further in a landmark paper, Extracts from the Virginia Charters, with Some Remarks Upon Them. "That slow Poison, [slavery] . . . is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentleman here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes. Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds. And in such an infernal School are to be educated our future Legislators & Rulers."20

  Mason's denunciations of slavery struck a surprisingly receptive chord with his fellow planters. In the coming decades, Virginia slaveowners would often complain that they found themselves enmeshed in a system that they loathed, but felt was too dangerous to public welfare to end. Jefferson was later to famously assert that reliance on slavery was like trying to hold "a wolf by the ears." Slavery had been forced on southern planters by Britain, the argument went, and the mother country's voracious appetite for the fruits of slavery— tobacco, rice, and indigo—perpetuated the detestable institution. One can almost imagine groups of Virginia planters sitting in the grand parlors of the manor houses that were built by slaves, eating food that was grown, cooked, and served by slaves, drinking fine wine that was poured by slaves, and speaking with complete conviction and sincerity about the evils of the system.

  But Mason was not so much an apologist as a visionary. He was not opposed to slavery on ethical grounds—this was no William Lloyd Garrison—but rather because he saw that reliance on slavery was undermining the social fabric of Virginia. As Mason well knew, by the 1770s, protecting slavery had become more than an exercise in convenience for Virginia planters. For these men, slavery was their life. It shaped their politics, their economics, and, most important, their view of themselves. But Mason also realized that the chains forged by slavery had come to bind the owners as much as the slaves. The seemingly geometric expansion of the slave population threatened to overwhelm Virginia, and Mason was one of the few planters who foresaw that, in order to survive, Virginia would have to find a solution to its slave problem.

  If opposition to slavery was as deep-rooted as most historians have contended, a man as clever as Mason would have proposed the most obvious and least painful method to phase it out—simply prohibit the institution in newly settled lands. Yet not once did he ever suggest that slavery be prohibited anywhere. 21 Quite the contrary—Mason fully expected slavery to spread throughout the Southwest and viewed this eventuality as a fortuitous means by which Virginia could rid itself of its oversupply of slaves.

  As practical as Mason's analysis of slavery might have been, there was no doubt of his idealism when it came to questions of individual freedom and democratic government, at least for men such as himself. In April 1775, in Remarks on Annual Elections, he wrote, "We came equal into this world, and equal shall we go out of it. All men are by nature born equally free and independent . . . In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim—that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour."22

  Although Mason almost never held public office—he declined to run for a seat in the House of Burgesses more than once and also declined to serve in the Continental Congress—perhaps no one save Washington more influenced the course of his state's history. In 1769, he drew up Virginia's nonimportation statutes, which Washington then presented to the Virginia assembly.23

  In 1776, Mason wrote the first draft of the Virginia constitution and is generally acknowledged as the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. He claimed to be at any rate, writing to his cousin George Mercer in 1778, "to show you that I have not been an idle spectator of this great contest . . . I enclose you a copy of the first draught of the declaration of rights just as it was drawn and presented by me." (Edmund Randolph, however, asserted that the declaration was actually written by Patrick Henry.)

  Even with all of these activities, and despite the great changes brewing around him, what occupied Mason the most, where he put his greatest energies, was his longstanding obsession with the Ohio Company.

  After being bested by Franklin in "Vandalia," Mason had been forced to turn his attention elsewhere. In 1773, he engaged a young frontiersman named George Rogers Clark to find an alternate tract for the Ohio Company's claim. To Mason's delight, Clark did just that, locating almost eight hundred thousand acres in what is now West Virginia that were, if anything, superior to the acreage that the company had lost. In a long letter to Robert Carter, Mason noted that the new acreage was "clear of . . . the Vandalia Company's claim . . . equal to any land on this continent, being exceeding rich and level." He complained to Carter, however, that the _£650 bill for surveying, which was supposed to be paid by the members, was due but that most of his colleagues had not yet come through. "It is unreasonable," he complained, "that I should advance the remainder." Mason was upset that "upon the credit of the Ohio Company, and the particular promises of several of its members to advance - £ 5 0 sterling each, I agreed to make myself liable for the charges of this survey, and am now liable to suffer for it."24

  As events in the colonies were reaching a crisis, Mason could not understand why his fervor for land speculation was not always shared by other Virginians. In March 1775, one month before Lexington and Concord, he wrote to Washington, "The inattention of our Assembly to so grand an object, as the right of this colony to the Western lands is inexcusable, and the confusion it will introduce will be endless."25

  At the outset of the war, Mason refused appointment to the Virginia Committee of Public Safety because of continued bouts of "ill health," most likely recurring bouts with his old nemesis gout, although he corresponded regularly with Washington and threw his weight as a private citizen behind the Revolution. As an agent for the committee, he procured supplies and arranged shipping. But even as the fighting began in Massachusetts, he had in no way abandoned his attempts to secure Clark's newly surveyed acreage for the Ohio Company.

  His reaction to Maryland's demands that states cede their western lands as a condition of ratification of the Articles of Confederation was typically personal. Mason was convinced that Maryland's mulishness was specifically aimed at denying the Ohio Company its claims. In April 1779, he wrote to Richard Henry Lee "that the secret and true cause of the great oppos
ition to Virginia's title to her chartered territory [Virginia and the Ohio Company being as one in the same] was the great Indian purchase between the Obache and Illinois Rivers, made in the year 1773 or 1774, in which Governor Johnston and several of the leading men of Maryland are concerned with Lord Dunmore, Governor Tryon, and many other noblemen and gentlemen of Great Britain."26

  But most of Mason's antipathy was reserved for the Pennsylvanians. At his prompting, the Virginia legislature had declared before the war that all purchases by the "Indiana Company" (essentially the same crew as the Vandalia Company) were void, a resolution with no teeth whatsoever since those decisions were being made in London. Once the the crown was out of the picture, Virginia was free to fight it out with Pennsylvania in Congress. With Franklin back on American soil, however, Congress seemed no more amenable to Virginia's claims than had been Parliament or the king.

  In December 1779, while Washington prepared for another brutal winter, Mason drafted a Remonstrance of the General Assembly of Virginia to the Delegates of the United American States in Congress Assembled that stated, "The General Assembly of Virginia cannot avoid expressing their surprise and concern, upon the information that Congress had received and countenanced petitions from certain persons styling themselves the Vandalia and Indiana Companies, asserting claims to lands in defiance of the civil authority, jurisdiction and laws of this commonwealth, and offering to erect a separate government within the territory thereof. Should Congress assume a jurisdiction [by the Pennsylvanians] . . . it would be a violation of public faith . . . and establish in Congress a power which . . . must degenerate into an intolerable despotism." Mason went on to assert that in its petition, Virginia was protecting not only its own claims, but those of the very Marylanders he had denounced in his letter to Richard Henry Lee.27

  Eventually, dealing with Pennsylvanians, Marylanders, and Northerners became too much, and Mason threw up his hands. In 1781, he announced that he was retiring from public life.

  Retirement did not, however, lessen his influence. As an intimate of Washington and a figure of respect up and down the Northern Neck, Mason continued to be sought out on matters affecting the state. When it seemed certain that the Ohio Company would not succeed in gaming control of any significant western territory, Mason backed a growing movement to cede all western lands to the Confederation, advocating like Jefferson the division of this land into new states. This would at least get Congress (and Franklin) out of the picture.

  But the fight was already over. By the war's end, the Ohio Company of Virginia existed only on paper, and would not even have had that distinction had not Mason continued to maintain it.28

  By May 1787, the sixty-two-year-old Mason was still a preeminent figure in Virginia politics, one of the most respected advocates for the tobacco planters of Virginia, but the doddering Franklin was no longer a force on the national scene. As Mason contemplated his first visit north, he may have wondered who his new adversaries might be. There was no shortage of possibilities—the delegate list was filled with men of national reputation, important men from important commercial states, such as Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris from Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton from New York, and Elbridge Gerry and Rufus King from Massachusetts. While the northerners would indeed prove treacherous, a fellow slaveholder, a man whose background was in many ways the mirror of Mason's own, would most prove to be Virginia's undoing.

  6. GOLD IN THE SWAMPS: SOUTH CAROLINA RICE, AND THE LOWER SOUTH

  Upon arriving in New York in 1765, South Carolina's John Rutledge, who had been educated in England, wrote to his mother, "This is my first trip to a foreign country."1

  Unlike the self-contained aristocracy of Virginia, the men that South Carolina sent to Philadelphia—Rutledge, the Pinckneys, and Pierce Butler—were almost more British than the British. They saw themselves as English gentry, behaved like English gentry, and Butler even reminded his fellow delegates that he was the only member of the convention who had actually descended from English gentry.2 All four were planters who had trained in the law and each played a pivotal role in Philadelphia. But the undisputed leader of the delegation was Rutledge. Perhaps the nation's most successful lawyer—he hadn't lost a case in court in twenty-six years—Rutledge had also risen to be South Carolina's most powerful and respected political figure. During the Revolution, he had been granted such sweeping powers to guide the state through the war that he had become known as the "Old Dictator" or "Dictator John," attaining this position through a combination of talent, attitude, and some extremely adroit marketing by his uncle.3

  The Old Dictator's saga began around 1730, when an appealing but nondescript young man with a law degree from the University of Dublin named Andrew Rutledge arrived in Charles Town, South Carolina.* Although he had no money and no discernible pedigree, with in a year Rutledge had sueceeded in charming his way into the tightly knit, generations-old Charles Town social elite, so much so as to get himself elected to the South Carolina assembly.4

  In early 1732, Rutledge was retained to prosecute a lawsuit by the immensely wealthy Colonel Hugh Hext. Hext was in his mid-sixties at that time, with a beautiful second wife in her twenties who had borne him an adored seven-year-old daughter, Sarah. Rutledge won the suit, and Hext invited him to dinner in gratitude. A few months later, Colonel Hext died, and a few months after that Andrew Rutledge married his widow.

  According to the terms of the colonel's will, however, the widow was only to receive income from the estate during her lifetime. When she died, the estate passed not to any new husband, but to Sarah, who would take possession on either her twenty-first birthday or her marriage, whichever came first. What's more, the colonel's brother Thomas, a widower with no heirs, had left his entire, quite substantial estate to Sarah as well, as had another uncle. Little Sarah Hext was thus poised to become one of the richest women in South Carolina.

  Seeing an opportunity, Andrew Rutledge undertook a search for his brother John, a ship's doctor, some years younger but with equal charm. John had never been to America, and it took Andrew two years to track him down and bring him to Charles Town. When Dr. John, as he became known, finally arrived, he moved in with his brother and was introduced to Andrew's stepdaughter.

  Romance blossomed and, on Christmas Day 1738, Sarah Hext, just turned fourteen, married twenty-five-year-old John Rutledge. A little more or less than nine months later, their first son was born, also named John for his father.5 Six children followed in quick succession, the youngest, Edward, destined for no small measure of distinction of his own.

  Dr. John's rollicking early life had rendered him susceptible to both alcohol and disease, the former of which he could now readily afford with the latter an inevitable result. The day after his twelfth wedding anniversary, December 26, 1750, John Rutledge I died at age thirty-seven. His eldest son, John II, was eleven, but would not lack a father for long, as Uncle Andrew moved in as surrogate to his brother's children, just as John Mercer had done for the children of George Mason III. From the first, young Rutledge showed no interest whatever in the classics, poetry, or history, but demonstrated a strong mathematical mind and both fascination and aptitude for his uncle's profession, the law. While John Mercer was a theoretician, however, Andrew Rutledge favored the practical application of the discipline.

  Law was a respected gentleman's calling in genteel Charles Town, the most culturally British city in America. "It was said that if a man who had been to England appeared on the streets of Boston or Philadelphia he would be pointed out and people would turn to look at him, whereas the only man people would turn to look at in Charles Town was the one who had not been to England."6

  Charles Town was also the wealthiest city in America, with at least four men whose fortunes exceeded any in the North. Pretenders to gentry as they were, the South Carolina "first families"—the Mamgaults, the Laurenses, and the Pinckneys—lived by a code that was almost a caricature of the British upper classes.7 Men did no manual labor, did not
speak badly of women, and always kept their word. They did not smoke or utter profanities. (Drinking, however, often in copious amounts, was permitted.) The best families had country plantations set on thousands of acres and large, three-story houses surrounded by walled gardens in Charles Town's best neighborhoods. They ate from fine china, drank from crystal, had been to Oxford or Cambridge for their educations, and dressed in the latest London fashions.

  And, of course, they all owned slaves—lots and lots of slaves. Planters had game cooks, vegetable cooks, servers, butlers, coachmen, footmen, maids of every type, houseboys, body servants (who were allowed to sleep on the floor at the foot of the master's bed), and, in the country, lowly field hands. Almost every manual task, from candle making to smithing, was performed by a slave. In the low country near the Atlantic coast where the plantations were clustered, the black population was at least double and, in some sections, six times that of whites. In Georgetown parish, up the coast from Charles Town, slaves made up an incredible 9 0 percent of the population when the Revolution began.8 Charles Town itself was the low country's hub, and in the townhouses there was a strict rule that only between ten and twenty slaves should be kept. More than twenty and the owner risked the sin of ostentation; less than ten, the greater sin of poverty.

  For all their affluence, proper South Carolina gentlemen almost never handled cash. Everything was done on credit, barter, by bank draft, or, most often, on a handshake. The only time a gentleman put his hand in his pocket was in a tavern. But the system was as merciless as it was genteel. A deterioration of fortune, a whiff of economic downturn, and a family could be excised from society like a dead limb sawed off a tree. The South Carolina elite were so snobbishly arrogant that even British aristocrats found them insufferable.