Like Virginia, the other Southern states and territories—Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi—continued to rely on mostly appointed local officials with the legislatures very much in control of government. Although the big slaveholding planters did not dominate all the political offices in these states, they set the tone for their societies; unlike in the North, where lawyers tended to dominate officeholding, many of the officeholders in these Southern and Southwestern states were themselves slaveholding farmers, with a vested interest in the institution of slavery.
That institution tended to create a different economy, society, politics, and culture than the North. While the North was coming to value labor as fit for all social ranks, much of the white population of the South was becoming more and more contemptuous of work and desirous of acquiring the leisure that slavery seemed to offer. Indeed, so great was the white cult of indolence that some Southerners began to worry about the discrepancy between an industrious North and a lethargic South. “Where there is Negro slavery,” one concerned Virginian told Madison, “there will be laziness, carelessness, and wastefulness,” not as much among the slaves as among the white masters. This Virginian even claimed that “our intelligent Negroes are far superior in mind, morals and manners than those who are placed in authority over them.”54
Slavery and the Southern economy tended to breed deference. Not only did the wealthy slaveholding planters’ management of the overseas marketing of the staple crop, whether cotton or tobacco, help to reinforce a social hierarchy of patrons and clients, but ultimately, and more important, their patriarchal system of slavery sustained that hierarchy. The commercial institutions that were springing up in the North had no counterparts in the Southern states. The South contained fewer turnpikes, fewer canals, fewer banks, fewer corporations, and fewer issuers of paper money than the North. Slavery even perversely affected the tax system and other public policies in the South. The Southern legislatures taxed their citizens much less heavily and spent much less on education and social services than did the legislatures of the North. “Slavery,” as one historian has said, “had profoundly antidemocratic effects on American politics.” The Southern planters could not afford to allow non-slaveholding majorities in their states to burden their peculiar “species of property,” and they used their disproportionate representation in their state legislatures to protect themselves. For example, even though slaves made up only 16 percent of Kentucky’s population, the minority of slaveholders in the state were able to write into Kentucky’s 1792 constitution the nation’s first explicit protection of slavery, declaring that “the legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owners.”55
In the early Republic North and South may have been both American and republican, both professing a similar rhetoric of liberty and popular government, but below the surface they were fast becoming different places—one coming to value common labor as the supreme human activity, the other continuing to think of labor in traditional terms as mean and despicable and fit only for slaves.
AS THE SECTIONS gradually grew apart, each began expressing increasing frustration with the other, aggravating an antagonism that had been present from the beginning of the Revolution. Northerners, especially New England Federalists, began to complain about what they saw as unjustified Southern dominance of the federal government. They focused on the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the levying of direct taxes and for assessing representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Since the federal government had seldom directly taxed its citizens and was unlikely to do so very often, representation became the main issue people cared about.
In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris had attacked the three-fifths clause as an unjust support for slavery, one that gave the slave states an incentive to import more slaves. But the Convention had overwhelmingly rejected Morris’s proposal that the slaves not be counted at all, with only New Jersey voting for it. Once that proposal was defeated, the most plausible alternative to the three-fifths clause was to count the slaves as five-fifths, that is, as full persons, which would have given the slaveholding South even more political strength. But that alternative, suggested by both James Madison and John Rutledge, went nowhere. Caught between not counting the slaves at all and counting them fully, the Convention wrote the three-fifths compromise into the Constitution.
In 1787–1788 most Northern Federalists like Rufus King accepted the three-fifths compromise as the necessary price to be paid to keep the South in the Union. But with the rise of the Republican opposition in the 1790s climaxing with the election of Jefferson and a Republican Congress in 1800, the Federalists began to change their minds. They realized only too well that the Jeffersonian Republican party was Southern based and was solidly dependent on Southern slaveholding leadership. The fact that Jefferson won the election of 1800 with 82 percent of the electoral vote of the slave states and only 27 percent of the Northern states reinforced the Federalists’ fear that the South was taking over the nation; indeed, the Federalists came to believe that their displacement from the national government was due almost entirely to the overrepresentation of the South in Congress and the Electoral College. Federalists like Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state, began referring to Jefferson as the “Negro President” and began urging that the Constitution be amended to end this Southern dominance.56
Thus was born the idea of the “slave power” that was unfairly usurping control of the national government from the free states.57 The fact that Pickering and other Federalists tended to lump the free middle states, especially Pennsylvania, in with the Southern states as part of the Negro-based Republican takeover of the government reduces somewhat the cogency of their argument. But that may be less important than the politics of the matter. The Federalists needed an issue to combat the victorious Republicans, and their principled stand against slavery was the most effective means of mobilizing opposition to the Republicans in the North—at least until Jefferson in 1807 tried his disastrous experiment with the embargo that cut off all overseas trade.
DURING THE COURSE OF THE 1790S the earlier enthusiasm of those in the Upper South to liberalize their society and to create a looser slave regime began to dissipate. Probably nothing did more to diminish the initial optimism of many whites in Virginia about the end of slavery than the black rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion began in 1790 with an uprising of free coloreds, a diverse group who numbered about thirty thousand and included French-educated planters, tradesmen, artisans, and small landowners. The insurgents had been infected with French revolutionary principles and now demanded equality with whites. The whites numbered about forty thousand, but they were bitterly divided between the grands blancs and the disorderly and marginalized petits blancs. Beneath the whites and the free coloreds were five hundred thousand African slaves.
Neither the free coloreds nor the whites realized the extent to which their clash over equality and the principles of the French Revolution was affecting the slaves. In August 1791 the slaves on the northern plains rose up, soon becoming a force of twelve thousand that began killing whites and destroying plantations. Brutal retaliation by the whites did not stop growing numbers of slaves from deserting the plantations. Confronted with this rebellion from below, officials in France belatedly sought to forge an alliance between the whites and the free coloreds and sent six thousand troops to put down the slave rebellion. But the whites and free coloreds were so divided by factions that the fighting became worse and eventually spilled over into the Spanish portion of Hispaniola (the present-day Dominican Republic). With the end of the French monarchy and the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, English forces invaded the island and soon became entangled in the brutal racial wars. Although the great
ex-slave leader of the revolt François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture tried to preserve a multi-racial society, he could not contain the chaos that spiraled into what became the rebellion’s eventual goal of eliminating from the island both slavery and whites.
Most Americans, including slaves, knew what was taking place in Saint-Domingue. Between 1791 and 1804 the American press carried regular reports of atrocities on the island. Moreover, thousands of refugees, both white and black, fled from the chaos, many of them to the United States, especially to the cities of Charleston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia. By 1795 as many as twelve thousand Dominguan slaves had entered the United States, bringing with them knowledge that slaves in the New World were capable of overthrowing white rule. Governor Charles Pinckney of South Carolina was not alone in realizing “that the day will arrive when [the Southern states] may be exposed to the same insurrection.”58
Frightened of the contagion of this West Indian slave rebellion, most Southern states, but not Virginia, barred Dominguan slaves from entry. Consequently, many of them ended up in Virginia and throughout the decade of the 1790s stimulated wild fears of slave insurrections in the state. In June 1793 John Randolph reported overhearing two slaves planning “to kill the white people.” When one of the slaves expressed skepticism about the plan, the other reminded him “how the blacks has kill’d the whites in the French Island . . . a little while ago.” News of the rebellion in Saint-Domingue was everywhere, and the island could not help becoming a symbol of black liberation. Throughout the 1790s major slave conspiracies were uncovered in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Louisiana, and slave rebellions actually broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curaçao, and Grenada. As Federalist Rufus King pointed out, “the example upon our slaves in the Southern states” was obvious.59
During the 1790s talk of slave insurrections in the United States became increasingly prevalent—eroding whatever liberal feelings the Upper South hitherto had toward the ending of slavery. By the end of the decade, as one Virginia slaveholder put it, “the emancipation fume has long evaporated and not a word is now said about it.”60
IN 1800 WHAT THE VIRGINIAN SLAVEHOLDERS had long dreaded finally arrived—a widespread conspiracy among their slaves to rise up and abolish slavery. In the area around Richmond a group of artisan-slaves enjoyed a much greater degree of liberty and mobility than they had in the past. Slaves with skills were often able to hire themselves out where needed, pay their masters a share of their wages, and thus earn some money for themselves. These slave-artisans often mingled with both free-black and white artisans in a shadowy interracial underworld that floated between freedom and slavery. The twenty-four-year-old blacksmith Gabriel, owned by planter Thomas Prosser of Henrico County, in which Richmond was located, participated in this borderland world in which heady talk of liberty and natural rights was increasingly common. Already convicted and branded for fighting with a white man, Gabriel was on fire to destroy the system of slavery. He was not alone: as one of the black rebels, Jack Ditcher, declared, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.”61
The timing of the conspirators was influenced by the explosive atmosphere of 1799–1800 when the Federalists and Republicans seemed to many to be on the verge of civil war. The Federalists in Virginia, who were mostly merchants and bankers confined to the thriving commercial cities of Richmond, Norfolk, and Fredericksburg, predicted that a Jefferson victory in the election of 1800 would lead to a liberation of the slaves, or worse, a slave insurrection. At the same time, the artisans in the towns, like their brethren in the North, were advocating a more equitable distribution of wealth and were attacking the Federalists for being rich drones who lived off of other men’s labor. Amidst these kinds of charges and counter-charges with predictions of violence and armies clashing, Gabriel and other slave artisans thought that their slave insurrection would become part of a larger upheaval in Virginia and, perhaps, even in the nation.
Gabriel and his conspirators envisioned not simply a slave revolt but a republican revolution against rich merchants that would transform Virginia society. They believed that “the poor white people” and the “most redoubtable democrats” in Richmond would rise with them in rebellion against the existing order. But if the whites would not join the insurrection, then they would all be killed, with the exception of “Quakers, Methodists, and French people,” since they were “friendly to liberty.”62
Although Gabriel may not have originated the conspiracy, he quickly became its leader. Beginning around April 1800, he and other slave artisans began recruiting rebels in the taverns and religious meetings of Richmond and other towns. Five or six hundred men at least orally agreed to participate in the insurrection. Hoping eventually to have a thousand-strong army, the leaders tried recruiting from the rural plantations with less success than they had among the artisans. The rebels planned everything with military precision. They stole guns, made swords from scythes, and organized their army into three groups that would march on Richmond, the capital, under the banner of “Death or Liberty.” Two of the groups planned to set diversionary fires in the warehouse district, while the main group led by Gabriel would seize the state’s treasury, the magazine where military supplies were stored, and Governor James Monroe. The attack was set for August 30, 1800.
On the appointed day two slaves informed their master of the uprising, and at the same time a torrential rain flooded roads and bridges, making it impossible for the rebels to meet and coordinate their plans. The rebellion was doomed from the start.
At first some whites scoffed at the idea of a massive conspiracy, but as the white militia over the next several weeks hunted down dozens of rebels, white Virginians became more and more terrified as they learned of the scope of the miscarried insurrection. Eventually twenty-seven men, including Gabriel, were tried and hanged for their participation in the conspiracy; others were sold and transported out of the state. Some of the rebels knew only too well how to make the white Virginians squirm. One of them, speaking at his trial, declared, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”63
Governor Monroe thought it “strange” that the slaves should have embarked on “this novel and unexampled enterprise of their own accord.” After all, he said, “their treatment has been more favorable since the revolution,” and because of the end of the slave importations into the state, there were proportionally fewer of them. Unable to understand why the rebellion should have come from those slaves who suffered the fewest restrictions and experienced the greatest taste of liberty, Monroe could only conclude that some outsiders put them up to it.64
Virginia Federalists, eager to make political capital out of the conspiracy, were quick to blame the Republicans for their constant sermonizing on the doctrine of “liberty and equality.” “It has been most imprudently propagated for several years at our tables while our servants were standing behind our chairs. It has been preached from the pulpits, Methodists and Baptists alike without reserve. Democrats have talked it, what else then could we expect except what has happened?” We have learned a lesson, said the Virginia Federalists. “There can be no compromise between liberty and slavery.” We must either abolish slavery or continue it. “If we continue it, it must be restricted, all the vigorous laws must be reenacted which experience has proved necessary to keep it within bounds.. . . If we will keep a ferocious monster within our country, we must keep him in chains.” The two decades of liberalization had to come to an end. Otherwise these Virginians believed they would end up with “the horrors of St. Domingo.”65
The New England Federalists picked up the refrain and taunted the Southern Republicans for having brought their misery upon themselves. “If any thing will correct & bring to repentance old hardened sinners in Jacobinism,” said the Boston Gazette, “it must be an insu
rrection of their slaves .” Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup joked to Rufus King about how the Virginia Republicans “are beginning to feel the happy effects of liberty and equality.”66 Of course, the New England Federalists had little to fear from slave rebellions and were even willing to support the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue as long as it hurt the Jacobinical French. The Adams administration supplied arms to Toussaint and at one point in 1798 actually intervened with naval support on Toussaint’s behalf; it even encouraged the black leader to declare independence from France.
With the end of the Quasi-War with France in 1800 and Jefferson’s election as president, American policy inevitably changed. After Napoleon failed to recover the colony for France in 1803, Haiti, as the black rebels called their new republic, finally became the second independent state of the New World; unlike the United States, Haiti succeeded in ending slavery and proclaiming racial equality at the moment of its independence. Although the United States was usually eager to encourage revolutions and during the nineteenth century was often the first state in the world to extend diplomatic recognition to new republics, in the case of the Haitian republic the nation behaved differently. Not until the Civil War did the United States recognize the Haitian republic.
GABRIEL’S CONSPIRACY was the final straw. The earlier liberal climate was already dissipating; now it definitely had to be eliminated. The planned slave insurrection convinced many Virginians that they had been terribly mistaken in loosening the bonds of slavery in the aftermath of the Revolution. They now sensed that slavery could not easily exist in a society that extolled freedom. They agreed with Federalist critics that too much preaching of liberty and equality undermined the institution of slavery. The South would have to become a very different place from what many of them had envisioned in the 1780 s. The earlier leniency in judging “freedom suits” in Virginia ended, and manumissions in the state rapidly declined. Southerners began reversing their earlier examples of racial mingling. The evangelical Protestant churches ended their practice of mixed congregations. The Southern states began enacting new sets of black codes that resembled later Jim Crow laws, tightening up the institution of slavery and restricting the behavior of free blacks. With the possibility of slaves running away to the free states of the North, despite the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) of the Constitution, the planters of the Upper South could no longer regard truancy with the casualness they had earlier. Free blacks now had to carry papers or wear arm patches affirming their status; of course, this was partly for their own security, but the practices only reemphasized the identity between blackness and slavery.
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