Although some blacks were landowners and even held slaves themselves, color prejudice was nothing new to the colony. Differences of skin color and language were obvious and remarked on. Traders brought stories back from Africa that suggested there were even more profound differences between Africans and Europeans, leading to fantastical distortions: Thomas Jefferson, for example, thought that orangutans were sexually attracted to black women. But despite color prejudice, there were sexual liaisons, marriages, and other associations across the color line. Notes historian Edmund S. Morgan, it was “common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon’s Rebellion one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty Negroes and twenty English servants.”
The colony’s rulers worried about the prospect of rebellious unity across racial lines. After Bacon’s Rebellion, they were determined to protect their power, wealth, and privilege from similar challenges, and African slavery stabilized their ability to extract tobacco wealth from the colony while giving even the poorest, most exploited “white” an illusory sense of having a piece of the new American pie.
Well before Bacon’s Rebellion, though, blacks in Virginia were subjected to degradations and cruelties not inflicted on whites. Disparity in court-ordered punishments for blacks and whites, for example, had begun before and continued after the Punch decision, with blacks sometimes being branded for offenses. More and more blacks were sentenced to a lifetime of bondage. Mixed marriages were outlawed. Court cases increasingly assumed the inferiority of blacks. But as the number of enslaved Africans swelled, fear that they might rebel also grew. In 1680, the Virginia General Assembly was worried enough about the potential danger of black social gatherings to enact a law sharply restricting them. That legislation also made it illegal for any black person to carry any type of weapon or potential weapon; a black person caught carrying a weapon was to be lashed twenty times with a whip. Virginia lawmakers also expressed concern at the possibility of “Christians” being ambushed by runaways and sanctioned whipping and even executing black fugitives from slavery. The 1680 legislation empowered any white person or posse to kill any black escapee resisting recapture:
And it is hereby further enacted by the authority aforesaid that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places … and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority by imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.
Yet this stricter legislation did not ease fear of black rebellion. In 1719, Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood warned the colony’s rulers against deceiving themselves into believing that language differences among enslaved Africans would prevent rebellion. “Freedom,” the governor said, “wears a cap which can, without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake of[f] the fetters of slavery.” By 1723 racial oppression had been completely codified in Virginia. The law permitted the punishment of slaves by amputation or death for almost any reason. Blacks’ voting rights were taken away. Enslaved or free, no black person could hold any public office or bear witness against any white person. Gun law was reinforced, and it became illegal for any black person to possess “any gun, powder, shot, or any club, or any other weapon whatsoever, offensive or defensive.” And any black person who raised a hand against a white person, for any reason, was subject to a public whipping of thirty lashes.
Despite these harsh laws, however, whites’ fear was not eased. The number of blacks in the colony was growing. Rebellions in Brazil, Jamaica, and other Caribbean and South American colonies of England, France, and Spain were erupting regularly. In 1736 William Byrd II, who was a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council and former deputy governor of Virginia, eyed rebellions in Jamaica and warned,
We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms [emphasis added], and these numbers increase every day, as well by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man exasperated by a desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline [sic] kindle a servile war … and tinge our rivers wide as they are with blood.
Byrd’s analogy was telling; Lucius Sergius Catilina, also known as “Catiline,” was a Roman politician of the first century BC best known for his failed conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic. And the governor’s worry and warning was clear: given the opportunity, oppressed blacks might bring down the entire white power structure in Virginia.
As the colonial era gave way to the early Republic, the position of black people in America only worsened. Like most of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson believed that protecting the right of free men to bear arms would help secure the nation’s liberty by safeguarding its people from tyrannical government. Ironically, slavery—and the laws protecting it—arguably made Africans the people most tyrannized by government, notwithstanding the subjugation of Native Americans (some of whom were enslaved too).
Jefferson did not consider black people human beings with the rights of free men. He drafted the Declaration of Independence but did not intend to include blacks among those people “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” He was a slave owner, after all; Jefferson held almost two hundred men, women, and children in chattel bondage, and though occasionally worrying aloud about the morality and consequences of slavery, he never gave up his supposed right to own and work these human beings as though they were farm animals or to sell them like livestock whenever he felt it necessary. That Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by an enslaved black person underscores both his privilege and his hypocrisy.
Well aware that slavery was his new nation’s great founding contradiction, Jefferson awkwardly separated the oppression and injustice of slavery from his idealistic American project of freedom and liberty. Africans had been enslaved because they were inferior, he rationalized, but for his entire life he was dogged by fear that they might revolt against their slavery or, if freed, might seek revenge against those who had enslaved them. “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” he asked in an 1821 exchange of letters with John Adams, like Jefferson a founder and former president. If slavery were outlawed, he and others worried, freed slaves would have the right to bear arms; given their numbers they might also seek and gain political influence and power, especially in Jefferson’s beloved South. This concern is essential for understanding the roots of white southern resistance to civil rights. For example, in 1857 the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of Dred Scott, a slave who, after he was taken by his owner to a free state, sued in court for his freedom. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney ruled that constitutional rights could not be given to black people because “It would give to persons of the negro race … the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects; [the right] to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went [emphasis added] … endangering the peace and safety of the state.”
Jefferson’s racism prevented him from believing that black people could meaningfully participate in the society he envisioned or that they could be equals to white citizens. And given slavery’s remorseless exploitation and cruelty, it is easy to understand his fear that free Africans might seek revenge. During a 1961 symposium—135 years after Jefferson’s death in 1826—author James Baldwin could still pronounce, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
Adams’s response to Jefferson’s letter revealed his sense of personal and political practicality and contrasted his own fear and caution with the antislavery zeal of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and Methodist Church cofounder John Wesley: I can’t deal with this problem
was the attitude he manifested in his reply to Jefferson:
If I was as drunk with enthusiasm as Swedenborg and Wesley, I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object: I must leave it to you.
Adams, who lived far away from the plantation South in Massachusetts, could opt out of worrying about the prospect and danger of black rebellion, but Jefferson in Virginia could not. He and other planters across the South were dependent on a growing enslaved population for the wealth they gained from tobacco, rice, sugar, indigo, and cotton. They lived with the ever-present threat of rebellions that might destroy their wealthy and—particularly in Jefferson’s case—extravagant lifestyle, a lifestyle enabled by the very slave labor that might someday undo it.
The fears of Jefferson and others in the slavocracy had intensified at the beginning of the fight for liberty from England. Deleted paragraphs in Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence blame George III for slavery in England’s colonies—“this assemblage of horrors,” as Jefferson denounced it. He wrote the draft without irony or self-examination, acknowledging that enslaved Africans were “people” whose freedom had been taken away through the criminal use of force and violence. At the same time, he excoriated King George for offering slaves their freedom in exchange for joining England’s side in its war against American patriots. “He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us,” Jefferson fumed, “and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people [emphasis added], with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” South Carolina and Georgia delegates to the Continental Congress did not want to hear anything about Africans being “people” and forced Jefferson to remove these words.
The final draft of the Declaration contains just a single reference to slavery. Brief and indirect, it nevertheless clearly reflects fear of slave rebellion, charging that King George “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” This complaint is the last of twenty-seven leveled against the English king, but the fear of slave rebellion played an outsized part in the decision of many American colonists in the South to turn against the British Crown. The frightening possibility of slaves joining the British helped convince the southern plantocracy that supporting American independence was necessary, despite the disturbing implications the Revolution’s driving political ideals of universal liberty held for the institution of slavery.
The independence movement’s egalitarian rhetoric was not lost on those who were enslaved. They agreed with the Revolution’s basic premise and promise: freedom is a God-given human right. In 1800 slaves led by Gabriel Prosser would attempt an insurrection in Richmond, Virginia. The rebellion failed, but before being sentenced to death, one of the rebels proclaimed, while standing in chains before a judge, “I have nothing more to offer than what General [George] Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.” This important commingling of Afro-American desire for freedom, willingness to sacrifice to gain it, and Euro-American idealism as defined by the eighteenth-century U.S. independence movement continues to be underappreciated, even though it reverberated across the centuries and into the twentieth century’s southern freedom rights struggle. In 1962, for example, Diane Nash—a twenty-three-year-old civil rights activist then six months pregnant with her first child—was on trial in Jackson, Mississippi, for training high school students to engage in nonviolent protests. The judge offered her two choices: pay a fine or be jailed for two years. She chose jail. “[My] child will be a black child born in Mississippi, and thus whether I am in jail or not, he will be born in prison… . If I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free,” she told the judge. Nash eventually served ten days in jail because she refused to move from the white side of the courtroom.
Blacks had served in northern militia units in the decades before the Revolutionary War, especially during the French and Indian War, and some blacks had been active in the agitation leading up to the Revolutionary War itself. Black Minutemen fought in the Battle of Lexington and in the Battle of Bunker Hill. A black man, Crispus Attucks, was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. Many blacks enslaved in the South, on the other hand, were willing to take a chance with the British. Hundreds joined the British Army’s Ethiopian Regiment after the Earl of Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor, proclaimed freedom for all rebel-owned slaves who joined the British war effort. Jefferson put the number of Virginia slaves who ran away to British lines at 30,000 (although this may have been an exaggeration on his part); some of them fled from his own plantation. Thousands more enslaved men and women in South Carolina and Georgia also fled to the British.
Blacks in America, like whites, were divided by the Revolutionary War. By the end of the war about 5,000 blacks had fought or served in some capacity on the side of the colonial revolutionists. In Boston, an all-black military company called the Bucks of America was celebrated at the end of the conflict. The company was formed in Boston, but little more is known about them. Their commander, Colonel Samuel Middleton, was the only black commissioned officer in the Continental Army, and he did not hesitate to use weapons when necessary to defend his principles. By one account, when a group of young white Bostonians tried to disrupt an annual, all-black abolitionist rally on Boston Common, Middleton charged out onto the street, leveled his musket at the unruly whites, and commanded them to leave. They did.
On the other side of the battle lines, about 1,000 black men and women had served with the British. A little more than half were soldiers; the rest were cooks and laborers. More would have signed up if the British had permitted them to do so, but Dunmore’s order never became general policy. Some black runaways made out better with the British than they would have with the American revolutionists, even though the British lost. At the end of the war, about 3,000 black loyalists were on the British ships that left New York for the Caribbean, Canada, and England.
The new American government, although it was “conceived in liberty,” did not abolish slavery. For Jefferson and other slavers, keeping firearms out of the hands of slaves continued to be an urgent matter of personal and public safety. Their fear was justified, as southern history is replete with slave rebellions. Historian Herbert Aptheker has estimated that between 1619 and 1865 more than 250 rebellions by slaves and indentured servants occurred in the United States. Among the most widely known are those of Denmark Vesey, a South Carolina freedman, who planned a slave rebellion in 1822, and Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Although these revolts failed to gain freedom for blacks, they helped germinate a tradition of organized resistance that was the taproot of the modern freedom struggle. Enslaved or free, most black people admired the leaders of slave revolts, people such as Prosser, Turner, and Vesey, and considered them heroes and liberators. And slave revolts were not limited to U.S. soil; nearby Haiti’s emergence as an independent black republic after the November 18, 1803, Battle of Vertières, in which rebels defeated some of Napoleon’s best expeditionary troops, became both a cause for white nightmares in the new United States and a source of black hope, pride, and inspiration for resistance and rebellion throughout the New World.
Slavery persisted for nearly a century after the American Revolution, and enslaved blacks continued to find ways to fight for freedom. Although most did not pick up weapons and engage in armed rebellion, many resisted slavery in subtler and less dangerous ways, such as engaging in work slowdowns, pretending to be sick, or deliberately breaking tools and committing other small acts of sabotage. The last was tol
erated by owners and overseers with minimal if any punishment because some slaves purposefully cultivated the notion of black ineptitude and lack of intelligence. Deception—the grin, the shuffle, and the head scratch—was a weapon sometimes as effective as the gun.
Dangerous, angry Negroes hid in plain sight, yet flight, rather than confrontation, was perhaps the most frequently used form of resistance. Escape cost planters money, for slaves were valuable property. And unlike the small Caribbean islands, where slaves worked on the sugar plantations, the North American mainland was vast. It was possible for a slave, even for groups of runaway slaves, to follow river routes and secret trails through swamp and forest to states or territories where slavery was not permitted. Slave intelligence networks ran from the plantation owner’s “big” house to the fields, from plantation to plantation, and even beyond the slave states altogether. One escaped slave attempted to marry in Cincinnati, Ohio (a free state). His church’s congregation accused him of trying to commit bigamy because they knew he had left behind—“deserted,” they said—a wife who was still enslaved in New Orleans. They demanded that he get a release from her in writing. He was able to contact his wife through a waterman who regularly traveled to New Orleans and was part of a black underground communications network. The waterman brought back to Cincinnati a release marked with his wife’s X, and the church then approved the new marriage.
Historian Corey D. B. Walker notes that, at a more sophisticated level, black fraternal associations nurtured would-be liberators. He specifically points to Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, and suggests that black Freemasonry, with its highly organized network of lodges, secrecy, and ritual “similar to the Exodus narrative,” gave African Americans “a system and a language” in the American context that helped generate “ideas, ideals and actions for freedom.” These associations engaged in more than rituals: they were spaces in which cultural and political ideas were exchanged. Haitians, after winning their own fight for freedom, were especially important in establishing Freemason lodges along the U.S. East Coast. The Haitian presence in the Masonic network in the new United States compares to the shadowy Committees of Correspondence formed on the eve of the American Revolution to coordinate planned rebellion. So too the network of Freemason lodges facilitated planning and communication among Gabriel and his freedom-seeking plotters. It is one of the reasons some white Americans felt that blacks in the United States were “infected by Haiti.”
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