Slave Nation

by Alfred W. Blumrosen

  To further both these concerns, they needed to determine how their own leaders, and those in other colonies, felt about slavery, and to measure the strength of these leaders’ support for Britain. Both objectives could be achieved by securing a resolution from the House of Burgesses, the lower house of the Virginia legislature, calling on all the colonies to create “committees of correspondence” to communicate with each other concerning British activities unfriendly to colonial interests. Richard Henry Lee, one of the “younger men” who would become prominent in the coming revolutionary period, characterized the measure as “leading to that union, and perfect understanding of each other, on which the political salvation of America so eminently depends.”19

  According to Jefferson’s recollection:

  Not thinking our old and leading members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required, Mr. Henry, R. H. Lee, Francis L. Lee, Mr. Carr, and myself agreed to meet in the evening in a private room of the Raleigh to consult on the state of things.…We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures was that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, to produce an unity of action: and for this purpose that a committee of correspondence in each colony would be the best instrument for intercommunication: and that their first measure would probably be to propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place, who should be charged with the direction of the measures which should be taken by all.20

  Some of these younger members were conflicted about the morality—but not the necessity—of the maintenance of slavery. Jefferson would later elegantly condemn slavery in a passage of the Declaration of Independence that was deleted by Congress.21 Much later, in his famous letter to Edward Coles in 1814, Jefferson concluded that public sentiment indicated “an apathy to every hope” that the younger generation “would have sympathized with oppression wherever found.”22 Richard Henry Lee’s initial speech to the Burgesses in 1759 had criticized slavery for weakening the energies of white Virginians. The importation of slaves “has been and will be attended with effects dangerous both to our political and moral interests.” Other colonies were outmatching Virginia because,

  With their whites, they import arts and agriculture, while we, with our blacks, exclude both...they are deprived, forever deprived, of all the comfort of life, and to be made the most wretched of the human kind.23

  Patrick Henry had also bemoaned slavery, while acknowledging its necessity. In Virginia, he wrote,

  When the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision…we find men, professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty.…Would anyone think I am master of slaves of my own purchase!…I am drawn along by the general inconveniences of living without them, I will not, I cannot, justify it.24

  They all knew that protecting slavery was essential to the political, social, and economic life of Virginia, and to their personal political futures.

  They suppressed what negative feelings they may have had about slavery and gave free rein to their desires for independence to protect it. Any impulse to move to end slavery was outweighed by their fears, their guilt, and their need to maintain slavery as well as their desire for independence that had been kindled during the taxation issues of the 1760s and nurtured by British incursions into colonial self-government.

  In fact, they were all in a position similar to Jefferson’s, as explained by economic historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick:

  [Jefferson] would never, in fact, be anything but an insider. His rise was swift and smooth as leaders of the provincial elite quickly recognized his abilities and in effect brought him into the ruling group while still in his mid-twenties....The coercions of this insidership were undoubtedly considerable. The system had given him everything he could have asked for: wealth, love and a profitable marriage, social position, the fullest opportunity to engage his talents, and general recognition. He was thus allowed the luxury of determining which of these things he valued most, and which least, without having to give up any of them. Such being the case, the likelihood of his offering a basic challenge to that system, whatever the defects he might decide needed remedying, was not very great. He might suppose himself viewing it with detachment, but he would never do so from the outside.25

  Jefferson’s sophistry, in his “Summary View” published in 1774, that the slave trade must be eliminated before slavery could be abolished, must be understood as going as far publicly toward restricting slavery as he thought possible without risking his political influence.26 But his conclusion was illogical. As historian Duncan MacLeod noted pithily: “It was slavery which supported the slave trade and not the converse.”27

  Once the younger members were satisfied with their draft, they sounded out some of the senior leaders before proposing it. Jefferson recalled how the senior members had heckled Richard Bland, one of the most respected of Virginia’s elder statesmen, when he proposed a modest easing of the prohibition on manumission of slaves.28 Jefferson, as pictured by historian Joseph Ellis, did not like personal conflicts or confrontations. His forte was—among other things—in working out wide ranging theories and expressing them brilliantly in his writing. Ellis writes:

  What his critics took to be hypocrisy was not really that at all. In some cases it was the desire to please different constituencies, to avoid conflict with colleagues. In other cases it was an orchestration of his internal voice, to avoid conflict with himself. Both the external and internal diplomacy grew out of his deep distaste for sharp disagreement and his bedrock belief that harmony was nature’s way of signaling the arrival of truth. More self-deception than calculated hypocrisy, it was nonetheless a disconcerting form of psychological agility that would make it possible for Jefferson to walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello thinking about mankind’s brilliant prospects without any sense of contradiction.29

  From their associations with the senior leaders, the younger members had reason to believe that their concerns for the preservation of Virginia’s slave system would override the older members’ attachment to the empire.

  Tobacco cultivation had worn out many acres of Virginia so much that experiments in planting wheat had already been undertaken by George Washington, among others. Wheat required fewer slaves than tobacco. The cultivation of tobacco or wheat was easier than the cultivation of sugar or rice. As a result, in Virginia, slaves multiplied. In the rice fields of South Carolina, slaves died early, and had to be “replenished.” West Indian planters also required constant supplies of “new” slaves as the working conditions on the sugar plantations caused slaves to die young, and consequently not reproduce. In Virginia, and most of the South except South Carolina and Georgia, the life of the slave was “less onerous”; slaves did reproduce and increased their population.30

  Historian Edmund Morgan explains:

  In Virginia not only had the rate of mortality from disease gone down, but the less strenuous work of cultivating tobacco, as opposed to sugar, enabled slaves to retain their health and multiply. To make a profit, sugar planters worked their slaves to death; tobacco planters did not have to.31

  Some Virginia planters found themselves with surplus slaves to sell to other colonies; others began to “breed” slaves for sale. Cutting off further foreign importation of slaves would enhance the value of the Virginians’ slaves. Thus Virginia could oppose the international slave trade while combining conscience and economics. The elimination of the trade would increase the value of the existing slaves and reduce the risk of severe slave over-population, which might threaten slave revolts. In addition, domestic and domesticated slaves were more valuable because they knew the language, work habits, and plantation customs, and were considered more peaceable and better security risks. Economic historian James A. Henretta identified the parallel increase in the
price of slaves and the value of land in Virginia between 1750 and 1776.32

  The leading slave holders had joined in a plea to the king in 1772 to ban foreign traffic in slaves, but had been rebuffed by the British government.33 The petition read in part:

  The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered a trade of great inhumanity, and under its present encouragement we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very existence of Your Majesty’s American dominions.34

  Because Virginia advocated abolition of the international slave trade, it has sometimes been considered an advocate for the abolition of slavery itself. This was George Bancroft’s view in his 1854 History of the United States. In discussing the Virginia petition to the king to abolish the trade in 1772, he states:

  In this manner Virginia led the host, who alike condemned slavery and opposed the slave trade. Thousands in Maryland, and in New Jersey, were ready to adopt a similar Petition; so were the legislatures of North Carolina, of Pennsylvania, of New York. Massachusetts, in its towns and in its legislature, unceasingly combated the conditions as well as the sale of slaves. There was no jealousy among one another in the strife against the crying evil. Virginia harmonized all opinions, and represented the moral sentiment and policy of them all.35 (emphasis added)

  Bancroft ignored the difference between abolishing slavery and abolishing the slave trade. He was also wrong in suggesting that the South was united behind Virginia’s desire to end the importation of slaves.36 South Carolina and Georgia imported slaves into the nineteenth century. The international slave trade was as necessary for them as for the West Indian planters.

  After the younger members had prepared the groundwork for the resolution for the committees of correspondence, it was presented to the House of Burgesses controlled by the senior members who dominated Virginia’s political landscape. By March 12, 1773, these men—all of whom had prospered under British rule— were prepared to take the serious step of uniting the colonies to oppose British actions that offended their interests. The Somerset decision, with its implications for southern slavery, had been the most recent and profound event that led them to assert publicly that, since the Stamp Act of 1765, the British government had demonstrated a pattern of disregard of colonial interests.

  These senior members were listed first among those to serve on the committee of correspondence. The first three men named in the resolution constituting the committee— Peyton Randolph, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Richard Bland—were wealthy planters and staunch supporters of slavery.37 They had been considered both social and political friends of the governor and no friend of radical talk during the tax crises with Britain of the preceeding years, although they had cautiously supported the boycotts of that time.

  The president of the House of Burgesses, Peyton Randolph, was a member (as was Jefferson’s mother) of the historic Randolph family, which had enormous interests in Virginia. Robert Carter Nicholas was a member of two of the most important families in Virginia history. He was so sensitive to the need to protect slavery that he led the filibuster against George Mason’s draft Bill of Rights for Virginia in 1776, on the grounds that it might incite slave revolts by suggesting that slaves might have rights.38 Richard Bland was a gentleman-planter-lawyer whose performance in public affairs was said to be “equaled by few and surpassed by no Virginians of the mid-eighteenth century.”39

  The other members in the order named in the resolution were: Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick Henry, Dudley Digges, Dabney Carr, Archibald Cary, and Thomas Jefferson. All these men were slaveholders and lawyers—the representatives who dominated the Virginia House of Burgesses for at least half a century.40

  Edmund Pendleton was a well-respected Virginia lawyer and judge who was much more cautious in moving toward independence than others like Patrick Henry, whom Pendleton considered rash. As a judge during the Stamp Act crisis, Pendleton carefully balanced his responsibilities by keeping his court open while using documents that did not require stamps in order to not violate the Act’s requirements. In 1775, he successfully discouraged Virginia militia from seeking to recover gunpowder that had been moved to a ship by Lord Dunmore.41 Pendleton did not believe the Virginia militia was equipped to begin a revolution that he did not yet support. Yet Pendleton’s name appeared high on the list of members in a resolution that he knew would draw the wrath of the Board of Trade in London, which later called the resolution “a measure of a most dangerous tendency and effect.”42

  When Patrick Henry, in March of 1775, moved that “this colony be immediately put into a posture of defense” to prepare for a war that was—in his view—already underway (the celebrated “liberty or death” speech), Pendleton opposed the motion.43 It was adopted, however, and Pendleton was placed on the committee to organize the defense. He was included to assure that all shades of opinion would be represented and because he was one of “the men of business to whom Virginia turned when the decision had been made and trusted leaders were needed to carry it out.”44

  This comment appears to explain Pendleton’s and the others’ inclusion as members of the committee of correspondence in 1773, long before the antagonism toward Britain had hardened into revolt. Despite his caution and hesitation to cut ties with Britain, Pendleton permitted himself to be included, along with Patrick Henry, on a “dangerous” committee of correspondence, demonstrating his belief that the vital interests of Virginia were at stake. This analysis also applies to Richard Bland, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Benjamin Harrison, whose names appear first in the resolution.

  The publication of the resolution upset the British Board of Trade because it prepared the colonies to act in concert. Historian Theodore Draper explains:

  The committees of correspondence transformed the struggle for power from agitation to organization. They were a radical innovation in the colonial struggle, extralegal if not illegal....Governors could and did dismiss or refuse to convene councils and assemblies, but they had no authority over committees of correspondence, which, in effect, existed outside the British imperial system. They again belied the old British assumption that the colonies were not to be feared because they were so diverse that they could not act together. From 1773 on, the colonies were prepared to meet any British threat with organized, collective opposition.45

  Before the year was out, Samuel Adams and friends in Massachusetts—along with others in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—would demonstrate how “collective opposition” worked.

  Just as the opinion in the Somerset case helped conservative Virginians to make a serious move toward revolution in March of 1773, the same judgment was being made in Massachusetts concerning a totally different issue. Within three weeks of Virginia’s resolution to establish intercolonial committees of correspondence, in far-off Boston letters written by Thomas Hutchinson in 1769 when he was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts began to circulate. These letters were written to Thomas Whately, a British friend of Hutchinson. Whately had been secretary to Lord Grenville, who had presided over the adoption of the Stamp Act in 1765.

  These letters came into the possession of Benjamin Franklin in 1772 after Whately died. In December, he sent them to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts. Franklin was at that time the agent for Massachusetts in Britain. He asked that they not be printed, but shown to important Massachusetts political figures. It was surely too much for Franklin to expect they would not see the light of day.

  Franklin said his objective was to demonstrate that the difficulties with Britain were the result of Hutchinson and other individual colonists’ despicable policies of secretly seeking to weaken colonial liberties, rather than the fault of the British government.46 This explanation sounds suspiciously like a Franklin satire, or else a desire to placate both the Massachusetts patriots and the British government at the same time. The letters were incriminating to Massachusetts eyes because they urged a restri
ction on colonial liberties. Here is a sample:

  This is most certainly a crisis. I really wish that there may not have been the least degree of severity, beyond what was absolutely necessary to maintain, I think I may say this to you, the dependence which a colony ought to have upon the parent state, but if no measures shall have been taken to secure this dependence or nothing more than some Declaratory Acts or resolves, it is all over with us. The friends of government will be utterly disheartened and the friends of anarchy will be afraid of nothing, be it ever so extravagant.

  I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony three thousand miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony, when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connection with the parent state should be broken for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.47

  Samuel Adams generated a demand that the papers be published, which they were, in June of 1773. The content of these letters led Adams, and other patriots, perhaps including Franklin, to conclude that there was a conspiracy between Hutchinson and others with the British to restrict the Massachusetts colonials’ exercise of their rights as Englishmen. If so, the time to move toward independence was at hand. This is the conclusion of historian John Ferling: