The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

by Taylor, Alan

  Enlistments in the Patriot army lagged, however, for most farmers preferred to stay home to tend their crops. When drafted to serve, some masters sent slaves as substitutes, promising freedom to those who survived the war. Desperate for soldiers, Virginia’s leaders reluctantly accepted the slave substitutes despite the long-standing fear that, although blacks allegedly lacked the courage to fight, it was dangerous to teach them to bear arms. At least 500 Virginia slaves won freedom by serving in the Patriot army.41

  After winning the war, however, Virginians quickly forgot the blacks who had fought for the revolution and fixated instead on those who had fought against it. In the postwar republic, Virginians defined blacks as alien enemies rather than potential citizens. During the 1790s, a French visitor to Virginia noted that “the American people, so excited about their own liberty, don’t consider the liberty of others.” He concluded that the revolution had increased the American contempt for the enslaved: “Doesn’t this imply that it would have been better for the people in slavery if liberty had never been mentioned?” Convinced that they had fought resolutely for liberty, white men disdained slaves as degraded and dishonored by their own failure to win freedom. Jefferson defined his fellow southerners as “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.” Virginians so cherished freedom precisely because they denied it to others, but slaves were keen observers who wanted what their masters enjoyed.42

  Patriarch

  During the revolution, St. George Tucker had advanced into the Virginia elite. Initially, he assisted the war effort as a merchant, smuggling salt and munitions from Bermuda to Virginia. Impressed by his exertions, Patriot leaders commissioned Tucker as a major in the militia. During the last three years of the war, he fought against the British in Virginia and North Carolina. In 1781 the state legislature rewarded Tucker with appointment to the governor’s Council of State: a prestigious and influential position.43

  Although a beneficiary of the revolution, Tucker emulated the colonial great planters who defined the genteel style of high society in Virginia. Gentility required wealth, education, and good manners. Tucker had acquired polish and charm as a boy in Bermuda, and he received a fine education in the classics, natural history, and law at college in Virginia. His trading generated a little wealth, and a fortunate marriage provided the rest. In 1777, while attending church in Williamsburg, he met Frances Bland Randolph, aged twenty-five, the lovely and charismatic daughter of one elite family (Bland) and the widow of another (Randolph). A year later, their marriage endowed Tucker with many slaves and three plantations: Bizarre in Prince Edward County, Matoax in Chesterfield County, and Roanoke in Charlotte County. But the lands and slaves were mortgaged to secure a great debt owed to British creditors by her late husband. And, per the terms of his will, the land, slaves, and debt would pass to her three Randolph children—Richard then aged ten, Theodorick eight, and John six—once they reached legal maturity at twenty-one. In the interim, Tucker enjoyed the prestige and property of a great Virginia planter. Residing at Matoax on a bluff overlooking the Appomattox River, he acquired expensive furniture and dishes, entertained genteel visitors, and raised fine race horses.44

  Already in decline before the revolution, the old elite suffered further losses during the war and still more during the postwar depression, when tobacco prices sagged. The scarce supply of money further deflated the value of land, slaves, and crops. Many planters lacked the funds to repair their properties ravaged by British raids. Meanwhile, the interest on their debts continued to mount. Tucker calculated that during the 1780s “barely one tidewater planter in twenty” made enough to pay the annual interest on his debts. Many old estates collapsed as lawsuits consumed the properties, leaving the losers with only the hollow pride of genteel poverty. A merchant sighed, “We have not only had a revolution in Political government but also in many people’s private circumstances.” Only lawyers and storekeepers seemed able to stay afloat.45

  Struggling as a planter, Tucker resumed his legal practice in 1783. During the hard times of the 1780s, lawyering paid better than did the marketing of crops, for the courts filled with lawsuits brought by creditors against indebted planters. As his practice and fame grew, Tucker shifted away from the dispersed county courts to specialize in the more prestigious and lucrative business of the state courts in Richmond, the state capital after 1780.46

  During Tucker’s prolonged absences on legal business, Frances managed the three plantations and bore four more children—Ann Frances in 1779, Henry St. George in 1780, Theodorick Thomas Tudor in 1782, and Nathaniel Beverley in 1784—who grew up with their three Randolph stepbrothers. “The children are very well, but intolerable noisy and troublesome—it is a hard day’s work to attend to them & the drudgery of the house,” Frances informed Tucker. The pregnancies took their toll on her. In December she wrote her last letter to her again absent husband: “I am yet much disordered but I entreat you not to return till the court rises.” Later that month she gave birth to a daughter named Elizabeth, but Frances never recovered, dying on January 18, 1788.47

  Distraught and overwhelmed by his large family, Tucker sent the three Randolph boys away to boarding schools, and he moved with the younger children to Williamsburg, where he bought and expanded an old house for his new home. During his impressionable years as a student, Tucker had fallen in love with the old colonial capital, although it had become depopulated and dilapidated during the 1780s. At least it lay far from his painful memories at Matoax and closer to his new appointment as a state judge in Richmond. Better still, the new home was within walking distance of his other new post, added in 1790, as a law professor at the College of William and Mary, where he replaced his mentor, George Wythe, who had gone to Richmond to become chancellor of the state’s new court of equity. One of Tucker’s cousins insightfully observed that the inhabitants of Williamsburg “have something peculiarly courteous and engaging in their manners. Perhaps, republicans as they are, they still retain the air of the old court . . . unconsciously, and almost in spite of themselves.” He perfectly described St. George Tucker, who had come home to Williamsburg: the past rather than the future of Virginia.48

  Tucker had lost interest in managing the three Randolph plantations, which would soon pass to his stepsons, and he began to sell off his own rural properties acquired during the 1780s. “I never did or could pretend to be any Judge of the proper mode of managing a Virginia estate,” he later explained. Tucker shrewdly invested his liquidated capital in bank stock and in the elite education of his sons, whom he expected to practice law rather than raise tobacco.49

  In October 1791 he married another young widow with connections to old money and prestige. Lelia Skipwith Carter was the daughter of Sir Peyton Skipwith, a British-born baronet and great planter of Mecklenburg County. As the widow of George Carter, she also possessed a life estate in the great Corotoman Plantation of Lancaster County. By entering his second marriage, Tucker added the Skipwiths and Carters to his nexus of elite families, which already included, through stepsons, the Blands and Randolphs. The new marriage also introduced two more stepchildren—Charles and Polly—into Tucker’s complex family.50

  Constitutions

  Adopted in 1776, Virginia’s new state constitution dispersed power by keeping the counties strong while bolstering the state legislature at the expense of the governor. The new regime preserved the traditional power of the county courts and their local oligarchies. The counties elected the state legislators who formed two houses: the numerous and powerful House of Delegates and the smaller, more prestigious, but less important State Senate. The state leaders shifted the regional balance of power in the legislature in favor of the Piedmont. Each county, no matter how large or small, elected two men to the House of Delegates: a representation system that favored the older, smaller, and numerous counties along the Tidewater and in the Piedmont at the expense of the newer, larger, and fewer counties farther west.51

  The Tidewater and Piedmo
nt leaders insisted that their superior property in the form of slaves warranted enhanced political power. They did not trust the westerners, who owned few slaves, or the poor whites in general, to protect the slave system. The state constitution restricted the vote to white men who owned at least fifty acres of land or a town property of comparable value. About three-fourths of the white men qualified to vote, and they supported their leading men so long as they kept taxes low and the state government small.52

  The state constitution weakened the governor and empowered the House of Delegates, which Jefferson characterized as an “elective despotism.” Virginia’s governor had no legislative veto, and his decisions required approval by a Council of State chosen by, and from, the legislators. One governor sighed that he was “no more than a reading and signing clerk to the Council.” The joint houses of the legislature met to choose the governor annually, and he could serve for no more than three years in succession. The weak executive reflected the Patriots’ disdain for the powerful colonial governors, especially the hated Lord Dunmore.53

  The Virginians had escaped from the distant and centralizing power of the British Empire, but they distrusted the federal union of the states as a potential new threat to Virginia’s cherished autonomy. In 1787 the proposed Federal Constitution provided for a stronger national government that could directly tax the people in the states. Virginia’s “Anti-Federalist” majority feared domination by northerners who did not own slaves. In Virginia’s ratifying convention, Patrick Henry explained that the Federal Constitution “put unbounded power over our property in hands not having a common interest with us.” Henry feared that northern congressmen “might lay such heavy taxes on slaves, as would amount to emancipation.” He concluded, “This government is not a Virginian but an American government.” A true Virginian distrusted an American government.54

  Led by James Madison, Virginia’s nationalists (known as “Federalists”) felt far more confident that their state would dominate the new Union. After all, Virginia was the nation’s largest state, and demographic trends apparently favored growth to the south and west, regions assumed to have common interests with Virginia. Predicting that a stronger nation would better protect southern slavery, the Federalists praised the three-fifths clause, which bolstered representation for the slave states, and the fugitive slave clause, which required northern states to help recover runaway southern slaves. The latter clause rejected the principle of the 1772 Somerset case: that escaped slaves could claim freedom by fleeing to a state that did not sustain slavery by positive law. Madison also insisted that the federal military could help suppress slave revolts. In June 1788, Virginia’s state ratification convention narrowly ratified the Federal Constitution, but Virginians remained wary of the new government.55

  Manumission

  The leading Patriots recognized the gap between their soaring ideals and their sordid practice of slavery. While Americans fought for liberty, Tucker noted, “we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained. . . . Should we not have loosed their chains, and broken their fetters?” Although Patrick Henry opposed a federal government that might meddle with slavery, he conceded that the system was “as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the bible, and destructive to liberty.” But Henry never freed his own slaves due to “the general inconveniency of living without them.” Slaves comprised so much property in Virginia that they could not be freed without impoverishing white men and ruining their creditors.56

  During the 1780s, Virginia’s evangelicals pushed the legislature to adopt some gradual plan for emancipation. They insisted that as republicans as well as Christians, Virginians needed to do right by their slaves. “The holding, tyrannizing over, and driving slaves, I view as contrary to the laws of God and nature,” declared the Baptist preacher David Barrow, who regarded liberty as “the unalienable privilege of all complexions, shapes, and sizes of men.” Citing the Golden Rule, Barrow wished that masters would be “doing as they would others should do to them!”57

  The evangelicals welcomed blacks into their churches, where their emotional responses helped to inspire the relatively staid whites to lose their inhibitions and feel the Holy Spirit. A Methodist declared, “In general the dear black people, that profess Religion, are much more engaged than the whites.” By 1790 the great majority of Virginia slaves had embraced Christianity fervently.58

  By adopting their own, especially devout Christianity, the enslaved could resist psychological domination by their masters. Indeed, they could claim moral superiority and a better prospect of salvation in eternity. Mason Locke Weems, an Anglican priest, assured a visitor, “No people in the country prize the Sabbath more seriously than the trampled-upon negroes. They are swift to hear; they seem to hear as for their lives. They are wakeful, serious, reverent, and attentive in God’s house.” Many clergymen concluded that the truest Christians in Virginia were enslaved and should be freed.59

  In 1778 the legislature did bar the importation of slaves into Virginia, imposing a hefty fine of £1,000 per violation and freeing any illegally imported slave. The ban allowed the legislators to display their antislavery sentiments without undermining the human property already in Virginia. Indeed, the restriction enhanced the value of the slaves within the state by reducing the competition of new imports. And the ban addressed the greatest fear of white men: that further growth in slave numbers would lead to a bloody revolt.60

  In 1782 the legislature also enabled masters voluntarily to free their slaves: a legal process known as “manumission.” Prior to the revolution, manumissions required the consent of the legislature, which was rarely granted from a reluctance to swell the numbers of free blacks. But the Patriots regarded that restriction as contrary to both liberty and the rights of property. They reasoned that a master should dispose of his own property as he wished even if he wanted to renounce it. However, because property rights trumped all, no indebted master could legally manumit without the consent of his creditors.61

  Manumissions did increase after 1782, swelling the free black population from 2,000 in 1782 to 20,000 in 1800, and from 1 percent of all blacks in 1782 to 7 percent in 1800. Some of the freed moved into the commercial towns to seek work as artisans and domestic servants or as laborers on the docks, in the streets, and aboard boats. But most freed people remained in the countryside, working as hired laborers or tenant farmers. Very few acquired title to any land.62

  A few manumitters were liberal critics of slavery, but many more were Quakers or evangelicals with religious scruples. Other masters simply wanted to reward a few favorite slaves for long service and to encourage others to work hard and remain loyal in hopes of their own eventual liberty. Most of the manumissions occurred in the older, economically stagnant counties of the Tidewater, especially on the Northern Neck (along the Potomac) and the Eastern Shore, where many planters had more slaves than they could employ. Masters with debts and few scruples sold their surplus slaves; only the solvent and the principled would manumit them.63

  The greatest liberator was Robert Carter of Nomini Hall in the Northern Neck. An eccentric great planter, he experimented in radical religion, joining a Baptist church that included twenty-nine of his own slaves. Carter’s spiritual quest led him to recognize slavery as a sin. In 1791 he began to liberate his 509 slaves, freeing about 25 a year until completing the process in 1812. His dismayed children saw much of their inheritance dissolve into freedom, and his neighbors denounced the freedmen for setting bad examples that ruined their slaves, who thereafter resented and resisted their bondage. An angry neighbor rebuked Carter, “It appears to me (witnessing the consequences) that a man has almost as good a right to set fire to his own building though his neighbor’s is to be destroyed by it, as to free his slaves.”64

  Manumitters faced social pressure and harassment from their agitated neighbors. On the Eastern
Shore, a Quaker named Robert Pleasants gave his former slaves plots of land to allow “them the full benefit of their labour.” Lamenting the powerful prejudice “against Negroes being in any wise released from a state of absolute Slavery,” in 1790 Pleasants reported that angry neighbors had “beat [the freedmen] without cause, and killed & destroyed their Hogs & other property.” Instead of prosecuting the culprits, the county court fined Pleasants for allowing “his Negroes to go at large.”65

  The most defiant manumitter was Richard Randolph, the eldest stepson of St. George Tucker. Tall, handsome, and charming, Randolph inherited a plantation aptly named “Bizarre” in Prince Edward County. In 1793 the county court prosecuted him for enabling an alleged infanticide by his wife’s sister, whom he was also accused of impregnating. Although cleared of the charges in a sensational trial, Randolph became embittered against his fellow planters.66

  In June 1796, he sickened and died at the age of twenty-six. In his provocative will, Randolph asserted his moral superiority over his fellow Virginians, whom he denounced as hypocrites. In the will’s searing preamble, Richard exposed the moral evasions of slaveholders by vowing

  to make retribution as far as I am able, to an unfortunate race of Bondmen, over whom my ancestors have usurped and exercised the most lawless and monstrous tyranny, and in whom my countrymen (by iniquitous laws, in contradiction of their own declaration of rights, and in violation of every sacred law of nature; of the inherent, inalienable and imprescriptible rights of man, and of every principle of moral and political honesty) have vested me with absolute property.