by Taylor, Alan
He rejected “the infamous practice of usurping the rights of our fellow creatures, equally entitled with ourselves to the enjoyment of liberty and happiness.” His will freed seventy-two slaves and reserved 400 acres of land, a fifth of Bizarre, for their settlement on Israel Hill beside the Appomattox River. But Randolph was a prophet without honor in his own county, for no other master in Prince Edward County manumitted his slaves between 1782 and 1810. Instead, the planters continued buying, selling, working, punishing, and bequeathing slaves.67
Reaction
Most Virginians clung to the slave system as essential to their prosperity and security. In 1802 in Prince William County an elderly slave known as Old Dick recounted the story of his master Spencer Ball, who had married a daughter of Robert Carter, the great manumitter. According to Old Dick, “in a fit of religious enthusiasm,” Carter “wrote a serious letter to Mr. Ball, exhorting him to free his negroes, or he would assuredly go to hell. Mr. Ball, whose property consisted in his slaves, and whose family was annually augmenting, entertained different notions; and with much brevity returned answer to the old gentleman’s letter, ‘Sir, I will run the chance.’” To provide for numerous heirs, masters risked eternal hell rather than impoverish themselves in life.68
Virginians disliked the growing number of free blacks, who allegedly lapsed into depraved lives of vicious larceny and drunken indolence: lounging in their cabins or wandering in the streets when not preying on the poultry, pigs, orchards, and gardens of their white neighbors. Examples of black freedom also encouraged slaves to bristle at their continued enslavement. In addition, white men suspected the freed people of harboring runaways and fencing goods stolen by the enslaved. Worst of all, free blacks might threaten the entire slave system by leading a revolt. A critic predicted, “They will furnish the officers and soldiers around whom the slaves will rally.” By depicting the freed as active subversives, the Virginians contradicted the stereotype of them as indolent. But whether seen as lazy, thieving, or scheming, free blacks were cast as proof of the dangerous naivete of emancipation.69
To reduce their supposed danger, Virginians restricted the liberty of the freedmen, who could not vote, serve on juries, or join the militia and could only own a gun with the permission of their county court. They also had to register with the court and obtain a certificate for display to any suspicious magistrate or slave patroller. And no colored person could testify in court against a white who cheated or struck him or her. But, as with every racial law in Virginia, enforcement lagged behind the draconian letter of the law. The tax-phobic and antigovernment ethos of Virginia precluded creation of a professional police force and state bureaucracy needed fully to enforce the race laws. Implementation instead relied on the part-time, amateur local magistrates, who usually had better things to do on their own farms and plantations. And despite the laws, the freed had won important gains: the right to work for wages without corporal punishment and without the terror of legal sale hanging over their heads.70
During the mid-1780s, Methodists petitioned the state legislature to emancipate all of Virginia’s slaves. That Methodist push galvanized pro-slavery counterpetitions from hundreds of masters who opposed abolition and demanded repeal of the manumission law, which saddled their counties with free blacks. The pro-slavery men claimed to defend the true legacy of the revolution: “We risked our Lives and Fortunes, and waded through Seas of Blood,” to defend the private property of white men from any government meddling. Indeed, they denounced the would-be emancipators as “the Enemies of our Country, Tools of the British Administration” who allegedly sought the “sure and final Ruin to this now flourishing, free, and happy Country.” In this view, any criticism of slavery threatened the freedom of white men, and emancipation would culminate in a race war of extermination: “the Horrors of all the Rapes, Murders, and Outrages, which a vast Multitude of unprincipled, unpropertied, revengeful, and remorseless Banditti are capable of perpetrating.” The pro-slavery petitioners ultimately blamed the antislavery plot on insidious Britons: an equation promoted by the Somerset decision and the wartime alliance of runaways with British forces.71
Faced with the dueling petitions, the House of Delegates compromised in the fall of 1785. A small majority retained the manumission act, but the legislators unanimously rejected any state-mandated emancipation. Sobered by this defeat, the Methodists and Baptists, retreated from antislavery activity. Once a champion of abolition, the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury reconsidered in 1798: “I am brought to conclude [that] slavery will exist in Virginia perhaps for ages; there is not a sufficient sense of religion nor of liberty to destroy it.” Most leading evangelicals sought respectability as middle-class men of property. Preferring neighborhood peace and acceptance, they marginalized any radicals who continued to agitate the issue. Becoming more conservative, mainstream evangelicals reframed their message, urging slaves to obey their masters and wait for freedom after death in heaven. Among the state’s Christians, only Quakers clung to antislavery principles, but they comprised a small and increasingly despised sect in Virginia.72
During the 1790s in Virginia, the kiss of death for antislavery came from news of a massive and bloody slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, a French colony in the West Indies. In 1789 the French Revolution divided the planter elite in the colony between supporters and opponents. In 1791, their contentions invited slaves to revolt, destroying a thousand plantations and killing hundreds of planters and overseers. Many more blacks died in the ruthless reprisals launched by the colonial government. In 1794 a radical regime in France sought to co-opt the rebels by emancipating all slaves throughout the French West Indies. Horrified by the news, white Virginians dreaded that the precedent might inspire their own slaves to rise in bloody rebellion.73
Although the Virginians had declared revolution a universal right for the oppressed, they shuddered when the enslaved claimed that right. Thomas Jefferson felt greater sympathy for the exiled planters than for the exploited slaves of Saint-Domingue. In 1797, Jefferson warned St. George Tucker, “If something is not done & soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children [for] the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe, will be upon us.” To fend off that storm, Jefferson favored emancipating and deporting Virginia’s slaves over the course of two generations.74
Most Virginians, however, rejected Jefferson’s plan for emancipation and African colonization as prohibitively expensive. If colonization could not work, emancipation would oblige Virginians to live beside an allegedly hostile black population. Indeed, they dreaded free blacks as more dangerous than slaves. After the revolution in Saint-Domingue, most Virginians concluded that their safety required bolstering rather than weakening the slave system. They had risked “the revolutionary storm” long enough.75
Heirs
Virginia’s revolutionary reformers doubted that their republic could survive any further growth in the inequality of rich and poor among the free. Jefferson and Tucker worried that inherited wealth eventually would consolidate an aristocracy to threaten the new and vulnerable republic with counterrevolution. To promote greater equality, reformers looked to the gradual and private process of inheritance, rather than to a government-imposed redistribution of wealth. Jefferson assured Madison, “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impractical, but [given] the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.” The reformers sought to abolish Virginia’s colonial laws of “entail and primogeniture,” which Tucker denounced as “the means of accumulating and preserving great estates in certain families.” He deemed those laws “utterly incompatible with the genius and spirit of our constitution and government.”76
Entail and primogeniture mandated that a great landowner pass on a landed estate (including slaves) intact to one heir, usually the first-born son, rather than divide that estate equally among all of the children. Perpetual in the male line
, an entail barred any heir of any future generation from subdividing and selling or otherwise devising the property in parts. The owner had to preserve the estate for his eldest son and could not even mortgage it to borrow funds. The lone exception came when a generation had no male heir to inherit; in such cases, the daughters inherited jointly and divided the estate: considered a tragedy by a legal system that cherished the continuity of wealth in the male line. Aristocratic in design, entail and primogeniture sought to preserve a great estate through the generations. During the colonial era, Virginia’s great planters emulated the English aristocracy by entailing three-fourths of the lands in the Tidewater. Very few entails could be broken by later generations without great expense to navigate through a complex legal thicket.77
Reformers denounced entail and primogeniture as the tyranny of a past generation overriding the rights of individuals in the present—and as a distortion of the natural equality of individual rights. Tucker derided entail as “the offspring of feudal barbarism.” Pressure for this change did not come from the common farmers seeking greater equality. Instead, that pressure came from the younger sons of the great planters, particularly those in the Piedmont. They sought to manage their inherited lands more aggressively and commercially: mortgaging, buying, and selling to raise capital to improve their plantations. To prosper in a commercialized society, they needed to act more as capitalists and less as aristocrats.78
In opposing entails, Jefferson spoke from harsh experience. In 1774 he had petitioned the colony’s legislature to break the entail on 1,200 acres that his wife had inherited from her grandfather, so that the couple could sell that property. The legislature agreed but Lord Dunmore vetoed the bill, compounding Jefferson’s rage at the royal governor and the aristocratic tradition that he upheld. The revolution enabled Jefferson to break the entail, not just on his own estate, but those throughout Virginia.79
Despite resistance from the old elite, the legislature abolished entails in 1776 and primogeniture in 1785. Thereafter multi-geniture (the equal division of land among the children of an owner) prevailed in intestate cases (when the owner lacked a will). From these reforms, Jefferson expected two great boons. First, society would benefit from the increased equality brought by the division of large, landed estates among multiple heirs. Second, the heirs would become free to manage their properties by mortgaging, subdividing, and selling as they saw fit. The dual benefits attested that these bourgeois revolutionaries linked social benefits to individual liberties in a commercial society. The reformers insisted that, as individuals buying and selling in a free market, people could best achieve their full potential and best promote social equality.80
The reforms accelerated the decline of the old Tidewater elite through subdivision by inheritance and through their increased exposure to lawsuits by creditors. In 1795, Tucker predicted that the new “law of descents, by which lands are divided among the children, . . . would compel many to labour who now seem only born to consume the fruits of the earth.” A decade later a visiting British diplomat mourned the decline of Virginia’s colonial estates: “the abolition of entails has nearly ruined them all,” for “present day estates are very much subdivided.”81
Richard Randolph’s younger brother, John, despised the decay of the colonial order wrought by the inheritance laws promoted by his stepfather, Tucker. No admirer of social equality, Randolph denounced the abolition of entail and primogeniture as ruinous: “Nothing . . . can be more melancholy than the aspect of the whole country on tide-water,—dismantled country-seats, ruinous churches, fields forsaken, and grown up with mournful evergreens,—cedar and pine.” He mourned the decline of the old elite families: “They whose fathers rode in coaches and drank the choicest wines now ride on saddle-bags, and drink grog, when they can get it.” He predicted worse to come: “The old families of Virginia will form connections with low people, and sink into the mass of overseers’ sons and daughters; and this is the legitimate, nay, inevitable conclusion to which Mr. Jefferson and his leveling system has brought us.” Unlike Tucker and Jefferson, Randolph saw aristocracy lost as a satanic bargain.82
Of course, Randolph had a special talent for hyperbole. While many old-style planters did lose their fortunes, the more entrepreneurial men of the new elite exploited the revised laws to borrow against their estates for capital improvements. At last Jefferson could sell his wife’s entailed property for the cash needed to rebuild Monticello and expand his wheat fields. And Randolph underestimated his own adaptability to the new order, for he profitably rationalized his inherited estate at Roanoke. But he despised the new commercial discipline that he had to adopt to thrive in the new order.83
Division
Entails often had attached slaves to their estates, which barred the owners from selling them. Although certainly not meant to benefit the slaves, that feudal restriction inhibited the breaking up of their families by sale. Under the reformed laws, the division of estates tended to divide enslaved families among multiple heirs. The changes benefited younger sons, entrepreneurs, and creditors, but not the enslaved people treated as liquid capital.84
The reformed inheritance laws promoted a surge in the sale of slaves by owners seeking cash. During the 1780s, 40 percent of slaves advertised in the Virginia press had been sold at least once before in their lives: up from 24 percent during the 1760s. Virginia planters increasingly valued slave children for future sale. Richard Blow assured his son, “I think it useless to raise up families of them for any other purpose but to sell.” Jefferson deemed “a woman who brings a child every two years as more valuable than the best man on the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labor disappears in mere consumption.” Jefferson’s grandson feared that Virginia was becoming “one grand menagerie where men are to be reared for market like oxen from the shambles.” But he failed to recognize his grandfather’s leading role in the revolution’s transition to a more commercialized slavery.85
The wider inheritance and increased sale of slaves combined to multiply the number of slaveholders in Virginia. By 1800 about half of the white households in the Tidewater and Piedmont owned slaves, but usually only a few. Meanwhile, the number of great planters who owned more than 100 slaves had declined from the peak in 1776. The revolution had broadened slave ownership, which enhanced popular support for slavery, leading to the crushing political defeat suffered by Methodist abolitionists during the mid-1780s.86
An inherited slave or two became the prime social security for a widow or orphan in Virginia. In 1798 in Mathews County, the Episcopalian pastor Armistead Smith gave an enslaved child named Nancy to his daughter, Harriet, and her new husband as a wedding gift. By early 1814 the couple had died and their lone child, Sally, inherited Nancy, but she sued for her freedom, citing a legal flaw in the will. Smith denounced the “diabolical plan” and vowed to see “that the vile Strumpet at last may be defeated in her views & Justice be done by D[ea]r Sally.” Focused on his granddaughter’s security, Smith could see no justice in an enslaved woman’s longing for freedom.87
After the revolution, the renting of slaves increased as a means for masters to profit from surplus slaves, in contrast to manumitting them, which brought no financial reward. Many widows hired out their inherited slaves to derive an income while avoiding the rigors of supervising and punishing them. Executors of estates also rented out slaves to support orphans until they came of legal age. During the 1790s a farmer could rent a prime male field hand for $31 per year, about a tenth of the cost of buying such a slave. And an adult woman cost only about $11 per year, compared to $200 for a purchase. As renters, common men could acquire slave labor more readily than by purchase. The surge in postwar hiring further spread slaves among the white households of Virginia. A careful study of Elizabeth City County (on the James River) found that over 80 percent of the farmers either owned or hired slaves.88
The rented slaves usually passed through multiple renters over the course of a decade, which complicated
their attempts to form and keep families. Only 39 percent of the Elizabeth City County slaves lived in the same household for three consecutive years. The hired slaves often left relatively prosperous masters for poorer renters who lacked the means to feed, clothe, and shelter their laborers decently.89
The revolution also promoted a new spirit of commercial improvement that motivated the leading planters to rationalize their estates to seek higher productivity and greater profits. After determining the optimal number of slaves as a workforce, the improvers sold the surplus children. Because men made better field hands, masters often sold more young females than males. As a consequence, young men struggled to find wives and form families. Ruing their standing as especially liquid capital, slaves grimly declared that at any time the master could “put you in his pocket.”90
The postwar era also increased the long-distance movement of slaves to harsher conditions on the frontier. By defeating western Indians as well as British troops, the revolution opened up vast tracts of backcountry land for settlement by migrating Americans. In Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, the frontier enticed Virginia’s young families with the opportunity to make their own farms by clearing the forest. Between 1790 and 1810, about 225,000 whites and 98,000 slaves left Virginia and Maryland for points farther south and west. While the frontier provided white opportunity, slaves bore the brunt of creating new farms in summer climes often even hotter and more humid than they had endured in Virginia.91
The forced migration disrupted slave families and communities. Given the dispersal of slave ownership in Virginia, most enslaved families had been divided among different owners in the neighborhood. When a master departed with his slaves, he compelled them to forsake wives, husbands, parents, and children on other farms and plantations. Austin Steward considered the forced migration of his master’s slaves to be “the greatest hardship” that they “had ever met” because of “the separation from our old home and fellow-slaves, from our relatives and the old State of Virginia.” Francis Fedric remembered “the heart-rending scenes” in Fauquier County when his master prepared to move to Kentucky: “Men and women down on their knees begging to be purchased to go with their wives or husbands . . . children crying and imploring not to have their parents sent away from them; but all their beseeching and tears were of no avail.”92