by Taylor, Alan
By traveling at night, the enslaved gained an intimate knowledge of their landscape, particularly the forests and swamps and the paths and waterways that avoided the main roads watched by slave patrols. The same wild landscape that alarmed whites, especially at night, seemed more welcoming and secure to blacks. Reassured by that familiarity, slaves felt more attached to their home places than did the white folk, who proved all too ready to pick up and move in search of frontier opportunity. Even when freed, Virginia blacks preferred to stay near the intimately known world of their youth and family connections. In an experiential sense, Tidewater Virginia belonged to African Americans more than it did to the more rootless common whites. In the near future, the naval captains of the British king would cherish the slaves’ intimate, nocturnal knowledge of the byways and waterways of Virginia.39
Sometimes the night became especially ominous for whites, as rumors of arson and revolt spread. The wooden buildings of Virginia often caught fire and burned down, arousing suspicions that a vengeful slave had slipped a hot coal into wooden shavings beneath a barn, kitchen, or house. After moving to Virginia, Philip Fithian adopted the local dread: “Now . . . I sleep in fear too, though my Doors & Windows are all secured!” Another traveler, Jesse Torrey, heard Virginians lament living in “a country where one cannot go to bed in the evening, without the apprehension of being massacred before morning!” Torrey noted that one master “retreated every night into an upper room, the entrance into which was by a trap-door, and kept an axe by his side for defence.” The former slave Austin Steward noted, “The slaveholder is well aware that he stands over a volcano, that may at any moment rock his foundation to the center, and with one mighty burst of its long suppressed fire, sweep him and his family to destruction.”40
Virginians also dreaded that, at night, their slaves were concocting poisons to slip into their coffee in the morning. When a white person suddenly sickened and died, the family suspected poison and often blamed an enslaved conjuror. In Halifax County, investigating magistrates opened a conjuror’s box to find a mix of “palma-christal seeds, dirt-dauber nests, with dead spiders and snail shells.” In a forensic experiment, they mixed the ingredients and fed the concoction to a cat, which quickly died. That evidence helped to convict and execute the conjuror for fatally poisoning a white woman who had been one of his patients.41
Masters and slaves contested the boundaries between night and day. A white man complained that a slave worked slowly by day but burst into activity at night, thinking nothing of walking seven miles to attend a dance, “in which he performs with astonishing ability, and the most vigorous exertions . . . until he exhausts himself.” George Tucker agreed: “Look at these same fellows the day after one of these nocturnal wakes, and see how ready they are to fall asleep over their work.” In King and Queen County in 1813 a slave declared “that black people were not like white people, that black people worked in the night and white people in the day.” Recovering from the night’s exertions, the slaves sought to work as slowly as possible through the day and to nap when the overseer was not looking. Pushing back, masters demanded more work by day and longer into the evening, particularly to pound corn. By exhausting slaves, masters hoped to curtail their roaming at night.42
Masters relied on slave patrols to enforce the laws against night meetings and roaming without a written pass from an owner. A straying slave could receive ten to twenty lashes or a brutal beating with fists and feet. In 1808 in Norfolk, a visitor saw a patroller accost a slave woman, demanding to know her owner’s name. When she gave a saucy answer, he “began to box & kick her in a most cruel & unmerciful manner.”43
But enforcement proved lax because the patrols were inefficient and irregular: often no more than once a month in times of apparent security. Drawn from the local militia, the patrollers spent much of the night visiting friends or taverns. In the dark the groggy (and sometimes drunken) patrollers struggled to distinguish friend from foe. In Alexandria, a resident reported a farcical scene involving novice slave patrollers: “We were somewhat alarmed last night by the noise they made in pursuing one of the citizens, whom they supposed to be some evil disposed person—while he, on the other hand, took them to be an armed band of negroes.” And the patrollers rarely knew of the obscure paths through the woods used by the enslaved to evade surveillance.44
In alarming times of suspected rebellion, the patrols became more numerous and vigilant, briefly revealing and suppressing the black nocturnal world. In 1802 in Madison County, alarmed whites intensified their patrols, catching many black men roaming between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.—deemed an especially suspicious time. One of the patrollers reported, “On being asked why they were out at such an unreasonable hour, some said they had been hunting the raccoon and opossum; and others replied that they had been visiting their friends and relations, which they could not do in the day-time.” The local magistrates “found them guilty of being out of their quarters at an unseasonable time, and ordered them all to be severely flogged, which sentence was executed by the white men, in turns.” Ordinarily safe, the nocturnal roaming became risky when white people suspected a plot against their lives.45
While masters tried to regain the night through armed patrols, some slaves sought to extended the night by running away. According to advertisements posted by their owners, most of the runaways were unmarried boys and young men: the slaves in the greatest danger of sale by their masters. The runaways tended to be especially daring and accomplished, for the advertisements dwelled on their skills and intelligence. Many fugitives were especially familiar with the roads and waterways to the wider world: boatmen, house slaves, and artisans rather than the field hands. Relatively few, the female fugitives often had recently been sold away from their old neighborhoods and sought to get back to their children and parents.46
Some runaways fled northward to escape across the state lines to the relative freedom of Pennsylvania or Ohio, but that was a very risky proposition. Even if an escapee made it through the gauntlet of slave patrols, suspicious whites, and professional slave catchers, he or she reached a northern community where, unless Quakers prevailed, most of the white people disliked blacks and enforced the federal fugitive slave law. More often, the Virginia runaway sought a time-out from slavery to visit a spouse or relatives in a nearby county; such fugitives rarely remained on the lam for long. Many runaways had better luck slipping away to a commercial town such as Richmond or Alexandria, where they found paying work by passing as free. This strategy worked best for skilled artisans who had free relatives in the town to provide haven. By selling their labor cheap, the skilled could find white protectors willing to evade the laws against harboring and hiring runaways.47
Running away often served as a short-term strategy to seek concessions from a master, particularly when he introduced a new overseer who demanded more work and inflicted stricter punishments. By bolting to hide in the woods, the runaways gave leverage to the rest to urge a more relaxed regimen, which usually then brought the fugitives home. Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. noted that when one slave ran, the others “felt pleasure at the idea of his running away, because the lost time would be an appeal to interest with the Master and overseer on future occasions manifestly in their favor.”48
Some runaways became “outliers” by forming small refugee communities in forests and swamps within their home county. They relied on hunting, stealing, and rustling and on food slipped to them by family members. In 1813 the Gloucester County Court tried Sam, the slave of Lewis Williams, for stealing bacon, beef, salt, and herrings from a smokehouse. The court determined that “Sam has from his infancy been the most notorious villain that ever lived, he has been one half of his time for many years a Runaway—has been constantly engaged in stealing hogs, sheep, &c., &c.,” despite at least one conviction and branding. He was finally taken in a “piney Swamp in this county,” where “Sam & other slaves” had “been runaway, outlying & committing robberies for a great length of time.” The four men an
d two women had dug holes to serve as “the hiding places of Bacon, &c.” As an outlier, Sam enjoyed the meat denied to him as a slave, but as a convicted felon, for a second time, he died on the gallows.49
Some camps proved surprisingly substantial and enduring. The largest and longest-lived runaway community lay in the vast Great Dismal Swamp, south of Norfolk. Other smaller and briefer havens lay scattered throughout rural Virginia. In Buckingham County in December 1810, William H. Cabell sought a tougher law and “some exemplary punishment” against
the practice very prevalent in this neighbourhood, and I understand in many others, of runaway slaves collecting in numbers, forming what they call Camp & to the great destruction of the [live]stock of the neighbourhood in which they may pitch themselves. These camps, as they are termed, are generally made under ground and covered with so much art that it is impossible to discover them in the day time, even should you walk directly over them. Few persons would give themselves the trouble to search for them in the night (when they are discoverable by the light of the fire below) in such difficult places as they generally chuse for the purpose, particularly when we consider the danger of the enterprise. The negroes go armed, and frequently a dozen in one camp or cave and therefore set at defiance the efforts of one or even 3 or 4 white men.
In these artificial caves in the forest, some runaways sustained and expanded the nocturnal world of potential freedom.50
Mixture
Visitors noted that Virginia’s slaves often had the brown skin of mulattos rather than the dark skin of Africans. Despite laws and publications preaching a stark dichotomy of black and white, the Virginians had bred an intermediate population of brown people. John Hartwell Cocke reported that Virginia’s mulattoes “would be found by hundreds. Nor is it to be wondered at when Mr. Jefferson’s notorious example is considered.” As one of Jefferson’s closest friends, Cocke was well informed. After Jefferson’s wife died in 1782, he never remarried but instead kept a slave mistress, Sally Hemings, who bore him six children. As the daughter of a mulatto woman by Jefferson’s father-in-law, Hemings was the enslaved half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife. George Tucker marveled after reading Jefferson’s insistence that blacks lacked physical beauty: “I own I was a little surprised at his derision after the stories I have heard of him.”51
No law punished masters who raped slave women or kept them as concubines. Neighbors did little more than gossip so long as a master kept a low profile and did not marry a slave partner: a model of discretion set by Jefferson. White wives hated the interracial sex of their husbands, but pride kept most from pressing the issue on those who pretended to keep it secret. Instead, humiliated wives sought to punish the black women involved. Despite the risks, some enslaved women pursued white gentlemen as lovers in a bid for better treatment, small favors, and, perhaps, the manumission of their children.52
In Virginia, status followed the mother, consigning her children to slavery. William Grimes lamented that he was kept enslaved although he was “three parts white,” the son “of one of the most wealthy planters in Virginia” and raised “in a land boasting [of] its freedom, and under a government whose motto is Liberty and Equality.” The wife of Grimes’s master was also the cousin of the boy’s father. Apparently she hated him as a reminder of her cousin’s betrayal of his white wife, for Grimes recalled, “She would beat me until I could hardly stand. . . . She is dead, thank God.”53
After four generations of mixing, some slaves were virtually white, to the shock of travelers. At Monticello in 1796, a French visitor noted several slaves “as white as I am.” At Norfolk in 1808, a Scottish traveler noted a leading man whose slaves were “mostly his own Children,” including one favored daughter, of especially light complexion: “She sleeps in the same bed with them [and] calls them father & mother while her Uncles, Aunts, &c. are serving at table. . . . So much for Virginia Manners!”54
Virginians worried that a mass emancipation would reverse the sexual power dynamic: instead of white men impregnating enslaved women, free black men would breed with white women to accelerate the making of a mixed race. In 1806 a legislator warned that if blacks “continue to mix with the whites as they have already done, as we daily see, I know not what kind of people the Virginians will be in one hundred years.” Colonel John Taylor dreaded the emergence of “a body politick, as monstrous and unnatural as a mongrel half white man and half negro.” Jefferson similarly worried that white Virginians were “in danger of falling into the ranks of our own negroes.” Although he had contributed six children to the racial blending, Jefferson longed to whiten the republic by emancipating the slaves and sending them far, far away as African colonists, but it was already too late to separate the intermingled peoples of Virginia.55
Masters favored mixed-race people as their house slaves. Often on display to family and guests, house slaves enjoyed better clothing and food, for it would not do for them to appear hungry and ragged. But they lacked privacy and faced constant scrutiny, provoking considerable stress as they scanned the faces and heard the words of their masters, who expected the conspicuous performance of subordination. A traveler noted, “During the warm season in the more respectable families, two of these negroes attend in the parlour at breakfast, dinner, & tea each having a bundle of peacock feathers made up elegantly, which they keep constantly waving over the table to prevent the musquetoes from annoying their owners.”56
Every day, the house slave risked losing his or her advantages by crossing some line known only to the master. In November 1802, St. George Tucker became disgusted with a young house servant named Johnny and sent him away to his son, Henry St. George Tucker, who put Johnny to work as valet, groom, and cook. Initially pleased with Johnny’s work, Henry soured on him in October 1803. Writing to Tucker, Henry reported, “Today, I have detected him wearing my clothes even. I cannot then hesitate about parting with him.” By donning the new attire of his master, the house servant became too familiar and too close, so he had to be punished and sold away. His fall was sudden and complete.57
John Randolph developed especially close relations with his body servants, John and Juba. “People may say what they please, but I have found no better friends than among my own servants,” Randolph declared. Given his fractious and volatile relationships with white men, we should take him at his word. Randolph considered Juba more intelligent than half the men in the president’s cabinet. Randolph said of John, “I know not at this time a better man. . . . I have not a truer friend.”58
But such unequal friendships could suddenly explode. In Randolph’s absence to attend Congress, John drank heavily, quarreled with the overseer, and ran away. When caught, John suffered a great fall from grace. Randolph left him to rot in jail for three months and then sentenced him to three years of field labor before restoring him to the house. Then Randolph resumed praising John: “His attention and attachment to me resemble more those of a mother to a child, or rather a lover to his mistress, than a servant’s to a master.” John may, indeed, have been Randolph’s Sally Hemings, given Randolph’s aversion to marriage and special, but fraught, bond with John. Whether they had sex is unknowable and beside the point; emotionally John filled the subordinate but nurturing role of a wife to Randolph.59
No matter how cherished, even house slaves faced the harsh economic roulette of Virginia slavery. John Faulcon wrote to his father-in-law, John Hartwell Cocke, to express dismay at the heavy debts that compelled the sale of a trusted servant:
Had he been a common cornfield hand, a brute of a man, without any feeling than his sensual appetites, I might not . . . have hesitated to hoist him on an auction block & have sold him to the highest bidder—but I could not forget that he had been raised in my father’s family & amid scenes calculated to awaken his sensibilities, that he had often exhibited evidences of feeling, and that he had . . . some attachment towards myself.
Full of principle, Faulcon rejected an offer of $350 for the man. When the price reached $400, how
ever, Faulcon sold him.60
Monster
When closely examined, any system of slavery reveals surprising diversity and multiple loopholes, for no set of masters could fully and always hold themselves apart and above slaves with whom they lived so closely. Slavery attempts perversely to treat human beings—who invite personal relationships—as if they were inert property defined by the law and the market. Such contradictions proved especially powerful in Virginia during the generation after the revolution, as the masters struggled to reconcile their libertarian principles with their practice of slavery. While the law and newspaper essayists drew a clear and rigid line between black and white, slave and free, lived experience proved far more kaleidoscopic. Whites could rarely enforce the letter of the law, and slaves often proved adept at evading it.61
As a complex and contradictory system, Virginia slavery offered almost every conceivable human experience, just as the system sustained every shade of skin color from pale to dark. Some slaves escaped to live in artificial caves; others fanned their masters with peacock feathers. Some rebuked the impiety of their masters, while others suffered brutal whippings for their temerity. Some wore rags and ate refuse, while others donned the threads and ate the food of their masters. Some killed their overseer with a hoe, while many more looked only to heaven for redress. Some flirted with their overseers, and others hated their sexual predation. Some plotted rebellion, while others turned informant. Some were trusted iron workers, while others were disdained as field hands. Some nurtured African traditions of conjuring, while others felt Jesus grip their souls—and many did both. Both masters and slaves included remarkably diverse individuals, all involved with one another in complicated relationships that shifted over time. They had to live together albeit in unequal ways. And while slavery enslaved blacks, it also imprisoned whites in a web of distortions and deceptions of their own making.62