by Taylor, Alan
Dread of an impending slave revolt rippled throughout the Tidewater in the panicky talk and letters of Virginians. In Gloucester County, Major Nathaniel Burwell reported, “We are threatened with an insurrection of our Negroes. Ten have been apprehended and are in jail for examination.” Fearing “our worst enemy,” Richmond’s mayor insisted that he had proof “that the Slaves of this City, probably in conjunction with free persons of colour, have conspired and are conspiring to burn the City, possess themselves of the public arms, and probably to murder the white Inhabitants indiscriminately.” John Campbell warned “of the whole state being convulsed by an insurrection.”23
On the night of March 2, 1813, in the Kingston Parish of Mathews County, in the Tidewater, eight enslaved men and one boy rendezvoused outside of Parson Armistead Smith’s gate. Harry, Abram, Humphrey, Yeoro, Billy Goodchild, James, Wharton, Sci, and Hugh belonged to eight different owners, attesting to a neighborhood cooperation among the slaves of scattered farms. Harry had brought along Sci Gillett, a boy of sixteen, which troubled the other men, who declared “that Boys could not be trusted.” Harry replied, “He has been raised with me. I know him and can trust him.”24
Passing quietly by the church, they reached the store of John Ripley. Breaking in, they awakened Ripley, who leveled his musket, but it misfired. The intruders overwhelmed him with fists and sticks, “calling him a Damm’d American Bugger.” Their “Captain,” Harry, put a sword to Ripley’s “Breast, declaring that if he breathed or spoke a single word they would stab the sword through him, calling themselves Englishmen.” These self-made Englishmen sought revenge for past rebukes at the store, for they accosted Ripley, “saying you have refused to let us have a little water and fresh Provision, now damn your country we will let you know what it is to refuse us and if you speak a word we will stab the sword through you and put every person to the sword as we go.” Rebels against the American Buggers, these slaves identified with the English as liberators.25
The black Englishmen then heard a warning. Ripley recalled, “A person came into the yard and gave a whistle, they then all retired from the House,” taking away $1,900 in gold and silver found in his money box. After each man claimed $6, Humphrey buried the rest. But John Patterson became suspicious when his slave Harry spent “more money in the course of a few days than it was likely he could have acquired by honest means.” Patterson’s overseer seized Sci Gillett, the weakest link in the gang. Hauled into Patterson’s office, Sci confessed and named the others in hopes of saving his own life. All were jailed, with the informant kept in a distinct cell lest he “be murdered by the friends or relations of some of the parties concerned.” By some mix of pain and persuasion, the magistrates induced Humphrey to lead them to the stash of gold and silver.26
On March 18, 1813, the magistrates of Mathews County tried the eight men for burglary. Convicting them all, the judges sentenced them to hang and appraised their worth at from $310 for Humphrey, evidently the oldest, to $472 for Yeoro. Before any would hang, however, their fate became entangled in another incident from James City County to the south.27
Before dawn on March 23, 1813, the armed schooner Sarus lay anchored in the James River near Jamestown. Three black men in a stolen boat rowed out from the shore and “asked if the ship was an English Ship.” “Yes,” replied the mate, so Anthony, Tassy, and Kit scrambled aboard and vowed to fight the Americans. Given cutlasses, the delighted refugees “declared that their overseer was the first they intended to kill and all Americans they could catch.” Anthony, Tassy, and Kit promised to recruit “from one to two thousand other negroes to join them in killing the Americans.” But the crew suddenly clamped all three into chains, for the Sarus was an American privateer rather than a British warship.28
Eight days later, Anthony, Tassy, and Kit went on trial for their lives for having conspired “to rebel and make Insurrection.” Meanwhile, newspapers published an inflated account, insisting “that 2000 negroes were embodied and exercised in squads at night.” As the property of a widow, Lucy Ludwell Paradise of Williamsburg, these three young men were especially vulnerable to imminent sale and relocation. Indeed, in January 1812, their erratic mistress had been committed to the Williamsburg insane asylum, where she would spend the last two years of her life. By running away and seeking British help, Anthony, Tassy, and Kit had sought to determine their own fate. Instead, they fell into the hands of judges who convicted and sentenced them to hang. Each of their corpses would cost the state $400 in compensation due to the widow Paradise.29
Per Virginia law, the magistrates of James City County and Mathews County forwarded their trial transcripts to the governor and Council of State in Richmond for review. The state leaders had the power to affirm the death sentences or to commute some or all of them to sale and transportation. Economy-minded, the state leaders wanted to buy only the minimum number of corpses needed to appease white fear and to promote black intimidation. Determined to transport most of the convicts, the council solicited recommendations from the county magistrates.30
In both counties, the leading men favored clemency for most of the convicts. The magistrates wanted slaves to fear them as powerful but also to respect them as just: a tough balancing act. While dreading slaves collectively as a menacing abstraction, “the internal enemy,” Virginians could balk at hanging particular local slaves whom they had long known. In a petition to the Council, the leaders of James City County discounted testimony from the privateers as outsiders. Asserting superior familiarity with the convicted slaves, the magistrates defended Anthony, Tassy, and Kit as submissive and ignorant—all too easily manipulated by cunning outsiders. The petitioners insisted “that these offenders were compleatley entrapped by the witness and others on board the vessel who[m] from their ignorance of words perhaps and by leading questions which were put to them were induced to say what they never designed to execute & . . . would never have thought of, had the subject not been first mentioned to them.” The magistrates could not believe that the three were covert rebels plotting to butcher their white neighbors.31
The petitioners knew the three as “runaways & had been so for several months before, from some disagreement between themselves & their overseer.” They had hidden in the forest until, wary of the “inclement weather,” they sought out the vessel so that “they could ultimately make their escape from this country & so gain their liberty.” Remarkably, the petitioners advanced these considerations, in a matter-of-fact tone, to mitigate the conviction rather than to condemn the convicted. They understood if they did not like, that sometimes slaves ran away, hid for months, and sought some avenue to freedom. Rather than hang such men, to the utter distress of their families, the local whites preferred to sell and exile them.32
On April 17 the Council of State decided that Humphrey and Harry should hang in Mathews County, but to sell and transport the other six convicts there, and all three in James City County. That limited clemency saved the state $2,700 because a slave trader paid $300 apiece for the nine. The total fell $850 short of their appraised value, which the state had to pay to their former owners, plus the full $625 value of Humphrey and Harry.33
The governor carefully instructed the sheriff of Mathews County: “By way of making the example more terrible you will cautiously conceal the fact of reprieve till the criminals are all under the gallows and the two doomed to death shall have been executed.” Only after scaring the other six out of their wits could he disclose their partial reprieve. By a show of power and clemency in the right proportion, Virginia leaders hoped to reassure alarmed whites and to reconcile intimidated blacks to their lives as slaves with powerful but just masters.34
Throughout Virginia, the leading men struggled to remain vigilant without overreacting. Despite all the agitated talk of menacing plots, the Virginians prosecuted very few slaves for conspiracy to rebel during the war. And they convicted fewer still, for the judges usually acted with a scrupulous skepticism of the wildest charges. In 1813 in Lancaster C
ounty some slave talk alarmed the local militia commander, who had three slaves arrested for “having consulted and advised rebellion, murder and insurrection.” Billy, Grandy, and Tamer belonged to Mary Ann Haggeman, a widow: a situation that aroused fears that the slaves lacked sufficient oversight. But the county court discharged them as innocent after a trial on April 20. Seven months later, the same county court acquitted another slave accused of setting fire to the county jail.35
Despite the many rumors of a slave revolt, imagined as the indiscriminate massacre of whites, none erupted in the Chesapeake region during the war. At best, some blacks discussed their options when the local militia marched away to defend the shore. The closest thing to a plot developed in Fredericktown, Maryland, in August 1814, when eight slaves met to “talk of arming themselves with knives” and to choose a captain as their leader. Arrested and tried, seven were convicted of conspiracy. The Frederick County Court sentenced three to the state penitentiary and ordered four others “whipped and sent home to their masters.” A local witness aptly dismissed this plot as “perfectly contemptible, both in numbers and means of mischief.”36
During the war Virginians executed only three slaves for conspiracy: the two in Mathews County in 1813 and a third in Powhatan County in 1814—and the Powhatan episode fell far short of a true plot, for there was only one supposed conspirator: an enraged slave who resisted punishment by brandishing an axe. Reluctant to destroy valuable human property, the Virginians could find little evidence for the supposed midnight plots to murder indiscriminately. Virginians had far better reason to fear plots to escape to the British warships as Sci Gillett did in March 1814, a year after his pardon for testifying against Humphrey and Harry in Mathews County.37
Union
On February 6, 1813, shortly after the British warships entered the bay, Governor Barbour received a letter from James Monroe, who warned that the federal government could do nothing more to defend Virginia. Dismayed by the federal neglect and spooked by the British invasion on February 13 the legislature authorized enlisting 1,000 men to form a state army to defend Virginia. Kept on duty and subject to discipline, the state regulars promised greater reliability and less expense than the chaotic militia amateurs. A state force also would reduce the need to draft men from the militia for active service in disease-ridden Norfolk. Instead, the hinterland militiamen could stay in their own counties to tend their farms and watch the slaves.38
But the Madison administration insisted that the Federal Constitution reserved to the nation the power to raise a standing army. Desperate for federal recruits, the president’s men rightly feared that few Virginians would enlist in the national service on the cold northern frontier if, instead, they could serve closer to home in a state force. In addition, Madison and Monroe feared setting a precedent in Virginia that the Federalist governors in New England could exploit to create state armies to resist the National government. How could the Madison administration deny them what it allowed to Virginia? As an alternative to a state force of regulars, Monroe promised to organize and enlist a national regiment posted at Norfolk and officered by Virginians commissioned by the president. The secretary of war also retained a Virginia militia general, Robert Barraud Taylor, in overall command at Norfolk.39
In late March, Barbour reluctantly suspended the state regular corps and called the legislature into session to complete the repeal. A majority of the Council of State agreed, but two members dissented, staking out a defiant, states’ rights position that anticipated Virginia’s political future. Strict constructionists of the Federal Constitution, Nathaniel H. Claiborne and Peter V. Daniel argued that it barred the states only from keeping armies in peacetime. During a war or rebellion, they insisted, every state retained the sovereign power to raise professional troops for self-defense. Claiborne maintained that Virginia needed such a force to suppress a slave “insurrection, an event the most awful and which we have every reason to fear, from the known disposition of the enemy.” He claimed that “the spirit of revolt has been recently discovered to exist to an alarming degree among our slaves.” The dissenters argued that Virginians could not trust the federal government to protect them from internal rebellion. Most of the state legislators, however, supported Barbour by repealing the state defense force in May.40
Although Barbour stood by the Madison administration, he privately resented its failure to defend Virginia: “The inattention of the General Government to the defence of the State has been to me inexplicable.” John Campbell added, “The General Government has left us to paddle our own Canoe.” Virginians grew more uneasy about the Union under the strains of external war and internal fear.41
They felt trapped in a contradiction: the federal government could not protect them but would not allow them to defend themselves more efficiently with state regulars. Instead, Virginia had to rely on disorderly, expensive, restive, and sickly militiamen who longed to run home. And the reliance on militia drafts increased the tensions between the Tidewater folk, who wanted reinforcements from the interior, and the Piedmonters, who dreaded serving in the disease-ridden low country and opposed paying higher taxes for defense. Campbell noted, “The low-landers curse and abuse us for not keeping a standing force in every point that is exposed, and the high landers think we are playing the very devil with the Treasury. So here we are between Scylla and Charybdes in the midst of a storm and the Lord have mercy on us.” He did not expect the British and the slaves to do so.42
By concentrating the federally authorized force at Norfolk, the state government left the rest of the Tidewater exposed to British coastal raids. On the Northern Neck, Walter Jones warned, “If all the petty resources of the State are collected at Norfolk, the Enemy knows that there are four other equally productive peninsulas, within a few hours Sail, which they may ravage with little or no hazard.” The British exploited the superior mobility of their ships, which sailed far faster than the militia could march over the bad roads, through the thick forests, and around the many streams and rivers of the Chesapeake. “They have wings, we have only heels,” noted a frustrated Virginian. Rowing ashore in barges, armed British sailors and marines landed to loot exposed farms and plantations. Once the local militia assembled in threatening numbers, the raiders quickly withdrew with their plunder to the safety of their warships.43
The British raiding threatened the shaky finances of Virginia and Maryland. As the naval squadron roamed up and down and across the bay, the warships drew out thousands of alarmed militiamen who had to be paid and supplied, at a great and growing cost, while their farms and plantations suffered in their absence. During 1813, Virginia’s military expenditures quadrupled to $433,363, which amounted to 52 percent of the state’s budget (compared to 23 percent in 1812). The increase burdened taxpayers without generating enough revenue fully to arm and pay the militia in the Tidewater counties. In Princess Anne County the British burned a mill when the local militia lacked the ammunition to resist. On the Eastern Shore the militiamen ran out of provisions, and their commander worried that he would have to disband them: “In that case if the British did not destroy us, our internal enemy, the blacks, might do it with facility.44
The British raids and blockade wreaked havoc on the Chesapeake economy, which relied on exporting tobacco, corn, wheat, and flour. John M. Garnett lamented that Virginians were “closely blockaded by his Satanic majesty’s shops and unable to sell a bushel of corn or wheat.” Thomas Jefferson estimated that, on the James River alone, the blockade had trapped 200,000 barrels of flour worth a million dollars. As a wealthy planter, Jefferson could stand the losses far better than the common farmers, who also faced militia drafts to serve in Norfolk, where death by malaria threatened to complete the ruin of their families.45
The hinterland militia dreaded swampy Norfolk as a death trap for newcomers. A western legislator complained, “From the pure atmosphere of their native hills, they are removed to a foetid air and a noisome bogg.” Westerners regarded the Tidewater climate
as “more dreadful to them than the Bayonet of the foe.” In the Piedmont, during the summer of 1813, John Randolph heard “the shrieks of agonizing wives that yet ring in my ears,” because anyone “who would go to Norfolk at this season, would be reckoned a mad, and certainly a dead man.” The Piedmont people also feared “the danger from an internal foe, augmented by the removal of so large a portion of our force” to distant Norfolk.46
The Piedmonters longed to stay home to guard against a slave revolt. After the governor called militia away from Frederick County, Virginia, James Singleton warned that “from the nature of our population, there are perhaps few parts of the state in which a beginning of the modes of midnight murder may be more justly apprehended.” Any departure by the militia seemed to excite seditious words from the local slaves, as whites heard more clearly what they listened most intently for. One visitor reported that “the blacks in some places refuse to work, and say they shall soon be free, and then the white people must look out.” In Amelia County in July, a slave robbed a white woman, which caused a sensation because 120 of the local militiamen had recently marched away to Norfolk, leaving “a great number of their families exposed to the attacks of that unfortunate race, the blacks.”47
In Hanover County in December 1813, a Mr. Bowles went to serve at Norfolk, leaving behind a wife and infant daughter. One dark and rainy night, a slave broke in allegedly to rape Mrs. Bowles. While the intruder sat down to wash his feet, she seized an axe and brought it down “with such tremendous effect upon his skull, that he fell dead from his seat.” His brains fell neatly into the basin at his feet. The episode unnerved Virginians, who expected white men instead of women to kill wayward slaves. Rather than praise Mrs. Bowles for courage and strength, the official story credited a sudden infusion of divine energy that temporarily transcended her proper weakness as a woman. Although she had been strong and decisive, the mayor of Richmond, Robert Greenhow, described “the rescue of a forlorn, helpless female, from the fell designs of a fiend! A monster in human shape!! Her mind in a moment endued with power; and her arm nerved with supernatural strength.” The Council of State discharged her husband from militia duty to return home, thereby restoring gendered order to his household.48