by Taylor, Alan
Conflict persisted between the slaves and Richeson. When pushed too hard, the slaves refused to work. When Richeson resorted to the whip, some slaves fled into the woods, further disrupting work. Apparently they also felt stinted in their food, for Richeson informed Cabell that the corn crop would fall short in 1816 because “the negroes had stolen a good deal from the field.” If so, they must have been hungry, for there was no local market for loose corn.8
Richeson blamed the unrest on the family of Great Jenny, the large, resourceful, and influential matriarch of the slave community at Corotoman and the mother of Canada Baton, who had escaped in April 1814 to become a Colonial Marine. Richeson regarded Great Jenny’s daughter Nancy as an especially saucy truant. In April 1817, after Nancy’s latest escape, Richeson assured Tucker, “She has not forgot her . . . tricks. Her mother says she has never seen her since she went off, but she lies.” Her brother Mathew soon joined Nancy in flight, apparently into the nearby woods, where they got food and clothing secretly from their clever mother on the plantation. In late September, Nancy and Mathew remained on the lam, so Richeson advised Tucker, “I think you had better get clear of great Ginney & her set or at least a part of them.” Tucker balked because of the long and close (albeit unequal) ties of his wife, Lelia, with Great Jenny and her clan. Despite Richeson’s complaints, Cabell retained Great Jenny and her many children and grandchildren (including Nancy), for they remained at Corotoman in 1834.9
In January 1818, John’s son and assistant, Henry Richeson, punched and tried to flog a slave named Billy, who struck back with a stick, then “drew his knife and immediately took his leave of the plantation.” Stealing a canoe that night, Billy made his way to Williamsburg, seeking out Tucker, just as that slave had done after a similar confrontation at Corotoman ten years earlier. Agitated when confronted by the harsh truth of plantation slavery, Tucker blamed both Billy and the Richesons for the invasion of his illusions. Tucker hired a man to flog the runaway, but it distressed the owner when the flogger reported that Billy’s already scarred back attested to previous, brutal whippings. Tucker promptly wrote to rebuke the Richesons for their cruelty. During the following summer, he sent Billy away to Cabell’s plantation in Nelson County rather than return him to Corotoman.10
Of course, the Richesons felt undercut when a runaway could, at the price of a bloody back, get the master’s attention to the detriment of their management. A defensive John Richeson replied that Billy had received only “2 or 3 lite flogings in the course of his stay at Corotoman.” Deeming him “the worst negro for deception that I ever had to do with in my life,” Richeson insisted, “Billy has not had a flogging since Mr. Cabell gave it to him himself when he was at Corotoman.” It is hard to imagine the slight and genteel Cabell wielding a whip, so presumably he had ordered the Richesons to flog Billy.11
In 1818, Corotoman belatedly produced a profit of about $1,000, but that remained too small for Cabell’s needs and plans. He blamed John Richeson, who had become depressed and drunken after his wife died in late 1816. Defending Richeson, Tucker urged forbearance: “I can heartily forgive & sincerely pity him . . . he seems to be a good hearted man, and as his removal to Corrotoman may have been the primary cause of his misfortune, I think we should regard his situation accordingly.”12
Richeson kept his job in 1818 but lost his life on October 30, 1820. Cabell reported, “Poor Richeson, he could not resist his propensity to drink. He drank very hard after I left him in May & alcohol carried him out of the world. . . . Richeson, poor man, had not a mind big enough for the business and the little he had, he almost totally destroyed by drink in the last years of his life. He has brought both the estate & his own name into disgrace.” At Corotoman, Cabell “found the estate in the hands of boys & almost in a state of ruin. It has been going down for several years, but this year it has sunk rapidly” and would produce no profit.13
To restore order, Cabell turned to George Robertson, the hard-driving manager who had run Corotoman until 1812, when he was sacked in favor of Richeson. Although sixty-eight years old, Robertson impressed Cabell with his zeal and energy: “The old man will produce a great change in the course of the year, if the negroes will but act well.” During the following spring, Cabell reported impressive improvements, which “keep me almost constantly & agreeably excited.” Superb on “the capital point of the economy of labour,” Robertson seemed to have broken the slave resistance, which had roiled the estate for more than a decade. Cabell exulted, “The negroes were all at home, working with a brisk, lively step & a cheerful & contented countenance. Under Richeson 1/3 of the labour was lost, because he was afraid to put the negroes up to the proper point of labour, & they were constantly discontented & often running away. Robertson did not hesitate a moment to insist on a full day’s work. Here is a striking proof of the necessity & propriety of discipline.”14
Within a year, however, the illusion of happy slaves and a progressing estate dissolved. In March 1822, Cabell again rued owning “that ill-fated place Corrottoman,” after learning that “one of the Barns containing about 200 barrels of corn & nearly all the corn for the support of the place, was set fire to by some incendiary & reduced to ashes. . . . It is a cutting stroke to my present circumstances, the more so as it opens such a horrible prospect for the future.” Cabell deemed Robertson “the innocent cause of this fiendlike act,” which suggests that some slave had furtively sought revenge on the hard-driving manager.15
In the fall of 1822, upon discovering that Corotoman was losing money faster than ever, Cabell lost faith in Robertson. During Richeson’s last, allegedly ruinous year, the plantation had yielded a profit of $160.63, while Robertson’s following two years produced a combined loss of $1,655. In 1821 a fierce summer drought had withered the crops before a fierce gale pummeled them in September. The next year proved little better. “What with the worm in the corn, & the garlic in the wheat, our crops have sunk almost to nothing,” Cabell mourned. Never one to fault the climate or pests when there was a manager to blame, he concluded, “Robertson, I fear, has worn out . . . he is old & obstinate, & bigoted to the accursed mania of enclosing to the destruction of livestock.” Although Cabell had pushed the enclosing program, Robertson became the scapegoat when the fenced-in cattle developed a herd disease.16
To cap off Cabell’s travails, he lamented that the “infernal Yankees are carrying off our negroes from time to time,” which he deemed “a growing & alarming evil on that estate.” Fleeing in boats, the latest fugitives sought freedom in a northern state. Cabell blamed the influence of “the colonization society [and] the Missouri question” for keeping alive the dream of freedom among the slaves. And yet, he too sometimes longed to escape into the more dynamic economy of the free states. In 1819, Cabell shared with his friend John Hartwell Cocke a secret dream of buying western land in Illinois: “Between you & myself, I should like to hold a large tract of land in a free state, and the time to make the acquisition is flying rapidly by. . . . This hint is confidential.” But Cabell could never extricate himself from slavery in Virginia to buy any land in Illinois, for he remained tethered to his debts and to his Tucker and Carter connections.17
Fed up with his losses, in December 1822 Cabell concluded, “To hold so fine an estate merely to make fortunes for overseers & to bring the owners in debt is a disgrace I cannot much longer submit to.” He resolved to move to Corotoman to set things straight through close supervision: “Nothing but the presence of an active owner for half the year will stop the tide of ill fortune which besets that place.” Once again, however, friends persuaded Cabell that his shaky health would never survive six months of exposure to the Tidewater malaria. Instead, he renewed his quest for a buyer, but Cabell still refused to sell at a loss despite the marked decline in property values throughout Virginia during the early 1820s. Although the Lancaster County assessors appraised his half of Corotoman at $26,550, Cabell hoped to sell it for a delusional $50,000. Cabell also felt constrained by his paternalis
m, for he preferred to sell the slaves with the land rather than separately: “Otherwise, what should we do with the old slaves who are numerous[?]” To abandon the elderly to starve would ruin Cabell’s reputation as a Virginia gentleman.18
After Robertson’s death, Cabell hired a Mr. Crittenden to manage Corotoman. Of course, he too disappointed the absentee owner and died prematurely in December 1826. Once again, the sickly Cabell dragged himself back to Corotoman to restore order. Finding “the estate in very bad condition,” he “spent the holidays in trouble & vexation, & intense suffering from the cold.” Cabell considered the slaves three to six weeks behind in their plowing, wood-cutting, and hauling, so he pressed them hard to catch up. Becoming desperate, Cabell lowered his asking price for the land to $30,000, but he still could not find a buyer. Instead, he became responsible for Carter’s half of Corotoman as well.19
Death And Debt
On November 30, 1825, Charles Carter abruptly died, leaving an orphan daughter, Rebecca Parke Farley Carter, known as “Parke” to the family. Her mother was already dead. About forty years old, Charles suffered an early and sad end for a once idealistic youth who had vowed to free his slaves. Instead, in 1812 he had buckled to family pressure, moving to Corotoman to live among the slaves he had never wanted to own. It must have been a lonely existence, especially after his wife died. But this is just a guess, for the partial survival of documents has played a cruel trick on Carter. Surprisingly few of his letters survive in the thick dossiers of St. George Tucker and Joseph C. Cabell. Their many words loom large in this story, while Carter remains in the shadows. His obscurity allows only speculation about how he reconciled himself to isolation and slaveholding after a vibrant youth spent dreaming of freedom in Paris and Edinburgh. He had studied medicine at the finest universities in the world, but Carter found his practice limited to a Virginia plantation. Ultimately, he seems the passive victim of his own resignation to fate—and we can only imagine him through the words of men who neither liked nor understood him, particularly Cabell.20
Parke was away at a boarding school in Fredericksburg, so Charles died in the company of just two men, Ellison Currie, a leading local planter, and Cabell. Carter’s last wish was to revive entail and primogeniture, which had preserved properties and slave communities through the colonial generations. When told he could not, Carter became resigned and “remarked that the law had made as good a will as he could make for himself”: his last recorded words. That passivity assured that his slaves would not be manumitted. Under Virginia law, no one could manumit them without also providing for their ouster from the state. Carter probably considered expulsion even crueler than slavery, for many of his slaves had family and friends on nearby farms and plantations, especially the Cabell half of Corotoman.21
The county court appointed Carter’s old enemy, Cabell, to administer the estate. Cabell reported that Carter “left his affairs in a bad state,” with at least $10,000 in debts. Reuniting Corotoman under his management, Cabell applied his improving principles. First, he ousted Henry Corbin, the brother of Carter’s late wife and allegedly “a corrupter of the slaves, a disorganizer among the overseers” and “the incessant fomenter of discord between my brother-in-law & myself.” Apparently, Corbin had tried to block Cabell’s takeover as a betrayal of Carter’s best interests. At the end of the year, Cabell also evicted the white tenants on Carter’s lands and demanded a payment of all their arrears in rent. Eventually, he would even forbid the harvesting of oysters from the creeks and coves of the estate.22
Cabell and his wife, Polly (who was Carter’s sister), adopted Parke—a nice solution because the Cabells had no children of their own. In January 1826, Cabell exulted, “That little innocent has awakened in my bosom feelings which I did not think it capable of feeling. We think of her by day, & dream of her by night.”23
While adding Parke to his family, Cabell soon had to subtract St. George Tucker. After retiring from his judicial post in 1824, Tucker and his wife, Lelia, spent every summer and fall in a small cottage on Cabell’s Edgewood plantation in Nelson County, returning home to Williamsburg for the winter and spring. At Edgewood on the morning of September 15, 1827, while dressing himself, Tucker suffered a stroke, falling to the ground paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak or write. “Our peaceful little family has been thrown into great commotion & distress,” Cabell reported. Formerly so strong, vigorous, and eloquent, Tucker became a bed-ridden, silent shell. On November 10, 1827, he died at the age of seventy-five and was buried at Edgewood, far from his beloved Williamsburg. Lelia remained with the Cabells until her own death in 1837, at the age of sixty-nine. With the deaths of Carter and Tucker, Cabell became solely responsible for all of Corotoman, but the mounting interest on Cabell’s debts threatened to consume the entire estate.24
During the troubled 1820s, Virginia’s great planters continued to live beyond their increasingly limited means. Few could curtail their spending or liquidate their assets, for the appearance of wealth and ease mattered enormously to them. No Virginia gentleman could abide the idea of living like some damned Yankee trader, by skimping on fine wines or new clothes, or by denying hospitality to a broad circle of family and friends. What would other gentlemen and ladies say? Worse still, a new and conspicuous frugality might seem desperate, alarming long indulgent creditors into suing to wrest something from an evidently collapsing estate. And despite all the past evidence of floods, blights, and droughts, planters remained convinced that a few years of good crops and better prices would restore their wealth, saving them from distasteful sacrifices.
Cabell and his older brother, William H. Cabell, faced ruin because they had cosigned for much of the massive debt left at death by their friend, Wilson Cary Nicholas. The Cabells felt betrayed that Nicholas had continued to live grandly while compounding his debts to the end. Expecting to lose $15,000 because of the Nicholas entanglement, Joseph C. Cabell assured a friend, “I cannot depict to you the misfortunes & afflictions brought on my family by a man whom I once revered as one of the greatest & best of mankind. Alas! what poor blind creatures we are.”25
In fact, Cabell was no better than Nicholas, for every Virginia gentleman fooled others by first deceiving himself. Surely, he reasoned, another loan or investment would restore his fortune. In 1822 Cabell confessed, “I am getting deeper into debt and feel restless & unhappy to think how I am going on. My wife is more disturbed than I am—more so than is requisite & proper.” And yet, a year later, over his family’s protests, he borrowed more money to buy another plantation, “Midway,” in Amherst County. Cabell kept throwing good money after bad, gambling on an implausible run of better crops and more dutiful slaves on additional lands. In 1824 he boasted, “The best thing I ever did was to buy Midway. . . . In a little time all my friends will see & applaud the wisdom of this measure.” Two years later, after another round of crop failures and mounting interest on his debts, he faced ruin: “These dreadful seasons are . . . truly distressing.” In 1828, his already ruined brother William begged Joseph to sell Midway at a loss to reduce his burden of debt: “But the misfortune is that you do not want to sell, & blind yourself to the dangers of your situation.” Cabell, however, had one last desperate hope of saving his estates: government compensation for the slaves who had escaped from Corotoman during the war.26
Commission
In the December 1814 Treaty of Ghent, the first article required the British to withdraw promptly from their American posts and territorial waters and to leave behind any private property still there on the day of ratification:
All territory, places, and possessions whatsoever taken by either party from the other during the war, or which may be taken after the signing of this Treaty . . . shall be restored without delay and without causing any destruction or carrying away any of the Artillery or other public property originally captured in the said forts or places, and which shall remain therein upon the Exchange of the Ratifications of this Treaty, or any Slaves or other priv
ate property.
Americans insisted that the British had to relinquish any runaways who were still on American soil or on warships within American waters on February 17, 1815. The British interpreted the article far more narrowly: as applying only to those slaves captured within the delimited areas fortified by the British. Under that reading, the British returned no Chesapeake runaways because they had fortified only Tangier Island, where they had captured no slaves. Similarly, on Cumberland Island in Georgia, Admiral Cockburn did restore eighty-one slaves who had belonged to the plantation that they fortified, but the British sailed away with another 1,600 runaways from other plantations in early March, three weeks after ratification.27
Their owners demanded their return, but preferred compensation in cash from the British, for they expected trouble from any restored runaways. William Prentiss explained, “For my part, I do not wish to see these unfortunate black people brought back, but a property worth perhaps a million dollars, if it could be recovered, would afford great relief to the sufferers.”28
The British had never compensated masters for the slaves removed during the revolution, and southerners had blamed the Federalist administrations of the 1790s for dropping the issue in favor of improving relations with the empire. That was a political mistake that the secretary of state in 1815, James Monroe, would never repeat: “A vigorous effort of the Government to obtain justice is claimed, and expected.” Attentive to the interests of his fellow slaveholders, Monroe directed the American minister to Great Britain, John Quincy Adams, to demand compensation from the British for the slaves removed by the Royal Navy in early 1815.29