by Hugh Brogan
The old British Empire, like its rivals, was built on slavery. This means not only that the Atlantic slave-trade, centring on the Guinea Coast, was a large part of the world trade which the Empire was designed to capture, but that most of the Empire’s commerce was in the produce of slavery. Sugar was the chief imperial commodity: the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were worked by slaves.16 Part of the sugar went to England, to enrich the merchants there; part in the form of molasses to New England, to be made into rum.17 The sugar islands grew very little of their own food, so merchants found ready markets there for the produce of Ireland, Pennsylvania, New York and the New England fisheries. The significance of this trade is unmistakable: as Richard Pares put it, ‘Without it the sugar colonies could not have existed and the North American colonies could not have developed.18 Exposed to new diseases, overworked and underfed, a slave on a sugar plantation had a life-expectancy of only seven years; this, and the shortage of women (which implied a shortage of children), meant that the planters had to replenish their labour force by regularly importing new slaves, which of course was good business for the slave-traders. The East India Company and the English manufacturers got a share of the profit by producing iron, coarse cloth, beads and other items with which to tempt African traders with victims to sell. This triangular trade was, in fact, the symbol of the Empire. Sicfortis Etruria crevit: the countryside round Bristol soon gleamed with country palaces for the merchants; Glasgow became a great city; Liverpool added to its indirect profits by operating a small slave-market of its own. The guilt of living off the misery and oppression of fellow human beings spread throughout prosperous and virtuous British society. To take two random examples: a slave-based fortune paid for the splendid buildings by Hawksmoor at All Souls College, Oxford; and although Jane Austen made a hostile reference to the slave-trade in Emma, she also made the Bertram family in Mansfield Park largely dependent on a slave-plantation in Antigua for their wealth, apparently unconscious of the evil they were exploiting.
Nor was any part of the North American colonies free of guilt. By 1720 one-sixth of Boston’s population was black. Cotton Mather was once presented with a slave-boy by his grateful parishioners: he turned this to good account by baptizing the boy Onesimus19 and learning from him the practice of inoculation. Mather spoke up for the religious equality of blacks and advocated their education; but he also urged Africans to give up their foolish ‘fondness for freedom’ and to recognize that they were better off as slaves.20 In 1760 there were 16,340 blacks in New York, most of them slaves. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Three Counties throve on their exports to the slave-islands; and the southernmost colonies – Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia – all enjoyed, if that is the word, slave-based agrarian economies.
It is still a matter for learned argument what effects the slave-trade had on the various African societies that were touched by it; but there is no dispute about what happened after the slaves were brought to the markets on the coast. After lengthy haggling, often complicated by rivalries among the slavers of different nationalities, some of the victims were bought and taken on board, while the rest were left rotting on shore, waiting for the next customers. The cargo slaves were meanwhile manacled with heavy iron chains in pairs. They were taken below and laid out, we are told by a reformed slaver,
in two rows one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more. And I have known a white man sent down among the men to lay them in these rows to the greatest advantage, so that as little space as possible be lost… And every morning perhaps more instances than one are found of the living and the dead… fastened together.
For the slave-decks were not only hellishly uncomfortable, but also spreading-grounds for the diseases that many of the victims brought aboard with them. Ships sometimes sailed with hundreds on board and arrived having lost two-thirds of their complement, though the usual loss on British ships in the eighteenth century seems to have been more commonly in the region of 10 per cent, and the figure tended to decline, for it was considered prudent to take some measures to preserve the lives of the slaves: they were valuable property.21 It was usual to bring them up on deck and force them to dance and sing for the sake of their health. Some slavers bought instruments on the coast for the cargo to play; in this way African music was carried to the New World. The songs were usually laments: the slaves did not much enjoy these occasions, nor was it meant that they should. Too great liberality might lead to a successful uprising, and it was always necessary to be on guard against suicide attempts; so a brutal constraint was universal. At last the ship would complete the Atlantic crossing (‘the Middle Passage’) and the slaves would be sold again, again with every additional circumstance of indignity. If they were lucky they were shipped to the North American mainland; if they were not (and it is now thought that only 5 per cent of the total, or approximately 400,000, in the whole history of the trade were carried to British North America) they quickly rotted away in the mines, ranches and plantations of Brazil, Spanish America and the sugar islands.
In this fashion the African population of the colonies grew until just before the Revolution (and for some decades after it). It was, next to the English, the largest ethnic group. The total number of slaves imported to the thirteen colonies or states before 1790 is thought to have been between 250,000 and 300,000 (our information is at present too scanty for greater precision), but very early, outside South Carolina at any rate, the African population began to show a natural increase which by the end of the century was approaching that of the Europeans. By 1775 there were approximately half a million African-Americans, many of whom had first-hand experience of the horrors of the Middle Passage.
A comparison of the birth-rate and death-rate of the North American plantations with those of plantations elsewhere, not to mention a comparison with the death-rate on shipboard, shows that conditions in the thirteen colonies, even in the tobacco- and rice-growing regions, were better than they might have been; but they were horrible enough. The system was one of forced labour and depended on the most brutal sanctions. Witches were not burned to death, but slaves were. So late as 1805 a slave suffered this punishment in North Carolina for poisoning her master, mistress and two other whites; the next year another, a man, was burned in Georgia for killing an overseer.22 Burning was a punishment that had earlier been fairly common, and it was resorted to on a grand scale in New York in 1740–41, when, in a scare that was the precise equivalent of the Salem witch-hunt, the city convinced itself that it was in imminent danger of being burned to the ground by a horde of popish blacks. Four whites were hanged, fourteen blacks were burned, eighteen were hanged, seventy deported. Everywhere the codes regulating slavery as a social institution authorized the harshest punishments and gave masters a free hand, up to and including the power of life and death, with their slaves. For private regulation, however, the whip was usually deemed sufficient: the diary of William Byrd, a cultivated Virginian gentleman, the colony’s most learned judge, shows him lashing one or more of his ‘servants’ every few weeks.23 Fearing to put ideas into their chattels’ heads, slave-owners would not let them be taught Christianity (not that the church had often baulked at recognizing the legitimacy of slavery) or be taught to read and write. Slaves were used casually as concubines, so much so that it has been thought that there was more inter-racial mingling in the eighteenth century than at any time since; the feelings of fathers, mothers and children were not respected, families being frequently broken up when the master wanted to sell. Slaves were outside the protection of the common law: even in Pennsylvania they were denied trial by jury. Above all the Africans were employed ruthlessly and incessantly to perform the heavy labour that the Europeans would not. To be a great tobacco planter in Virginia two things were required: plenty of cheap land to replace the acres wasted by soil-exhaustion and soil-erosion, the marks of inefficient agricul
ture, and cheap labour (otherwise the overheads of running a large plantation would price its product out of the market). Oppression of the Indians provided the first, oppression of the Africans the second. On this foundation a splendid civilization was erected.
Or so it is conventional to state. Certainly it cannot be denied that for a short time Virginia produced numbers of men as remarkable for their character as their intellect. George Washington (1732–99), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and John Marshall (1755–1835) are only the greatest names among them. They were high-spirited, well-educated, rich, intelligent and responsible gentlemen, who broke a kingdom and created a republic. Many of them deeply disapproved of slavery, though few of them could think of anything to do to end it, save emancipating their own slaves in their wills, as Washington did. Meantime they planned to clear the Indian tribes from the lands west of the Appalachians and seize for themselves new fields to exploit through the labour of their bondsmen. They lived in handsome houses on tidal creeks and rivers, exporting tobacco to England, and in return importing the means to lead a civilized life as the English gentry understood it: port, porcelain and mahogany furniture. They sent their sons either to the Inns of Court to acquire a smattering of law and manners, or to Williamsburg, Jamestown’s successor as the capital of Virginia, where they could attend the college of William and Mary (founded in 1693) and later study, as Jefferson did, under the lawyers practising in the town. Their cultural achievements were real. William Byrd had one of the largest libraries in the colonies in his generation, as Jefferson had in his. And Monticello, Jefferson’s great dream house, designed by its owner, remains the most extraordinary building in the United States, as Versailles is in France. It was begun in 1770 and not finished until 1809, and incarnates a lifetime of steadily improving taste and skill. But like Versailles it has a profoundly ambiguous meaning. Jefferson, an architect and interior designer of genius, imposed his vision of the noble life on a Virginian hilltop as completely as the Sun King imposed his on the heaths of the île de France. Posterity does well to admire and cherish both monuments: posterity has not had to pay for them. Yet each glory was made possible only by a deeply oppressive society which ruthlessly exploited the weak.24 Jefferson, it is true, was a humane slave-master, where Louis XIV was a supremely callous king; but he was the beneficiary of a system which was the negation of humanity. And like the French monarchy, the Virginian system, because of its strength and weakness alike, carried the seeds of its own certain destruction within it.
For the greatest achievement of the Virginian gentry was unquestionably political. It is possible to exaggerate its originality. Gentlemen in England were equally monarchs of the countryside, and every community in the colonies was necessarily self-governing. But there is no denying that in Virginia, more than anywhere else, the theory and practice of American republicanism grew to maturity. The gentlemen of the colony were said to be ‘haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power’. The great planters and their families – Randolphs, Byrds, Harrisons -dominated the region; the lesser planters and white farmers moved obediently in orbit, and the franchise, being restricted to freeholders with at least a hundred unimproved acres (or twenty-five improved, with house), could not place power in dangerous – for example, in black – hands (though some black freemen voted as late as 1723).25 It was, in short, a highly class-structured society. The gentry expected to be consulted about the organization and politics of their communities; they served conscientiously if, in many cases, reluctantly, on the vestries, commissions of the peace and other institutions by which their hold on church and state was maintained, and treated the voters to rum punch26 and barbecued beef at election time, to make sure that the right men continued in command (it once cost George Washington £50 to be elected to the House of Burgesses). Officially Anglican, they allowed no bishop to challenge their control of ecclesiastical patronage; although a Crown colony, Virginia was really ruled by its assembly, the House of Burgesses, which, in an epoch when all the colonial assemblies were rising in power and vigour, had no rival for self-assertiveness. The ruling class had in a few decades achieved a position of unchallenged authority and had not yet bred out of its system, by marriage exclusively within a confined circle, the qualities of intelligence, drive and judgement which had brought it to the top. Its commonwealth was as much a model of the aristocratic republic dear to Montesquieu as Boston was a model of the city-state. The great planters were as casually certain of their right to make all important decisions without interference from above or below as they were certain of their benevolence and wisdom. If challenged, they would and eventually did rely on their self-evident maturity and skill to justify their desire to govern themselves and others. And within the aristocratic pale, all was equality, duty and responsibility.
Unhappily for the gentry, aristocracy was, in the eighteenth century, showing signs of obsolescence. The most important slogan of the age was that of the ambitious, intelligent, educated young bourgeois: ‘careers open to talent’. All the traditional justifications of aristocratic rule proved useless when challenged, in one nation after another, by men who desired and were able to take and wield power, whether intellectual, economic or political. It is true that all was not plain sailing for these new men. In England they had a hard time of it until the 1832 Reform Act, and later. In France it took three revolutions to displace the nobility. All the same, their monopoly of power was doomed, and nowhere more than in America. There, the urban gentry was by definition raw, bourgeois and arriviste, like the towns themselves; and even the tobacco aristocrats were new men. Their power and position were too recently gained, by methods too imitable, and were too completely undermined by economic failure, to create a permanent noble caste like those which held up progress in France and Germany. The tobacco barons were soon supplanted, in true American fashion, by men as energetic and as newly rich as their own grandfathers had been. Even their political practices worked against them, as a Pennsylvanian writer pointed out in 1776, saying that ‘a poor man has rarely the honour of speaking to a gentleman on any terms, and never with familiarity but for a few weeks before the election… Blessed state that brings all so nearly on a level! In a word, electioneering and aristocratical pride are incompatible.’ Finally, in order to defend their power from a challenge from above and abroad – from Britain and the British King – they had been obliged to become self-conscious and explicit republicans; they had found it necessary, as will be shown in the following chapters, to justify rebellion by appealing to the rights of man. Extreme emergency had produced an extreme remedy, one which was a powerful example to others besides gentlemen. It proved impossible to keep the slaves from English, Christianity and literacy for ever; soon they found friends whose consciences were newly awakened to the implications of their religious and political principles (many of the latter having been learned from the Virginians); and in due course it was discovered that the rights of man were seditious. They undermined George Washington’s Virginia as thoroughly as they had undermined George III’s empire, and the leadership of the South passed, disastrously, to South Carolina, where men were still growing rich by slavery and were not ashamed to admit the force on which their political and social system rested. Men were still living who remembered Jefferson when, in 1861, a war broke out between those who adhered to his principles and those who adhered to his practice. Thus the Virginian formula was exposed as self-contradictory.
Nor was that all. It cannot be denied that Virginia was based on slavery; equally, it was based on race-prejudice. From the beginning of the trade slavery and racism had gone together. It is impossible to say that either came first. The Portuguese, in carrying the slave-trade into the Atlantic, were merely extending a practice which had been continuous in the Mediterranean since the remotest antiquity. And in all epochs men of one creed, class, race or state have tended to despise, hate and fear men of alien identities. F
ew societies, furthermore, have been more parochial, self-satisfied, greedy and cruel than Europe in the age of the discoveries. So the fate of the Africans was as certain and unpleasant as that of the Red Indians with whom it was linked. They were to be enslaved, put to menial tasks and despised, as the masters have always despised the mastered. As time went on the neat reasoning that the African was enslaved because he was inferior, and was inferior because he was a slave, came to be supported by other, equally mischievous, if not always mutually consistent, syllogisms. Slavery was a punishment for the Fall of Man and therefore part of the natural order, not to be tampered with. The slave-trade conferred a benefit on the African, since it removed him from the sin and heathenism of the Dark Continent. The same African was a savage who could not be Christianized, and because he was not a Christian had no rights. Being black, heathen and enslaved the African was different, and therefore wrong, for to be European, and especially English, was to be right; to be heathen and enslaved was clearly to be inferior to a free Christian; since all Africans were black, heathen and enslaved perhaps their colour was inferior too. Indeed it quite clearly was, because black was the colour of night, of evil, of the curse of Ham (imposed on him for looking at his father Noah drunk and naked);27 and it was well known that black men preferred white women to their own, just as apes (it was alleged) preferred black women to mates of their own species.28 Possibly the black man was not human at all, but a lesser creature, a link in the Great Chain of Being between humanity and the apes. After all, he lived, and was first encountered by the European, in the same part of the world as the chimpanzee (known at that time as the orang-outang)29… an immense farrago of evil nonsense slowly multiplied as men, otherwise of good conscience, found that they had to justify the continuing wrong they were inflicting on their fellow-men; and fear of rebellion or other retribution, fear inspired by guilt and the occasional violent expression of black resentment, made hatred inevitable and increased the will to justify the root of all evil. The result was the deeply entrenched, pathological enmity between the races which is the ugliest and oldest problem of American society; an enmity to which the light of Virginia, Mr Jefferson, gave revealing expression in those parts of his book on his native land, Notes on Virginia, where he expatiated at length on the ugliness of Africans. It makes one look with a sceptical eye on his rhetoric, his architecture and the wooden plough he invented, and prefer, to his rustic paradise, cities such as Boston and Philadelphia where hope for the future was really being born.