Henry never made it to Williamsburg. The leaders of the Virginia Convention convinced him not to proceed, having arranged a truce of sorts in which the governor agreed to compensate the colonists for the gunpowder. Still bent on retribution, Dunmore declared Henry an outlaw, which only made Henry more of a hero; county after county rallied to his defense. When he set out for Philadelphia to resume his seat in the Continental Congress, three companies decked out in full military dress escorted him to the Maryland border. Through one intemperate act, the colonial governor had ensured that his chief rival became Virginia’s champion.
Having watched these events unfold, Madison wrote William Bradford a detailed account. Fully aware that most of Virginia’s leadership disapproved of Henry’s action, he wholeheartedly sided with Henry for his resolute effort “to procure redress.” In “the most spirited parts of the country,” Madison said, Henry’s boldness had “gained him much honor” among the citizenry.
He himself was one of those citizens, drafting an address to express thanks to Henry, which he and his father both signed as ranking members of the Orange County Committee of Safety. In this message to the public, published in the Virginia Gazette, Madison contended that Henry had the right to use “violence and reprisal” even if vengeance was his sole motivation. Conditions had changed with the “blow struck” at Lexington and Concord. The time for reconciliation was past.24
At this historic moment, then, Madison’s thinking was closest to Henry’s, setting him apart from Jefferson and Pendleton, who saw Henry as a man of impulse unable to resist responding to Dunmore’s provocations. Sizing up the magazine incident, Pendleton concluded that “the Sanguine are for rash measures without consideration, the Flegmatic to avoid that extreme are afraid to move at all, while a third Class take the middle way” toward a “Steddy tho Active Point of defense.” Henry’s boldness had shifted the balance of power away from the middle ground. Jefferson echoed this view in a letter to William Small, his college mathematics professor, now living in England. He worried that Dunmore had unleashed the “almost ungovernable fury of the people,” which no one but the “more intelligent people” of Virginia could temper. In Jefferson’s mind, Henry deserved no thanks.25
Young Madison had no fear of popular passions and no wish to restrain Henry. He was so deep in the marchers’ column and so uncomfortable with Jefferson and the moderates that he bought into a rumor that the half-blind sixty-five-year-old Richard Bland, in Congress at Philadelphia, had “turned traitor” after having been offered a lucrative job by the British. “We all know age is no stranger to avarice,” Madison charged, willing even to believe that the venerable Benjamin Franklin had returned from fruitless negotiations in London no longer worthy of the patriots’ trust. “Indeed it appears to me that the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality,” Madison stated, jumping to conclusions well at odds with his later reputation for reasoned analysis.26
Dunmore’s real transgression—his most inflammatory act—was the undisguised “malice,” as Madison termed it, of threatening to incite a slave uprising. Virginians were not taken by surprise, however. Rumors had been circulating that the design of the British administration all along was to pass an act freeing slaves and servants so that they could then take arms against the Americans. Congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee believed that Americans should free their slaves before the British did. Months before Dunmore revealed his plans, Madison had written to Bradford that he feared an insurrection. There had been a meeting of slaves (“a few … unhappy wretches”) who intended to seek out the invaders once British troops landed on Virginia soil. Bradford was no less appalled at the prospect, finding it incomprehensible that “the Spirit of the English” would countenance “so slavish a way of Conquering.”27
Madison was prepared to admit that its slave population was Virginia’s greatest vulnerability, its Achilles’ heel: “If we should be subdued,” he said in June 1775, “we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.” Madison knew that free, white Virginians had created an unstable society, and that all their bravado, all their talk of liberty, could not hide this fact. When his paternal grandfather, Ambrose Madison, had died at the age of thirty-six, in 1732, a court determined that he had been poisoned by at least one of his slaves; three were tried, one hanged.28
To be literal, using real slaves might be called a “slavish” way of conquering, but that is not precisely what Bradford meant. In 1775 the idea of slaves fighting their masters under sanction of the British military was an insult to the inherited sense of honor claimed by the king’s freeborn British subjects in Virginia. London had long maintained that plantation slavery could be safely managed and hitherto had done nothing to reverse or undo the arrangement. A new, “slavish” way of conquering meant setting up British Americans for destruction. Whether one looked at “slavish” conquering as race war or mere indecency, the situation was grim.
In June 1775, once Dunmore fled the governor’s palace, fearing for his life, his detractors assumed that his departure was part of a larger plan to invade Virginia. He had already kept the burgesses from meeting for over a year when the Virginia leadership finally felt compelled to establish its substitute government, the Virginia Convention. Fairfax County patriarch George Mason proceeded to devise the first serious plan for an organized military, and Patrick Henry made known his ambition to lead the First Regiment. After Henry won his colonelcy and the title of commander in chief of the Virginia militia, George Washington remarked caustically: “I think my countrymen made a Capitol mistake, when they took Henry out of the Senate to place him in the field; and pity it is, that he does not see this.” Washington believed that Henry, energetic though he was, did not reason (or strategize) as a military man should.
Meanwhile Dunmore made good on his threats, initiating raids along the coastline, harassing planters, and recruiting slaves. In November 1775 he did battle with the Princess Anne County militia, seizing its captain and securing a hold on the oceanside town of Norfolk. Victory so emboldened Dunmore that he issued the most infamous of his proclamations, charging rebellious Virginians with treason while promising freedom to all slaves and servants who flocked to his standard.
In simple terms, he had declared war on the Virginia planter class. Arming former slaves turned their great white world upside down. Dunmore’s so-called Ethiopian regiment, which helped defeat the Norfolk area militiamen, were musket-bearing slaves led by white officers, eager troops who wore the words Liberty to Slaves on their chests. There appeared to be more than one revolution in the offing.29
Jefferson recognized Dunmore’s new army as a menace. Writing from Philadelphia to his college chum John Page, he concluded his letter by reprising Cato the Elder’s call in the Roman Senate, substituting Norfolk for Carthage: “Delenda est Norfolk”—Dunmore’s stronghold must be destroyed. A prominent planter reported to Jefferson and the Virginia delegation in Congress that Dunmore’s ships were “plying up the Rivers, plundering Plantations and using every Art to seduce the Negroes. The Person of no Man in the Colony is safe.” Pendleton likewise expressed indignation over Dunmore’s “Piratical War,” telling Jefferson that all Dunmore really had in mind was to lure slaves on board his ship and then sell them for profit to plantations in the West Indies. This was not true, but it served Pendleton’s purposes.
General Washington, stationed outside a besieged Boston, shared in the moral confusion and outright indignation. Dunmore was the “Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity,” he charged, and if his movement was not quickly crushed, it would have a “snow Ball” effect; for Dunmore knew how to grow his army through a combination of “fear” and “promises,” most notably among the “Negros,” who otherwise had no reason to be tempted. He too understood that race relations constituted Virginia’s Achilles’ heel.30
Just a few weeks earlier Washington had appealed for a discontinuation of black enlistments in New England. He was uncomf
ortable with the number of blacks under arms and their easy camaraderie with white soldiers. But the slow pace of recruitment caused him to acquiesce at least to the reenlistment of free blacks. The commander of Continental forces was not alone: in Congress, John Adams echoed Washington’s concern, empathizing with the white southern troops who arrived in Massachusetts only to encounter this strange situation.
Lord Dunmore’s words and actions ensured that slavery remained central to how Virginians thought about their future prospects. The members of the Virginia gentry felt that their backs were to the wall. Whether or not the Continental Congress acted en masse, the colony’s elite was getting closer to declaring Virginia’s complete independence from Great Britain.31
“The General Inconvenience of Living Here”
Americanness had been forced upon the Virginians. Despite their good educations and their country seats, the English persistently portrayed them as clumsy provincials. In 1770 less than one-tenth of Virginia’s white males owned one-half of the colony’s land, while their slaves—human beings designated as property—accounted for nearly 40 percent of the population. Under such circumstances, late colonial Virginia would hardly seem to possess the building blocks of a healthy republic.
Madison and Jefferson were passive beneficiaries of a severely hierarchical system. Virginia’s landowners had overborrowed to maintain their opulent lifestyle. There is no better proof of the Virginians’ rank among the colonies than the fact that their most important product, tobacco, represented some 40 percent of the thirteen colonies’ combined exports to Great Britain. And it was declining in value. Financial worries intensified feelings of mistreatment by a Parliament that insisted on taxing the colonies. In short, the Virginians who exercised power at home felt dangerously exposed abroad.32
Slavery could not but define them. North of Maryland most slaves were house servants, playing a far less decisive role in the economy. To feed the commercial engine of the South, slavery had been made cruelly efficient. It had to be energetically maintained, policed by communities, and encoded in laws; otherwise it would not thrive. As a result, the Virginia gentry upheld inherently contradictory ideologies in the 1770s. They proclaimed their love of liberty, appealed to philosophy and literature, and exhibited a genteel and increasingly sentimental appreciation for the human potential. Admitting slavery’s corruption of whites’ morals, they did not, however, abandon the old compulsion to mix kindness with violence in dealing with their human property.
Were they helpless, born wrapped in an economic straightjacket? Or were they spineless? That is history’s problem to solve. In 1773 Patrick Henry, writing in a style that belies both Jefferson’s and Wirt’s descriptions of his intellectual limitations, told a Quaker who had educated and then freed his own slaves what Jefferson, Madison, and their compeers all felt in varying degrees: “Is it not amazing,” wrote Henry, “that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty … we find men professing religion the most humane, mild, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty?” Henry did not speak in the abstract: “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it.”33
His words embodied the paradox facing Virginians. Since 1765 white Americans had repeatedly and dramatically termed their suffering at the hands of Parliament “enslavement.” Yet all soon realized that their poignant metaphor invited comparisons to the slavery they practiced. In the famous case of Somerset v. Steuart (1772), British jurist Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery could not be sanctioned by the common law. It was, as the trial transcript reads, incompatible with the “natural rights of mankind” and the “mild and humane precepts of Christianity.” Once a slave stood on British soil, the very air he breathed gave him legal protection and made him free. A writer in the New-York Journal assumed that this ruling would produce “greater ferment” than had the Stamp Act protests, for it placed the regulation of American slavery within the jurisdiction of British courts.
Mansfield had no intention of freeing British slaves or of undermining the British slave trade. But he did imply that Parliament could, if it chose, pass legislation affecting slavery in the colonies. A successful attorney in the case went so far as to declare that the laws of Virginia were as repugnant to the British constitution as the customs found in the “barbarous nations” of Africa. Another contended that recognizing Virginia law in England was no different than permitting a Muslim to bring his fair-skinned slaves to London and rape them at will.34
Benjamin Franklin, in England at the time, saw the case as a perfect example of the hypocrisy of Englishmen. The state could congratulate itself on the “Virtue, Love of Liberty, and Equity of its Courts, in setting free a single Negro” named Somerset, while at the same time protecting what Franklin called a “detestable” slave trade on the high seas.
The British did not stop taking potshots at America after Somerset. In 1775 the conservative wit Samuel Johnson, essayist and lexicographer, wrote a heckling pamphlet, Taxation, No Tyranny, in which he mocked the colonists’ use of the slavery metaphor. Johnson famously asked readers: “If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of slaves?” The American slave poet Phillis Wheatley came to a similar conclusion in a 1774 letter published widely in New England newspapers, pointing out the “strange absurdity” of American slaveholders “whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposed.”35
The great contradiction could not be ignored. Only weeks before the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Packet boldly inquired: “Can we suppose the people of England will grant the force of our reasoning, when they are told, that every colony in the continent, is deeply involved in the inconsistent practice of keeping their fellow creatures, in perpetual bondage?” Cognizant of the Somerset ruling, the same patriot writer reasoned that if slaves were instantly free on British soil, then the only way Americans could contend for genuine liberty was to drive an “inhumane practice” from their borders. He urged Congress to outlaw the slave trade. And so it did: in calling for a general boycott of British goods, the colonies’ delegates all agreed to a ban on the importation of slaves, which was kept in force even after the other import restrictions were lifted.36
The contest with Lord Dunmore obviously tested Virginians’ discomfort with the institution of slavery. When it became clear that the Somerset precedent was not going to lead to the emancipation of slaves, Dunmore’s innovative approach to war—arming slaves—raised new and disquieting prospects. Slave owners now suspected that London was going to issue an “act of Grace,” thereby setting all slaves free. The Virginia Gazette reacted to the panic by giving a distorted picture of the slaves who sided with Dunmore, putting them in two broad categories: they were either stolen property or wayward men, easily tricked. The writer laughed nervously at the military pretensions of the slave conscripts, supposing that they performed their drills to the absurd tune of “Hungry Niger, parch’d Corn!” The New-York Gazette dismissively labeled Dunmore’s recruits as the “scum of the country.” Depicting slaves and indentured servants as hapless pawns, if not mindless creatures, enabled the Virginia militiaman to conclude that he had nothing to fear from them.37
As one can imagine, not all white Virginians believed the stereotype that their slaves were inferior beings. A good many were forced to concede that if given a taste of freedom, slaves were fully capable of pursuing private interests with a will of their own. As slaves began to desert their masters to join up with Dunmore, an unnamed writer in the Virginia Gazette promised those who chose to stay with their current masters that slavery would be abolished by the rebellious colony in due course. At the same time, members of the Virginia Committee of Safety executed two liberty-loving
slaves who had shown an inclination to serve with Dunmore. Their deaths were meant to serve as an example to others. To judge by the variety of what appeared in the Virginia Gazette in 1775–76, there was no universally agreed-upon policy in response to Dunmore’s arming of the slaves.38
One of the most intriguing reactions comes from the private journal of Robert Carter, a prominent forty-eight-year-old planter who lived sixty miles north of Williamsburg. He owned seventy thousand acres and more than five hundred slaves. On July 13, 1776, he gathered his slaves together and carefully explained the logic behind the Declaration of Independence. He told them that Dunmore had “called upon black People of North America to join him” and enter the king’s service. And then, without apparent guile, he asked whether they disliked their “present condition of life” enough to join Dunmore. They replied that they had no wish to fight against the “white people of the 13 united colonies” and proffered their allegiance to Carter, vowing “to use our whole might & force to execute your commands.” (This is as his diary reads.) Continuing to treat slaves as rational beings, Carter demanded on the spot that they take an oath of allegiance—which free whites would have to do shortly, when General Washington and the Continental Congress required them to pledge their loyalty to the new government. Carter may have been unusual in his approach, but his history reminds us of the complex psychology involved in relationships between masters and slaves. Both had aspirations. Both constantly reckoned with the meaning and extent of power.39
We must be careful not to conflate the eighteenth century with the nineteenth. Once the American Revolution began, the cause of liberty was everywhere shouted, and responsibility for the slave trade was laid at England’s door. In later decades, as more North American land was released from foreign dominion and the British brought slavery in their colonies to an end, a new defense of southern slavery was constructed. Tender masters were turned into philanthropists, somehow the holy victims of a northern conspiracy against them, and slavery became “a necessary evil.” It was different in 1776, when Virginians would have preferred to wish slavery away. A simple logic told them that differences in physical appearance did not dictate that one person should own another. It was a Boston preacher who pronounced in 1774 that “a dark complexion may cover a fair and beautiful mind,” but Virginians too knew that something was terribly wrong.40
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