CHAPTER 10
Nat Turner, that most successful of North American slave insurrectionists, terrified the slaveholding establishment into an historical debate over emancipation!
How a dramatic chronicler would love that introduction to a tale of murder begetting reform. Perhaps a novelist would prefer the fable that John Brown’s famous Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859 scared the South out of the Union in 1860. But epic possibilities abound in the saga of how Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831 frightened Virginians into the most massive reconsideration of slavery that ever occurred in a North American black belt.
So much for epic possibility. Most Virginians, like most Southerners, were only fleetingly panicky about whether blacks would murder whites. For either Nat Turner or John Brown to touch off lasting crisis, terror had to touch more sustained anxieties. In both 1831 and 1859, passing doubts about whether whites could control blacks quickly gave way to these masters’ greater worry: whether slaveholders could count on nonslaveholders, especially nonslaveholders two mountain ranges removed.
We will see that John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859 is an overrated cause of southern secession in 1860, not least because too little substantiated initial fears that slave revolt would inspire nonslaveholder uprising. In 1832 that deadly sequence transpired. Virginia’s legislative showdown over slavery, following in the wake not just of Nat Turner but also of the Convention of 1829, stemmed far more from white egalitarians’ fury at elitist republicanism than from slaveholders’ fear of black insurrection.
Still, Nat Turner’s uprising bestowed one boon on western egalitarians who would deflate eastern elitists. In the malapportioned Virginia legislature of 1832, as in the malapportioned Virginia Convention of 1829, a unanimous eastern establishment could have stymied western nonslaveholders. But Turner widened cracks at the top. A small fraction of eastern slaveholders, alarmed at Turner’s revolt, initiated debate on how to ease slavery out of Virginia.
1
Why did a few strategically placed slaveholders cave in before Nat Turner? The answer is not obvious, for Turner was never close to victorious. William Styron’s rather implausible novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, is most plausible in asking the question (its misleading answers aside) why Turner and friends did not brutalize more broadly. A novelist’s problem in turning a few dozen assassinations into an epic of assassination parallels the historian’s problem in explaining why an easily controlled rebellion demoralized a few critical slave-holding legislators.
Turner’s revolt is replete with ironies of a historic, frightening killer who looked not all that frightening and whose killings were not necessarily numerous enough to slay several significant slaveholders’ will to continue.2 Nat Turner was not an eerie dwarf, such as Gullah Jack, the witch doctor in Charleston’s Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822. Nor was Turner an intimidating giant, such as the towering General Vesey. General Nat was ordinary in size.
Nor was Nat’s owner of historic stature. The “master” was one Putnam, an infant. Putnam, having inherited “his” black from his lately deceased father, had lately been brought with “his” slave to live under his new stepfather, Joseph Travis. Nat Turner, least mastered of North American slaves, had master and step-master both.
Nor was Turner’s capture accomplished in the epic manner of John Brown’s at Harper’s Ferry. No establishment army smashed into a rebel-occupied arsenal, braving a fusillade of bullets. Rather, an impoverished nonslaveholder snatched the starving rebel from a heap of pinebrush. Previously, a slave’s dog had chased the fugitive from a cave and a bullet through the hat had driven him from a corn-fodder stack.
Nor did Turner orchestrate a grande finale in the manner of John Brown at the gallows. No righteous warrior here told his killers that the meek would murder the mighty. Rather, the slave capped an uneventful hanging by not moving a muscle before expiring.
Nor had General Nat’s 60 black warriors almost conducted a successful coup d’état. The Virginia militia, upon racing to the scene, could find only whites brutalizing blacks. Those who subsequently searched for brutalized white bodies found that fire had consumed some human remains. Wolves had devoured others. But even fantasies agitated by these horrors could not conceive of more than 70 whites slain.
Sixty rebels could not massacre many whites in so short a time in so isolated a setting. Nat Turner’s locale was not the crowded stage of a Vesey in Charleston, where thousands of throats were present to be sliced. Turner’s army victimized a scarcely populated speck of southernmost Virginia near the uninhabitable North Carolina Dismal Swamp. Turner terrorized this remote turf for 48 hours. His uprising was effectively over after one evening. In the morning, one brief barrage from six whites sliced the rebels’ ranks in half. Another brief burst shrunk Nat’s army to Nat hiding alone. Only Southampton County of Virginia’s hundreds of counties experienced the uprising. Less than 1% of Southampton’s territory was touched. Turner’s crudely armed followers had to march 10 miles to gain an arsenal. Rebels traversed only five.
If that sort of rural uprising had inevitably caused all to quake, Latin American slaveholders would have been constantly trembling. Hundreds of Latin American revolts spread thousands of times more viciousness than did Nat Turner’s spree. Latin Americans did not almost do in slavery every time—any time—thousands of bondsmen marauded and murdered. They would have been incredulous that 60 rebels could almost crack an establishment. But then again they knew despots must live and die by the sword. They were not democrats who needed to believe that familial slaves willingly consented to slavery.
Nat Turner’s anti-familial assault killed something more vulnerable than some 70 white dependents. Nat Turner murdered slaveholders’ domestic illusion. One question summed up why Nat Turner himself particularly threatened a Domestic Institution. Since Turner was a family assassin, what “family friend” could be trusted? Nat Turner had always posed as loving “boy,” grateful for patriarchal guidance. Why lock doors against Nat Turner? He would protect his Massa, little Putnam.
How little they knew, Virginians shuddered after Nat Turner threw off the disguise, what transpired behind their Cuffee’s mask. While Turner’s body had been performing Cuffee, his mind had been savouring the Holy Spirit. This domestic servant came to his mission after a vision “of white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened, the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in the streams.” At first Nat Turner thought the white’s anniversary of freedom was the appropriate day to slaughter despots and their families. But as July 4 approached, his black body ached. His illness seemed a sign that blacks must follow their own calendar. Then in mid-August, a black spot obliterated a sun made silvery-white by the fog, and the sky turned bloody crimson. The black knew the time to redden “his” white folks had come.
Past midnight on August 22, 1831, Nat Turner’s stepmaster, Joseph Travis, slept on the second floor with his wife and three children. The general put a ladder to a window, climbed inside, tiptoed downstairs, and let in six privates. Rebels, sneaking into the bedrooms, swung first at Massa Travis. The stepmaster was decapitated. His wife’s neck was severed. One blow beheaded two sons sleeping together. Gore-splattered warriors then splintered furniture and smashed china, apparently leaving no semblance of home intact.
They rushed into the August night. They remembered something intact. Putnam lived. They slipped back. They crept to his crib. They slit off his head. They fed his spurting body to the flames. Nat Turner, “infantilized” slave of an infant, was “childish” domestic no more.
Turner had planned, after gutting his own “home,” to march on the town of Jerusalem, ten miles north. He would there capture guns to replace hatchets. He may have anticipated marching back south and hiding gunmen in the Dismal Swamp.
He never made it up to the Promised City, much less down to the saving swamp. His army spent too much time and awakened too many alarms slaughtering sleeping families. Perhaps rebels thought domestic bloodletting would attract recruits. Perhaps vengeance waylaid strategy. Most likely the devout leader based his strategy on those heavenly signs of reddened whites. Whatever the reason, Nat Turner’s army savaged every white domicile en route.
A spree less heavy on domestic savagery might have been harder to put down. The general might have slipped his army past sleeping homes, murdering only if someone noticed. His troops might have raced to Jerusalem, ambushed the town, seized guns, and rushed back towards the Dismal Swamp, with hours of night still to pass. That raid would have combined Denmark Vesey’s surprise attack on The Man’s guns with Frederick Douglass’s dash beyond The Man’s grasp.
The preacher saw a more anti-domestic coup written in a crimson sky. Nat Turner’s crew did not restrict its savagery to resisting males. At their most notorious stop, the Waller home, instead of hunting down a patriarch fleeing to awaken the community, they massacred his wife and ten school children sleeping at his house. Black warriors then made a heap of the headless white dependents.
One best counts victims not by heads but by homes. The Francis home: wiped out, including one woman and three children. The William Williams home: wiped out, including one woman and two children. The Jacob Williams home: wiped out, including two women and five children. The Vaughan home: wiped out, including a widow and two children. In all, less than ten white men were killed. Twice as many women were savaged. Twice again as many children were massacred.
In a reversal typical during southern insurrection scares and especially understandable this time, panicky whites briefly turned the Domestic Institution into an anti-domestic prison. Homes were abandoned. Women and children were garrisoned. Men marched in front of un-family-like forts, as if guarding jails. Having previously assumed, albeit with occasional qualms, that hearths and firesides were safe from midnight assassins, slaveholders now assumed the unmentionable reverse: that every domestic could be an executioner. Having previously assumed, albeit with some brutal lashings, that fatherly cuffs would keep slaves laboring, patriarchs now slaughtered dozens of suspected blacks, put bodyless heads and headless bodies on display, savagely reminded Cuffee of the price for not obeying Massa.3
That anti-domestic violence had to dissipate. Patriarchs could not routinely be executioners. Families could not reside in garrisons. “Family friends” could not be locked outside homes. But the domestic charade, once resumed, had lost its verisimilitude. Democrats wanted no more garrisons. But could they believe their domestic slaves consented?
2
One important matriarch could not. Jane Randolph was the wife of Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Her husband was son of Thomas Mann Randolph, the governor who had urged the Virginia legislature to deport blacks after the Missouri Controversy, and thus grandson of Thomas Jefferson, who had called state deportation less practicable than national action. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, his grandfather’s namesake and executor, was to the manor born when it came to Conditional Termination.
Mrs. Randolph saw the Turner insurrection as a sign to start terminating slavery. The Southampton “horrors,” Mrs. Randolph wrote her sister, have “aroused all my fears which had nearly become dormant, and indeed have increased them to the most agonizing degree.” The “horrible slaughter” was no more “torturing” than “appalling precautions” now necessary “even up here,” hundreds of miles from Southampton. Nothing should “induce persons who can get a home elsewhere to remain.” She was “using all my efforts with Jefferson,” as she called her husband, “to quit at once and move North.” She would make “Jefferson … think on this subject as I do.”4
“Jefferson” thought about insurrection the way his grandfather had. Thomas Jefferson Randolph tried to calm his wife. Cuffee, he claimed, for now, is too lazy to kill. National, state, and local armies, for now, could crush any uprising.5
For now. For now. How this “Jefferson” sounded like his grandfather. Thomas Jefferson had always deflected his nightmare onto generations unborn. If we do not do something, he had warned, our children’s children will be murdered. By placing danger in the distant future, Monticello’s master had eased necessity for instant action. A conception of danger nonexistent until the living are dead invites the thought that the Thomas Jeffersons would never act.
The grandson proved otherwise. Procrastinators are especially tested when future fears receive present substantiation. Those timorous about generations yet unborn may build bulwarks against danger. Or edgy procrastinators may seek termination of a dangerous institution. Thomas Jefferson Randolph nervously stepped forward where his grandfather had faltered back. “The danger,” Thomas Jefferson Randolph wrote his terrified wife, “is to our children’s children 40 or 50 years hence, not to us.”6
But true patriarchs must save future families. In his speech in the Virginia House of Delegates on January 16, 1832, initiating the legislature’s historic debate, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson predicted how his slaves would murder his grandchildren.7 Randolph foresaw “a dissolution of this Union.” A northern “invasion, … in part with black troops,” would offer “arms and asylum” to slaves. When white males “shall march to repel” Yankees, “their families” would be “butchered and their homes desolated in the rear.”
This familial patriarch, wishing “better prospects” for our progeny, pressed hard for a version of the post-nati plan which his grandfather had softly suggested. Thomas Jefferson Randolph urged a legislative decree that Virginia slaves born on or after July 4, 1840, would be freed after they became adults—women at 18, men at 21. All those freed must then be deported to Africa.
Randolph’s plan would free no slaves born on or before July 3, 1840. No slave woman born on or after July 4, 1840, would be freed before 1858; no slave male before 1861. Indeed, no slave born in Virginia need ever be freed. Masters could sell otherwise-to-be-freedmen into perpetual slavery down south before emancipating birthdays. Thomas Jefferson’s grandson would make New York’s illegal form of black removal legal, even moral in Virginia, just as New York’s James Tallmadge, Jr., had proposed for Missouri.
The Virginia government, cheered Randolph, need not compensate masters for potentially unemancipating post-nati emancipation. Future mothers would be the only relevant property owned at the moment future emancipation was decreed. That property would always remain Massa’s. As for future offspring, they could be sold down river if slaveowners wished compensation. Nor would Randolph charge public coffers for freedmen’s deportation to Africa. Young adults would be required to labor long enough to finance their journey towards freedom. The consequence, for Virginian grandchildren of Jefferson’s grandchild, would be priceless, costless absence of blacks.
Eastern Virginians’ leading newspapers cheered Randolph’s proposal. The Democrats’ Richmond Enquirer hailed the “unprecedented event” and, urged “one last appeal for emancipation.” The Enquirer’s most important newspaper rival, the Richmond Constitutional Whig, denied this legislative debate would be the last. “This year may not see the vast work commenced. … A half century may not see it completed.” But no philanthropist could “calculate the benefits to mankind of Virginia’s… abolition.”8
Virginia’s governor concurred. Governor John Floyd, a slaveholder, had in November 1831 timidly initiated what he prayed would be a south-wide movement to remove his property. He privately informed South Carolina’s and Georgia’s governors that his annual message would urge “a first step to emancipation.” His proposal, Floyd reassured South Carolina Governor James Hamilton, Jr., “will of course be tenderly and cautiously managed, and will be urged or delayed as your State and Georgia may be disposed to cooperate.”9
Hamilton’s reply evidently has not survived. What a loss. The South Carolina governor must have penned a memorable command from the Lower South to the Upper South to measure up to being a Southerner. The South Carolina Nullifier, deep in a fight to nullify the legal basis for future antislavery, would hardly join a Slavepower Conspiracy to abolish slavery. Perhaps given pause by South Carolina’s “Little Jimmy,” Governor Floyd was circumspect in recommending legislative action. But Randolph’s debate had the governor’s sanction. At last, a fraction of the Virginia establishment encouraged a “Jefferson” to act.
A handful of key slaveholding legislators affirmed Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s conception that the safety of southern homes demanded removal of slavery. James McDowell, Jr., a Valley slaveholder and a future governor of the state, called this “domestic institution” an inseparable union of “danger and slavery.” In patriarchal Virginia, “peculiarly,” McDowell claimed, “attachment of the slave to his owner is common.” But this very “humanity of our people” was the “principal cause of apprehension.” Paternalists who “improve” a slave’s “intellect” and “lift up” his “condition” thereby “bring him in nearer contact with the liberty he has lost.” Patriarchs proud of the “privileged condition of their slaves” had created “a mask of mischief,” hiding a “future explosion.”
Domestic servitude, warned McDowell, is the worst “conceivable” form of slavery. “Nothing can be done” to ensure “domestic defense,” for our “dwelling is at all times accessible” to our “enemy.” The “defenseless situation of the master and the sense of injured right of the slave” are “the best possible preparative for conflict.”10
William Henry Brodnax, another large slaveholder and representative of a heavily enslaved district, added another theory on why Nat Turner’s rebellion necessitated deportation of domestic servants. General Brodnax, commander of militia units during the Southampton Insurrection, had dashed to the scene, thousands at his command, only to discover no insurrection to conquer. Midnight assassins had scattered the moment they could no longer advance “unseen and unopposed.”
The general, although finding no enemy to conquer, had experienced one almost unconquerable difficulty. “The public mind was excited almost to frenzy by seeing the mangled corpses of helpless females and unoffending infants devoured by dogs and vultures.” His army had “the greatest difficulty” stopping “indiscriminate slaughter of the blacks.” Some “Domestic Institution” this, where the commander sent to prevent Cuffee from decapitating Massa had instead to prevent patriarchs from massacring blacks.
William Henry Brodnax was “not without my fears.” Within “insulated neighborhoods, a few misguided fanatics, like Nat Turner,” could recommence “partial excesses of pillage and massacre.” Midnight ambushes, “the real extent of the danger,” were “bad enough.” What matter to the mutilated family whether others were slaughtered? “To the wretched individuals assailed,” a revolt against their household was as critical “as if all the world was involved.”
Brodnax believed that another insurrection anytime “soon” would yield “indiscriminate slaughter of all the blacks.” The more probable event, several “partial attempts” at “intervals of many years,” would still provoke white avengers. A responsible paternalist must protect his blacks against likely massacre—and his whites against not-so-likely beheadings.11
Brodnax and the few other slaveholding reformers in the legislature called the Domestic Institution detrimental to economic prosperity as well as to domestic safety. “Virginia,” complained McDowell, “has greatly declined.” Slave labor’s “improvidence,” “inactivity,” and “apathy” have yielded “our desolated fields, our torpid enterprise, and … our humbled impotence.”12 “Who can doubt,” added Brodnax, that “slavery” is “principally” the cause of Virginia’s pecuniary decline?13
On what should be done about this “mildew,” this “incubus,” this “transcendent evil,” William Henry Brodnax turned on Thomas Jefferson Randolph with that viciousness reformers reserve for each other. “Monstrous,” “dangerous,” “revolutionary,” “immoral”—that is what Brodnax thought of this latest “Jefferson.” Randolph’s notion that the state would owe masters nothing for children seized, Brodnax scoffed, displayed “very absurd” understanding of why masters paid premiums for breeding “wenches.” “Jefferson’s” conception of obviating “impending dangers”with a plan commening 30 years hence, marveled the white commander who had marched on Nat Turner, left criminally vague “what is to become of… our safety … in the meantime.” In “dark and uncertain” years before the “day of jubilee,” Virginia legislatures would spend “winter after winter” causing “dangerous excitement” by considering repeal of the Jacobinical law. No less certain to lead to “lawless efforts and insurrection” was Randolph’s proposed mix of blacks to be freed because born on or after July 4, 1840, and blacks always to be enslaved because born on or before July 3, 1840.
To further disrupt the domestic realm, Randolph’s proposal would give every gentleman “the strongest temptation … to convert himself into a negro-trader.” Owners could “sell and pocket the value of every one of these post-nati, up to the very hour” of adulthood. Under “this fanciful” emancipation, where not “one single negro ever would be liberated,” blacks would rise like madmen when sold down river in the final hour. Randolph’s chimera was thus a scheme of liberation destined to free no one, a preservation of domestic peace destined to produce 30 years of domestic warfare, a maturation of Virginia paternalism destined to make every patriarch a child-seller.14
William Henry Brodnax proposed instead that deportation be commenced immediately and emancipation soon. He would begin by exiling 6,000 free blacks a year, at state or federal expense. “Within ten years,” no free black would remain. After this “process … shall have demonstrated the practicality … of gradual deportation,” Virginia should move on to deporting 10,000 slaves a year, with compensation to masters. “In less than 80 years,” not one slave would blacken lily-white Virginia.15 Expensive? Certainly. But less costly and more moral than the alternative: slaughtering domestics during the next insurrection panic, a catastrophe Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s proposal would hasten.
3
Most Virginia slaveholders and most of their representatives saw a better upper-class solution than Brodnax’s or Randolph’s. Rulers of blacks should shut up and do nothing. Nat Turner’s rebellion, said slaveholding conservatives, would remain too exceptional to ruin domestic slavery, unless legislative speeches provoked more domestic savagery. No legislative talk should occur, for no effective law was possible. Legislative action against slavery required government-financed compensation to slaveholders and deportation for slaves. Virginia could not afford remedies so expensive.
But no legislator called slavery good or permanent. All assumed the posture of Benjamin Watkins Leigh, demanding no legislative interference with the “evil.” Everyone found some way to call bondage a “curse,” a “poisoned chalice,” indefensible “in the abstract.”
These not-very-proslavery opponents of legislative action saluted a safer way of cleansing the Chesapeake of bondsmen. Worldwide demand for cotton, urged Randolph’s and Brodnax’s opponents, would slowly drain Virginia slaves towards the cotton-producing Deep South. As slaves diffused out, whites would come in. “Natural causes,” trumpeted William O. Goode, would gradually, peacefully achieve “removal of slavery from Virginia.”16
With most slaveholders preferring “natural” termination by slave sales, “unnatural” legislative termination had no chance, if the issue was the upper class’s to determine. The danger of ruling-class division remained what it would ever be: lethal only if nonslaveholding locales, North or South, made the fate of slavery their business too. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, like his grandfather, favored proper collaborations with other regions and classes to achieve blacks’ removal. In 1824, Thomas Jefferson had sought alliance with a northern nonslaveholder, Jared Sparks, to achieve through national legislation what state legislatures could not afford. Now Thomas Jefferson Randolph sought alliance with Virginia nonslaveholders to secure a legislative interference most slaveholders could not abide.
Brodnax called Randolph’s proposed collaboration treason. Letting nonslaveholders decide about slavery would undo the work of the 1829 Convention. Virginia’s minority of slaveholders had then secured protection against King Numbers. Now, allowing a nonslaveholding majority to determine whether, when, and how slaveholders’ property shall be seized would re-enact “the dark and bloody scenes of the French Revolution.”17
Randolph answered Brodnax with a metaphor. Suppose dogs bit citizens. Should only “dogholders” determine “whether the dogs should be destroyed?” Is not the family “of the non-dogholder as likely to be bitten and to die … as the family of the dogholder?”18
With that metaphor, Randolph caught the possible danger in the division of Virginia’s upper class. When have-nots meddled with what they did not have, a split among the haves could be disastrous. If Nat Turner had commenced a series of events destined to topple the establishment, nonslaveholders would have to make Virginia slaveholders pay for division at the top. The West had failed, despite Thomas Jefferson’s invitation and eastern divisions, in 1829. Now a new “Jefferson” was renewing the invitation for a historic collaboration.
4
Yeomen needed no invitation. They accepted anyway. So-called outsiders gained delicious legitimacy by following insiders. Eastern slaveholders, pointed out the West’s George Summers, initiated antislavery debate and “called for assistance.” Western nonslaveholders came “at their request, … to labor side by side with them.”19
They labored side by side with Randolph because slavery was not just slaveholders’ business. Back in 1829, Phillip Doddridge had regretfully predicted that slaves might be sold west. The Nat Turner affair, warned western legislators in 1832, increased the prospect that the “black vomit” would spew upon them. Eastern Virginia, diagnosed Westerners, had too many slaves. Other southern states would bar Turner-crazed serviles. Where would that leave western Virginia’s fertile valleys? The only outlet for diffusion of eastern Virginia’s slaves! Cursed by a “disease … we can establish not even a QUARANTINE” against.20
Most Westerners, like their handful of eastern legislative allies, wished to quarantine themselves against Turner-like domestic dangers. No one wants to live, noted Charles Faulkner of the Valley, in a home where “such an evil may occur”; and where no “vigilance of your police can prevent its recurrence.” No one wishes to reside, added George Summers of the Trans-Allegheny, in a household where “a daring and desperate spirit” masks the “murder in his heart” with “smiles upon his face” as he “leaps upon his devoted victims.”21
Still, Westerners attacked slavery less because of dread of slave rebellion than because of desire for political power. Like Rufus King at the time of the Missouri Controversy, nonslaveholders argued that because slaveholders demanded more than one-white-man, one-vote, achieving white political equality required containing black slavery. A tyrannical institution had spawned a tyrannical constitution, based “on the odious doctrine that wealth is the proper basis of Representation.” Social tyranny, having begotten political tyranny, would furthermore spawn economic tyranny. The eastern minority, alias the anti-republican legislative majority, would defeat “railways, canals, and all other magnificent projects” of the western majority, alias hapless legislative minority.
Westerners held down politically and thus economically by the Slavepower would be still more economically shackled, they declared, if slavery poured over the mountains. Trans-Allegheny legislators, echoing again eastern critics of the system, called slavery the sure route to economic stagnation. Free labor was the key to economic growth. Independent republicans who freely consented to labor outperformed dependent slaves lashed into exertion. A single poor Westerner, working a minuscule “patch of corn,” displayed more “boldness of invention” than 10,000 lazy slaves or 1000 idle owners.22
The argument demonstrated that just as economic systems yield political ideology, so political systems generate economic ideology. Republican and capitalistic assumptions here fused into an ideological passion for consent, whether to labor or to be ruled, a passion beyond what mere politics or mere economics alone could have inspired. Benjamin Watkins Leigh’s point at the Virgina Convention was proving to be all too right: egalitarians aroused to full consciousness could turn against all forms of coercive inequality. With Westerners’ desire for consenting and equal laborers fusing with their desire for consenting and equal citizens, Easterners would need every unequal constitutional advantage which Leigh had lately helped secure.
5
Westerners preferred Randolph’s way of clipping the Slavepower’s dominance to Brodnax’s. Nonslaveholders would rather begin by removing slaves than by deporting free blacks. But rather than losing reform in a squabble with each other, reformers coalesced behind an abstract proclamation that legislative action against slavery was “expedient.” Conservatives coalesced behind a motion to table the subject.
Virginia proved, as usual, too divided for so clear-cut a choice. The resolution declaring legislative action against slavery “expedient” lost, 73–58. The vote revealed a geographically remote nonslaveholder class almost unanimously eager to challenge the Slavepower. The Trans-Allegheny declared legislative reform expedient, 31–0. The Valley concurred, 18–6. The half-dozen valleyites who voted with eastern slaveholders all lived in slavery’s few southern Valley bastions.
Only the East’s extra legislative seats prevented nonslaveholder power from truly menancing the Slavepower. The legislative malapportionment of 1829 gave western Virginia seven less, eastern Virginia seven more delegates than a one-white-man, one-vote apportionment would have provided. A shift of seven votes would have narrowed a rather substantial 73–58 vote against the expediency of legislative termination into a razor-thin 66–65 defeat for nonslaveholders. Virginia, with one and a half times more slaves than any other southern state in 1830, barely had a majority mandate to continue despotism, at least according to the egalitarian republican way of measuring mandates.
The legislative vote also illustrated continued dissent inside the slaveholders’ section. Nine eastern delegates voted for the expediency of legislative action against slavery. Two defectors represented Tidewater cities, home of nonslaveholding laborers; one represented the Tidewater’s Accomac County, bastion of nonslaveholding fishermen; six represented areas near Monticello, locale of planters geographically and ideologically close to western Virginia antagonists. This fraction of slaveholders, when added to the nonslaveholding majority, could indeed have endangered slavery—if King Numbers had ruled the Old Dominion.
The malapportioned legislature, having resolved against legislative interference, next voted on tabling further discussion. On that roll call, the crack in the eastern ruling class widened. Eleven eastern delegates who had voted down the expediency of legislative interference joined the nine eastern “traitors” who had voted up legislative termination to provide 20 eastern votes against terminating the debate. Too few Easterners stood ready to silence western insurgents.23
Wavering legislators, having voted against terminating the discussion and the institution, now had to terminate something. The foggy solution came from an indistinct figure. Archibald Bryce, Jr., a representative from the northwestern Piedmont, moved that the legislature take the “first step” of colonizing free blacks. The second step, of colonizing enslaved blacks, “should await more definite development of public opinion.”
Since slaveholders wished free blacks out, Bryce’s middle ground might seem tilted toward perpetuating slavery. But Bryce inclined towards ending slavery. He called his resolution an “entering wedge,” a signal to “the world” that Virginians “look forward to the final abolition of slavery … and that we will go on, step by step, to that great end.” Virginians believed that ending slavery required removing blacks. Let us prove, urged Bryce, that colonizing free blacks would work. Then terminating bondage would follow.24
The vote on the Bryce Preamble showed that most legislators read Bryce’s language Bryce’s way. Of the 73 conservatives who had previously voted that legislative termination of slavery was “inexpedient,” 58 now voted that Bryce’s “entering wedge” was also inexpedient. Of the 58 reformers who had affirmed legislative action as “expedient,” 52 now accepted Bryce’s experiment to prove that removing blacks was expedient. The Bryce Preamble passed because those eastern moderates who had voted against terminating both the discussion and the institution joined 90% of the legislative termination coalition in hoping that colonization now would make action against slavery expedient later. Almost all members of the swing group of eastern moderates represented counties with over 40% slaves.25 An irresolute ruling class had pushed an irresolute resolution over the top.
6
Thomas Jefferson Randolph cheered Archibald Bryce’s one-quarter loaf. “A revolution has commenced,” he wrote his wife, “which cannot go backwards.” A key legislative supporter agreed. “Do not fear any plan of abolition that proposed less than yours,” wrote James McDowell. “The first step is everything.” Let “the legislature once decree” a shipment of 100 negroes. Then “our objective is achieved—achieved because the value of the negro as a property for speculation” will be “gone & because the moral sentiment of the community will eschew” so besieged a property.26
McDowell’s victory statement echoed Robert Y. Hayne’s warning, back in 1827, that slavery would be lost if Congress so much as debated colonization. The Virginia apologist and the Carolina perpetualist agreed that the slightest slaveholder submission to government meddling would nurture uneasiness in the Big House, unrest in the quarters, uncertainty at slave auctions. The Bryce Preamble could be an “entering wedge” if it sliced a smidgeon into masters’ dominance.
But Archibald Bryce’s language could not cut fudge unless the Virginia legislature proved it meant to ship out blacks. The declaration that the government meant to deport would be empty without a law to effect deportation. To guarantee McDowell’s first boatload of 100 blacks, the Virginia government had to provide 100 tickets and ensure 100 souls on board.
Irresolution reigned again over how to ensure passengers. Archibald Bryce wished to begin with free blacks. But would free blacks freely consent to go? General William Henry Brodnax, the white who had coerced Nat Turner’s blacks, answered that he would make free blacks go.27
This deportationist was too toughminded for most Virginia softhearts. Some Virginia blacks had been incongruously freed, even if all blacks were supposed to be slaves, because ex-slaves’ ex-masters no longer consented to coerce “their people.” The resulting freedmen owned land. Could a property-loving republic dictatorially seize property by despotically expelling property owners? Free blacks had enslaved mates and children. Could a domestic regime savage homes by exiling husbands?
The Virginia majority could not. To deport a “whole class … of free men,” urged the Richmond Constitutional Whig, would “stain the Statute Book of Republican Virginia with a law which would disgrace Turkey.”28 Such attitudes left only slaves eligible to be forced aboard ship. Few doubted that coerced slaves could be coercively deported. But eastern Virginians preferred that free rather than enslaved blacks be the first removed.
The House finally narrowly passed financing to deport slaves who masters wished to free, with Archibald Bryce’s majority at last honing an edge on his entering wedge. But the Senate narrowly refused to concur in the appropriation bill, largely because eastern Virginians had even more seats proportionately in the upper house than in the lower. The Slavepower’s extra power in the Senate thus narrowly defeated state-financed deportation of slaves about to be freed, just as the East’s extra seats in the House of Delegates had widened the margin against the expediency of legislative action. The malapportioned legislature of 1832 adjourned, having brought forth only Archibald Bryce’s abstract affirmation of colonization as an entering wedge, and having authorized not one of James McDowell’s 100 proofs that the legislature meant to act on the abstraction.29
7
The Virginia Slavery Debate exposed a regime in need of new vocabulary, new thought, new action to consolidate slavery. Upper-class rulers who called slavery dishonorable almost invited renewed efforts to cure dishonor. Procrastinating Virginians needed at least a rationale for further procrastination. Zeal to perpetuate slavery would have yielded still more comfort.
Historians, sensing slaveholders’ discomfort, have written as if Virginia’s historic debate of 1832 spawned a Great Reaction immediately thereafter. An escalating move to call slavery blessedly permanent supposedly dissolved ancient differences between Old Virginia and Old Carolina. Thirty years before the Civil War, the Old South confidently united on confident reactionaries’ terms.
Alas for reactionary confidence. So much for posterity’s confident logic. The Old Dominion mentality evolved within its own logic, which meant never far from old assumptions. Instead of immediately rallying behind South Carolina’s Unconditional Perpetualism, procrastinating upper-class Virginians needed another 20 years to repudiate Conditional Termination. Even then, the greatest theorists would stumble over the same ideological traps which prevented earlier Virginia polemicists from calling slavery a perpetual blessing.
Thomas Roderick Dew, the most famous Virginia writer on slavery in the aftermath of the slavery debate, supposedly proves that the Old Dominion immediately repudiated the viewpoint that slavery was evil and should be ended. Some of Dew’s positions did anticipate later arguments that slavery was a permanent good. But Dew lived in the wrong place and at the wrong time to clear his voice of Virginia apologetics. This key writer is the so-called exception proving the rule that Old Dominion reactionaries remained drifting Virginians rather than consolidating South Carolinians.
Thomas Dew came naturally by Old Virginia’s procrastination. He was both scion of an old Tidewater family and professor at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, once Old Virginia’s capital. His Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature, published several months after the debate, reiterated what had passed for “proslavery” in the debate itself, which was never defense of perpetual slavery.30
The professor attacked the Virginia legislature for dangerous talk and disastrous solutions.31 Every remedy for slavery proposed, urged the young Tidewater political economist, would collapse the commonwealth. Liberating and deporting every black would cost one-third of the state’s wealth. The other two-thirds of Virginia’s financial power, largely based on the slave economy, would dissolve without slavery. Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s trickle of post-nati blacks in exile would infuriate blacks not exiled. William Henry Brodnax’s larger trickle of deported free blacks would overwhelm tiny Liberia.
The professor was more interesting when he moved past such by now stale arguments. Many passages in his Review and in essays published soon thereafter prefigured later arguments that laborers of all races in all nations should be enslaved. An upper-class Virginian of Dew’s ilk was trained to distrust Alabama’s herrenvolk model: only slavery for blacks, only egalitarianism for whites. Upper-class domination over poorer folk, black and white, was written into the Virginia government. Dew sometimes wrote color-blind dominance into his proslavery argument.
Dew thus called slavery the remedy for modern industrialists’ exploitation of all races. Wage slaves, always underpaid and often fired, would be better off as chattel slaves of protective paternalists. “At this very moment,” Dew claimed, “in every densely populated country, hundreds would be willing to sell themselves” into chattel slavery “if the laws would permit.” “A merrier being does not exist on the face of the globe,” Dew soared, “than the negro slave of the U. States.”32
In his other writings in the mid-1830s, Thomas R. Dew occasionally picked up a point left implicit here, that wage slaves would eventually rise in revolution, unless chattel slavery saved Western Civilization. America, argued Dew, because not yet densely populated, would be among the last nations to suffer lower-class revolt. But even here, “the time must come.” Eventually, “millions shall be crowded into our manufactories and commercial cities.” When the urban poor shall “form the numerical majority,” then a French “reign of terror” would devastate the American social order. Only paternalistic slavery could “ward off the evil of this agrarian spirit.”33
But this Virginia prophet, the first to call slavery best for all races, always dropped the argument for color-blind bondage after a few paragraphs. Elaborate proof that Hebrews and Christians maintained color-blind slavery, for example, came coupled with the admission “that slavery is against the spirit of Christianity.” Dew’s excuse for supporting an anti-Christian institution: the “evil” has been “entailed upon us by no fault of ours,” and we must not “shrink from the charge.”34
So too when discussing economic relations, this occasional advocate of enslaving all laborers usually called free labor the fast lane to prosperity. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was Dew’s favorite economic treatise. The Virginian agreed “in the main” with the Scot that “desire to accumulate” leads free citizens to “much more efficient and constant exertions” than the lash can draw from slaves. Like Smith, Dew trusted the Invisible Hand of free labor’s ambitions more than the heavy hand of government.35
A man usually so fond of Adam Smith’s free labor ideology could only call coerced labor sublime under exceptional circumstances. Dew attacked Smith for ignoring two exceptions. First of all, Adam Smith had erroneously considered “desire to accumulate and better our condition” a human universal. Yet among red and especially black men, the “principle of idleness triumphed over the desire for accumulation,” unless “the strong arm of authority” coerced. Thomas R. Dew’s universal slavery here narrowed towards what a later school of color-blind proslavery writers would deride as “mere negro slavery,” servitude as good only for supposedly lower, lazy races.
Dew escaped “mere negro slavery”—and further constricted bondage—in his second exception to Adam Smith’s universals. Smith erred, thought Dew, not only in thinking exertion exceeds laziness in all races but also in presuming that hard work is more attractive than indolent leisure in all climates. In steaming southern habitats, “idleness is very apt to predominate,” even amongst the highest races, “over the desire to accumulate.” Whites in “very warm or tropical latitudes” have always displayed “signal deterioration of character, attended with an unconquerable aversion to labor.” Only color-blind “slavery can remedy this otherwise inevitable tendency” in oppressive tropics.36
Dew’s geographical and racial exceptions to Adam Smith led to a dual map of utopia. Inferior races should be forced to labor in torrid zones. Superior races should be at liberty for exertion in cooler climes. An Invisible Hand more subtle than Adam Smith’s had already produced that happy result in the United States. “To the North, negro slavery has everywhere disappeared, while to the South it has maintained its ground against free labor.”
So where was Virginia, key state of the Middle South? Dew answered with three critical words. Virginia, like Maryland, was “too far North” for slaves. Free whites, better workers than coerced blacks in cooler climes, would outproduce slaves in coolish Virginia. Coerced blacks, better laborers than consenting whites in humid zones, would be called to the Lower South. Slave sales would naturally accomplish what meddling legislatures would make impossible.37
The Dew who would keep government hands off blacks still wanted government hands on the economy, to hasten economic preconditions for deporting blacks. He wished the Virginia legislature to build canals and roads past mountain barriers. New western opportunities to ship produce to eastern seaboard cities would draw grain farmers. Newly burgeoning eastern cities would attract free laborers. New floods of productive white workers would push less productive blacks southward. An institution imposed unnaturally too far north would drain to its natural Lower South home. Virginia, shorn of the “evil,” would ascend into modernity.38
Thomas R. Dew here completed a wild ideological tour. This “proslavery” Easterner thought eastern Virginia too far north for slavery. This proponent of progress through individual rather than governmental exertion urged the state legislature to build western internal improvements and thus hasten the departure of Virginia’s slaves. This supporter of slavery as the solution for advanced industrial economies wished free labor to propel Virginia into the industrial age. This defender of slavery as biblically sanctioned called slavery anti-Christian in spirit and unfit for nontropical Christians. This prophet who supposedly spawned a Great Reaction for a consolidated South divided the southland north and south and wished his South to go the way of New York and New Jersey. Thomas Dew ultimately proves that all Virginians in the 1830s, even the one who flirted with slavery-blessed-for-all-races, hoped the Upper South would someday contain no more slaves—and only the white race.
8
Thomas R. Dew was understandably on the minds of Virginians who consolidated proslavery later. Theorists in the 1850s called Dew’s publication of the 1830s the most important book they had read. To build upon Dew’s position that slavery was best for all laborers, black or white, Virginia intellectuals 20 years later would have to pick and choose among the professor’s sentences. But expunge Dew’s slavery based merely on race and geography, spike the notion that slaveholding was unchristian in spirit, bury the cry that Virginia was too far north. Then the pieces put together weirdly in the 1830s could help build the case for universal slavery in the 1850s—if the George Fitzhughs could avoid their own dizzy spin through the difficulties beyond “mere negro” slavery.
Historians label those who prefigure as transition figures. The trouble with seeing Dew as transitional is that no transition took place. The professor did not lead a school of his Virginia contemporaries halfway towards the 1850s. In his state, he worked largely alone. Benjamin Watkins Leigh published a short proslavery pamphlet in 1833. Abel P. Upshur struggled with the political side of proslavery polemics in the later 1830s. But the great Virginia proslavery writers—George Fitzhugh, William R. Smith, Thornton Stringfellow, and so on—were all luminaries of the 1850s. All were conscious they were attempting something fresh. In all of Virginia’s past publications, they found little useful precedent. Thomas R. Dew’s bits of clarity, although imbedded in contradiction, were the only useful tradition handed down from an era when not even Dew wished a transition from Conditional Termination.
9
Dew was not the commanding author even in his publishing season. In 1833, while Dew urged state internal improvements to escalate diffusion of Virginia’s slaves southwards, his ideological opponent championed a different diffusion. In The Slave Question in Virginia, published within weeks of Dew’s Review of the Debates, Jesse Burton Harrison urged the Virginia legislature to deport blacks to Africa.
Harrison, friend of Thomas Jefferson and cousin of Henry Clay, was a personal link between the tradition of federally financed colonization/termination that Jefferson had proposed and that Clay would perpetuate. But for now, in his The Slavery Question in Virginia, Harrison urged not federal but statefinanced deportation to Africa. Like the Dew who called Virginia too far north, Harrison termed his arguments against Upper South slavery “very little” applicable to the Deep South. Virginia, however, “possesses scarcely a single requisite to make a prosperous slave-labor state.” A state so far north, by sending blacks “home” to tropical Africa, would become home for free whites.39
In the 1833 legislature, Virginia’s establishment favored Harrison over Dew. The legislature authorized $18,000 a year for five years to colonize free blacks. At last, the state had decided how Archibald Bryce’s “entering wedge” might enter something.40
The entering wedge still could not necessarily remove one black from the commonwealth. Colonization of slaves was not authorized. Coerced deportation of free blacks also was not enacted. Free blacks could freely decide whether to accept the state’s free tickets to Africa.
Blacks largely decided to stay. Their families, their jobs, much of their culture was American. Migration to Africa was a flight from the known and the understood. The Virginia government could keep its money. Afro-Americans would consent to make America their home.41
Blacks’ decision to stay and whites’ indecision about deportation together gutted the vital condition for termination of slavery: that free blacks would leave. James McDowell’s 100 blacks had never stepped aboard ship. These legislators’ waverings had left slavery in Virginia no closer to termination.
10
Much was lost and little gained in the Virginia “Antislavery” Debate. Lost was any prospect that New York’s or New Jersey’s legislatively induced slave sales to the Lower South could be achieved in the Middle South. Virginia solons had ruled that their state, if too far north for perpetual slavery, was too far south for that much legislative interference. Furthermore, state government-financed colonization, that popular conception up in Henry Clay’s Border South, had won so indecisively down in the Middle South as to be lost.
Middle South reformers’ failures might seem to make Middle South slaves the greatest losers. But black freedom would likely have been lost no matter who won among Virginia whites. Another traditional title for this episode, the Virginia “Antislavery” Debate, shows how inappropriate is that word “antislavery.” A better title would be the Virginia Deportation Debate. The issue was less how to liberate slaves than how to move blacks elsewhere—most often to slavery elsewhere. Most western Virginians favored legislatively induced removal of slaves, lest blacks be marketed across the mountains. Most eastern Virginians would rely exclusively on private sales to diffuse slaves to more tropical climates. Thomas Jefferson Randolph would escalate slave removal with post-nati threats. General Brodnax would expel blacks to Africa. Thomas R. Dew would use internal improvements to quicken slave sales southward. But all these opponents implicitly concurred that households would be safer and labor more productive if Virginia’s blacks could be diffused away. That consensus helps explain why the diffusion argument had emerged in the Missouri Controversy of the 1820s and would remain in the Texas Controversy of the 1840s as the natural outcome of southern apologetics, more natural than Jefferson’s attempts to bar diffusion of slaves to new territories during the 1780s.
While state government-accelerated diffusion lost in 1832–3 and slaves who were not diffused neither won nor lost, reactionaries secured a shaky victory. Western Virginia nonslaveholders, angry about their second political defeat in three years, were more determined than ever to secure a one-white-man, onevote, democratically apportioned state legislature. If egalitarian republicans won the next constitutional controversy over apportionment, the next determination of slavery’s fate might occur in a Virginia legislature elected on an up-to-date count of where citizens lived. Then the burgeoning West could dictate to the stagnating East. The key issue in these Virginia controversies, as in the Missouri Controversy, remained undecided: Could slaveholders’ quest for unequal protection and nonslaveholders’ drive for equal power yield a political solution acceptable to both—and safe for slavery?
Virginia’s compromised Slavepower seemed in no position to master the answer. The slaveholding establishment had been too divided to table reformers’ call for action. Conservatives had also been too split to defeat Archibald Bryce’s entering wedge. Bryce’s removal scheme had failed not because hardheaded reactionaries were too powerful but because reformers were too softhearted to support coercive deportation. As for slaveholders who cheered these failures, they hoped to continue diffusing their Peculiar Institution to buyers southward, to the very buyers who wished to possess a permanent slavocracy northward. Furthermore, many of the Virginians who called African colonization sure to bankrupt the state also hoped the richer national government would pay for the experiment.
South Carolina called these antics folly, unbelievable folly, cowardice indicating that irresolution in the Middle South demanded resolute action in the Lower South. No reliable slavocracy could counter slave rebels and rebellious nonslaveholders with loose talk in the legislature and with loose agreement that removal of slaves would be salutory. Nor could a regime hoping to remove its slaves be counted on to crusade forever for slavery.
Still worse from the Carolina perspective than irresolute apologetics in Virginia, apologists were massing more resolutely in the tier of states further north. In the Border South, where low black ratios, the key condition for Conditional Termination, were more achievable than in the Middle South, another debate over terminating slavery was transpiring in the wake of Nat Turner.