The history of these 3,500 acres where I now sit—the Bremo Plantations in Central Virginia—goes back to 17th-century England, where the Cockes, a wealthy family of English aristocrats, owned an estate that (most people assume) carried the name “Bremo.” Sometime during the middle part of that century, the family moved to the colony of Virginia and founded another Bremo down in the Tidewater of the state, Surry County specifically. Two brothers were given land grants there as part of the English colonization effort. Within a few decades, King George I gave Richard and his brother Benjamin another vast tract of land, nearly 6,000 acres, further up the James River, at the south end of what is now Fluvanna County.
To establish this land as owned by king and country, the Cocke brothers had to build a single edifice here. True to the future of their new commonwealth, they ordered the construction of a stone hunting lodge on a hill overlooking the James. The structure was roughly 20 by 12 and still stands today as the dining room of the plantation house near my father’s home. It’s had a marked upgrade with wide, heart pine floor planks, columns, and powder blue plaster, but the walls—18-inch-thick stone—are original. As far as the record shows, this structure stood alone on the land for the next 50 years or so while the family focused their attention on homes and land in the Tidewater.
In 1780, Hartwell Cocke, son of the original landowner, Richard Cocke, had a child, John Hartwell Cocke, to whom he left the upstate land on his death when John was a mere 12 years old. John’s uncle, another Richard, became his guardian, raised the boy, and sent him off to university at the College of William and Mary when John was 14 years old. Upon graduation, John began to establish his own life, taking up residence at Mount Pleasant Plantation in Surry with the enslaved people his father left him in his will.
In roughly 1781, Richard, John’s guardian, began sending slaves to prepare the land at Bremo, presumably on behalf of John. Then, in the early 1800s, John and his young wife, Anne Blaws Barraud Cocke, started splitting their time between Surry and Fluvanna Counties. In roughly 1801, John ordered the construction of a house called “Recess,” where they lived for the next few years and had their children—John Hartwell III and Louisiana Barraud—before moving in 1808 to Upper Bremo, the Monticello-like house that became the main plantation.
About 15 years later, Cocke directed his slaves to add on to the original hunting lodge, now on the farm called Lower Bremo (the farm, incidentally, where I was raised), and made it a residence for his son Cary Charles Cocke. During these years, Anne and John also had one more son, Phillip St. George, and two more daughters, Anne Blaws and Sallie Faulcon. Anne died, to John’s great sorrow, in 1816, less than 10 years after her plantation home was complete.
During these early years in Fluvanna, John formally divided his Bremo property into three distinct plantations—Bremo Recess, Lower Bremo, and Upper Bremo (or simply Bremo), a division that remains intact to this day. Each plantation operated separately with its own enslaved workforce, overseer, and farm structures. When people visit these properties now, it’s the structures they notice. They marvel at the houses and sigh at the barns. As one friend said, “It’s like a plantation ghost town here,” and it is. It’s as if one day a vast wind or virulent plague swept through and took all the people. Of course, John might very well have felt this very thing had happened with emancipation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Early on in his adult life, John earned a good reputation as a farmer and experimental agriculturist. He came to abhor tobacco—calling it the “Devil’s plant”—at a time when tobacco was the mainstay of Virginia crops. Instead, he grew corn, tried cotton, and even went so far as to plant mulberry trees as a way of cultivating silkworms for production. He believed in vigilant crop rotation and was one of the first people in the U.S. to use terracing for gardens. His notes (archived at the University of Virginia, an institution for which he served on the very first Board of Visitors) show complex plans for orchards and vegetables gardens, and his notes on marling—using a clay-based form of fertilizer—are quite detailed, much to my tired eyes’ dismay. It is for his agricultural ingenuity as much as anything else that he is lauded.1
John’s additional claim to fame—if he has one in the history of America writ larger than Virginia or Fluvanna County—is that he earned the title of brigadier general during the War of 1812. I am not a military historian, nor do I want this work to divert into a study of military prowess, so I will leave this information as the only reference here.Let it suffice to say that because of his military experience, for the rest of history—at least here on the Bremo farms—this man will be called “The General,” and so I will call him.
Influenced by his second wife, Louisa, whom he married in 1821, The General came to detest alcohol and took on the temperance movement as one of his great passions. In fact, the couple’s zeal for temperance was so great that they constructed a “Temperance Fountain” and placed it on the banks of the James and Kanawha Canal, the main waterway between Richmond and points west, so that bargemen could refresh themselves with water rather than alcohol. (Of course the family joke is the sailors used the water to mix their mint juleps. No teetotalers, these modern Cockes.)
The death of Anne and his marriage to Louisa were also deeply influential in The General’s religious life. While it seems he would have called himself a Christian throughout his years, it was his marriage to Louisa that pushed him to be what can only be called staunch in his faith. In fact, his views on the Sabbath were so devout that the only activities he permitted his family on Sunday were reading from Scripture and church attendance.
This viewpoint extended beyond the walls of his house as well. The slaves were expected to keep the Sabbath, and to that end, The General brought in a preacher most Sundays to share with the people “a lesson.” On the Sundays when a preacher was not available, one of the enslaved men or The General himself might give a sermon.
Perhaps the greatest testament to The General’s religious zeal is the still-standing slave chapel that he had built in 1835 on the property line between Lower and Upper Bremo. The one-room building stood just up the road from the slave cemetery and was the regular meetinghouse for not only slaves but also the Cocke family and their guests on occasion. In the present day, the chapel serves as the parish hall for Grace Episcopal Church in Bremo Bluff, the town just down the river. This building needed to be repaired because it was moving quickly toward ruin. The Cocke family and the church chose to move it off the plantation, an action which saved the building.
In addition to his great crusades against tobacco and alcohol and his deep devotion to Christianity, The General was extremely invested in the cause of African colonization. As a founding member of the American Colonization Society (ACS), General Cocke helped to purchase land in the western portion of the African continent that would become, in time, the country of Liberia. The ACS’s great mission was to purchase slaves from their owners, free them, and then transport those freed people to Liberia. The idea was to colonize the continent of Africa for Christ with these freed people, hence the name Liberia. For The General, this was the best—and perhaps the only—acceptable resolution to a system that was economically and politically flawed.
It’s clear from his writings that The General saw problems with the system of slavery. He believed a slave-based economy encouraged sloth and lack of motivation among poor whites and, thus, discouraged the overall advancement of the American economy. He also believed that the system was tyrannical in that it kept the United States beholden to the vicissitudes of the slave trade. While he may have also held some moral reservations about “the peculiar institution,” his reasons for supporting colonization had less to do with the treatment of enslaved people and much more to do with the sustenance of the American economy.
In fact, The General did not believe that freed slaves could survive in mainstream American society; he felt that white and black people could not abide together civilly. I cannot say why he held this belief. Perhaps he thought white society would not accept freed slaves as full members of their world. It’s possible he thought that freed slaves would never be able to support themselves with trades. Maybe being an eyewitness to the resulting subjugation and oppression of slaves led to that conclusion. A more common reason would be that The General held some encultured and deeply rooted racist leanings. I expect his conclusions about separated races arose from some blend of these ideas. Or perhaps his encultured racism gave rise to the other reasons to justify his thoughts and actions.
Whatever the ideas behind his belief, despite his distaste for the slave system, The General did not support abolition. In fact, he opposed it quite emphatically. He believed, moreover, that taking the hard-line stance in favor of abolition against other Southerners who not only accepted but advocated for slavery would result in civil war. With the hindsight of history, it’s easy to see he was correct in this assessment.
So rather than work for abolition, he began to work for what historians have dubbed “gradual emancipation,” a process that stipulated, among other things, that the newly freed people be part of a massive colonization effort. Beginning in the 1830s, he started emancipating his slaves if they agreed to move to Liberia immediately upon receipt of their free papers.
To receive this “gift” of emancipation, the men and women enslaved on the Bremo plantations had to meet several conditions: profession of Christianity, a pledge of temperance, progress in becoming literate (able to read if not to write). Additionally, the men had to learn a skilled trade. Failure to subscribe to and achieve these requirements meant continued enslavement.
In total, The General freed fewer than 35 people over the course of 30 years or so. In contrast, other members of the ACS freed (or, to be more specific, took payment from ACS for) all their enslaved people. Why The General’s numbers are so low, I can only speculate, but my best hypothesis is that he deemed them not ready for freedom. Certainly he found some people “worthy” of this opportunity, and so I cannot find him simply hypocritical; I cannot conclude that he was in favor of freeing people for colonization while not actually participating in the process. Considering the standards by which he deemed someone “ready” helps me understand his thought process.
The requirements were rigorous, and The General’s standards for achieving them rigid. Perhaps he made achievement so difficult because he was dictatorial, because he could not loosen his strict sense of moral and religious order, because he—consciously or subconsciously—feared losing his workforce, or because he felt these things necessary for success as free people. It’s possible to locate some of the responsibility in the enslaved people themselves; maybe choosing to be “free” was not worth the cost of leaving one’s extended family and the country which—for all the Bremo slaves—was the only home they had ever known. They may have deliberately failed to live up to these standards. While I cannot know the full reality of any of these choices, even with an extensive collection of documents to inform me, my hypothesis is that both The General and the enslaved people at Bremo had reasons for not wanting emancipation to come by way of Liberia. It would be easy for me to indict The General alone—to hold him entirely responsible, to label him racist and selfish, to write him off. But I can’t do that. Nothing is ever that simple, even in hindsight.
The General was, more than many slave owners, a kind master, as the surviving documents—including handwritten letters from the slaves—seem to confirm. He taught the slave children to read and write, sometimes at the risk of his own physical safety. (Because he taught his slaves to read and write, The General was nearly beaten to death in a nearby town.) He trained the enslaved men in many trades—masonry, blacksmithing, carpentry—and all the records indicate that the slaves were well fed and well housed, at least by the standards applied to enslaved people in that time. He regularly sought medical care for them, and at least once, he traveled hundreds of miles to attend a funeral for a slave. On some level, then, he truly cared for these people. I certainly wouldn’t excuse his actions or practices, but again, these were complex times, and it seems The General was a complex man.
But of course, these “kindnesses” were not simply gifts. All the skills enslaved people learned helped provide The General with income from their “hiring out” as well as saved him money from having to hire someone to perform those tasks. Additionally, strong, healthy workers meant more productivity and less expense. Thus, his care of them was probably directed by, at best, mixed motives and, at worst, singular self-regard. Also, when enslaved people did not behave according to his strict standards, rules he laid out in detail in some of his many writings on the subject, they were subject to whipping, sale, and “turning out.”
This last punishment was perhaps the most harsh. Given The General’s professed belief that formerly enslaved people would not be able to support themselves in white society, coupled with the fact that a black person without papers—either a traveling pass from a master or legal documents showing their freedom—was in danger of sale or even murder, “turning out” could be, in fact, worse than simply being sold.
These considerations make it difficult for me to see him as “the benevolent master,” though I recognize that by the standards of his day he was regarded as such, even by the people he owned.
In his older years, The General lost his second wife and his youngest son, Phillip St. George. His health also began to fail, and in the final years of his life, he and his son Cary swapped houses, The General choosing instead to live in the smaller, more manageable Lower Bremo.
As the Civil War moved like a torrent though the country, The General’s ideas about slavery took a turn. It seems that the war caused him to assume a hard line on the institution, one he had equivocated on his whole life, and this makes me sad in a profound way. He entrenched himself in the South’s proslavery stance and threw his allegiance wholeheartedly to the Confederacy. But of course, my view here, too, oversimplifies, even if it is my true feeling.
It’s easy to see how—as a Southern planter—this could happen and yet, still, I am grieved by this fact. I wish he had found the moral courage to take the side of freedom. He stood against the Southern aristocracy on tobacco but couldn’t bring himself to do so on slavery, even for the lives of the very people he lived with day in and day out. Perhaps this position, more than anything, shows his true feelings on the institution. Or perhaps it only shows his allegiance to the place and culture he called home.
In 1866, just the year after he saw all his slaves freed, The General died in his bedroom at Lower Bremo. Sometimes I go in that room and look at his bed and dressers, which still furnish the space. I stand next to the bed with his headboard that almost reaches to the 10-foot ceiling, and I lay my hand there. I want to feel him in this wood, to believe that objects hold memories as all the ghost shows say they do. I want to know his life and the way it passed to death. I want to find a way to uncover something certain about his feelings for the people he owned, even as I know that if he flickered to me in these moments, a full body in his dressing gown of death, I would still have my doubts.
But still, I wonder. I wonder what he thought as he lay ill in that bed. I wonder if he had regrets or felt pride. I wonder who he remembered, Louisa and Anne, his children, Primus, Malvina, Lucy. This, too, I cannot know.
There is a story I’ve heard, though, passed along through mouths and ears for almost 150 years now, a story that says The General committed suicide and that the free people who had stayed to work for him were sworn to secrecy of this fact by his children. I can’t know if this is true, and I don’t really know if it matters. But it seems to speak of a quiet judgment. By whom is the real question.
I, for one, hope it isn’t true. I owe this man—just as I owe the people he owned—my sense of home, and while a great part of me wants to condemn him with a righteous anger, another part of me only wishes him well. For what can come of bitterness and anger at a dead man but bitterness and anger.
So I hope, in the end—with freedom still so large with promise for the people he no longer owned—he felt peace.