12 12It was not necessary to pretend or to prove that the enslaved were a different race … Anyone could tell black from white, even if black was actually brown or red. And as the number of poor white Virginians diminished, the vicious traits of character attributed by Englishmen to their poor could in Virginia increasingly appear to be the exclusive heritage of blacks.1
THE FIRST LARGE LAND distribution in Virginia was overseen by William Berkeley, royal governor as of 1642. A wit and playwright from the court of Charles I, he “encouraged the cavaliers to come over in large numbers,” wrote Philip A. Bruce, and made his cronies into large landholders.2 Berkeley remained as governor over a thirty-five year period, although he was out during the years of the Civil War and the Puritan reign. His years in power were on the whole prosperous ones, but his governorship ended badly with the suppression in 1676 of Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion, the largest colonial-era uprising in the territory of the future United States.
Bacon’s Rebellion was a class war, in which “the ambitions and fears of frontier planters clashed with the desire of the royal governor to maintain a monopoly of trade with the Indians.”3 A tiny number of families—the gentry—had quickly come to control the affairs of each county, and they had the good coastal land locked up. The leading edge of the economy was on the west, pushing out into the wilderness. In a pattern that would be repeated in various forms during the long westward expansion across the continent, the pioneers made war on the Native Americans in order to enclose the land the “salvages” lived on. To that end, they wanted to get rid of the Indians as fast as possible—abduct them and sell them to Barbados, thereby profiting, or simply kill them and consider the expropriated land adequate profit.
Bacon, recently arrived in Virginia, led a group that attacked the Pamunkey and then led an uprising against Berkeley in which he promised slaves their freedom if they would fight with him. Bacon was put down by Berkeley after a battle involving a thousand Redcoats sent from London; a battalion of eighty slaves and twenty indentured servants was one of the last to surrender.4 In the course of suppressing the rebellion, Berkeley heavy-handedly massacred a number of the rebels, and hung some as well, confiscating the property of anyone he deemed an enemy. Ebenezer Cook, the London-born Maryland poet remembered for his satirical poem “The Sot-Weed Factor,” composed his longest poem about Bacon’s Rebellion. He described the rebels as “Bullies, Ruffians, Debauchees, Cheats, Gamesters, Pimps, and Raparees,” and characterized Berkeley’s force as a mercenary one:
Berkley, whom the Mob detested,
In Bacon’s Absence had invested;
Transporting from the Eastern Shore
(T’augment the Force he had before)
Of Arms and Ammunition Store,
And Men, who fought for ready Pay,
Twelve Pence a Head, for ev’ry Day;
With Plunder of all that had taken
Rebellious Oath to Col’nel Bacon.
There had been uprisings of the poor in England, but Bacon’s Rebellion brought a new element into the mix that would become a permanent feature of American clashes: guns. Unlike England, Virginia was a gun culture. “Whereas in England, only men with estates valued at above one hundred pounds sterling were allowed to own guns,” writes Kathleen M. Brown, “English men in Virginia at all levels of property ownership were expected to own them, especially after the succession of Dutch threats to the colony during the late 1660s and early 1670s.”5 Guns and slavery were intimately associated with each other; all slave-raiding relied on guns, and all slaveholding relied on armed repression.
One of the messages of Bacon’s Rebellion as received by the Virginia gentry was that new poor freedmen emerging from indenture every year created a social problem. Enslaving them was not possible: Englishmen would not countenance enslaving other Englishmen. The solution was to shift over to African laborers. By replacing English laborers with African ones, they could, in Edmund S. Morgan’s memorable phrase, “enslave the poor,” transforming the underclass from a political threat to a security issue with a color-coded caste system.6
Locked up and dispersed across isolated tobacco plantations, enslaved Africans were easier to control than indentured English, Scottish, and Irish freemen. Slavery was for life: manumission, common in Spanish territories, would not become so in Virginia. It was widely assumed that if slaves were freed, they would be a danger to the public at large, an assumption that drew on (and fed) a common belief that Africans were naturally more violent than Europeans and would become vicious if not repressed.
Though tobacco required much less startup capital than sugar, Virginia nonetheless became a magnet for capital, much of which went into acquiring slaves. With slave labor, Virginia produced more tobacco than ever before.7 “In the three generations that followed Bacon’s Rebellion,” writes Bernard Bailyn, “a hierarchy of the plantation gentry emerged in stable form, dominated by a social and economic leadership whose roots can be traced back to the 1650s and whose dominance in politics was largely uncontested.”8 The fact that this politicized gentry was principally invested in slaves would determine the course of policy for subsequent generations.
Leaving future generations to deal with the consequences of a society divided into white masters and black slaves, the great planters of late seventeenth-century Virginia established dynasties of wealth in English North America, some of which continue into the present day. They locked the need for slavery into place by making it such a central part of the economy that, once implemented, it could not be eradicated—at least, not without the destruction of the economic structures they had put in place and the erasure of their accumulated wealth. Future generations were born into a system they felt powerless to dismantle.
The move to a slave society in Virginia bound rich and poor whites together through the privilege of skin color. Landowning Virginians would be free to experiment with democracy, since their enslaved working class had no rights or vote. Lesser whites would identify with the masters, whose caste they were privileged to belong to, and not with the slaves. This implied a considerable commitment to the policing of caste boundaries, since this category of the poor would have to remain repressed and enslaved in perpetuity.
By the time of independence, some two-thirds of freemen were landowners. Their society was necessarily organized along different lines than that of England, nurturing the republican tendencies already present in English society and fostering an ideology of liberty that was taken to extremes, with guns aplenty. It was a frontier society, in which the most brazen won out.
A Virginia slave regime was implemented by 1640, the earliest date at which “surviving Virginia county records began to mention Negroes,” writes Winthrop Jordan, who adds, “sales for life, often including any future progeny, were recorded in unmistakable language.”9 There was now a clear distinction between slave and indentured servant—necessary not only in terms of civil and criminal law, but in terms of the market for their services: a transfer of indenture was considerably less valuable than a slave sale. While the changeover from indentured to chattel labor offered political and labor advantages, the greatest benefit for slaveowners was the property rights it conferred.10 It was the profitability of owning slaves as capital, added to their capacity for labor, that made slavery foundational to Virginia’s economy.
There was “no body of English law to invoke,” writes James A. Rawley. “Slavery may be considered a colonial invention, abetted by the English traders in slaves.”11 A legal framework appeared in Virginia for dealing with slavery, one law and ordinance at a time, beginning in the 1650s. In 1662 the partus sequitur ventrem passed to Virginia children the free or enslaved legal status of the mother, thus extending slavery to all future matrilineal generations, in perpetuity. Another law seven years later, headed An Act about the Casuall Killing of Slaves, exempted slaveowners from being charged with felony murder if one of their slaves should die during “correction,” noting the difference in types of punishment dealt to indentured servants and slaves: “The only law in force for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master, mistris or overseer cannot be inflicted upon Negroes.” In other words, since indentured servants could have their term extended as a punishment but slaves in perpetuity could not, it was necessary to use violence on slaves. The law even provided a philosophical justification that noted the value of slaves as multigenerational property: “it cannot be presumed that prepensed malice (which alone makes murther ffelony [sic]) should induce any man to destroy his owne estate.”12
Management of slave labor in the Americas generally took one of two forms. One, which Jacob M. Price calls the Latin model, protected the integrity of the plantation by treating slaves as immovable assets, or real estate, which could not be separated from the plantation as a whole.13 This model, employed in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French territories, tended toward maintaining family ties among the enslaved and may well have contributed to the rootedness of the Afro-Louisianan population that is notable into the present day.
The other, the Anglo-Saxon model, protected the creditor by treating slaves as chattel, or disposable personal property, like furniture, and allowed the dismantling of a plantation for the instant conversion of its labor force into cash, breaking family relations among the enslaved whenever it was financially expedient.
The Barbadian code at first considered slaves to be real estate but was amended in 1668 to reclassify them as chattel alienable from the land, conforming with facts on the ground. That quickly became part of Virginia law as well, where the forward-looking knew that massive importation of Africans would come soon. The logical consequence of capitalizing slaves as chattel was that creditors felt more secure investing in slaves.14 As the international slave market became stronger, the chattel principle also supported the creation of a locally traded market in slaves, who were a self-increasing source of riches—an important domestic business during those days of restricted foreign trade.
By the time slave ships began to disgorge hundreds weekly into Virginia, a legal framework for slavery was already in place. This legal infrastructure would be subject to constant revision, but the basic questions were settled by the time of the great wave of African arrivals in the last days of the seventeenth century. By 1690 or so, perhaps a little earlier, Virginia’s labor force was majority enslaved, not indentured.15 The society became even more unequal as large landowning slaveholders became very wealthy men and the formerly indentured were shut out of participation in the economy and from landowning.
Despite the glamour of the Royalist Cavalier image, most British emigrants to Virginia were indentured servants, most of them young men. In marked contrast to Puritan New England, which was more middle-class and more egalitarian, Virginia received rich and poor, exalting the former and exploiting the latter.
Many of the Virginia colonists confronting the daunting physical problems of clearing and planting wilderness land never bothered to establish formal title, and did not necessarily know how. Many would move on; their relentless, unrotated farming of tobacco exhausted the soil of the necessary nutrients after a few years, and the West was always beckoning with the promise of more land. Old Dominion became concentrated in large holdings, which ultimately facilitated the cultivation of tobacco and the importation of slaves.
The consequences for American society were permanent. “During a brief period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century,” writes Anthony S. Parent in his study of the creation of Virginia’s slave society between 1660 and 1740, “a small but powerful planter class, acting in their short-term interest, gave America its racial dilemma.”16 A miserably fed, clothed, and housed force of enslaved black laborers was what planters wanted, and that’s what they bequeathed.
Only the wealthy could afford to own an enslaved work force, so the influx of slaves created an additional competitive advantage for the larger planters, even as the enslaved people themselves counted as wealth for them. “The workers who produced the crops,” writes Lorena S. Walsh, sounding a note repeatedly expressed by writers on the subject, “were almost invariably the most valuable asset that planters possessed.” The rich of Virginia became richer, and the super-rich, or “great planters holding thousands of acres and exceptionally large labor forces” probably “increased from fewer than a dozen in 1640 to around eighty at the close of the Seven Years’ War [1763].”17
While generally the colonial wealthy had unimpressive fortunes compared with the income English lords had, the Virginians had them beat in terms of luxurious living: they had slaves, who made the planters’ lives comfortable in every detail.
The planters had to superintend their affairs closely, though; unlike the island confines of sugar-producing Barbados and Jamaica, the extensive tobacco lands of Virginia were not conducive to absentee ownership. Planter William Fitzhugh wrote about a proposed land deal in 1689: “it is not worth two pence to anyone that is not actually upon the Spot.”18
Not all farmers understood the importance of legal documentation, but it made a fortune for those with English legal training and connections. Holding public office in early Virginia was a direct path to personal enrichment on a drastic scale. Members of the oligarchy who knew best how to appropriate land helped themselves to large tracts. Claimed and commodified by England, this newly fenced land was given to individuals who were in a position to use it to create wealth. The laws were crafted so as to make rights of property—both the enclosed land and the human labor—sacrosanct at a foundational level to the society built atop the Chesapeake, creating a network of property owners whose descendants have traditionally been of high social importance in the region.
Writing of the nineteenth century, Steven Deyle notes that white births were recorded in a Bible, black ones in a ledger.19 It was that way already when the big ships began sailing from Africa to Virginia. Black servitude was to be perpetual, including all future children of the enslaved person, and their children, and their children’s children, founding a fortune of human property within a few generations through the power of what came to be called “natural increase.”
Consider a hypothetical example of the economic power of the capitalized womb: if an enslaved girl brought from Africa in 1695 survived long enough to give birth to four children who survived long enough to be of reproductive age (which typically entailed giving birth to a number of other children who died), and if two of those four surviving children were girls and each similarly produced four surviving children, recursively over 165 years (twelve generations, supposing fifteen years to be a generation), a first-generation enslaved woman’s womb would thus engender a population of 2,048 people by 1860, all of them legally considered property, each with a cash value.
The only thing hypothetical about that scenario is the numbers. Apart from that, it in fact happened: enslaved women began having children as soon as their bodies were able, and their children were handed down as inherited property from generation to generation. There was a white family’s fortune to be accumulated from the “increase” of a single African kidnap victim. That Virginia planters understood this is clear from the records of one of the first planters for whom we have much documentation, who was also a lawyer.
On the strength of his correspondence, the English-born William Fitzhugh was a pioneer not only in the use of an enslaved labor force in Virginia, but also in comprehending the value of owning the laborers’ children and descendants in perpetuity. Anthony S. Parent writes:
He did not have to purchase laborers; he could grow his own. He thought of his blacks as stock, not unlike cattle, that could be bred indefinitely. He boasted in 1686 that most of his twenty-nine enslaved workers were Virginia-born, and the Africa-born were as “likely as most in Virginia.”20
In a 1681 letter about a slave cargo (the place of origin is not noted) expected to arrive into York, Virginia, Fitzhugh requested a colleague there “to buy me five or six, whereof three or four to be boys, a man and woman or men and women, the boys from eight to seventeen or eighteen, the rest as young as you can procure them, for price I cannot direct therein because boys according to there age and growth are valued in price.”21
He used the word breeders. Writing of his holdings, Fitzhugh anticipated cheerfully that “the Negroes increase being all young, & a considerable parcel of breeders, will keep that Stock good for ever.”22 He does not appear ever to have purchased any more Africans. Were more documentation extant of the thoughts and actions of seventeenth-century colonists, one would presumably find more examples of this line of thinking, as per the 1696 deed in Hampton, Virginia, turning over “one negro Lad nam’d Will and one Gray Mare & their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.”23
Educated in England as a lawyer and elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1676, Fitzhugh used his office to acquire vast parcels of land through abuse of the headright system. He had labor to work it, his workforce increasing as the long-range value of owning people’s perpetual descendants worked its actuarial magic. When Fitzhugh died in 1701 at the age of fifty—not an uncommonly early age to die in colonial Virginia—he was a very wealthy man. He had not only been a highly successful accumulator of land, but had also watched his holdings of human beings increase on their own, or perhaps with his or his sons’ help, as household sexual abuse of servants by gentlemen was common.
Fitzhugh’s informative will makes clear the ideal of legacy in Virginia. Dividing out his possessions among his widow and five sons (his married daughter Rosamond was not included), it begins with bequests of land, awarding five parcels containing a total of 30,918 acres to his eldest son, also named William Fitzhugh, “to have and to hold the said Tracts and parcels of Land to him & the heirs of his Body Lawfully begotten for ever.”24 Dividing among his remaining sons and his widow a total of twenty-seven parcels comprising 49,500 acres, he described precisely from whom each parcel had been acquired and any details and conditions attaching to it, e.g., “all that Tract or parcel that I bought to Mr. Waugh conta. 400 acres lying upon Rappahannock one half thereof being now Leased [to] William Yates.”25
Once the lands were bequeathed, Fitzhugh divided up his slaves. His style of disposition made clear that he saw them as the most valuable of his family’s heirlooms, parceling out to different households in the region his fifty-one “Negroes and Mulattoes,” providing inadvertent witness that the multigenerational skin-lightening process had already begun in Virginia.
AND as for what Personal Estate God Almighty hath been graciously pleased to Endow me with I Give and bequeath as followeth[:] Item I Give to my Dear and well beloved wife seven Negroes – (to say) Harry & his wife Katherine Kate Will and his wife Peggy, Hanna & her youngest child to her & her dispose forever … I Give to my said beloved Wife one silver Bason three silver Plates one of the Lesser silver Candlesticks a silver Salt half my silver Spoons in the house the second Best silver Tankard a silver Porringer & a large silver Ladle the Great silver Tumbler to her & her heirs forever [etc.] …
The enslaved Hanna left no record of her thoughts, so we do not know how she responded to the news that she was being bequeathed to Mrs. Fitzhugh along with her youngest child only, while her children Clory, Rose, and Robin went to one of Fitzhugh’s sons, her family divided up like so many silver spoons. Still, there was some consolation: Hanna would be in the same county as her children, and perhaps they would see each other from time to time or could at least hear news of each other.
Virginia’s enslaved population grew its own extended communities through fragile webs of kinship that paralleled those of the masters, with the grapevine as a means of communication. Despite the regime of dehumanization that confronted the enslaved, a multigenerational African American community was forming in Virginia, which was as much home to Hanna’s children as it was to Fitzhugh’s heirs.
Sugar in Barbados, tobacco in the Chesapeake: following the whirl of the ocean gyre, a global production cycle, still in its early stages, took slave labor from Africa to raise crops in the Americas that were consumed in Europe.
But Barbados was full. Population pressures were already palpable there in the 1640s. After the Restoration, the Barbadian Royalists who had been loyal to Charles II during his years of exile, and who were now influential in his court, successfully petitioned the king to be allowed to create a colony in southern Virginia that would be christened with the Latin version of his name.
Carolina wouldn’t cost the king anything. It would be a buffer between Virginia and the Spanish territories, and it was the perfect expansion slot for Barbados.