21 21sold Sandy to Col. Chas Lewis for £100. paiable in June. from which deduct £9.4.8 my present debt with him; leaves £90.15.4. to be received.1
PATRICK HENRY WAS BY accounts a good fiddler, a singer of tavern-ballads, and an engaging character. Jefferson, who first encountered him in 1760 when Henry’s store had failed, recalled that “his manners had something of coarseness in them; his passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry. He excelled in the latter, and it attached everyone to him.”2 A slaveowning tobacco planter and a seditious orator, Henry strikingly personifies the fundamental paradox of the early American experience: how liberty could be intimately bound up with slavery.
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” Henry’s hyperdramatic, rhetorical ultimatum, the most popular and durable slogan of the independence movement, subsequently venerated as patriotic scripture, was in support of what was basically his own declaration of war against Britain, arguing in favor of placing the entire state on an emergency mobilization. Henry’s speech has been widely credited with moving Virginia to declare independence from Britain. It took place, so we are told (though there is no contemporary record of it), on March 20, 1775, from the third pew of the left central section of St. John’s Church in Richmond.
Hoping to avoid escalation of hostilities, the pro-American Irish statesman Edmund Burke warned in a speech given in London two days after Henry’s peroration that “in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves … these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the northward … such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.”3
Interior of St. John’s Church, Richmond, June 2013.
It required five weeks minimum, and often much longer, for a message to travel from America to England, so Burke’s speech was not a direct response to Henry, but his words described Henry perfectly. Henry’s polemical evocations of liberty and slavery were framed by his concrete, daily experience of denying the most basic freedoms to an entire community of people over whom his word was law, and who lived in misery at his grudging expense.
Henry’s famous line was reworked from Joseph Addison’s Cato, a play the founders of the American republic knew well. Written in 1712 and published the following year, Cato might be understood as a parable: Britain, once a vassal of the Roman Empire, was now the center of an empire modeled on Rome. Addison’s sober neoclassical tragedy of liberty versus tyranny was set in Mediterranean North Africa, with Roman exiles as the heroes. The word “Africa” is heard frequently in the mouths of the actors in Cato, perhaps for its resonant value, though the play is ambiguous about it. By Addison’s time, London coffeehouses were getting coffee from Martinique; the transformation that African labor in the colonies had wrought in the metropolitan economy lurked offstage as well as on. The African character, Juba, is a figure out of history: the king of Numidia (Algeria), then under the control of the Carthaginians. When Juba wants the hand of Cato’s daughter, Marcia, Cato responds with a nonanswer to his request: “It is not now time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”
Arguably the most politically consequential play in the history of British theater, Cato was carefully bipartisan and scrupulously inoffensive. At its premiere, Whigs and Tories competed to applaud the loudest at the mention of the word “liberty.” To be a patriot, a son of liberty, a free man and not a slave—that was a British oratorical legacy, imperial in scope and carried over to the colonies. In England, writes Bernard Bailyn, “a flood of what has been called ‘Whig panegyric verse’ … poured from the presses from 1700 to 1760 and … echoed from the stage in play after play … No writer, however famous or obscure, could afford to neglect the theme of British liberty and power.”4
The Americans saw themselves as Cato’s conspirators, called to sacrifice against a British Caesar. The first professional theater companies in the colonies performed Cato. Excerpts of its soliloquies were printed in colonial newspapers.5 It was staged by students at William and Mary College. Benjamin Franklin could recite chunks of it from memory. Its line “What a pity it is / That we can die but once to serve our country” proved inspirational for the martyred Nathan Hale. George Washington, who saw Cato various times, referred to it in letters and had it performed near the front lines at Valley Forge on May 11, 1778, within earshot of the British troops.6
There’s a good reason modern audiences have not seen Cato: it’s not Shakespeare. Today it would seem stiff, stilted, and interminable. A celebration of stoicism in the face of tyranny, it lacks complex characters. Cato is noble and good; Caesar, the villain, is an unseen oppressor who has no part in the drama. Amateur theatrics were popular in the isolation of plantation Virginia, and Cato was, writes Jane Carson, “a favorite vehicle for amateurs because it requires little acting ability; the characters simply strike an attitude and declaim noble sentiments in high-flowing oratory.”7
Patrick Henry was something of a “ham actor,” notes biographer George F. Willison, and as he gave his riveting oration in Richmond, he dramatized it.8 Not that we know exactly what he said: unlike Jefferson, who even as president declined to speak in public but left us a massive record of his thought in written form, Henry’s most famous words live today only as hand-me-downs. There is no contemporaneous transcription of the full text; what follows, likely assembled from the recollection of jurist St. George Tucker, was published seventeen years after Henry’s death:9
It is vain, Sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace; but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! …
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
Forbid it, Almighty God!
I know not what course others may take. But as for me—give me liberty, or give me death!
When Henry shouted “Give me liberty!” he paused for effect, and poised a letter opener in his right hand, pointed at his chest—an ivory letter opener, a product of Africa. When he said “or give me death!” he thumped his right hand containing the letter opener of death against his breast, as if stabbing himself. John Roane, who was present, recalled that “When he said, ‘Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?’ he stood in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom. His form was bowed, his wrists were crossed, his manacles almost visible.”10
Patrick Henry knew what a manacled slave looked like. He had received six people as a wedding present from his father-in-law, and later sold them to raise money to set himself up in an ill-fated storekeeping venture. For that matter, slaves were routinely sold in front of the Virginia House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, where a fair-weather auction outside would have been audible through the open windows of the building.
Henry’s bound-slave gesture can be read as an example of how the struggle for independence from Britain branded itself as a “revolution” against “tyranny.” To judge from the writings and recorded speeches of the self-proclaimed Patriots, they were obsessed with slavery, as per a New York protest of 1770, typical of the genre: “The Right of a People to tax themselves is essential to their Liberty; and the Power of imposing Taxes on them, when exercised by others, subjects that People to the most abject Slavery.”11 The word “slave” turns up repeatedly in their discourse, as the essence of what they would never allow themselves to become. This was nothing new: describing those in opposition to oneself in terms of slavery and freedom was an ingrained English trope of at least two centuries by then, heard routinely from the pulpit in the sermons of every denomination.
Henry’s liberty-or-death message carried the clear blame-the-victim implication that those who submitted to slavery were unworthy of liberty. The protest against Britain thus doubled as a taunt at the colonists’ enslaved laborers. It was a libel routinely asserted against African Americans: that they were complicit in their degradation.
Meanwhile, the use of slavery as a political fighting word continued in use in England as well. “Shall our fate be national bankruptcy, poverty, oppression and slavery?” asked a 1772 London pamphlet castigating the East India Company.12 Looking at a dismal future as a colony, in which their sole purpose would be to enrich Britain, the wealthy North American colonial elite saw an analogy with the way the slave only existed for the benefit of the master. But the word “slavery” did not only compel colonials as an abstract metaphor; the Americans brought something different to the use of the term. For those who were born into full-fledged slave society as masters, some of their most profound, complex, and unrestrained relationships were with their slaves.
Patrick Henry owned slaves when he was a sermonizing radical, and he owned them when he was the first governor of independent Virginia, where he was second in popularity only to George Washington. Like other liberty-loving Virginians, he bewailed the necessity of having slaves. Henry acknowledged the contradiction in a 1773 letter to his Virginia planter friend Robert Pleasants. A devout Quaker, Pleasants had educated and freed his slaves at an enormous personal cost of £5,000 (more than $700,000 in 2014 dollars) and had sent Henry an antislavery book. “Would anyone believe,” asked Henry rhetorically, “I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot, justify it.” This was, it should be emphasized, in a private letter; there is no record of his expressing such sentiments publicly. “I believe a time will come,” the letter continued, “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil … I could say many things on this subject, a serious view of which gives a gloomy perspective to future times.”13
His gloomy perspective was well-founded. The general inconvenience of living without slaves would have meant not merely having to empty one’s own slop jar. It would have meant not living on the capital they embodied. Ending slavery would have required a different kind of revolution than the one Henry championed.
The liberty Patrick Henry was willing to trade for death (not his own martyrdom, as it turned out; others did the dying) was, as his other discourses and letters bear out, the freedom to own—which inescapably meant the freedom to breed and sell—slaves. Henry’s revolution did nothing to change slaves’ status as chattel or creditors’ valuation of them as collateral. Whether or not Henry believed, as he wrote to Pleasants, that the time for abolition would someday come, he clearly believed it had not come yet, and he worked to delay it until long after his generation had departed.
Henry argued against freeing slaves even as he dramatized the evil of slavery. “Slavery is detested,” he wrote in a letter. “We feel its fatal effects, — we deplore it with all the pity of humanity … we ought to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow-men in bondage. But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate them without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?”14
Was it practicable? It would indeed have been possible to free the slaves voluntarily. Thousands of slaveowners did, including Robert Pleasants, in some cases because they got religion and in others simply because they despised the slave system they had been born into as hereditary slaveowners. But it was not “practicable”—not because, as Henry, Jefferson, and most other slaveowners assumed, freeing the slaves would unleash the criminality they believed was inherent in the enslaved, but because to do so would have made their former owners poor.
To manumit one’s slaves was to make a ruinous financial sacrifice. Without slaves, Virginia would be destitute; with them, she was the wealthiest of the states. With slavery having been built into the deepest levels of the colonial Virginia economy during the seventeenth century, there was no way to get rid of it by Patrick Henry’s time, short of all of the slaveowners voluntarily impoverishing themselves. The historical record amply demonstrates that most slaveowners were not only not willing to do this, but would hurl the poorer class of their society against cannonballs first.
That the War of Independence resulted in the strengthening, not the termination, of slavery was not an unexpected outcome for Southerners: protecting slavery had been the point of the war for them. It was the principal Southern political goal at every moment until slavery was destroyed.
“Here’s to the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies,” said the proudly anti-American Dr. Samuel Johnson as he offered a toast at Oxford.15 In a thirteen-thousand-word pamphlet called Taxation No Tyranny that mocked the inflated rhetoric of the colonists in the last days before war, he wrote in the spring of 1775, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
Patrick Henry, the loudest of all the voices for liberty, was the perfect example of the colonists being caricatured by Johnson, though no one who heard Henry orate ever described his voice as a “yelp.” Dr. Johnson continued his essay by proposing to arm the colonists’ slaves:
It has been proposed, that the slaves should be set free, an act, which, surely, the lovers of liberty cannot but commend. If they are furnished with firearms for defence, and utensils for husbandry, and settled in some simple form of government within the country, they may be more grateful and honest than their masters.
As Dr. Johnson knew full well, though the colonial tax protestors might feel emboldened to stand up to London, their more serious threat came from closer to home. After Dunmore’s proclamation, which put the idea espoused by Dr. Johnson into practice, enslaved people in Virginia began voting with their feet.
By December 23, 1775, Henry was writing Edmund Pendleton, who as president of the Virginia Committee of Safety was Virginia’s highest-ranking official, from Williamsburg: “SIR: I have the pleasure to inform you … that we have taken a Vessel of the Govt. bound to the Eastern shore for provisions, commanded by Capt. Collett & manned with 16 Negroes.”16 Not only the “Govt.,” but “Negroes,” were Henry’s enemies in war. The enslaved overwhelmingly sided not with Henry’s vision of liberty, which was their slavery, but with the British who offered them freedom.
The paradox of liberty versus slavery at the nation’s birth is no paradox at all. Liberty was the right to property. Slaves were property. Liberty for slaveowners meant slavery for slaves.
Viewed from the slaveowners’ perspective, liberty was slavery. It was made much easier by—indeed, almost required—believing something that resonated with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: those who were enslaved were those who were naturally inferior. God had made them that way for a reason, and they were easy to visually identify.
In Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated reworking of George Mason’s “all men are by nature equally free and independent” into the catchier, more deistic “all men are created equal,” the thirty-three-year-old Virginian was not envisioning a republic in which Barack Obama would be president. In Jefferson’s society, black people did not have the legal status as people—“personhood,” we call it now—that Lord Mansfield had acknowledged in the Somerset case.
The later pro-slavery propagandists of the Confederacy were right in insisting that, like them, Jefferson did not intend those words to mean “all men.” This is not merely a statement about Jefferson’s psychology; there was an existing framework for interpretation of the phrase. When George Mason wrote his version of the phrase as part of the preamble to a new Virginia constitution, it met with objections from planters, who saw it as an incitation to slave rebellion. Donald L. Robinson writes: “Defenders of Mason’s language replied that the clause could not have this effect because it did not apply to Negroes, since Negroes were not ‘constituent members’ of the society being formed.”17 Nor did anyone think it applied to Native Americans. “All men” did not mean all men, any more than it meant women, but it was a politically useful phrase, since those opposed to slavery could read into it what they wanted.
In drafting the document (his authorship of it was generally not known at the time), Jefferson needed to please the French, who wanted a political commitment on the Americans’ part before they in turn would commit to an overt war against Britain in America yet again, after having gotten kicked off the continent not twenty years before. Though Britain’s naval power was supreme, its army boasted nowhere near the manpower of France’s, which was the largest in Europe.
Nor, despite the citation of it fourscore and seven years later in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, was Jefferson declaring the existence of a new nation. The Declaration announced the birth of, in Garry Wills’s words, “not one country, but thirteen separate ones” that were forced to form a “league” in order to attract foreign aid for the war they were fighting together.18
Jefferson’s document was not the legal declaration of independence; that had been made by the Continental Congress on July 2, with the passage of the Virginian Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that “these United Colonies” were “free and independent states,” and note the plural.19 Jefferson’s Declaration, which took on a mythical glow with the passage of years, announced the passage of Lee’s resolution. The French participation in the American uprising took two more years to codify, in the commercial treaty of February 6, 1778.
Despite Jefferson’s expressed misgivings about slavery during his early years and his frequently quoted bits of antislavery-sounding rhetoric and philosophical reflection, his actions make it clear where he stood on the subject in practical terms: African Americans in republican Virginia were property, period. He did his best to sound like a French philosophe when he inserted that word: life, liberty and the pursuit of … happiness. But whether Jefferson’s captives, whom he described as laboring for his “Happiness,” lived at his mountaintop prison of Monticello or on one of his other parcels of land, they had no right even to keep their own children, though they were mostly allowed to.20 Nor did Jefferson at any time express any intention of ultimately extending the franchise to them, ever.
In his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included a complaint against the king for the slave trade:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce …
Then he evoked the terrorism of Lord Dunmore:
and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.21
It was slickly done. The slaveowner denied all American agency in slavery. He threw all the blame for the slave trade on Britain, thereby exonerating the slave-ship captains of Rhode Island, the many slave dealers throughout the colonies, and the eager buyers who patronized slave sales. The slave trade was an easy target: it was genuinely unpopular, and not only for its sheer ugliness. The traffic to North America was mostly conducted by British ships, with a corresponding loss of profit to Americans. It was out of the control of colonial legislatures, which at times wanted to regulate the supply of Africans on the market by shutting it off. Every slave ship lowered the resale value of slaves already in the colonies, and Virginia already had an oversupply. The arrival of so many Africans was terrifying to the nonslaveowning majority of whites, who tended to see them the way they were generally portrayed in the political discourse of the day, as a socially destabilizing and potentially violent element.
Though Jefferson cloaked his complaint in “moral dress” (Robinson’s term), it was a complaint against the African slave trade, not against slavery itself; but the section was struck out at the insistence of the congressmen from South Carolina and Georgia, who were not against the slave trade at all.22
While Jefferson was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates between 1776 and 1779, he obtained a prohibition of the slave trade into the state—but, tellingly, not out of it. One of his best-known achievements of those years was his successful campaign to end the aristocratic institutions of primogeniture (the first son received the entire inheritance) and entail (landholdings could not be broken up) in Virginia. Georgia was the first state to ban primogeniture and entail entirely, in its constitution of 1777; all the other states prohibited them as well. Though these institutions were not vigorously in force in Virginia at the time of their prohibition, abolishing primogeniture and entail was unquestionably a democratizing move—for whites. But the resulting distribution of land among more men of the family (and thus the franchise, for only men of property could vote) meant breaking up more black families, who were divided up along with the estate.
Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone recalled in 1967 his conversation with “a traditional Virginia lady more than forty years ago. This grande dame began by asserting that ‘Mr. Jefferson undermined the family.’ Her reference was to the abolition of entails and primogeniture, which were supposed to safeguard family estates and family lines. Continuing, she said, ‘he wrecked the church,’ the reference being to the disestablishment in Virginia shortly after the American Revolution. ‘In fact,’ she triumphantly concluded, ‘the only decent institution he left us was slavery.’”23
This flurry of lawmaking could have proceeded along a different line than it did. The Virginia delegates did not throw out the established body of law and create a new one from scratch; instead, they retained and modified the existing law regarding slavery. John Quincy Adams commented retrospectively on the process in 1831:
The principle of setting aside the whole code of their legislation would of itself have emancipated all their slaves. In renovating their code, they must have restored slavery after having abolished it; they must have assumed to themselves all the odium of establishing it as a positive institution, directly in the face of all the principles they had proclaimed….
It was easier to abolish the law of primogeniture … the bill on the subject of slaves was a mere digest of the existing laws respecting them, without any intimation of a plan for a future and general emancipation…. Mr. Jefferson contents himself with a posthumous prophecy that [emancipation] must soon come, or that worse will follow.24
Partus sequitur ventrem came through the Revolution intact, as did the rest of Virginia law regarding slaves, all of which had been made by the Virginia House of Burgesses and none of which was British law.
When Patrick Henry was governor of Virginia, at war in 1777, he signed a bill written by Jefferson to regulate and discipline the militia. Every free man in Virginia was expected to join it, including indentured servants and free men of color, with a list of exceptions (professors at William and Mary, for example). Jefferson stipulated that “the free mulattoes in the said companies or battalions shall be employed as drummers, fifers, or pioneers,” which meant that men of color were to be required to participate in combat, but were not to have guns.25
Lord Dunmore had offered freedom to the enslaved, and military commissions, but the best Jefferson could do was to put free people of color on a battlefield as “pioneers.” That word may evoke covered wagons to some, but its prior military use meant those who went out in front of the army to dig trenches, one of the most dangerous of positions. Pioneer is etymologically related to pawn and to peon, and roughly synonymous with the French military term avant-garde. Virginia’s militia, according to Jefferson, was to be an all-white force except for the musicians and the free black avant-garde, who would not have weapons to defend themselves with.
Writing from Charlottesville on January 20, 1779, Thomas Anburey, a lieutenant in the British army who kept an extensive journal and who was clearly not a sympathetic observer, described in detail the typical Virginia planter as an idle character, then went on to outline the work day:
It is the poor negroes who alone work hard, and I am sorry to say, fare hard. Incredible is the fatigue which the poor wretches undergo, and that nature should be able to support it; there certainly must be something in their constitutions, as well as their color, different from us, that enables them to endure it.
They are called up at day break, and seldom allowed to swallow a mouthful of homminy, or hoe cake, but are drawn out into the field immediately, where they continue at hard labour, without intermission, till noon, when they go to their dinners, and are seldom allowed an hour for that purpose; their meals consist of homminy and salt, and if their master is a man of humanity, touched by the finer feelings of love and sensibility, he allows them twice a week a little fat skimmed milk, rusty bacon, or salt herring, to relish this miserable and scanty fare. The man at this plantation, in lieu of these, grants his negroes an acre of ground, and all Saturday afternoon to raise grain and poultry for themselves. After they have dined, they return to labor in the field, until dusk in the evening; here one naturally imagines the daily labor of these poor creatures was over, not so, they repair to the tobacco houses, where each has a task of stripping allotted which takes them up some hours, or else they have such a quantity of Indian corn to husk, and if they neglect it, are tied up in the morning, and receive a number of lashes from those unfeeling monsters, the overseers, whose masters suffer them to exercise their brutal authority without constraint. Thus by their night task, it is late in the evening before these poor creatures return to their second scanty meal, and the time taken up at it encroaches upon their hours of sleep, which for refreshment of food and sleep together can never be reckoned to exceed eight.
When they lay themselves down to rest, their comforts are equally miserable and limited, for they sleep on a bench, or on the ground, with an old scanty blanket, which serves them at once for bed and covering, their cloathing is not less wretched, consisting of a shirt and trowsers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff, in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse woollen jacket, breeches and shoes in Winter. But since the war, their masters, for they cannot get the cloathing as usual, suffer them to go in rags, and many in a state of nudity.
The female slaves share labor and repose just in the same manner, except a few who are term’d house negroes, and are employed in household drudgery.
These poor creatures are all submission to injuries and insults, and are obliged to be passive, nor dare they resist or defend themselves if attacked, without the smallest provocation, by a white person.26
In 1779 at the urging of Jefferson, who had at this time been elected governor of Virginia, the state’s capital was moved inland from Williamsburg to Richmond—farther away from Washington’s home turf and closer to Jefferson’s. In the first days of 1780, Jefferson and his family fled Richmond for Monticello—his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson had an infant in her arms—to escape Benedict Arnold’s troops as they entered the new capital.
The British began a victorious forty-day siege of Charles Town on March 5, 1780, and after the city surrendered en masse, they occupied the city until the end of 1782, almost three years, with an army whose ranks included—to the white population’s great discomfort—armed black men. Escaped slaves came to occupied Charles Town to seek refuge.
Lord Charles Cornwallis invaded Virginia in 1781, plundering and bringing liberated slaves along in an entourage that was larger than any town in Virginia, but from there, he went directly on to defeat at Yorktown. During that invasion, shortly after Jefferson’s term as governor expired, the Jeffersons—Martha was pregnant—fled the British again, this time from their home in Monticello, to escape a troop led by Cornwallis’s Lieutenant Colonel Banastre “Bloody” Tarleton. Adding to the insult, Cornwallis used Monticello as a base for a few days while the Jeffersons hid.
It was as close to being in combat as Jefferson ever came, unless you count peering through the Venetian blinds of his carriage in the streets of Paris in 1789.27 He was subsequently called on to defend his alleged cowardice as governor in a formal proceeding, which Jefferson believed to have been instigated by Patrick Henry. Sixteen years later, when Jefferson was running for president against John Adams, his nemesis Alexander Hamilton wrote mockingly (and pseudonymously) of the occasion that the “governor of the ancient dominion dwindled into the poor, timid philosopher and, instead of rallying his brave countrymen, he fled for safety from a few light-horsemen and shamefully abandoned his trust.”28
But then, Hamilton was a bona fide war hero. Born illegitimate in Charlestown, the capital of the tiny Antillean island of Nevis, he had distinguished himself in active military service during the long War of Independence, serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp during the horrendous winter at Valley Forge. Rising through war, in 1780 he married one of the most eligible rich young women in New York—Elizabeth Schuyler, a slaveowner.
In April 1780, George Washington received word that Louis XVI was sending six thousand troops in ten ships of the line* and thirty transports, with one of France’s most distinguished generals, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, at the head, all to be placed under Washington’s command. Financed via Havana, the white-uniformed French troops, who tripled the size of the US army, paid for their purchases in gold and silver, endearing them to local merchants.29 Virginia was grateful to Louis XVI, and on May 1, Governor Jefferson signed the Virginia General Assembly’s charter for a new port town: Louisville, on the Ohio River in the part of Virginia that would become Kentucky.*
French cannon, dated 1761, on the grounds of Yorktown battlefield, June 2013.
In the late days of the war, there were various plans and proposals to arm black regiments, as in Maryland in 1781, when Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote his father indicating he would not oppose such a measure: “nothing but the exigency of the occasion, & the total want of money can excuse such hars[h] & violent measures.”30 Henry Laurens tried to act as though he were taking seriously his son John’s proposal for a black regiment in South Carolina, but no such plan came to fruition.
One of the decisive battles of the War of Independence was not fought by Americans at all. The Battle of the Capes was a days-long encounter at sea between François Joseph Paul de Grasse’s French fleet—whose expedition was financed by a substantial loan from Havana, because Spain also had an interest in defeating the British—and Sir Thomas Graves’s smaller British fleet.31 Beginning September 5, 1781, the French blockade at the mouth of the Chesapeake resulted in the British Navy’s withdrawal to New York, cutting off Cornwallis and his army from escape by sea.
The decisive assault of the Siege of Yorktown, the storming of the redoubts with bayonets on October 19, was accomplished by two stealth groups of four hundred handpicked troops that included black troops from the Rhode Island Regiment on one side, commanded by Alexander Hamilton, and a French team on the other. Once the redoubts had been attacked, two columns attacked the British: George Washington led the left column, and Rochambeau the right. In that decisive campaign against the British, French soldiers formed the majority of those on the battlefield.
About half of the British forces were sick with malaria. Cornwallis abandoned the escaped slaves in his train, many of whom were dying. Jefferson noted that besides destroying his crops and livestock, Cornwallis “carried off also about 30. Slaves,” 27 of whom he believed had died “from the small pox & putrid fever then raging in his camp.”32 He and his compatriots expected idemnification from the British for their property.
The Americans’ southern flank in the war was covered by Louisiana’s Spanish governor, the general Bernardo de Gálvez, who led a group that took back West Florida (Mobile), though not East Florida (Pensacola), for Spain. A number of Gálvez’s troops were black—battalions of pardos and morenos constituted about a third of Spain’s fighting force in the Americas generally—and a number of them were what might fairly be called Cubans, though a distinct Cuban national identity did not yet exist.
Negotiations for war’s end began in April 1782, culminating in the signing in November 1783 of the Treaty of Paris. The British side of the negotiations was led by the man George III believed the “fittest Instrument for the renewal of … friendly intercourse”: the slave trader Richard Oswald, who had lived in Virginia and unlike most other Britons had a realistic notion of what America and the Americans were like.33 Oswald seems to have been chosen in part because of his acceptability to American negotiator Benjamin Franklin, to say nothing of another American negotiator, Oswald’s former factor Henry Laurens, who arrived late in the process. Oswald allowed his old friend to insert at the last moment a clause prohibiting the “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American Inhabitants.” When the treaty was ratified by the Confederation Congress in Annapolis in 1784, Laurens was its president.
Among its other accomplishments, the Treaty of Paris retroceded East Florida from Britain to Spain; Oswald knew from experience that Florida was, in Laurens’s words, “a Paradise from whose Bourn no Money e’er returns.”34 Africans had been imported to Florida as plantation slaves during twenty years of British rule, and during the War of Independence the territory had been a haven for Loyalist planters fleeing the war with their slaves. Now it would be Spanish again, and again San Agustín could be a haven for the escaped enslaved of Georgia and Carolina.
Though the Treaty forebade the carrying away of human property, Sir Guy Carleton, the Irish commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, considered that those who had crossed behind British lines were free, and as soon as the spring weather of 1783 permitted, he began a flotilla that between April and November took some three thousand of Britain’s black allies to Nova Scotia, beyond the reach of re-enslavement. Their names were recorded in a document called The Book of Negroes; descendants still live in Canada, mostly in Halifax. But life was difficult in Nova Scotia, and more than twelve hundred of them went on to Sierra Leone in 1792.
Other black soldiers opted for military careers in the Black Carolina Corps, formally organized in 1779. A career outfit, it was evacuated to Jamaica following the defeat at Yorktown in 1781. Its success spurred the further Africanization of Britain’s army in the Caribbean, leading in 1795 to the creation of the West India Regiment—a standing infantry of free black and enslaved soldiers. In order to fill out its ranks, the British army on occasion resorted to buying African captives off the slave ships and putting them to work as soldiers. Buying some 13,400 slaves for this purpose between 1795 and 1808, at the considerable cost of about £925,000, the British government became one of the largest customers of the same African trade that many in Parliament were working to abolish.35
As peace negotiations got under way, some French aristocrats remained in North America, where they were the toast of society. The Marquis de Chastellux, a major general at Yorktown under Rochambeau, took Jefferson up on his invitation to visit him at Monticello in April 1782, where Jefferson was living in what he said was retirement from public affairs. Chastellux remained at Monticello for four days with his entourage of ten, six of whom were servants.36
Martha Wayles Jefferson had to provide hospitality for them. She had been pregnant almost constantly for ten years, throughout the war, and though she was, in Chastellux’s description, “amiable,” she was in the habit of retiring early and seems to have been depressed, as she was, in Chastellux’s words, “expecting her confinement at any moment” in the pregnancy that would finally kill her. Chastellux and Jefferson stayed up after Mrs. Jefferson had gone to bed, talking about, among other topics, their mutual enthusiasm for the poems of Ossian—about which, more later.
Martha gave birth in May for the last time, and died in September. Jefferson, who attended her for four months continually as she declined, was prostrate with grief on his wife’s death. This has provided a dramatic scene in many Jefferson biographies, though his obvious agency in her repeated pregnancies has often gone circumspectly unmentioned.
There is no clue in Jefferson’s papers that he saw himself as playing any part in his wife’s death through continual impregnation in the face of her continually weakening condition, despite Jefferson’s clear awareness of the mechanics of sexual reproduction. Nor was Jefferson unaware of what we now call family planning, as per his description of Native American women in Notes on the State of Virginia: “The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after.”37
Let us be clear that we are not guilty of the present-day bugaboo of “presentism” by noting that women in Jefferson’s day were expected to be pregnant constantly. Our point is to call attention to the difference between the mindset of Jefferson’s world and that of ours: it was commonly considered women’s duty to produce babies nonstop, whether it killed them or not. We differ, however, with the interpretation offered by Jon Meacham, who suggests that Martha Wayles Jefferson’s fatal continuum of pregnancy (Meacham suggests she may also have had tuberculosis) was evidence of “no shortage of physical passion between them.”38 We propose an alternate interpretation: that her repeated, debilitating pregnancies might be evidence that a dutiful wife had no right to say no.
On her deathbed, according to the later recollections of the enslaved women who attended her while dying, she exacted an oath from Jefferson never to remarry, which would have compromised their daughters’ inheritance. But we don’t know what Martha Wayles Jefferson thought, confined to die in her bed on that isolated mountaintop. Jefferson, so conscious of his own immortality through writing, burned her letters, thus erasing her voice from historical memory. We have not even a picture of her.
The forlorn widower returned to public life, accepting the appointment to serve the presidentless, moneyless American Confederation as US Minister Plenipotentiary—basically, the trade representative—to France in 1784, where he remained until 1789. John Adams, who unlike Jefferson was an experienced diplomat, performed the same function in London.
Chastellux, who helped get Jefferson’s daughter Patsy into a good school in Paris, published in 1786 an account of his travels that helped promote the Jefferson mystique in France—an early flash of the enduring legend of the mountaintop sage of Monticello. In it, he noted the abject condition of Virginia’s poor whites and connected it to the Virginia slaveowners’ desire for “increase”:
Humanity [suffers] from the state of poverty in which a great number of white people live in Virginia. It is in this state, for the first time since I crossed the sea, that I have seen poor people. For, among these rich plantations where the Negro alone is wretched, one often finds miserable huts inhabited by whites, whose wane looks and ragged garments bespeak poverty…. I have since learned that all these useless lands and those immense estates, with which Virginia is still covered, have their proprietors. Nothing is more common than to see them possessing five or six thousand acres of land, but exploiting only as much of it as their Negroes can cultivate. Yet they will not give away or even sell the smallest portion of it, because they are attached to their possessions and always hope to eventually increase the numbers of their Negroes.39
In Paris, where printing was much cheaper than in America, Jefferson in 1785 privately published Notes on the State of Virginia, first drafted in 1781 as an answer on the part of Virginia to a questionnaire put to the various states by François de Barbé-Marbois, the secretary of the French legation to the United States. The only book Jefferson ever published, it was intended to pitch the wonders of his state to the wealthy French. Jefferson printed two hundred copies privately and semi-anonymously (the author was “M. [Monsieur] J***”) for individual distribution in elite circles only. When he sent one to James Madison, he wrote, perhaps disingenuously, “I shall only send over a very few copies to particular friends in confidence and burn the rest … in no case do I propose to admit them to go to the public at large.”40 But they did.
A French bookseller who acquired a copy after its owner unexpectedly died jobbed it out to a “hireling translator” and published it in French in 1786. The book was favorably reviewed in the Mercure de France, who proclaimed the barely anonymous author a philosophe. Jefferson, who disliked the translation, then allowed his English version to be published in London the following year.
In composing what amounted to an intellectual investment prospectus for the state he represented, Jefferson faced the problem of having to explain to the French why the enslaved of his country would never be freed. Most of his friends in France were abolitionists who expected the postrevolutionary United States to bring slavery to an end. But Jefferson’s Virginia countrymen overwhelmingly had no intention of ever freeing their slaves and thus losing their property, and were touchy about the issue.
Jefferson did not make the true argument, which would have been that he and all his relatives, friends, and constituents would be paupers without slaves. Rather, his justification was that the “negro” was inferior—something he seems to have truly believed—and moreover dangerous, and therefore had to be kept in a state of slavery for everybody’s good. This problem, as Jefferson insisted throughout his career, was due not to the greed of the colonists themselves, but to British insistence on imposing slavery on the colonies in the first place, leaving the wealthy of Virginia no choice, so went the story, but to soldier on with their white man’s burden of ever-increasing human property.
It’s not an oversimplification to say that Jefferson despised blackness. The most inflammatory quote from Notes has been frequently reprinted in recent years after being largely overlooked, and we too will include it for purposes of clarity, with apologies to the reader:
[T]he difference [of “the negro”] is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over those of his own species.41
With his evocation of “the Oranootan” copulating with black women, Jefferson provides an early instance of the fundamental racist trope that Felipe Smith calls the ape libel.42 Because “negroes” were an inferior “race,” Jefferson argued, they could not be freed. To do so would require their immediate deportation, he insisted, in order to avoid the amalgamation that would stain the purity he detected in the white “race”:
This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people … The [Roman] slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us [in America] a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.43
The notion of “racism” did not yet exist; the French term racisme was coined in the late nineteenth century. But if this call to maintain purity of blood is not racism, the word has no meaning. James Madison, who never freed any of his slaves in life or death, was a racist of the same stripe, who believed abolition impossible because of “the physical peculiarities of those held in bondage, which preclude their incorporation with the white population.”44
With Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson definitively established himself as a founding theorist of white supremacy in America, laying out in condensed form key points of racialized thought that pro-slavery writers would consistently reaffirm and that would echo in the cant of modern day white supremacists. He linked his ideas to a deportation scheme that was, in effect, a foolproof way to avoid ending slavery, though he didn’t package it like that. Quite the contrary: he pitched his impossible project as the only way slavery could be ended.
Jefferson insisted that manumission required the immediate deportation of the emancipated. This would be necessary, Jefferson explained, in order to avoid “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”45 To avoid this conjectured race war of annihilation, emancipation required what is now called ethnic cleansing: Jefferson stamped that demand with a founder’s seal and a philosopher’s sigh.
The reviewer for the Mercure waxed enthusiastic about Jefferson’s solution for the problem of slavery. That Jefferson would consider emancipation under any circumstances and would speak badly of slavery, even in abstract terms, was enough to trip the hair-trigger anger of many American slaveowners, which is perhaps why he had wanted to keep the book off the general market. It cost him some political support, especially in South Carolina.
Jefferson’s plan was to deport flotillas of black youth, in wave after wave, year after year. He would “by degrees, send the whole of that population from among us,” until the “race” itself was gone, and simultaneously replace them with white immigrant laborers—a plan for total removal that did not acknowledge the presence in the United States of free people of color. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he proposed:
that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independant people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed.46
To better understand what Jefferson had in mind, we flash forward to a February 4, 1824, letter he wrote to Jared Sparks, the Unitarian minister who published the North American Review. In it, the eighty-year-old Jefferson outlined a scheme for accomplishing the “colonization” that would rid the United States of its proliferating African Americans once and for all, before they got any more numerous, and proposed a timetable for accomplishing the expulsion of about a sixth of the nation’s population:
there are in the US. a million and a half of people of colour in slavery. to send off the whole of these at once nobody conceives to be practicable for us, or expedient for them. let us take 25. years for it’s accomplishment, within which time they will be doubled. their estimated value as property, in the first place, (for actual property has been lawfully vested in that form, and who can lawfully take it from the possessors?) at an average of 200.D. each, young and old, would amount to 600. millions of Dollars, which must be paid or lost by somebody.47
Jefferson went on to propose the creation of a fund, financed by the sale of western lands, for purchasing infants on the cheap, raising them as wards of the state, and deporting them—to “St. Domingo” (he did not ever use the name “Haiti”). But, he suggested:
the estimated value of the new-born infant is so low, (say 12 ½ Dollars) that it would probably be yielded by the owner gratis, and would thus reduce the 600,000,000 millions [sic] of Dollars, the first head of expence, to 37 millions & a half. leaving only the expense of nourishment while with the mother, and of transportation.48
Jefferson calculated that though it would take twenty-five years to accomplish the entire project, by the last nine years, the number of “breeders” (he used the word) would have diminished considerably. He imagined a fleet of fifty vessels recursively sailing away full of black youth and coming back empty for more until every last one of them was gone:
suppose the whole annual increase to be of 60 thousand effective births, 50 vessels of 400 tons burthen each, constantly employed in that short run, would carry off the increase of every year, & the old stock would die off in the ordinary course of nature, lessening from the commencement until it’s final disappearance. in this way no violation of private right is proposed.49
The “private right” Jefferson was talking about was, of course, that of all those men who were created equal. Black people did not have “private right.” But separating them from their children was not all that bad, thought Jefferson, because, as he explained in Notes,
Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.50
This was the classic rationalization for minimizing the damage caused by systematically destroying African American families, and it was a libel: being simple creatures, they’d get over it. Accordingly, Jefferson concluded his letter to Sparks: “The separation of infants from their mothers … would produce some scruples of humanity. But this would be straining at a gnat, and swallowing a camel.”51
Were the United States not purged of its black people soon, Jefferson warned Sparks, the demographics guaranteed armed slave resistance: “A million and a half are within [slaveowners’] control; but six millions, (which a majority of those now living will see them attain,) and one million of these fighting men, will say, ‘we will not go.’” This did in fact happen, though the numbers were different: there were four million enslaved African Americans in 1860, not six million; and there were officially 186,097 soldiers and sailors who fought in the US Army and Navy against the Confederacy, in effect saying, “we will not go.”
Confiscate all African American children from their mothers and ship them off to thrive or die: that was Jefferson’s vision of a final solution for the Negro problem. Presumably such a massive expulsion as Jefferson contemplated would have required a fully totalitarian state apparatus to implement, and would have resulted in the death of many of the deported; mortality rates were high in the few miserable “colonization” attempts that were made.
Jefferson had not suddenly gone mad in his dotage. This had been his idea all along, as he explained to Sparks: “This was the result of my reflections on the subject five and forty years ago, and I have never yet been able to conceive any other practicable plan. It was sketched in the Notes on Virginia, under the fourteenth query.”52 If this kind of massive deportation couldn’t be achieved, he insisted throughout his career, emancipation could not take place. This conviction would be strengthened by the Haitian Revolution that erupted in 1791 and by Gabriel’s unenacted rebellion of 1800, and would be taken as gospel by pro-slavery Southerners. It would spur the founding of the American Colonization Society, whose ostensible mission was to deport all free people of color.
Having outlined the “physical” reason for exile in Notes, Jefferson proceeded to the “moral” reason, pursuant to which he described a long list of inferiorities attributed to “them,” which we will not quote here. This was perfectly in line with the thinking of many European intellectuals. Citing David Hume, the leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant had written in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) that “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries [etc] …”53 But the point was less urgent to Kant, whose wealth did not consist of black people, than to Jefferson and Madison.
A mere seventy-five years later, as Southern states left the Union, prosecessionist radicals argued to their unconvinced countrymen some of the same points as Jefferson’s: the “negro” was inferior and not the equal of whites; emancipation would result in a race war to the death, or in the purity of the white race being sullied by the horror of mongrelization; and slaveowners’ property rights must be respected.
There was, however, a solution of sorts to the perceived problem of black overpopulation, and it was highly profitable: if Virginia’s black people could not be emancipated and deported, they could be sold away into the new territories.
All the states had prohibited the African slave trade by the time non-importation cut off exterior commerce during the independence struggle, so Africans had not been entering the colonies for years. With independence achieved, South Carolina and Georgia, whose labor forces had massively taken flight or died, reopened their slave trades. As Charles Town’s slave market boomed, it changed its name in 1783 to the less regal Charleston. According to James McMillin, “between 1783 and 1787 nearly one hundred Charleston merchants handled slave sales ranging from one person to cargoes of more than four hundred Africans.”54 But there was soon a glut on the market as slavers from multiple territories, most numerously British but also from Rhode Island, tried to get in on the action, depressing point-of-sale prices in America and raising point-of-supply prices in Africa.
The slave trade continued being a cash business for the captains who brought in the cargoes, so an intermediate class of British factors—still very much active in the independent republic—brokered the sales to the planters on easy terms, with up to two years to pay.55 Though some of the factors became wealthy, there wasn’t much money coming into the territory. The large market for American indigo died with independence, never to return, because Britain ended the subsidy that had made it profitable. The rice economy recovered only slowly.
A boom in slave sales meant a debt problem as well. The eagerness of planters to buy slaves drained the supply of specie from the economy, and many individuals were carrying excessive debt burdens. “The great quantity of negroes now pouring in upon us, occasions every planter to wish an increase of his stock,” said Thomas Bee before the South Carolina Enquiry into the State of the Republic in 1785. “The sight of a negroe yard was to[o] great a temptation for a planter to withstand, he could not leave it without purchasing; in short, there seemed to be a rage for negroes, without any consideration how they were to be paid for.”56 Then Charleston’s economy crashed, and in 1787, drowning in debt, the South Carolina legislature prohibited slave importation after a spirited debate.
South Carolina’s closure of the foreign slave trade increased the traffic to Georgia, where the trade remained open until 1798, with an illicit trade continuing afterward.57 More Africans entered Georgia after independence than before, but not so many as the planters would have liked: less credit was available to Georgia planters from merchants, so the state’s economy incurred less of a debt burden than it might have, but since less labor was imported, production came back only slowly. During Georgia’s period of importation, two revolutionary developments charted the nation’s course:
In Philadelphia, the Constitution. In Savannah, the sawtooth cotton gin.
*Ships of the line were large, heavily armed vessels that, in battle, formed a line.
*Kentucky was entirely occupied by Native Americans until the first settlement at Harrod’s Town, later Harrodsburg, on a surveying expedition ordered by Lord Dunmore in 1774.