25 25The experiments made in planting Annual Cotton has generally prov’d successful in respect to quantity and quality. But unless some engine be found as will take out the Seed agreeably to that Sort which is rais’d in the West Indias, no great quantity can be obtain’d. That of the West Indias will not produce Cotton here and is easily divested of its’ Seed; But the Sort which grows here is far more difficult, and at present is no otherwise cleans’d than by a tedius picking.1
COTTON CROPS HAD BEEN grown in the North American colonies every year from 1607 forward, but American cotton was not wanted by the English during colonial days, nor was mass production of cotton textiles yet possible.
British policy was protective of its woolens industry. But Britain was running out of land on which to raise sheep for wool, and a series of industrial inventions caused the manufacture of cotton textiles to overwhelm the older woolens manufacture.2 Machines could card the cotton (untangle its fibers) and comb it (align the fibers, making a more compact, tightly weavable yarn). Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764) spun the yarn into thread multiple strands at a time. All the different machines were combined under one roof into a single, integrated textile factory, and then there were a thousand such factories. Remembered as the Industrial Revolution, its input was cotton, and cotton’s input was enslaved children.
Cotton’s desirability for manufacturers rested on its unique strength: each cotton fiber (the “lint”) is a single cell. First the fibers grow long, then, after seventeen days, the cellulose walls begin to thicken. There are only four species of domesticated cotton, which emerged independently in isolated parts of the world. Of the two that would grow in the Americas, one, Gossypium barbadense, became known as long-staple, or “Sea Island,” or “black-seed” cotton, while the other, Gossypium hirsutum, was short-staple, or “upland,” or “green-seed” cotton. The two were genetically isolated from each other and did not easily interbreed.
The fibers of G. barbadense were longer and stronger, and it was easier to separate the fibers from the seeds and the lint; but in North America, it would only grow on the Sea Islands and inland for thirty miles or so. This was the crop that Thomas Causton was lamenting would not grow in Savannah, but in 1786 it was successfully raised for the first time in Georgia with seed brought from the Bahamas. The fibers could be removed from the seed mechanically by means of a roller gin—a machine with rollers that plucked the fiber off, preserving its length and orientation.3
The other variety of cotton, G. hirsutum, which today accounts for more than 90 percent of the world cotton crop, could be cultivated across a much broader area, and it had a higher yield than long-staple; unfortunately, as Causton noted, it was too labor-intensive to clean by hand. Planters were growing it in areas where Sea Island cotton would not grow, using several types of cumbersome, labor-intensive foot- or hand-and-foot-operated gins to pull the fibers from the seed.
A mechanical solution to that problem could open up vast new possibilities for cotton, and Thomas Jefferson wanted to find it. The US Patent Office, established in 1790, was his responsibility as secretary of state. He wrote in 1792 to William Pierce of New Jersey, who was advertising a machine that would mechanically tear the fibers from the boll and sweep the seeds away, but Pierce failed to answer the letter. The following year, however, Jefferson received a drawing of such a machine from Eli Whitney, a newly minted Yale graduate and mechanical prodigy from Massachusetts. While staying as a guest on the Mulberry Grove plantation near Port Wentworth, Georgia, Whitney built a prototype cotton gin. Jefferson expedited the patent, writing Whitney on November 16, 1793:
The only requisite of the law now uncomplied with is the forwarding a model, which being received your patent may be made out & delivered to your order immediately.
As the state of Virginia, of which I am, carries on household manufactures of cotton to a great extent, as I also do myself, and one of our great embarrassments is the cleaning the cotton of the seed, I feel a considerable interest in the success of your invention for family use.4
Jefferson’s term “family use” referred, as was customary, to his extended “family” of captives, as per Whitney’s sales-talk answer to Jefferson: “It is the stated task of one negro to clean fifty [pounds] … of the green-seed cotton Per Day. This task he usually completes by one oClock in the afternoon.”5 Whitney’s machine, a sawtooth, or “saw,” gin, solved the problem of cleaning cotton by redefining it. The twenty-six-inch-long tabletop machine didn’t pull the fibers off, leaving them intact and combable, like the roller gin; it used teeth to chomp them off, so it could not be used on long-staple cotton without destroying its value. It produced an inferior fiber, a third the length of roller-ginned Sea Island cotton, that was not what textile manufacturers wanted to use for high-value goods.
But massification was happening. While the hirsutum cotton processed by Whitney’s gin was of lower quality, the South could turn out a tremendous amount of it. Having transitioned to highly productive steam-powered Watts-engine mills, Lancashire’s textile businesses had the capacity to handle all the cotton the South could produce. The immediate consequence of Whitney’s saw gin was to give upcountry South Carolina and Georgia their new staple crop—the two states produced the majority of United States cotton until 1821—but its long-term consequence was to create the cotton kingdom of the South.
It was not simply a switch that was flipped on in 1793: improvements and accommodations had to be made, including to the machines of Britain, which had to be refitted for the shorter-staple cotton. The power loom, first used in 1785, took until about 1820 to become reliable, but once it was, it gave Britain’s textile industry capacity far in excess of the available supply of cotton thread. At first the gins were powered by horses, then by steam. Another invention, the screw press, compacted cotton into bales, which were then compressed into place in the holds of vessels by “screwmen”—highly paid, muscular artisans who used specialized equipment to apply enormous screw-pressure to the already compressed bales.
The success of the saw gin sparked new enthusiasm for premium long-staple Sea Island cotton as well, which, processed by the roller gin, sold for three times as much per pound as hirsutum, in much smaller quantities.
More or less concurrently with the rise of cotton, Spanish Louisiana became a late arrival to the longtime major staple crop of the hemisphere: sugar. Amid the market scramble caused by the Saint-Domingue rebellion, sugar was fetching high prices that caused explosive growth of canefields in Cuba to the south and east of Havana. The port of Matanzas, which the British had not even bothered with when they occupied Havana in 1762, would soon begin its career as the cultured, affluent “Athens of Cuba.” Cuba was in constant communication with Spanish Louisiana, whose governor reported from New Orleans to the Spanish captain general in the strategic hub city of Havana.
Unlike Cuba, Louisiana could not make sugar. Louisiana freezes in the winter, and its nine months’ growing season was thought to make sugar production unfeasible, since a crop of sugarcane was considered to require some thirteen to fifteen months of growth and several months of harvest. But in 1795, working with a Domingan sugar chemist, the planter Étienne de Boré found a way to produce a light, sweet syrup from the sucrose in Louisiana cane; the method required the labor force to work long hours in damp cold. There had been other such initiatives, but Boré’s sugar crop, produced by forty enslaved laborers, was the famous one: after it brought him $12,000, sugar plantations sprang up along both sides of the Mississippi. By the following year there were ten sugar refineries in operation.
Sugar operations were large and capital-intensive: those with fortunes could make their fortunes larger, but it was much easier to get started in cotton. The sugar plantations of south Louisiana became the highest-priced farmland in the South as the area around the lower Mississippi filled up with slave labor camps and the mansions they supported.
The sugar regime had come to North America, creating a voracious new demand for labor. But there was a complication: the Pointe Coupée slave rebellion conspiracy was uncovered in the spring of 1795. The testimony from the promptly held trials made it clear that radical ideas from the French and Haitian Revolutions had reached Louisiana. According to the testimony, conspiracy leader Jean Baptiste said, “we could do the same here as at Le Cap [Cap Français in Saint-Domingue].”6 Twenty-three people were promptly tried and executed, and Spanish authorities, already nervous about infiltration of Jacobin radicals into the French-speaking population they uneasily governed, banned slave importation, even as labor-hungry plantations were springing up along the banks of the river, where the conspirators’ heads were placed at intervals, impaled on pikes.
But the planters were determined to acquire slaves, and their regime had only begun.
The pro-French turmoil in Philadelphia pushed the Federalists closer to Britain.
The 1794 treaty that John Jay negotiated with Britain at President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s behest resolved a number of issues stemming from the War of Independence and laid the groundwork for ten years or so of relative peace between Britain and the United States, which was a boon for American shippers. However, Jay, a pro-British Federalist who had been against American independence and who detested slavery, dropped a major sticking point from the negotiations: the issue of compensation for slaveowners for the loss of their slaves during the war. The treaty was then more easily resolved, but at the domestic political price of cutting the Southern claimants loose. Moreover, the treaty appeared to be an alliance with Britain, which in those tense times meant against France.
Beginning with Jefferson, who had filed a claim for compensation, Southern slaveowners were furious about Jay’s dropping their demands, and they made their displeasure felt. Henceforth, US diplomats in negotiations with foreign powers, whatever their domestic position on slavery—even John Quincy Adams—maintained “a unanimity in favor of guarding slavery from foreign harm,” in Ward M. McAfee’s words, “even to the extent of claiming it as a constitutionally recognized national institution.”7
In Nashville, the twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Jackson thought Jay’s treaty had created an “alarming situation” and wondered, “will it End in a Civil warr[?]”8 In Paris, Jay’s treaty was seen as aggression. As the pro-French Democratic-Republican societies in the United States protested, the partisan breach in American politics widened. English and French alike identified the party of Hamilton as pro-English and that of Jefferson as pro-France.
Jay’s Treaty seems to have been a spur for Manuel Godoy, the “Prince of Peace” in charge of Spanish affairs for King Carlos IV, to cut a deal with the Americans. On October 27, 1795, negotiations with Spain by Thomas Pinckney (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s younger brother) yielded the Treaty of San Lorenzo, by which Spain acknowledged the United States’ “right of deposit”—i.e., to place goods for transshipment—at the port of New Orleans, which meant that the cotton and sugar that was beginning to be cultivated in large quantities could find an outlet, along with all the other products that came from the growing upriver population.
The Treaty of San Lorenzo temporarily resolved a part of the Florida controversy by ceding to the United States a portion of the territory that comprised about the lower third of present-day Mississippi and Alabama. This Mississippi Territory did not extend down to the Gulf Coast, but it included the Mississippi River port of Natchez. It was a tremendously useful acquisition for the businesses of cotton and slaves, but the all-important coastal zone, including the port of Mobile, remained part of Spanish-controlled West Florida.
As part of organizing the Mississippi Territory, the Anglo-Americans marked an international boundary in 1798 by hacking out a neutral ground between their territory and that of the Spanish: a sixty-foot gash in the forest growth from the Mississippi River eastward all the way to Georgia—cut by slave labor, needless to say.9 Foreign slave importation into the new territory was strictly forbidden; the labor would have to be purchased from domestic sources.
In Paris, the five-man Directory, three of them Jacobins, brought a more conservative government to power on November 2, 1795. The Royalist Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who had lived unhappily in Philadelphia after fleeing the Terror (unlike Genêt, he was never officially received by President Washington), returned home on September 25, 1796, and became foreign minister for the Directory in July 1797, just before the Coup of 18 Fructidor (September 4) brought a disastrous group to power within the Directory. Authoritarian and incompetent, this new Directory repressed journalists and declared the state bankrupt, stiffing France’s creditors, even as the Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte was conquering Italy in the name of France.
At a time when candidates did not campaign for office in the public way we have since become used to, John Adams beat Thomas Jefferson in the 1796 presidential election, one that entailed a Virginia-South Carolina split: Adams’s running mate was South Carolina Federalist Charles Pinckney, and South Carolina failed to support Jefferson. But Jefferson got the second highest vote total, so under the laws then in force, he, not Pinckney, became vice president, though he was Adams’s political enemy. (Adams may have had occasion to recall the words of diplomat Arthur Lee, who in 1788 when sending a copy of the draft Constitution to Adams in England, complained about the creation of the office of vice president, “whose sole business seems to intrigue.”10)
By then, the diplomatic break between France and the United States was complete. With Talleyrand as its would-be head, the Directory looked to restore the colonial project that the Seven Years’ War had arrested thirty years previously: to control the North American continent, even as France expanded its empire to control the rest of the world. By 1796, six hundred US merchant ships were doing business in Saint-Domingue. But when French privateers started attacking, hundreds were lost. When three American diplomats (John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) tried to resolve the issue, Talleyrand sent go-betweens to solicit an enormous bribe—$250,000—before he would allow them to be received as diplomats. This was the “XYZ Affair,” so called because French diplomats’ names were redacted from documents that, to Talleyrand’s surprise, the Adams administration released to the public.*
American indignation over XYZ was the spark, though not the reason, for the Quasi-War with France, an undeclared war during the second half of the John Adams administration, from 1798 to 1800. The affair cost Talleyrand his post with the Directory, though he soon worked his way back into power via his alliance with the ascendant Napoleon.
The number-one reason for the Quasi-War, as enumerated by the Federalist Secretary of State Timothy Pickering (leader of a disunionist movement for New England to secede and establish a Northern confederacy), was “spoliations and maltreatment of [US] vessels at sea by French ships of war and privateers.”11 The pro-British Federalists began what has been remembered as “black cockade fever,” wearing long trailing black ribbons from the back of their hats. As Republicans countered with red—or red, white, and blue—ribbons, Philadelphia divided into two color-coded camps.
Some Federalists believed that the democratic frenzy was the result of a conspiracy of a secret society of Illuminati, with French and Domingan membership. The Republican position was expressed by Virginia senator Henry Tazewell in a letter to Andrew Jackson: “The Contest between them [England and France] is a Contest of political principles. One or the other must be annihilated … Either monarchey or Republicanism must be rooted out of Europe, or the War will not cease. If England succeeds, Monarchy will become more formidable then ever to the liberties of mankind … If France succeeds liberty will at least for a time be emancipated from the despotism of Kings.”12
Attempting to combat a prolonged period of domestic political unrest following the French Revolution and war with France, and pushed by Pickering, the Adams administration passed the Alien Act, with which they hoped to deport French people—they were never used for prosecution, but they motivated some French-speakers to leave the United States—and the Sedition Act, which they used against the highly partisan press.
In response, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, in which he argued that states could find federal laws unconstitutional and oppose them. He did this anonymously, while he was Adams’s vice president and as such was in theory part of the administration that had promulgated the Alien and the Sedition Acts. His stalking horse was Kentucky state representative John Breckinridge, who introduced the resolutions in the Kentucky House as his own, keeping Jefferson’s involvement secret.
Though the Kentucky Resolutions are largely forgotten today, they became a touchstone for antebellum separatists because in them Jefferson put the soon-to-be-a-buzzword “nullification” into the American political vocabulary: “[T]he several states who formed [the Constitution], being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those [states], of all unauthorized acts … is the rightful remedy.” Madison in 1799 drafted a similarly anonymous, somewhat milder, document, the Virginia Resolutions, which did not use the word “nullification.”
By the time Toussaint negotiated a British withdrawal in 1798, some fifteen thousand British soldiers had died during Britain’s ill-advised campaign to take Saint-Domingue.13 One of the great military debacles of British history, it marked in blood the point at which Britain turned away from its sponsorship of plantation slavery. By this time, Toussaint was firmly in control in Saint-Domingue, and, as life became more orderly there, some planters even began returning.
In France, the Coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9), 1799, definitively put an end to dreams of democracy and republicanism, deposing the Directory in favor of the French Consulate government. This left only one republic in the world: the United States. Talleyrand was the coup’s chief political strategist and, as of February 7, 1800, its head was First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who had returned from a failed two-year mission in Egypt days before.
“The recovery of colonial power was the first of all Bonaparte’s objects,” wrote Henry Adams, and every “decisive event in the next three years of his career was subordinated to it.”14 Bonaparte’s Consulate intended to re-establish France’s lost colonial plantation empire in the Americas, but, in the words of biographer Steven Englund, “the measures proved to be such a failure that posterity has stopped seeing the policy as foundational.”15
Napoleon’s ascendancy was the definitive end of the abolition movement in France. A new French Constitution specifically exempted the colonies from metropolitan law, which was tantamount to re-legalizing slavery.16 Saint-Domingue was still theoretically under the French flag, but Toussaint was in charge and had restored some of the colony’s sugar production using conscripted labor. In order to re-establish French control of Saint-Domingue, it was necessary to pacify the high seas so as to have clear sailing for the fleet, which Talleyrand and Napoleon did by making peace with the United States—easily accomplished—and with Britain, which took longer.
Relations between Toussaint Louverture’s government in Saint-Domingue and the United States were not bad under President Adams. Saint-Domingue, still in theory a colony of France, was exporting coffee and sugar again under Toussaint, and US merchants, especially those from Baltimore, were doing business in its port cities despite the problems. During the Quasi-War, Toussaint had taken the extraordinary step—for which, along with related offenses, he paid with his life—of brokering a separate peace with Adams, because supplies from North America were essential to Saint-Domingue’s survival. An arrangement between the United States and Britain brought the British navy to patrol Saint-Domingue, allowing for commerce to continue, though the conservative British prime minister William Pitt the Younger was horrified by the idea of a black government.
The Adams administration went so far as to support Toussaint with the US Navy (the first intervention by the US military in another country’s war) in a decisive 1800 battle in the south of Saint-Domingue between forces commanded by Toussaint’s general Jean-Jacques Dessalines and those of André Rigaud.
As the United States entered into war with France, there was renewed fear in the South that slaves would once again become weapons of war in the hands of the enemy. Henry Knox, the former secretary of war, in the words of Alexander DeConde,
urged Adams to raise an army for protection against a possible attack by “ten thousand blacks” recruited by the French. He feared that the invaders would land at “the defenceless ports of the Carolinas and Virginia,” where slaves would join them in a march of conquest.
Rumors spread saying that special Negro agents were distributing arms among the slaves in preparation for the French attack. These rumors were repeated in a Federalist pamphlet published in April. “Take care, take care, you sleepy southern fools,” a Federalist gazetteer warned. “Your negroes will probably be your masters this day twelve month.”17
Though Spain was the pre-eminent colonial power of the Americas, it was increasingly subordinate to France. Louisiana had been founded by France, but had been given over to Spain in 1762 as part of France’s disgrace at the close of the Seven Years’ War. Now Napoleon made a secret pact with Carlos IV, the Italian-born Bourbon king of Spain to recover Louisiana. Carlos, who flattered himself Napoleon’s ally but was more like his stooge, was known as El Cazador (The Hunter), for the avidity with which he hunted game on his private preserve, to the neglect of affairs of state. In exchange for Louisiana, Napoleon swapped Carlos the Italian Duchy of Parma as a kingdom for his son-in-law. Key to this retrocession of Louisiana from Spain to France was Napoleon’s promise not to alienate—not to give away or to sell—Louisiana.
Napoleon’s intention in retaking control of Louisiana was to use it as a supply base for the plantation empire he was planning to re-establish on Saint-Domingue, where every bit of ground was to be used to produce cash crops. The English sugar islands were being provisioned from the United States, and in the absence of a French supply base, so would a French island colony have to be.
Hostilities between France and the United States ended on September 30, 1800, when Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, signed with the Adams administration the Convention of Mortefontaine, named for the lesser Bonaparte’s country estate. But, writes Henry Adams:
The next day, October 1, [Louis Alexandre] Berthier [Napoleon’s chief of staff] signed at San Ildefonso the treaty of retrocession [of Louisiana to France], which was equivalent to a rupture of the relations established four-and-twenty hours earlier. Talleyrand was aware that one of these treaties undid the work of the other. The secrecy in which he enveloped the treaty of retrocession, and the pertinacity with which he denied its existence, showed his belief that Bonaparte had won a double diplomatic triumph over the United States.18
Napoleon’s plan to establish an empire in the Americas was moving forward. Meanwhile, Saint-Domingue’s legacy of emancipation via violent rebellion was percolating throughout the slave societies of the hemisphere.
In Cuba, practitioners of the Kongo religion speak of Zarabanda, “Nsalabanda,” the blacksmith god of iron and war. In Haiti, there is Ogou Feray, the creolized Yoruba blacksmith liberation-fighter lwa. In Richmond, in 1800, a well-planned conspiracy was discovered, led by one Gabriel, a literate, enslaved blacksmith who could split a grain scythe down the middle to make a pair of fearsome swords and had stockpiled a number of them. Gabriel had been sentenced to hang the year before, when he bit off the ear of a white overseer who had whipped him, but he was too valuable for his captor, Thomas Prosser, to lose, so Gabriel was allowed to take advantage of an archaic law that commuted his sentence to being publicly branded if he could quote a Bible verse. Let off on the condition of good behavior, with a brand burned into his skin, he was soon jailed again, forcing Prosser to post a thousand dollars to get him back, an indication of how lucrative the rented-out services of a blacksmith could be.19
Virginia had modernized its penal code as of 1796, reclassifying twenty-seven different kinds of offenses as punishable by prison time instead of corporal abuse and restricting capital punishment to murderers. To deal with the new prison population this change would generate, Jefferson’s friend, the English-born architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the first professional architect working in the United States, received his first major American commission in 1797, to build the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1797. The first penitentiary to be built as such in the United States, it was an Enlightenment-era prison, part of an agenda that emphasized a notion, advanced by Jefferson, of reform over punishment, with the architectural innovation of individual cells that facilitated the carceral innovation of solitary confinement.20 It quickly became a hellhole, was rebuilt in 1905, and was closed in 1992.
Gabriel’s conspirators planned a surprise attack on that partly finished penitentiary, where the militia’s weapons were stored but were only lightly guarded. After that, it was said, they would burn the city and hold Governor James Monroe hostage. Gabriel’s plot was quite real, and could well have achieved those tactical objectives. Terrifyingly for the slaveowners, it was, like Boukman’s uprising, widely networked among agents on different plantations. It grew out of routine socializing among the enslaved of the region, who might see each other in a number of ways, ranging from clandestine nighttime visits to church socials on Sunday.21
Gabriel and his network of conspirators were animated by an ideology that resonated fearfully in the post-Saint-Domingue world: with the bold paralysis of the apparatus of state and the violent chaos they intended to cause as leverage, they planned to demand freedom for the slaves of Virginia.22 For the terrified slaveowners of Richmond, “the most commonly repeated notion of how far the slaughter of whites would go simply held that all whites would be killed,” writes Lacy K. Ford, “except Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen, whom Gabriel planned to spare because they had tried to help the slaves win freedom.”23
Much the same way that the Stono Rebellion was a clear demonstration of the threat posed by Spain, Gabriel’s plan was understood to be a signal of the perceived vulnerability of the slave regime to the revolutionary abolitionism of the French, even though in fact the viciously anti-abolitionist Napoleon was now in charge there. As with the later scapegoating of “outside agitators” in the civil rights era, saboteurs were thought necessary to catalyze uprisings among enslaved laborers, who were believed to be otherwise inert. Quite possibly there had been a “Frenchman” or two trying to foment slave uprising, or perhaps it was a figment of the paranoia of the times; the implication of two unnamed Frenchmen by witnesses at the trial cast a pall of suspicion over all the “French” people in Richmond, whether French-born or merely Huguenot-descended. The press denounced “the French principle of liberty and equality,” an idea that was self-evidently un-Virginian, because it was incompatible with slavery.24
Gabriel’s rebellion was foiled by a spectacular storm—in Monroe’s words, “checked by the extraordinary torrent of rain which fell”—on the night the assault had been planned for, which was interpreted by both conspirators and townspeople as divine intervention.25 The plot was then betrayed by Pharoah and Tom, two enslaved informers fearful of the rebellion’s consequences, who were subsequently purchased from their owners by the State of Virginia for five hundred dollars each and were not only emancipated as a reward, but also ultimately received an annuity of fifty dollars each a year.26 Amid fears that the conspiracy might still be active and moving forward, Monroe initiated a manhunt for Gabriel, who was described by Prosser as “twenty four years of age, six feet two or three inches high, darkish complexion, long visage, with a gloomy insidious brow, short black knotty hair, some scars on his head.”27
Monroe informed Jefferson on September 9 that “about” thirty prisoners were being held.28 There was considerable concern that the new, untested penitentiary would not be able to hold them; adding to the tension, it also turned out that four thousand muskets delivered to the militia and stored in the penitentiary were shoddy goods that were “improperly constructed” and “badly executed.”29
Though the conspiracy had not resulted in any bloodshed, trials began on September 11 and hangings began the following day. On September 18, thirteen men from Richmond petitioned the Henrico County court to move the executions somewhere out of sight, “as the frequent Executions that have lately taken place, has been extremely distressing to the view of our families—especially the female members.”30 In response, three of the condemned were halted “in the cart” on their journey to the gallows for a reprieve until the place of execution could be moved.31
With a price of three hundred dollars on his head, the “Black General” Gabriel escaped Richmond by boat, but ran aground four miles below Richmond. Taken up by a schooner that was going to Norfolk, he was brought back to Richmond under heavy guard on September 28, a few hours before Monroe’s youngest child died after a few days’ illness, overwhelming him “with grief,” as he wrote to Madison the next day.32
Monroe and Gabriel—whom Monroe referred to not by his name, but as “this slave”—had what must have been a dramatic face-to-face: “From what he said to me,” wrote Monroe, “he seemed to have made up his mind to die, and to have resolved to say but little on the subject of the conspiracy.”33 Gabriel attempted no defense at his trial but requested that his execution be postponed so that he could be hanged together with the others who would also be convicted. The request was granted, and Gabriel was hanged on October 10 together with George Smith, Gilbert, Tom, William, and Sam Graham.34 By October 24, twenty-six people had been executed.35
With presidential voting about to begin October 31, it was a time of great political tension between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson was running for president again, and this time he was the leading candidate.
The poison-pen propagandist James Callender wrote to his employer, Thomas Jefferson, on September 13 from the Richmond jail, where he was serving his six-month sentence, that “nothing is talked of here but the recent conspiracy of the negroes.”36 Callender, who had fled Scotland one step ahead of the law in 1793, was one of only ten people convicted under President Adams’s Sedition Act, for his book The Prospect Before Us. Funded by Jefferson, it was a sleazy work of character assassination that attacked Hamilton and Adams as monarchists while praising Jefferson in immodest terms.
Two days later, Monroe informed Jefferson that “the plan of an insurrection has been clearly proved, & appears to have been of considerable extent. 10. have been condemned & executed, and there are at least twenty perhaps 40. more to be tried, of whose guilt no doubt is entertained.”37 Twenty-six conspirators were hanged. Jefferson, whose preferred method of dealing with troublemakers on his plantations was to sell them to Southbound traders, wanted them disposed of by sale instead of hanging, and nine conspirators were, thereby realizing some income.
In the Richmond Virginia Argus of October 3, 1800, Callender—still loyal to Jefferson—responded to charges that had been levelled against him of having somehow been involved in Gabriel’s rebellion by changing the subject back to vilifying Alexander Hamilton:
If an idea so monstrous as that of promoting an African conspiracy can have entered into the head of any white man, he must have been a Federalist; for this plain reason. An insurrection, at the present critical moment, by the negroes of the southern States, would have thrown every thing into confusion, and consequently, it was to have prevented the choice of electors in the whole, or the greater part of the States to the south of the Potomac. Such a disaster must have tended directly to injure the interest of Mr. Jefferson, and to promote the slender possibility of a second election of Mr. Adams.
I do not, for my part, believe that any white person whatever was concerned in the business. But if the country contains one man capable of conceiving such a project, it corresponds, in preference to the character of any other person, with that of Alexander Hamilton, the theoretical incendiary of Pittsburg,* and the grand Patriarch of American calamities.
— JAMES T. CALLENDER.
Richmond Jail.
Callender subsequently wrote a second volume of The Prospect Before Us, also funded by Jefferson.
Gabriel’s plot sensitized electorate and politicians alike to the dangers of slave rebellion, with obsessive focus on the possibility of ideological contamination from Saint-Domingue. Virginia had a far greater slave population than anywhere else in the United States. Its 345,796 enslaved were overwhelmingly (322,199) in the eastern district, with only 23,597 of them in the non-plantation west of the state.38 Virginia slaveowners had been terrorized by the nightmare that “the horrors of St. Domingo” could happen to them; now, they thought, it was coming closer.39 The popular panic facilitated the adoption of the “Negro Acts,” which had been previously been considered too harsh to pass. These were new state laws directed at slaves, and partly also at pro-emancipation evangelicals, particularly Methodists and Baptists. A suite of laws forbade masters from manumitting, removed rights of assembly for blacks and all assembly by them at night, and forbade religious instruction of slaves—though after pressure from evangelicals, the law was amended to allow religious gatherings if a majority of white people were present. A new military-style police organization, the Public Guard, was created as part of the militia in Richmond in 1801.40
President Jefferson wrote his minister to Britain, Rufus King, in 1802 that “the course of things in the neighboring islands of the West Indies appears to have given a considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves in different parts of the US. A great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them, which, in one instance, in the state of Virginia, broke out into actual insurrection,” though of course Gabriel’s conspiracy did not break out into actual insurrection but was merely planned. Jefferson, who thought the many hangings resulting from Gabriel’s conspiracy—“between 20. and 30. I believe”—too severe, affirmed that they had caused public revulsion: “so extensive an execution could not but excite sensibility in the public mind.” In other words, as terrified as the Virginians were, the repression was too grisly. The purpose of Jefferson’s letter to King—at the request of the Virginia legislature, he noted—was to ask him to make inquiries in London into the possibility of using the English Sierra Leone colony not only as a “receptacle” for “insurgents” but also for future “emancipated negroes.”41
Richmond’s African American burial ground was rediscovered in the 1990s, and there is now a state historical marker for this potter’s field at Fifteenth and Broad. The wide expanse is partly covered over by I-95 and was for years partly buried under a Virginia Commonwealth University parking lot. Before that, it had been the dog pound, and, before that, the site of the Richmond City Jail. The lot was transferred to the city in response to community initiatives, resodded, and rededicated. It is now a flat, grassy memorial space framed by the interstate high overhead on one side and rail cars on the other.
A circle marks the approximate site of the execution of Gabriel. Richmond, June 2013.
To mark the gallows where Gabriel and five coconspirators were hanged in 1800—not that the exact spot is known—there is nothing more than a yellow cord strung around ground-level wickets, making a barely perceptible circle of power in the immensity of the field. To one side are two large trees with sashes tied around them, and, when we visited, small altars in the African manner. No one is allowed to play sports or picnic on the large field, respecting the space’s memorial status as the trucks and train cars roll by above. It’s walking distance from where Patrick Henry made his “Liberty or Death” speech, a quarter-century before Gabriel.
*It was first referred to as the WXYZ affair, in which “W” was Caron Beaumarchais, who had acted as a go-between; Beaumarchais is also remembered as the librettist of Mozart’s class-conflict opera farce Le Nozze di Figaro.
*Referring to the recent Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, which had erupted in response to a tax Hamilton had tried to impose.