Amelioration and Empire

Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas

Christa Dierksheide

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813936222
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des débuts de l'Amérique

Christa Dierksheide argues that "enlightened" slaveowners in the British Caribbean and the American South, neither backward reactionaries nor freedom-loving hypocrites, thought of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan men with a powerful alternative vision of progress in the Atlantic world. Instead of radical revolution and liberty, they believed that amelioration—defined by them as gradual progress through the mitigation of social or political evils such as slavery—was the best means of driving the development and expansion of New World societies.

Interrogating amelioration as an intellectual concept among slaveowners, Dierksheide uses a transnational approach that focuses on provincial planters rather than metropolitan abolitionists, shedding new light on the practice of slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic world. She argues that amelioration—of slavery and provincial society more generally—was a dominant concept shared by enlightened planters who sought to "improve" slavery toward its abolition, as well as by those who sought to ameliorate the institution in order to expand the system. By illuminating the common ground shared between supposedly anti- and pro-slavery provincials, she provides a powerful alternative to the usual story of liberal progress in the plantation Americas. Amelioration, she demonstrates, went well beyond the master-slave relationship, underpinning Anglo-American imperial expansion throughout the Atlantic world.

I

Virginia

During the imperial crisis with Britain, many Virginia colonists resisted the perceived imposition of “tyrannical” British policies—including slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Although nearly 40 percent of Virginia’s population was enslaved when the American Revolution broke out, some whites supported the introduction of wage labor. Elite patriots believed that an ameliorative end to slavery, which would begin with the abolition of the slave trade and culminate in the “repatriation” of freed blacks, was the best plan to rid Virginia of slavery. Antislavery amelioration gained further traction in the wake of the revolution, when anxious revolutionaries were eager to prove their legitimacy on the world stage. The existence of slavery in the new nation impeded a “union” with civilized European states. But the democratization of slave owning, the increased practice of slave hiring, and the rise of the domestic slave trade only strengthened support for slavery in postrevolutionary Virginia. And in the absence of large-scale slave rebellions, white Virginians by the 1830s began to argue that slavery could be “improved” not toward abolition but in order to uphold the institution.

1

“THE GREAT IMPROVEMENT AND CIVILIZATION OF THAT RACE”

In the spring of 1801, Thomas Jefferson described the implications of the republican “revolution of 1800.” He declared that “our revolution and its consequences,” which had “excited” the “mass of mankind,” would “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” After being “hood-winked from their principles” by the pseudo-monarchical Federalists, the “people,” Jefferson believed, had finally “learned to see for themselves” by electing the Democratic-Republicans to political office. A Federalist-dominated regime, one that operated on the principle that “man cannot be governed except by the rod,” would retard advancement in the union. The “tyranny” of consolidated power, of a resurgent aristocracy, had emerged to thwart the experiment in self-governance. But freed from the “bands” that deprived them of their liberties, the American people—and all peoples—could share in the “amelioration” of mankind under the auspices of a “just and solid republican government.” In Jefferson’s view, a people could only embark on a project of amelioration under the aegis of self-government and legitimate nationhood; despotism prevented progress wherever it manifested itself.¹

Although it is debatable whether Jefferson’s “revolution of 1800” was revolutionary at all, the logic that undergirded his imagined “revolution in principles” and “revolution in form” remain crucial to understanding Jefferson’s political thought and his views on slavery. For him, slavery constituted the same despotism and imposed the same “bands” of oppression that he identified with the Federalists or George III. Hyper-vigilant about the preservation and progress of his cherished union, Jefferson believed that slavery threatened to stymie the development of the “spirit” of the people—their morals and manners—while also undermining the political advancement of the nation on the world’s stage. His definition of slavery—a “state of war”—and his definition of slaves—a “captive nation” living in bondage—suggest the despotic, regressive, and unnatural features that he believed to be inherent in the institution of slavery. The relationship between master and slave was an unnatural one—it was a selfish and wasteful “commerce” that represented a “perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions.” Jefferson wanted to remove the “blot” of slavery from America not merely for reasons of morality or benevolence, but because he viewed the excision of a despotic system as the necessary precondition of the amelioration of white citizens. Thus, Jefferson sought to facilitate the natural progress of a people—which he defined as amelioration—by removing the unnatural and adversarial “captive nation” of slaves from their midst.²

Of course, even though Jefferson understood slavery to be a form of tyranny, the process of removing the black population from American soil in the postrevolutionary period could not be tyrannical either. He knew full well that slaves constituted valuable private property; the sovereignty of the people also meant the sovereignty of their property. And under republicanism, the central government’s jurisdiction was only over “foreign” concerns—treaties, war-making, and international commerce. Federal power could not constitutionally extend into the domestic realm and abolish slavery; it was antidemocratic and contrary to the principles of the revolution for the federal government to enact abolition. Thus, Jefferson proposed a gradual plan to end slavery that would, he thought, result in the “amelioration of the condition of mankind.” First, the transatlantic slave trade would be abolished. Second, slaves and slavery would be ameliorated, that is, the violence of the institution mitigated and the material conditions of slaves improved. Third, slaves would be freed in a single, large-scale emancipation effort. Finally, slaves would be “repatriated” to an unspecified “country,” such as Sierra Leone or an island in the West Indies.³

Jefferson was not alone in advocating for an ameliorative end to slavery in order to assure the progress of the American people. Many patriots opposed the continuation of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, but these supporters of antislavery amelioration were almost always members of elite Virginia families rather than middling or poorer whites. The famous orator Patrick Henry, for example, believed that an interim period of “improvement” should take place between the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation. In a speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses, Henry declared that, though a “time will come … to abolish this lamentable Evil,” the moment had not yet arrived. Still, in the interim, “every thing we can do is to improve it.” Henry advised Virginians to “transmit to our descendants together with our Slaves, a pity for their unhappy Lot, & an abhorrence for Slavery.” Indeed, he stipulated, “let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity, & it is the furthest advance we can make toward Justice.”⁴

And when the time did arrive for emancipation, Jefferson and his contemporaries agreed, “repatriation” should follow. America would not survive if the “captive nation” of Africans was set loose on its soil. In 1791, Ferdinando Fairfax, a prominent Virginia landowner, suggested the “propriety, and even necessity of removing them [slaves] to a distance from this country.” Fairfax believed that sending former slaves to Africa would, “from their industry, and by commercial intercourse, make us ample amends for our expenses, and be enabled to live without our protection.” Moreover, he noted that “after some time,” such colonized slaves would “become an independent nation.”⁵ The jurist St. George Tucker pinned his hopes on slaves’ colonization beyond the “limits” of the union: “We might reasonably hope, that time would … remove from us a race of men, whom we do not wish to incorporate with us.”⁶ And in 1803, the Virginia slave owner and agriculturist John Taylor mused that, “if England and America would erect and foster a settlement of free negroes in some fertile part of Africa,” slavery and the slave trade “might then be gradually re-exported, and philanthropy gratified by a slow re-animation of the virtue, religion, and liberty of the negroes.” Abolishing the “foreign” slave trade and expelling “foreign” Africans from the union went hand in hand.⁷

With the slave trade and slavery eradicated from America, Jefferson believed that progress would ensue. One prong of this amelioration was the “enlightenment” and education of the people; through the improvement of their morals and manners, the people would become better guardians of their liberty. A second prong, however, implied America’s political development. It was the process by which America would be transformed from a provincial slaveholding society into an independent and legitimate member of the Atlantic family of nations. For the young republic to join the civilized “confederacy” of European states—the wellspring of Atlantic civilization in Jefferson’s mind—America needed to gain recognition as a legitimate “confederacy” of the New World by making treaties, forging alliances, and engaging access to new commercial markets. Thus the New World would have to purge itself of what Jefferson deemed to be an archaic system—the institution of slavery—in order to be closer to Europe and share in its civility.⁸

But if Jefferson wanted to eradicate slavery in order for Americans to embark on a project of improvement and move closer to Europe, his view was reversed by the time the Napoleonic Wars were drawing to a close. The failure of the French experiment in republicanism, and the “rivers of blood” that continued to flow as European monarchs slaughtered each other and their peoples, meant that Jefferson turned his back on Europe as the site of amity and civility. No longer did Europe provide the model of morals, manners, and political development for the federal union. “Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe,” he declared, since “America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and particularly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe.” Here Jefferson underscored the peculiarity of American nationhood—the young republic functioned as the only repository of liberty in the world because all others, including revolutionary France, had failed. Of course, the exceptionalism of American nationhood also legitimated exceptional institutions—a “system of her own.” That system, even if Jefferson continued to resist it, included the “peculiar institution” of American slavery.⁹

Jefferson continued to define slavery as a vestige of the Old World even while he increasingly trumpeted the exceptional nature of the New World. The two definitions, however, were incompatible; he could not have it both ways. Jefferson’s antislavery amelioration was predicated upon his stubborn view that slavery was an archaic system that had been born in the Old World. His gradualist plan to rid America of its slaves in successive stages suggested that slaveholders would chip away at the “blot” of slavery by mitigating the physical horrors and violence that defined bondage. But in admitting that slavery could be improved—that slaves could be “ameliorated” and domesticated—Jefferson made a fatal error. For if the institution could be reformed, then arguments to end it appeared moot. Why, planters would ask, should a system so widespread be abolished if it could simply be made better? Ultimately, the notion that slavery could be improved in America rendered the system both modern and exceptional—rather than an archaic figment of the Old World—which thus legitimized its expansion and perpetuation. As a result of their “exceptional” treatment, the “blot” of slaves increased. The self-regenerating power of the black population indicated the modernity and “newness” of American slavery. Thus, the system that had been antithetical to the amelioration of “mankind” in the postrevolutionary era had become entirely compatible with progress in America in the 1800s.¹⁰

Jefferson understood amelioration to be the social progress of the American people and the political development of their nation—slavery was at odds with both. Jefferson used his definition of slavery as an inimical “commerce” and of slaves as a separate “nation” as the crucial antecedent to the amelioration of the new American nation. Knowing that enlightened European philosophes believed slavery to be antithetical to human progress, Jefferson believed that the removal of the enslaved African “nation” from America was the only way to forge closer ties with civilized European states. In addition, he articulated two schemes, colonization and diffusion, that would “remove” an entire black population from the United States, leaving a homogenous American population of white citizens to improve and expand in its absence. And lastly, until slave owners would consent to diffusion or colonization plans, Jefferson argued for the amelioration of slavery on plantations. On his own properties, he implemented rational, enlightened plans of “government” to ameliorate his slaves with the goal of emancipating and “repatriating” them at some future time.¹¹

AN OLD WORLD PROBLEM

Jefferson believed that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were fundamentally Old World problems. These two systems, each dependent on the other, were manifestations of the tyranny, backwardness, and war-making that he thought characterized the Old World—especially monarchical Britain—on the eve of the American Revolution. In contrast, he imagined that after seceding from Britain, the New World would embrace republican principles, modernity, and perpetual peace. The binary of Old World and New animated Jefferson’s thinking during the revolutionary era. But slavery in the recently formed state-republics could neither be “new” nor exceptional. Jefferson and many other patriots, seeking to rid themselves of slavery and the slave trade, reimagined their recent colonial past, claiming that it was George III and British merchants who imposed the oppressive and immoral practices of slave trading and slave owning on hapless colonists. In order to relegate slavery to the Old World, patriots had to gloss over their recent past as agents of empire—and proponents of the slave trade—in the New.¹²

Jefferson described British Americans as active participants in colonization, rather than passive bystanders. British settlers had civilized the land in the “wilds of America,” where they “thought proper to adopt that system of laws which they had hitherto lived in the mother country.” These enterprising colonists were conquerors and consumers; they “pacified” the land through bloody conflicts with native peoples and eagerly consumed British goods in order to civilize newly settled areas in British America. And while Jefferson did not say as much, one type of commodity that the colonists eagerly purchased was African slaves. Slaves were critical to the settlement of land and the connection of such lands to Atlantic markets. Jefferson believed that the experience of colonization was a formative one—it allowed colonists to forge a collective history, a collective identity, and a sense of themselves as a united people. But Jefferson conveniently forgot that the colonists’ active role in the “empire thus newly multiplied”—from the rice plantations of the Carolinas to the tobacco estates of the Tidewater—was due in large part to the rapid importation of slave labor.¹³

Imagining the transatlantic slave trade and the slave labor system it spawned as archaic figments of the Old World allowed patriots to forget that their formative experience of colonization was made possible by slavery. During the imperial crisis in Virginia, colonists sought to overturn the oppressive policies of Parliament by abolishing the slave trade; revolutionaries believed that slavery was a direct result of the British transatlantic slave trade. Although Virginians in the 1770s had petitioned to end the trade, neither Parliament nor George III did anything to reform or curb the commerce in human beings. Residents of Prince George County, for example, petitioned in 1774 that “the African trade is injurious to this Colony, obstructs the population of it by freemen” and “prevents manufacturers and other useful emigrants from Europe from settling amongst us.”¹⁴ Indeed, when Jefferson addressed his grievances against the king in his political pamphlet Summary View of the Rights of British America, he insisted that the “abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”¹⁵

The unanswered petitions helped to bolster colonists’ arguments that the slave trade had been foisted on British America by a distant and despotic monarch. George III had “waged cruel war against human nature” by “captivating and carrying them [Africans] into slavery in another hemisphere” and by “keeping open a market where MEN should be bought & sold,” Jefferson seethed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. And what made George III a despot was “inciting those very people to rise in arms among us,” so that he could pay “off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”¹⁶ For Jefferson, not only was George III responsible for imposing the barbaric slave trade, which impeded colonists’ moral development; he was also to blame for inciting devastating slave rebellions that would destroy his own subjects. The killing of the king, metaphorically speaking, was thus legitimized in 1776 by the seemingly brazen attempts to use slaves to kill his own subjects.

For colonists, this expression of the king’s “tyranny” came to pass in 1775. John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, who raised troops to fight the colonists, decreed freedom to “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others … willing to bear arms.” Less than a month later, Dunmore had organized his own “Ethiopian regiment,” composed mainly of runaway slaves, to fight against their former masters. What the British did, however, was not simply lure slaves from their plantations; rather, the British forces sought a breadth of destruction beyond even Jefferson’s comprehension.¹⁷ Charles Cornwallis, Lord Cornwallis, whose troops had invaded Jefferson’s Elkhill plantation during the war, Jefferson later wrote, had “destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco” and those animals “too young for service he cut the throats.” He had also “carried off about 30 slaves.” Cornwallis “burnt all the fences of the plantation, so as to leave it in absolute waste,” with “that spirit of total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my possessions.” Jefferson proffered the hyperbolic estimate that Virginians had lost nearly thirty thousand slaves to Cornwallis’s plunders in 1781, and “that of these about 27,000 died of the small pox and camp fever, and the rest were partly sent to the West Indies and exchanged for rum, sugar, coffee, and fruits, and partly sent to New York, from whence they went at the peace to Nova Scotia.” Cassandra Pybus has shown that Jefferson’s estimates were grossly inflated for effect; she argues that of the twenty thousand slaves who fled to British lines, only about two thousand gained freedom.¹⁸ But even if Jefferson exaggerated the number of slaves who defected to British lines, it nonetheless highlighted the agency that he assigned enslaved men and women—he genuinely believed that tens of thousands of slaves would seek their freedom when given the chance. Thus, the combination of an emancipation on American soil and armed conflict was a scene of “whole devastations” that provided a real-life preview of the race war he had imagined. A tangible glimpse of such a potential conflict came again during the War of 1812, especially in the Tidewater regions of Virginia, when nearly five thousand slaves escaped to British lines in order to obtain their freedom.¹⁹

Just as the actions of Dunmore and Cornwallis exemplified Old World “tyranny” and war-making, so too was slave owning a tyrannical practice introduced by George III. In fact, Jefferson imagined a parallel between the despotic king oppressing and warring...