I
Virginia
During the imperial crisis with Britain, many Virginia colonists resisted the perceived imposition of âtyrannicalâ British policiesâincluding slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Although nearly 40 percent of Virginiaâs 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 ârepatriationâ 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 âunionâ 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 âimprovedâ not toward abolition but in order to uphold the institution.
1
âTHE GREAT IMPROVEMENT AND CIVILIZATION OF THAT RACEâ
In the spring of 1801, Thomas Jefferson described the implications of the republican ârevolution of 1800.â He declared that âour revolution and its consequences,â which had âexcitedâ the âmass of mankind,â would âameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.â After being âhood-winked from their principlesâ by the pseudo-monarchical Federalists, the âpeople,â Jefferson believed, had finally âlearned to see for themselvesâ by electing the Democratic-Republicans to political office. A Federalist-dominated regime, one that operated on the principle that âman cannot be governed except by the rod,â would retard advancement in the union. The âtyrannyâ of consolidated power, of a resurgent aristocracy, had emerged to thwart the experiment in self-governance. But freed from the âbandsâ that deprived them of their liberties, the American peopleâand all peoplesâcould share in the âameliorationâ of mankind under the auspices of a âjust and solid republican government.â In Jeffersonâs 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 Jeffersonâs ârevolution of 1800â was revolutionary at all, the logic that undergirded his imagined ârevolution in principlesâ and ârevolution in formâ remain crucial to understanding Jeffersonâs political thought and his views on slavery. For him, slavery constituted the same despotism and imposed the same âbandsâ 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 âspiritâ of the peopleâtheir morals and mannersâwhile also undermining the political advancement of the nation on the worldâs stage. His definition of slaveryâa âstate of warââand his definition of slavesâa âcaptive nationâ living in bondageâsuggest 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 oneâit was a selfish and wasteful âcommerceâ that represented a âperpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions.â Jefferson wanted to remove the âblotâ 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 peopleâwhich he defined as ameliorationâby removing the unnatural and adversarial âcaptive nationâ 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 governmentâs jurisdiction was only over âforeignâ concernsâtreaties, 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 âamelioration of the condition of mankind.â 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 ârepatriatedâ to an unspecified âcountry,â 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 âimprovementâ 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 âtime will come ⊠to abolish this lamentable Evil,â the moment had not yet arrived. Still, in the interim, âevery thing we can do is to improve it.â Henry advised Virginians to âtransmit to our descendants together with our Slaves, a pity for their unhappy Lot, & an abhorrence for Slavery.â Indeed, he stipulated, âlet us treat the unhappy victims with lenity, & it is the furthest advance we can make toward Justice.â4
And when the time did arrive for emancipation, Jefferson and his contemporaries agreed, ârepatriationâ should follow. America would not survive if the âcaptive nationâ of Africans was set loose on its soil. In 1791, Ferdinando Fairfax, a prominent Virginia landowner, suggested the âpropriety, and even necessity of removing them [slaves] to a distance from this country.â Fairfax believed that sending former slaves to Africa would, âfrom their industry, and by commercial intercourse, make us ample amends for our expenses, and be enabled to live without our protection.â Moreover, he noted that âafter some time,â such colonized slaves would âbecome an independent nation.â5 The jurist St. George Tucker pinned his hopes on slavesâ colonization beyond the âlimitsâ of the union: âWe might reasonably hope, that time would ⊠remove from us a race of men, whom we do not wish to incorporate with us.â6 And in 1803, the Virginia slave owner and agriculturist John Taylor mused that, âif England and America would erect and foster a settlement of free negroes in some fertile part of Africa,â slavery and the slave trade âmight then be gradually re-exported, and philanthropy gratified by a slow re-animation of the virtue, religion, and liberty of the negroes.â Abolishing the âforeignâ slave trade and expelling âforeignâ 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 âenlightenmentâ 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 Americaâs 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 âconfederacyâ of European statesâthe wellspring of Atlantic civilization in Jeffersonâs mindâAmerica needed to gain recognition as a legitimate âconfederacyâ 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 systemâthe institution of slaveryâin 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 ârivers of bloodâ 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. âOur first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe,â he declared, since âAmerica, 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.â Here Jefferson underscored the peculiarity of American nationhoodâthe 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 institutionsâa âsystem of her own.â That system, even if Jefferson continued to resist it, included the âpeculiar institutionâ 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. Jeffersonâs 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 âblotâ of slavery by mitigating the physical horrors and violence that defined bondage. But in admitting that slavery could be improvedâthat slaves could be âamelioratedâ and domesticatedâJefferson 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 exceptionalârather than an archaic figment of the Old Worldâwhich thus legitimized its expansion and perpetuation. As a result of their âexceptionalâ treatment, the âblotâ of slaves increased. The self-regenerating power of the black population indicated the modernity and ânewnessâ of American slavery. Thus, the system that had been antithetical to the amelioration of âmankindâ 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 nationâslavery was at odds with both. Jefferson used his definition of slavery as an inimical âcommerceâ and of slaves as a separate ânationâ 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 ânationâ 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 âremoveâ 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 âgovernmentâ to ameliorate his slaves with the goal of emancipating and ârepatriatingâ 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 Worldâespecially monarchical Britainâon 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 Jeffersonâs thinking during the revolutionary era. But slavery in the recently formed state-republics could neither be ânewâ 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 empireâand proponents of the slave tradeâin the New.12
Jefferson described British Americans as active participants in colonization, rather than passive bystanders. British settlers had civilized the land in the âwilds of America,â where they âthought proper to adopt that system of laws which they had hitherto lived in the mother country.â These enterprising colonists were conquerors and consumers; they âpacifiedâ 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 oneâit 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 colonistsâ active role in the âempire thus newly multipliedââfrom the rice plantations of the Carolinas to the tobacco estates of the Tidewaterâwas 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 âthe African trade is injurious to this Colony, obstructs the population of it by freemenâ and âprevents manufacturers and other useful emigrants from Europe from settling amongst us.â14 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 âabolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.â15
The unanswered petitions helped to bolster colonistsâ arguments that the slave trade had been foisted on British America by a distant and despotic monarch. George III had âwaged cruel war against human natureâ by âcaptivating and carrying them [Africans] into slavery in another hemisphereâ and by âkeeping open a market where MEN should be bought & sold,â Jefferson seethed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. And what made George III a despot was âinciting those very people to rise in arms among us,â so that he could pay âoff former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.â16 For Jefferson, not only was George III responsible for imposing the barbaric slave trade, which impeded colonistsâ 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 kingâs âtyrannyâ came to pass in 1775. John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, who raised troops to fight the colonists, decreed freedom to âall indented Servants, Negroes, or others ⊠willing to bear arms.â Less than a month later, Dunmore had organized his own âEthiopian regiment,â 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 Jeffersonâs comprehension.17 Charles Cornwallis, Lord Cornwallis, whose troops had invaded Jeffersonâs Elkhill plantation during the war, Jefferson later wrote, had âdestroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobaccoâ and those animals âtoo young for service he cut the throats.â He had also âcarried off about 30 slaves.â Cornwallis âburnt all the fences of the plantation, so as to leave it in absolute waste,â with âthat spirit of total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my possessions.â Jefferson proffered the hyperbolic estimate that Virginians had lost nearly thirty thousand slaves to Cornwallisâs plunders in 1781, and âthat 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.â Cassandra Pybus has shown that Jeffersonâs 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 womenâhe 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 âwhole devastationsâ 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 âtyrannyâ 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...