Dear Va-Hist Subscribers:

As a former moderator of this list, I am disappointed to see a conversation about historical evidence and interpretation becoming intemperate. Please don't worry the current moderator, John Deal, with deciding whether a posted message goes too far or gets too personal.

On the subject of the outmigration of enslaved Virginians, what most of us learned when we were young (that was a long time ago in my case) was largely wrong. Either we learned nothing about outmigration, or its importance was so egregiously minimized in the old textbooks as to be distorted into inaccuracy.

Much modern scholarship on the interstate slave trade, together with the well-informed estimates that Frederic Bancroft and Ulrich B. Phillips published about 75 years ago, indicate that Virginians exported more Virginians down the river to the slave markets of Memphis and New Orleans between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War than Virginians imported directly or indirectly from Africa during the whole of the colonial period.

The domestic slave trade was by far the largest forced migration in American history. It became the one largest business in all of Virginia by the middle of the nineteenth century, far outpacing in dollar value any agricultural or industrial commodity. And that is based on incomplete evidence about the number of Virginians thus sold and sent south against their will.

In addition, thousands of white Virginians moved their families and their slave property to the west and southwest between the middle of the eighteenth century and the outbreak of the Civil War. Enslaved Virginians who went with them almost certainly did not go voluntarily. Neither did the horses and cattle that those white Virginians took along with them.

I do not here equate horses, cattle, and enslaved people. Owners of enslaved Virginians in those days sometimes did, though, in spite of the complex emotional and economic interrelationships that existed between some owners and some enslaved people.

The documentary evidence and the scholarship leave no room to doubt any of this, so it is not very profitable to impugn the motives of people who are trying to make sound deductions about the nature and consequences of the forced outmigrations. The slave regime was violent at times and routinely deprived free and enslaved African Virginians and enslaved Indian Virginians of nearly all of their human rights. Forget the moonlight and magnolias romances about the good ol' days, and remember that every person involved was a human being, an enslaved Virginian.

$0.02 worth from

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.virginia.gov/



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