I do not remember if this was already posted on this list, but it should be
of interest to many VA-History subscribers.
Martha Katz-Hyman
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From: Mintz, Steven H <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Jul 31, 2007 9:00 AM
Subject: REV: Gellman on Wolf, _Race and Liberty in the New Nation:
Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion_
To: [log in to unmask]
From: H-SLAVERY Co-Moderator <[log in to unmask]>
X-Post h-law (ed. "Chris Waldrep, H-Law" <[log in to unmask]>)
From: "Chris Waldrep, H-Law" <[log in to unmask]>
Date Posted: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 13:02:40 -0700
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July 2007)
Eva Sheppard Wolf. _Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in
Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion_. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana University Press, 2006. xix + 284 pp. Tables, maps, notes,
bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-3194-6.
Reviewed for H-Law by David N. Gellman, Department of History, DePauw
University
The More Things Change ... The Triumph of Colonial Racism in Early
National Virginia
Some slaveholders had their faith in slavery shaken by the spirit of
liberty, but the American Revolution failed to shake white Virginians'
commitment to slavery. Eva Sheppard Wolf's book _Race and Liberty in the
New Nation_ would seem to be telling us what we should already know in
charting Virginia's commitment to its fundamental source of white wealth
and status. But Americans, with good reason, continue to be disturbed by
the paradox of slaveholding founding fathers like Jefferson and
Washington enacting a radical experiment in republican liberty. Thus we
treat the story of slavery in the new republic as one of tragic
contingency (if only they had acted on their principles!), tragic
inevitability (try though they did, what choice did they really have?),
or an unstable mix of both. Wolf offers a tremendous service by
providing a ground-level view of emancipation in Virginia that walks the
reader chronologically through the law and practice of emancipation from
1776 to 1832. This approach provides readers with a clear view of the
self-limiting nature of liberty in the new nation's most important
state. Virginia's commitment to slavery was recurrently contested and
debated; but the contest always ended the same way, with the refusal by
white Virginians to embrace collectively a racially egalitarian future.
This result had less to do with the hypocrisy of its Olympian political
leaders than a more widespread "failure of imagination" (p. 87) born of
interest, fear, and racism. If there was a struggle for Virginia's "and
America's soul, it was never fought on a level field. Virginia clung as
a state to the institution that had defined it as a colony.
Wolf's narrative takes place under a tent held up by three poles, the
Revolutionary War, Gabriel's Rebellion, and Nat Turner's Rebellion. She
devotes only minimal space to describing these events--even though each
represents a dramatic moment of violent black resistance that forced
whites, powerful politicians and ordinary citizens alike, to think
carefully about the place of slaves in Virginia society. Wolf is more
interested in the deliberations that emerge from crises than the crises
themselves. Her approach is sensible and efficient, given the existence
of extensive scholarship on these events. Moreover, Wolf proceeds on the
assumption that through the more ordinary process of drawing up
manumission papers and drafting laws we see white and, to a lesser
degree, black ideas about race and slavery most clearly revealed.
The impact of a disruptive war and its egalitarian ideology on slavery
was limited but also highly revealing. The Revolution simultaneously
stimulated "liberal" inclinations and "conservative reflexes" (p. xi).
Thus, Virginia's small Quaker population put natural rights rhetoric
into practice, encouraging and ultimately insisting upon manumission
within their sect, and pushing judicial and legislative authorities to
legitimize their emancipations. Methodists, officially establishing
themselves as a church in 1784, initially demanded that their members
make plans to free their slaves. Some Baptists also expressed opposition
to slavery. Virginia's political leaders banned the slave trade,
although Wolf casts this measure in exclusively self-interested terms.
Thomas Jefferson toyed with ideas for gradual emancipation laws, but
brought no such measure before the provincial or state legislature.
Slaves themselves, meanwhile, availed themselves in large numbers of the
offer of Virginia's last royal governor of freedom to runaways from
patriot masters. But in Wolf's account, the signal accomplishment of
the era was the 1782 "act to authorize the manumission of slaves." This
law, which remained on the books until 1806, was a sharp departure from
the laws that preceded it and those that would follow: masters wishing
to free female slaves between eighteen and forty-five and males between
twenty-one and forty-five could do so, without seeking individual
approval by the legislature. Significantly, the law contained no
provision demanding that freed former slaves leave the state. Yet the
law did not attempt a systematic, state-sponsored program of
emancipation, channeling emancipation exclusively through private
individuals under certain defined conditions.
The law's limitations notwithstanding, the 1782 manumission law allowed
whites to free their slaves and blacks to buy their freedom, thus
fostering the emergence of much larger free black communities than
existed in the colonial period. In the cleverest analysis in the book,
Wolf investigates how, for whom, and to what extent the 1782 law
reshaped behavior. While Wolf estimates that ten thousand African
Americans gained their freedom through the aegis of this law, this is
significantly less than other estimates. More importantly, she suggests
that the breadth and ideological significance of the emancipations
during this period has been overestimated by previous historians. Wolf
samples manumission documents in eight counties in various regions to
reach the conclusion that only in the first decade after the law went
into effect can it be concluded that most masters freed their slaves out
of a principled renunciation of slaveholding. Half the deeds from this
period express antislavery ideas and 70 percent of emancipations covered
every slave of a particular master, an action which indicates, according
to Wolf, a sincere disdain for the institution. Wolf also finds that
manumitting slaveholders tended to be part of particular communities
taking antislavery action, sometimes based on religion (e.g., pockets of
Quakers or Methodists), but sometimes bound together by secular
ideological or social affinity, especially on Virginia's eastern shore.
After the mid-1790s, however, manumission assumed a different, and, to
historians of ancient and modern slavery outside of North America, quite
familiar pattern whereby individual slaves gained their freedom for
special considerations or as a means of securing loyalty. This pattern
was compatible with strengthening slavery, manumission being used by
masters to create individual incentives for loyalty or performance.
Moreover, Wolf finds that manumission deeds, even in the earlier phase
of manumission, far from expressing a belief in natural rights, referred
to the slaves as "my" and "mine," thus underscoring the masters'
possessive claims even in the act of granting freedom. Other important
findings from her eight-county sample include the conclusion that one in
twelve manumissions under this law was the result of slave
self-purchase, and that black men were more likely to be manumitted in
rural areas, while it was more common among black women in cities.
These gendered patterns reflected, in part, the opportunities of rural
enslaved men and urban enslaved women to take advantage of self-hire
labor markets to raise money for self-purchase. In any event, only a
tiny percentage of masters freed any slaves, and those who did
increasingly did so for reasons other than conscience. Simultaneously,
the ardor for equality in this world as an affirmation of equality in
the next cooled precipitously amongst Methodists and Baptists.
Whatever the motivation of Virginia's manumitters, white Virginians
found themselves bedeviled by the racial implications of emancipation.
Wolf covers more familiar ground in examining the racial logic of
Jefferson's desire to couple emancipation with deportation and St.
George Tucker's glacially gradual plan for abolition. The author's
central point is that the growth of the free black population in
Virginia had a blowback effect; as the free black population increased
and as the Tidewater economy declined, fears of "social disorder"
emerged (p. 113). The revolutionary violence of St. Domingue and the
exposure of Gabriel's plot against Richmond further fanned the flames of
fear. Free blacks and the manumission law itself became targets, indeed
scapegoats, of reaction. In 1806 the Virginia legislature averted by a
mere two votes a total prohibition of manumission, instead opting for
the Jeffersonian formula of linking any further emancipations to exile.
Virginia's twenty-four-year experiment with, by their own historical
standards, liberal manumission law came to an end.
The new manumission regime had two effects--a decrease in emancipations
and the creation of a class of illegal aliens within the free black
community. As in our own times, whites intermittently enforced laws
against their vulnerable, marginalized illegal neighbors. For free
blacks, their color had a legal meaning that ensured their vulnerability
and created painful dilemmas. The story of Samuel Johnson drives home
the precarious position of black families under these legal conditions.
In 1811, Johnson garnered thirty-eight white men in Fauquier County to
support a waver from the legislature that allowed him to stay in the
state once he had purchased his freedom. Johnson filed several
subsequent unsuccessful petitions, with even larger numbers of white
signatories, on behalf of his wife and children, whom he also purchased
but could not free. Thus, his family lived in "semifreedom" (p. 144),
and were still Johnson's property upon his death.
The two concluding chapters of Wolf's study make clear that it was not
the plight of people like Samuel Johnson that a developing cohort of
antislavery politicians had in mind when, during the late 1820s, they
began to question the role of slavery in Virginia. Rather, eastern
elites themselves introduced slavery into the debate over a new state
constitution in 1829 in order to counter western impatience with the
disproportionate political power of the Tidewater. Easterners feared
western efforts to expand the franchise by eliminating property holding
requirements, so that far more white men in the west could vote. They
also feared plans to reapportion the legislature to reflect white
populations, which would have deprived the eastern regions of Virginia
of the population advantage gained from its large number of slaves. Wolf
indicates that conservatives beat back the call for electoral reform by
raising the specter of abolition and by asserting that the egalitarian
rhetoric of westerners, taken to its logical ends, would enfranchise
free blacks, as well as women. Thus, according to Wolf, the defense of
slavery forced eastern conservatives to refashion the ideals of the
American Revolution as dedicated to the preservation of property rather
than the extension of liberty. The two-fold effect of this ideological
retrenchment was to blunt the western constitutional agenda and to
inspire amongst many westerners an incipient free-soil philosophy that
made them even more hostile to slaveholder interests.
Nat Turner's Rebellion delivered one more shock to Virginia's body
politic that in 1831 and 1832 provided a final opportunity for
Virginians to consider whether emancipation might reshape the state's
future. Predictably, the problem of what the state should do with its
current population of free blacks and the future increase that
emancipation threatened, framed the debate and ultimately
short-circuited it. Few white Virginia politicians saw the natural
rights of black people as a major consideration. Legislators divided
largely on sectional lines as to whether a gradual emancipation scheme
freeing the offspring of current slaves violated the property rights of
slaveholders. Western critics of slavery emphasized that the institution
harmed economic and political development, preventing Virginia from
realizing its full potential as a dynamic and virtuous society dominated
by free white farmers. Ironically, a debate centered on slavery as a
practical, not a moral, problem produced nothing but impractical plans
that would have stretched out the emancipation process as late as 1910
and was undermined by the consensus of pro- and antislavery legislators
that free blacks should be deported. A pervasive consensus on race thus
ensured even the contemplation of conservative reform would produce
complete inaction. In the thick of the age of Jackson, the eastern
elite's colonial commitment to race-based slavery won the day in
Virginia.
By taking into consideration a half-century sweep, from 1776 to 1832,
and by viewing it as a period of prolonged transition, Wolf's work on
slavery in Virginia would seem to mirror the project of Richard S.
Newman and others who view the same period as a transformative one in
the history of northern abolitionism.[1] Defenders of slavery and
critics, whites and blacks, worked out their ideas and strategies in
real time, in reaction to unfolding events, interests, and political
structures, not simply in response to a clear set of identified, albeit
problematic, Revolutionary principles. In Wolf's case, ironically, she
has to make this argument by repeatedly making reference to
Revolutionary principles, measuring words and actions by the presence or
absence of egalitarian and libertarian language. While she does show us
Virginians responding to external events such as the War of 1812 and the
Missouri Crisis, her argument might be stronger, and her portrait more
textured, if she more frequently looked beyond the boundaries of
conventional politics and expanded the range of voices that reflected on
the meaning of race or recorded the presence of blacks, slave and free,
in the Old Dominion. As it is, the Revolution is the measuring stick
for ideology, despite Wolf's efforts to provide a story more deeply
grounded in a changing social landscape.
Still, Wolf mounts an intriguing challenge to historians who have
claimed that the Revolution had a powerful impact on thinking about race
and slavery. Her emphasis on conservatism provides nuance to works by
William Shade, Dickson Bruce, and Robert McColley.[2] Wolf locates
slavery and race closer to the heart of political conservatism in
Virginia than does Bruce. In building on these previous perspectives,
she interrogates claims by historians such as William Freehling, Gary B.
Nash, and Duncan Macleod regarding the relative intensity of
revolutionary liberalism, as well as casting doubt on whether oppressive
ideas about race were really a response to the inability of the
Revolutionary generation in the South to dismantle slavery.[3] Colonial
era habits of mind remained a crucial instrument of power in Wolf's
account, merely tuned up for a new era. Throughout the half century
that she examines, the persistent refusal by whites to accept the
possibility of large numbers of free blacks and free whites living
amongst one another, even on unequal terms, vanquished even the most
cautious antislavery arguments.
Like Edmund Morgan long before her, Wolf maintains that Virginia's story
is emblematic of the nation's [4]. But in the period that Wolf's study
focuses upon, there are limits to this formulation. Western Virginians
may have become increasingly skeptical of slavery's political and
economic value, but in the North during this period, a succession of
states actually abolished slavery. To be sure, northern emancipation was
deeply flawed, reflecting, as well as leading to, intense legal and
cultural expressions of racism. But in the north, advocates of black
disfranchisement as the corollary of abolition, men like Martin Van
Buren, were architects of a new, modern politics, not apologists for a
colonial order as in Virginia. In any event, to test the Virginia
paradigm would require Wolf to frame her work in more explicitly
comparative terms, looking north, south, and west of the Chesapeake, not
only to see how Virginia's approach to emancipation stacked up, but also
to see if Virginians drew meaningful comparisons between themselves and
other states. Along these lines, Wolf also might have made much more of
the ways that national westward expansion underwrote Virginia's
conservatism, by creating a profitable demand for Virginia's slaves.
Ultimately, Wolf's study raises broader questions about how ideology
relates to substantive legal change and what the social costs of
ambivalence are. These questions have direct relevance to two of the
most crucial issues facing the United States today--immigration and
climate change. Virginians tolerated the presence of a despised
minority of free people whose status was legally ambiguous and presence
in many cases a downright violation of the law. At least some
Virginians, from the Revolution forward, recognized slavery itself to be
a ticking social time-bomb. Sporadic outbreaks of ambivalence over the
world they had made in the previous century reinforced racist phobias,
but produced few concrete collective actions. Wolf thus provides us
with a story in which surprisingly little changes over fifty-plus years.
Virginians refused to solve their illegal alien problem or their
dependence on slave labor. In retrospect, what white, or for that
matter, black Virginians thought would happen in the long run--whether
they believed the racial order forged in colonial times could
last--remains unclear, despite Wolf's penetrating investigation of
legal, political, and social history.
Notes
[1]. Richard S. Newman, _The Transformation of American Abolitionism:
Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic_ (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002).
[2]. William Shade, _Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the
Second Party System, 1824-1861_ (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1996); Dickson D. Bruce Jr., _The Rhetoric of Conservatism:
The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the
South_ (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1982); and Robert McColley,
_Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia_ (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1964).
[3]. William W. Freehling, "The Founding Fathers and Slavery,"
_American Historical Review_ 77 (1972), 81-93; Gary B. Nash, _Race and
Revolution_ (Madison: Madison House, 1990); and Duncan J. Macleod,
_Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution_ (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1974).
[4]. Edmund S. Morgan, _American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal
of Colonial Virginia_ (New York: Norton, 1975).
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