Migrants Against Slavery: Virginians & the Nation (review)

Migrants Against Slavery: Virginians & the Nation. By Philip S. Schwarz. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. 288. Cloth, $38.50.)

During the late antebellum period, Virginia was a state of amazing diversity. With the largest numbers of slaves in North America (nearly half a million) and slaveholders (nearly 60,000), the commonwealth also possessed a nonslaveholding majority, a large portion of whom were concentrated in mostly white counties west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A state dominated by plantation agriculture, by the 1850s slavery was moving into nonplantation wheat farming, manufacturing, and a host of other commercial activities. Meanwhile, as Philip J. Schwarz shows in this imaginative study, Virginia was experiencing significant social changes. By the late antebellum period, a large portion of Virginia slaves migrated, involuntarily, to other slaveholding states, while free blacks and runaways relocated north. Meanwhile, many white Virginians also emigrated to free states, especially border midwestern states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. During the last decades of the antebellum period, indeed, nearly half of Virginia's white migrants moved north.

Schwarz's chief purpose in Migrants against Slavery is to examine these white and black expatriates. Although he acknowledges that not all of them followed antislavery motives, Schwarz is especially interested in migrants who, by moving to free states, consciously rejected the Virginia slaveocracy. The most obvious of these "intentional" migrants were runaway slaves, and, with Virginia's proximity to freedom, either by land or water, meant that regular flow of these migrants existed. A significant number of free blacks also left the state, and Virginia sent more black colonists to Liberia than any other state in the Union. But there were other, even more unusual migrants, and Schwarz's treatment of them constitutes the bulk of the book. Some of these migrants were whites openly opposed to slavery, though antislavery proponents of any kind did not generally remain long in the commonwealth. Edward Coles, James Madison's private secretary, emigrated to Illinois, emancipated his slaves, and later was elected governor of that state on an antislavery platform. Moncure Daniel Conway hailed from distinguished white Virginian lineage but, in his youth, departed Virginia to become an avid abolitionist. George Boxley, another white Virginian, was accused of organizing a slave revolt in 1815, and he fled Virginia for Ohio to escape prosecution.

The final portion of Migrants against Slavery traces the stories of individual African Americans who resisted slavery by migrating. In 1831, free blacks George and Eliza Gilliam left eastern Virginia for Alleghany County, Pennsylvania; light-skinned, they were able to "pass" as whites. George subsequently attended Dartmouth medical school and amassed a respectable fortune. A far different example comes in the instance of the nearly 275 manumitted slaves of Samuel Gist. Freed on Gist's death, they moved to Ohio, where they occupied the center of an intensely contentious litigation. Finally, Schwarz traces the story of the family of Dangerfield Newby, who was killed while participating in John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in October 1859.

The conclusion of Migrants against Slavery—that emigrating antebellum Virginians constituted a sort of referendum against slavery—is intriguing. Schwarz's account remains most compelling on an individual than a group level: his rich examples of how individual Virginians decided to move to free societies is fascinating. There can be little doubt that the vast majority of African American migrants leaving the commonwealth did so as a part of a larger pattern of resistance toward the slave system. Yet the motives for white Virginians are complex. Although many emigrated against slavery—either because they opposed the institution or, more likely, because they hated both slaves and slaveholders—many more probably left for primarily economic reasons: that is, the same reasons motivating other Americans.