Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia's Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760-1810

Chapter 3: The World(s) Northern Neck Slavery Made

S 3 the world(s) northern neck slavery made If the class frictions among whites described in the previous chapter were essentially constant for most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the evolving institution of African American slavery on the Northern Neck fostered growing amounts of conflict and anxiety among slaveholders, slaves, and non-slave-owning whites in the age of the Revolution. The institution had always rested upon a foundation of exploitation and brutality, and the enslaved resisted in a myriad of ways that reflected not only their African backgrounds but also their Virginia experience. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, slaves lived within an increasingly diverse and complex economy that created both greater opportunities and greater hazards for them. Many acquired additional skills and participated in a hired labor market that gave them more freedom from the immediate control of their owners in their day-to-day lives. Through these and other means, many also learned much more about the geographic and social worlds beyond their plantations. Yet if these changes enabled some slaves to win greater autonomy, they also increased the risks and uncertainties of their lives. Hiring contracts brought separation not only from owners but also from family and community. The expansion of the plantation economy to other regions beyond the Tidewater Chesapeake that accelerated in the 1770s increased the potential for slave sales and forced removals. And as these developments reshaped the lives of enslaved and free African Americans on the Northern Neck, they also worked in several contradictory ways to intensify class frictions among whites. Accommodating Revolutions 102 S As in the rest of the Americas, slavery on the Northern Neck produced a life of cruelty, deprivation, and control for those human beings caught within it. These hardships were influenced not only by the inherent characteristics of the system but also by the particular social, cultural, and economic conditions of life in which slavery operated on the peninsula in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Northern Neck slaves lived predominantly in plantation communities rather than small farms. In the late 1780s, when systematic tax records began to be kept, only 26.1 percent of slaves were owned by individuals who possessed less than ten slaves. Almost half (46.9 percent) had owners who held twenty or more slaves, and nearly a third (32.1 percent) were the property of men and women who held more than thirty slaves. By 1810, slightly more than half of enslaved Northern Neck residents (51.5 percent) were owned by persons who held ten or less slaves, presumably reflecting the greater rate of sales and forced migrations among the slaves of the larger planters. Nevertheless , a substantial majority (70.1 percent) were held by owners of more than five slaves.1 The region’s slaveholders produced an ample record of brutality and physical cruelty. Although many owners complained of the excesses of overseers, they repeatedly sanctioned whippings and other forms of harsh punishment . Some owners and overseers endorsed rubbing salt and other irritants into the wounds inflicted on slaves. In 1768, one Northumberland County slaveholder was so enraged at a runaway slave who had threatened to commit arson that he offered a reward of ten pounds for his severed head but only forty shillings, “besides what the law allows,” if he were returned alive. Local courts often ordered that enslaved felons be branded and have an ear cut off. In at least two cases, jailors apparently allowed imprisoned slaves to suffer frostbite resulting in the loss of limbs and death. As in other slave societies , coerced sex with enslaved women was common. A British traveler visiting Fredericksburg in 1804 reported an allegation that some local whites freely sold slaves who were their own children or siblings, with no more regard to their actions “than they would to the disposal of a cow or a horse or any other property in the brute creatures.”2 Even those slaveholders who criticized brutality seemingly regarded such practices as inevitable. Philip Fithian described Robert Carter as the most humane slave owner in his area, but also noted the planter’s strong The World(s) Northern Neck Slavery Made 103 disapproval of a local Anglican minister’s criticism of cruelty to slaves. Carter himself repeatedly endorsed the whipping and sale of recalcitrant slaves. In one case, he returned a runaway to the overseer of his Dickerson Mill Quarter and ordered...