The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In a world that was largely unfree, the Enlightenment visions of liberty, equality, and brotherhood simultaneously inspired alarm and hope. At the heart of conflicting ideologies of governance lay the question of who had the right to control material resources and to profit from human labor. Most men were ready to embrace the notion that they were as entitled to the fruits of their labor as were their social “betters,” but few were prepared to accept the notion that their social “inferiors” possessed similar inalienable rights. The dream of human equality simultaneously enlivened and threatened the dream of personal wealth. The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader examines the development of and clash between the dream of equality and the dream of wealth as they shaped three generations of a prominent Virginia family from 1715 to 1872. Just as major players on the world stage such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson articulated and embodied paradoxes at the heart of America, so too less famous white men made choices that were infused by and helped to perpetuate social dreams and nightmares. American Dreams analyzes the economic, racial, and sexual dynamics of family systems , multiracial households, and class networks by exploring the social origins, public careers, and emotional investments of the Prentis family of Williamsburg and Richmond. The clan’s founder, William Prentis, was an English indentured servant who rose from rags to riches by clerking in, then managing, and finally becoming the major shareholder in the colony of Virginia’s most successful store, which is still standing in Colonial Williamsburg. His son, Joseph Prentis Sr., became an influential Revolutionary-era judge and politician, exhibiting both the radical and the reactionary potentialities inherent in a movement for human freedom led by slaveholders. The sons of the third Prentis generation, Joseph and John, embarked on divergent paths, colluding and conflicting with one another during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the radical promise of the Revolutionary age was betrayed as the United States expanded its dedication to slavery and empire. 2 introduction A close analysis of the development of John B. Prentis’s life and ideas forms the book’s center. As a youth, John expressed distaste for Virginia’s peculiar institution. In 1805, he went to Philadelphia as an indentured apprentice to study architecture with a Quaker builder. His letters home were filled with righteous indignation about the ways slavery corrupted Virginia’s young gentlemen and destroyed “the poor slaves.” He identified with hardworking tradesmen and prided himself on his physical strength and manual skills. Determined to make his way by the sweat of his brow in Richmond after his apprenticeship ended, John abruptly accommodated himself to slavery and soon grew besotted with it. After inheriting a slave woman from his father, he quickly acquired several more slaves, ran a jail in which slaves were imprisoned, and began to speculate and trade in slaves. By the end of his life, he had transported thousands of slaves from Virginia for sale in the Deep South. In short, his ascent in American society involved abandoning his innate sense of justice and equality in favor of a frenzied investment in violence, exploitation, and dehumanization. This book pays close attention to the reasons that although he became wealthy, John Prentis repudiated the ideological gentility of his birth family to embrace a working-class identity. His letters and other documents illuminate why and how many working-class white men rejected class solidarity with blacks and indeed behaved in viciously racist ways. John’s evolution provides a powerful case study of how the ideological crisis caused by the dissonance between the two American dreams—the dream of possessing wealth and the dream of social equality —was resolved, in a restless and unsustainable fashion, through an aggressive cult of violent white masculinity that married “democracy” to white male supremacy. Slave traders are typecast in both pro- and antislavery literature as execrable wretches around whom genteel folks held their noses. Proslavery literature romanticized the image of aristocratic plantation patriarchs surrounded by contented subordinates, while antislavery literature represented the subjection and violation of victims who would be or ought to be rescued by “the heroic actor[s] of the romance of resistance,” to use Saidiya Hartman’s apt phrase (Scenes 54). Both camps excoriated slave traders as the source of everything that was most odious about the peculiar institution. Adam Rothman observes that the ideological line between slave trading and slaveholding “originated as a useful...