Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America

1. Becoming Antislavery

1 / Becoming Antislavery In the winter of 1805, a young Virginian rode his horse down Williamsburg ’s deserted Duke of Gloucester Street and viewed the remnants of a once-vibrant capital. The town’s residents remained closed inside the many buildings that lined the main thoroughfare, protected from the cold December weather. At one end of the main street lay the old capital building. Years earlier colonial representatives in that building had challenged the authority of the king of England, but now the rooms were empty and the voices silent. At the other end sat the second oldest college in America. Once a place of learning that produced many of the state’s most prominent revolutionary leaders, the College of William and Mary now struggled both to remain financially solvent and to keep students enrolled through graduation. At first glance, the appearance of departed grandeur, bare trees, empty streets, and an overcast sky presented a portrait of dreary isolation. Nineteen-year-old Edward Coles, who harbored grand expectations for his tenure at the college, arrived in town only to be “disappointed in the idea that I had formed of Williamsburg.”1 Southern elite planters had been sending their sons to the College of William and Mary for decades. They did so because they expected the school to transform the students into enlightened gentlemen who would become civic leaders in the young nation. As early as 1785, Thomas Jefferson had bragged to Englishman Richard Price that “the college of William and Mary in Williamsburg is the place where are collected together all the young men of Virginia under preparation for public life.” Thomas Todd, a Virginia-born Supreme Court Justice, sent his son becoming antislavery / 11 to Williamsburg because he believed a young man’s college years were a “golden period for improvement, . . . the most important . . . in the course of your whole life.” It was during these years, insisted this father, that the young man would “form [the] character—habits of industry & study . . . which . . . last you forever.” Edward Coles’s father similarly recognized the value of a refined education and sent three sons to the College of William and Mary. Isaac attended the college from 1796 to 1798, and Tucker was a student from 1801 to 1803. Edward entertained such high expectations for the school because his older brothers and their friends frequently celebrated their experiences there as transformative. Carter Henry Harrison, who was Isaac’s classmate and a cousin of future president William Henry Harrison, boasted endlessly of the “Gaiety and myrth which Williamsburg affords.” Isaac, who also enjoyed carousing with his friends, emphasized a different aspect of his experience. He venerated the school as “the best place on the continent for the education of young men.”2 Edward’s initial impression of the school and town hardly matched these descriptions. “I see nothing very prepossessing,” lamented Coles, “either in the town or College.” In fact, he feared that his stay in Williamsburg would provide few of “the advantages of improvement” he had expected to encounter.3 Coles soon discovered, however, that appearances could be deceiving. As he had been led to believe, Williamsburg and the college both offered plenty of opportunities to refine his manners , cultivate friendships, and acquire a useful education. In one important way, however, his two-year stay at the College of William and Mary produced an outcome few would have predicted. While most of his fellow collegians became slaveholding planters and prominent public servants after graduation, Edward Coles become an antislavery idealist who would eventually emancipate the enslaved property he inherited from his father. “the ease and self-indulgence of being waited on” Edward Coles was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, on December 15, 1786, and he enjoyed an almost idyllic childhood. As a member of the third generation of the Coles family in Virginia, he benefited from a lifestyle remarkably similar to Virginia’s colonial planter elite, and he had little reason to doubt that he would continue to enjoy such a high standard of living. He grew up at Enniscorthy, an elegant plantation house situated on the ridge of Green Mountain in the Piedmont 12 / becoming antislavery region of Virginia. It was here that enterprising planters like his father managed diversified homesteads sustained by enslaved labor. Like most eighteenth-century Virginians and southerners generally, the Coles family never questioned their dependence on enslaved labor. They took it for granted that they lived...