Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack, Grateful Slaves, and Racial Difference

Throughout the British eighteenth century, the image of the grateful slave recurred insistently, although it has been little remarked in scholarship. The first novel to represent a scheme to reform a plantation by eliciting slave gratitude was Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel Colonel Jack. ¹ Although this aspect of Defoe's novel has been little noted, it presented a model eerily prescient of, if not influential on, many later examples. ² Colonel Jack is self-consciously set at a moment when racial categories are inchoate. Jack, a young English man, having boarded a ship supposedly bound for London, is kidnapped and sold as a "slave," despite his protests that he and his companions, as "Men of Substance," "were not people to be sold for Slaves" (114). On arrival in Virginia, Jack must, at first, work--and be disciplined--side-by-side with the Africans who will later become his charges. When he becomes an overseer, however, he sets about articulating racial differences between black and white people. Indeed, while leaving aside the much-debated question of Jack's aspiration to gentility, I will argue that his aspiration to whiteness is entirely successful within the terms of the novel. ³

Given that Jack, as a white Englishman, is not allowed to remain alongside the African slaves for long, one might assume that Defoe, in referring to an Englishman as a "slave," is merely being inaccurate; but I believe this is telling evidence of the place of the novel in the history of racial thinking. In 1722 in England, the practice of calling only Africans slaves was not yet established. ⁴ Indeed, the distinction between lifelong, heritable chattel slave status for people of African descent and short term, relatively privileged indentured servitude for white Europeans was a recent invention. In Virginia, this distinction only fully emerged after Bacon's rebellion of 1676. The historian Theodore Allen argues that the distinction between black African slaves and white European servants emerged primarily out of the practical need of the Virginia master class to find numerous allies who could help them control their workers. In the earlier seventeenth century, Africans and Europeans had been lumped together as bond laborers, performing the same tasks, subject to the same rules, and leading intertwined lives. By systematically distinguishing English and European workers from their African counterparts and rewarding the whites with economic, legal, and social privileges, the masters broke the sympathy and solidarity between their bond laborers. This sympathy had created a threatening coalition among the lower orders during Bacon's rebellion, and such sympathy was never seen again after the imposition of a system of white-skin privilege. ⁵ When this system extended beyond Virginia--and even into England itself--has not been established. ⁶

Defoe's novel, then, represents a moment when the still inchoate category of race is being actively theorized. Although Defoe starts with the possibility of sympathy between bond laborers, regardless of race, he does not use it to imagine a return to pre-1676 conditions of common cause between bond laborers and slaves, but instead to theorize a justification of the legal and practical differences that were institutionalized at the end of Bacon's rebellion. Indeed, given readings of Defoe's Maryland and Virginia scenes as propaganda for colonization, and his personal involvement in the transportation business in the late seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that he would present colonial whiteness as a ready means to, or replacement for, gentility. ⁷

Initially, it is the failure to distinguish between black and white plantation workers, a failure which extended beyond names to modes of punishment, that motivates Jack's sympathy for slaves. In later novels reformers claim to have been prompted by sympathy, that is, the natural impulses of their sensible souls in reacting to slaves' suffering. ⁸ Jack's sympathy for--or understanding of--the African slaves on his master's plantation, in sharp contrast, is not presented as...