Institutions and Ideology in the Slave South

In November 1785, more than 150 "free Inhabitants of the County of Lunenberg," Virginia, affixed their names to a petition to the General Assembly. Aroused by a "daring attempt … to wreste from us … the most valuable and indispensable Article of our property, our Slaves, by a general Emancipation of them," the petitioners reminded their representatives of what the recent Revolution—to their minds—was all about. When the British Parliament "usurp'd a right to Dispose of our Property" and sought "to establish a principle which might one day prove fatal to our rights of Property … we dissolved our union with our parent Country" in order "to fix a Tenure in our property on a Basis of Security not to be shaken in the future." Talk of emancipation aroused their anger, for such an action would have betrayed what they had fought for: "Title to the full, free, and absolute Enjoyment of every species of Property, whatsoever, or howsoever legally acquired." Aware that several prominent Virginians endorsed the idea of general emancipation, these "free independent Citizens" insisted that their efforts to secure their property constituted a "Purchase of too great a Value to be sacrificed to the Caprice, or Interest of any rank or Description of Men, however dignified or distinguished." Confident in their understanding of the Revolution, they rose to oppose emancipation and defy any "dignified or distinguished" men who advocated it.¹

The Lunenberg County petitioners, and the hundreds of other white Virginians who signed similar petitions in 1784 and 1785, remind us that the meaning of the Revolution found expression among countless common people as well as the elite. Their understanding of that meaning should caution us against seeing the Revolution as necessarily in tension with slavery. The petitioners sought to protect their private property in human beings as well as in land. And they declared that the "sacred Constitution" of Virginia best expressed and secured the meaning of the Revolution. Our modern obsession with the Declaration of Independence too often leads us to see it, especially its second paragraph, as the "sacred" text of the Revolution. However valuable the Declaration and that now-famous second paragraph may have been to the development of modern Americans' sense of themselves and their national mission, the petitioners demonstrate that many Americans after 1776 understood equality to be compatible with slavery.

Legal historian Alfred Brophy opens his important and valuable book by claiming that "'the Influence of America on the Mind' … was toward freedom, toward the Enlightenment truths that all people are created equal" (p. xiii). He further asserts that "the origins of Thomas Jefferson's ideas for the Declaration of Independence lie in Virginia," especially "in Williamsburg, where he attended William and Mary and absorbed the Enlightenment ideas that drove our country's Revolution" (p. 1). So begins Brophy's tale of declension. The South, or more specifically its intelligentsia, "moved away from beliefs in universal truths and began to laugh at concepts like Thomas Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are created equal'" (p. 3). Brophy does not consider whether "the" Enlightenment spoke in one voice regarding "universal truths," especially the "truths" that "all men are created equal" or whether "Enlightenment ideas" "drove our country's Revolution." Instead, he assumes that everyone in America began with the same set of beliefs and that somehow the South experienced "the loss of the idea of freedom" (p. xiv). His book, at one level, seeks to explain this "loss"—this long, steep decline from "the idea of freedom" to the triumph of a proslavery ideology that constituted a "departure from the Revolutionary era's focus on abstract and universal truths" (p. 4). The academics, lawyers...