The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

6. On Domestic Slavery

6 22 ON DOMESTIC SLAVERY This portrait of Martha Haines Butt (1833–1871) (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly on 14 January 1860 at the time of the publication of her second book, The Leisure Moments of Martha Haines Butt, A.M. Born in Norfolk after nearly all of the Virginians who lived through the American Revolution were dead, she imbibed ideas about slavery that became widespread during the decades before the American Civil War. She published her first book in 1853, a novel entitled Antifanaticism: A Tale of the South, to counter the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unlike Virginians of earlier generations, Butt and a large proportion of white Virginians of her generation believed that slavery was an institution beneficial to enslaved laborers as well as to their owners. “Death or Liberty.” Enslaved Virginians planned to raise a flag with those words over the Capitol of Virginia in Richmond at the end of August 1800 when they began the war against slavery . During the trials of the men who planned to wage the war or to employ the threat of war to negotiate for the end of slavery, one of the conspirators described the flag, which contained in inverted order the critical memorable words of Patrick Henry’s March 1775 speech. The men may have intended the flag to express their determination to gain freedom, or it may have been a threat to the city’s white population.1 A few years later a plausible but possibly apocryphal story circulated that one of the conspirators had stated “in a manly tone of voice” at his trial, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause: and I beg, as a favour, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have pre-determined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial?”2 The actions and words of the Revolutionary generation were very familiar to Virginians, both white and black. The ideas that the words conveyed across the years resonated powerfully among the enslaved black men who planned to fight for their liberty in Virginia and to be freed from slavery just as the patriots of the American Revolution had fought for their liberty and to be freed from the king. Twenty-five years after Patrick Henry made his speech and more than fifteen years before the first account of his speech was printed, enslaved Virginians knew all about the meaning and the inspiring words of the Revolution: about liberty or death, about all men being created equal and endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Gabriel and his numerous conspirators, foiled by informants who disclosed their plan and by a flash flood that prevented them from assembling to put their plan into execution , drew on pure Virginia precedents and principles to fight against an impure Virginia creation, slavery. In the decades after the American Revolution, white Virginians and other Americans expressed a wide variety of conflicting ideas about slavery in their republic founded on the ideas of liberty and equality. Some of them believed that slavery was a mere fact of life; others that it was an unavoidable inheritance or a necessary evil; that it was incompatible with Christianity; that it was incompatible with republican government; that it was morally unjustifi- 140 the grandees of government able but impossible to change; or later that it was even a positive good for the owners and for the enslaved people.3 Prior to the Revolution, as Richard Bland had indicated in his courtroom argument in 1772, white Virginians generally perceived slavery as a naturally occurring institution, a form of master and servant relationship with some distinctly unpleasant characteristics and consequences. Quakers in the colonies, including Quakers in Virginia, were among the first Americans to argue that the institution was immoral and a violation of Christian principles. Later, as evangelical Christianity worked its way into the sensibilities of the age and the considerations of the body politic, more and more Virginians came to share that view. By the end of the Revolutionary decade...