Madison and Jefferson (6 page)

He himself was one of those citizens, drafting an address to express thanks to Henry, which he and his father both signed as ranking members of the Orange County Committee of Safety. In this message to the public, published in the
Virginia Gazette
, Madison contended that Henry had the right to use “violence and reprisal” even if vengeance was his sole motivation. Conditions had changed with the “blow struck” at Lexington and Concord. The time for reconciliation was past.
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At this historic moment, then, Madison’s thinking was closest to Henry’s, setting him apart from Jefferson and Pendleton, who saw Henry as
a man of impulse unable to resist responding to Dunmore’s provocations. Sizing up the magazine incident, Pendleton concluded that “the Sanguine are for rash measures without consideration, the Flegmatic to avoid that extreme are afraid to move at all, while a third Class take the middle way” toward a “Steddy tho Active Point of defense.” Henry’s boldness had shifted the balance of power away from the middle ground. Jefferson echoed this view in a letter to William Small, his college mathematics professor, now living in England. He worried that Dunmore had unleashed the “almost ungovernable fury of the people,” which no one but the “more intelligent people” of Virginia could temper. In Jefferson’s mind, Henry deserved no thanks.
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Young Madison had no fear of popular passions and no wish to restrain Henry. He was so deep in the marchers’ column and so uncomfortable with Jefferson and the moderates that he bought into a rumor that the half-blind sixty-five-year-old Richard Bland, in Congress at Philadelphia, had “turned traitor” after having been offered a lucrative job by the British. “We all know age is no stranger to avarice,” Madison charged, willing even to believe that the venerable Benjamin Franklin had returned from fruitless negotiations in London no longer worthy of the patriots’ trust. “Indeed it appears to me that the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality,” Madison stated, jumping to conclusions well at odds with his later reputation for reasoned analysis.
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Dunmore’s real transgression—his most inflammatory act—was the undisguised “malice,” as Madison termed it, of threatening to incite a slave uprising. Virginians were not taken by surprise, however. Rumors had been circulating that the design of the British administration all along was to pass an act freeing slaves and servants so that they could then take arms against the Americans. Congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee believed that Americans should free their slaves before the British did. Months before Dunmore revealed his plans, Madison had written to Bradford that he feared an insurrection. There had been a meeting of slaves (“a few … unhappy wretches”) who intended to seek out the invaders once British troops landed on Virginia soil. Bradford was no less appalled at the prospect, finding it incomprehensible that “the Spirit of the English” would countenance “so slavish a way of Conquering.”
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Madison was prepared to admit that its slave population was Virginia’s greatest vulnerability, its Achilles’ heel: “If we should be subdued,” he said in June 1775, “we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.” Madison knew that free, white Virginians had created an unstable
society, and that all their bravado, all their talk of liberty, could not hide this fact. When his paternal grandfather, Ambrose Madison, had died at the age of thirty-six, in 1732, a court determined that he had been poisoned by at least one of his slaves; three were tried, one hanged.
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To be literal, using real slaves might be called a “slavish” way of conquering, but that is not precisely what Bradford meant. In 1775 the idea of slaves fighting their masters under sanction of the British military was an insult to the inherited sense of honor claimed by the king’s freeborn British subjects in Virginia. London had long maintained that plantation slavery could be safely managed and hitherto had done nothing to reverse or undo the arrangement. A new, “slavish” way of conquering meant setting up British Americans for destruction. Whether one looked at “slavish” conquering as race war or mere indecency, the situation was grim.

In June 1775, once Dunmore fled the governor’s palace, fearing for his life, his detractors assumed that his departure was part of a larger plan to invade Virginia. He had already kept the burgesses from meeting for over a year when the Virginia leadership finally felt compelled to establish its substitute government, the Virginia Convention. Fairfax County patriarch George Mason proceeded to devise the first serious plan for an organized military, and Patrick Henry made known his ambition to lead the First Regiment. After Henry won his colonelcy and the title of commander in chief of the Virginia militia, George Washington remarked caustically: “I think my countrymen made a Capitol mistake, when they took Henry out of the Senate to place him in the field; and pity it is, that he does not see this.” Washington believed that Henry, energetic though he was, did not reason (or strategize) as a military man should.

Meanwhile Dunmore made good on his threats, initiating raids along the coastline, harassing planters, and recruiting slaves. In November 1775 he did battle with the Princess Anne County militia, seizing its captain and securing a hold on the oceanside town of Norfolk. Victory so emboldened Dunmore that he issued the most infamous of his proclamations, charging rebellious Virginians with treason while promising freedom to all slaves and servants who flocked to his standard.

In simple terms, he had declared war on the Virginia planter class. Arming former slaves turned their great white world upside down. Dunmore’s so-called Ethiopian regiment, which helped defeat the Norfolk area militiamen, were musket-bearing slaves led by white officers, eager troops who wore the words
Liberty to Slaves
on their chests. There appeared to be more than one revolution in the offing.
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Jefferson recognized Dunmore’s new army as a menace. Writing from Philadelphia to his college chum John Page, he concluded his letter by reprising Cato the Elder’s call in the Roman Senate, substituting Norfolk for Carthage: “
Delenda est Norfolk
”—Dunmore’s stronghold must be destroyed. A prominent planter reported to Jefferson and the Virginia delegation in Congress that Dunmore’s ships were “plying up the Rivers, plundering Plantations and using every Art to seduce the Negroes. The Person of no Man in the Colony is safe.” Pendleton likewise expressed indignation over Dunmore’s “Piratical War,” telling Jefferson that all Dunmore really had in mind was to lure slaves on board his ship and then sell them for profit to plantations in the West Indies. This was not true, but it served Pendleton’s purposes.

General Washington, stationed outside a besieged Boston, shared in the moral confusion and outright indignation. Dunmore was the “Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity,” he charged, and if his movement was not quickly crushed, it would have a “snow Ball” effect; for Dunmore knew how to grow his army through a combination of “fear” and “promises,” most notably among the “Negros,” who otherwise had no reason to be tempted. He too understood that race relations constituted Virginia’s Achilles’ heel.
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Just a few weeks earlier Washington had appealed for a discontinuation of black enlistments in New England. He was uncomfortable with the number of blacks under arms and their easy camaraderie with white soldiers. But the slow pace of recruitment caused him to acquiesce at least to the reenlistment of free blacks. The commander of Continental forces was not alone: in Congress, John Adams echoed Washington’s concern, empathizing with the white southern troops who arrived in Massachusetts only to encounter this strange situation.

Lord Dunmore’s words and actions ensured that slavery remained central to how Virginians thought about their future prospects. The members of the Virginia gentry felt that their backs were to the wall. Whether or not the Continental Congress acted en masse, the colony’s elite was getting closer to declaring Virginia’s complete independence from Great Britain.
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Americanness had been forced upon the Virginians. Despite their good educations and their country seats, the English persistently portrayed them
as clumsy provincials. In 1770 less than one-tenth of Virginia’s white males owned one-half of the colony’s land, while their slaves—human beings designated as property—accounted for nearly 40 percent of the population. Under such circumstances, late colonial Virginia would hardly seem to possess the building blocks of a healthy republic.

Madison and Jefferson were passive beneficiaries of a severely hierarchical system. Virginia’s landowners had overborrowed to maintain their opulent lifestyle. There is no better proof of the Virginians’ rank among the colonies than the fact that their most important product, tobacco, represented some 40 percent of the thirteen colonies’ combined exports to Great Britain. And it was declining in value. Financial worries intensified feelings of mistreatment by a Parliament that insisted on taxing the colonies. In short, the Virginians who exercised power at home felt dangerously exposed abroad.
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Slavery could not but define them. North of Maryland most slaves were house servants, playing a far less decisive role in the economy. To feed the commercial engine of the South, slavery had been made cruelly efficient. It had to be energetically maintained, policed by communities, and encoded in laws; otherwise it would not thrive. As a result, the Virginia gentry upheld inherently contradictory ideologies in the 1770s. They proclaimed their love of liberty, appealed to philosophy and literature, and exhibited a genteel and increasingly sentimental appreciation for the human potential. Admitting slavery’s corruption of whites’ morals, they did not, however, abandon the old compulsion to mix kindness with violence in dealing with their human property.

Were they helpless, born wrapped in an economic straightjacket? Or were they spineless? That is history’s problem to solve. In 1773 Patrick Henry, writing in a style that belies both Jefferson’s and Wirt’s descriptions of his intellectual limitations, told a Quaker who had educated and then freed his own slaves what Jefferson, Madison, and their compeers all felt in varying degrees: “Is it not amazing,” wrote Henry, “that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty … we find men professing religion the most humane, mild, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty?” Henry did not speak in the abstract: “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it.”
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His words embodied the paradox facing Virginians. Since 1765 white
Americans had repeatedly and dramatically termed their suffering at the hands of Parliament “enslavement.” Yet all soon realized that their poignant metaphor invited comparisons to the slavery they practiced. In the famous case of
Somerset v. Steuart
(1772), British jurist Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery could not be sanctioned by the common law. It was, as the trial transcript reads, incompatible with the “natural rights of mankind” and the “mild and humane precepts of Christianity.” Once a slave stood on British soil, the very air he breathed gave him legal protection and made him free. A writer in the
New-York Journal
assumed that this ruling would produce “greater ferment” than had the Stamp Act protests, for it placed the regulation of American slavery within the jurisdiction of British courts.

Mansfield had no intention of freeing British slaves or of undermining the British slave trade. But he did imply that Parliament could, if it chose, pass legislation affecting slavery in the colonies. A successful attorney in the case went so far as to declare that the laws of Virginia were as repugnant to the British constitution as the customs found in the “barbarous nations” of Africa. Another contended that recognizing Virginia law in England was no different than permitting a Muslim to bring his fair-skinned slaves to London and rape them at will.
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Benjamin Franklin, in England at the time, saw the case as a perfect example of the hypocrisy of Englishmen. The state could congratulate itself on the “Virtue, Love of Liberty, and Equity of its Courts, in setting free a single Negro” named Somerset, while at the same time protecting what Franklin called a “detestable” slave trade on the high seas.

The British did not stop taking potshots at America after
Somerset.
In 1775 the conservative wit Samuel Johnson, essayist and lexicographer, wrote a heckling pamphlet,
Taxation, No Tyranny
, in which he mocked the colonists’ use of the slavery metaphor. Johnson famously asked readers: “If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of slaves?” The American slave poet Phillis Wheatley came to a similar conclusion in a 1774 letter published widely in New England newspapers, pointing out the “strange absurdity” of American slaveholders “whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposed.”
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The great contradiction could not be ignored. Only weeks before the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, the
Pennsylvania Packet
boldly inquired: “Can we suppose the people of England will grant the force of our reasoning, when they are told, that
every colony
in the continent, is deeply involved in the inconsistent practice of keeping
their fellow
creatures, in perpetual bondage?
” Cognizant of the
Somerset
ruling, the same patriot writer reasoned that if slaves were instantly free on British soil, then the only way Americans could contend for genuine liberty was to drive an “inhumane practice” from their borders. He urged Congress to outlaw the slave trade. And so it did: in calling for a general boycott of British goods, the colonies’ delegates all agreed to a ban on the importation of slaves, which was kept in force even after the other import restrictions were lifted.
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