Slave Nation (7 page)

Some Virginia planters found themselves with surplus slaves to sell to other colonies; others began to “breed” slaves for sale. Cutting off further foreign importation of slaves would enhance the value of the Virginians’ slaves. Thus Virginia could oppose the international slave trade while combining conscience and economics. The elimination of the trade would increase the value of the existing slaves and reduce the risk of severe slave over-population, which might threaten slave revolts. In addition, domestic and domesticated slaves were more valuable because they knew the language, work habits, and plantation customs, and were considered more peaceable and better security risks. Economic historian James A. Henretta identified the parallel increase in the price of slaves and the value of land in Virginia between 1750 and 1776.
³²

The leading slave holders had joined in a plea to the king in 1772 to ban foreign traffic in slaves, but had been rebuffed by the British government.
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The petition read in part:

The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered a trade of great inhumanity, and under its present encouragement we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very existence of Your Majesty’s American dominions.
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Because Virginia advocated abolition of the international slave trade, it has sometimes been considered an advocate for the abolition of slavery itself. This was George Bancroft’s view in his 1854
History of the United States
. In discussing the Virginia petition to the king to abolish the trade in 1772, he states:

In this manner Virginia led the host,
who alike condemned slavery and opposed the slave trade
. Thousands in Maryland, and in New Jersey, were ready to adopt a similar Petition; so were the legislatures of North Carolina, of Pennsylvania, of New York. Massachusetts, in its towns and in its legislature, unceasingly combated the conditions as well as the sale of slaves. There was no jealousy among one another in the strife against the crying evil. Virginia harmonized all opinions, and represented the moral sentiment and policy of them all.
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(emphasis added)

Bancroft ignored the difference between abolishing slavery and abolishing the slave trade. He was also wrong in suggesting that the South was united behind Virginia’s desire to end the importation of slaves.
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South Carolina and Georgia imported slaves into the nineteenth century. The international slave trade was as necessary for them as for the West Indian planters.

After the younger members had prepared the groundwork for the resolution for the committees of correspondence, it was presented to the House of Burgesses controlled by the senior members who dominated Virginia’s political landscape. By March 12, 1773, these men—all of whom had prospered under British rule— were prepared to take the serious step of uniting the colonies to oppose British actions that offended their interests. The
Somerset
decision, with its implications for southern slavery, had been the most recent and profound event that led them to assert publicly that, since the Stamp Act of 1765, the British government had demonstrated a pattern of disregard of colonial interests.

These senior members were listed first among those to serve on the committee of correspondence. The first three men named in the resolution constituting the committee— Peyton Randolph, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Richard Bland—were wealthy planters and staunch supporters of slavery.
³⁷
They had been considered both social and political friends of the governor and no friend of radical talk during the tax crises with Britain of the preceeding years, although they had cautiously supported the boycotts of that time.

The president of the House of Burgesses, Peyton Randolph, was a member (as was Jefferson’s mother) of the historic Randolph family, which had enormous interests in Virginia. Robert Carter Nicholas was a member of two of the most important families in Virginia history. He was so sensitive to the need to protect slavery that he led the filibuster against George Mason’s draft Bill of Rights for Virginia in 1776, on the grounds that it might incite slave revolts by suggesting that slaves might have rights.
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Richard Bland was a gentleman-planter-lawyer whose performance in public affairs was said to be “equaled by few and surpassed by no Virginians of the mid-eighteenth century.”
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The other members in the order named in the resolution were: Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick Henry, Dudley Digges, Dabney Carr, Archibald Cary, and Thomas Jefferson. All these men were slaveholders and lawyers—the representatives who dominated the Virginia House of Burgesses for at least half a century.
⁴⁰

Edmund Pendleton was a well-respected Virginia lawyer and judge who was much more cautious in moving toward independence than others like Patrick Henry, whom Pendleton considered rash. As a judge during the Stamp Act crisis, Pendleton carefully balanced his responsibilities by keeping his court open while using documents that did not require stamps in order to not violate the Act’s requirements. In 1775, he successfully discouraged Virginia militia from seeking to recover gunpowder that had been moved to a ship by Lord Dunmore.
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Pendleton did not believe the Virginia militia was equipped to begin a revolution that he did not yet support. Yet Pendleton’s name appeared high on the list of members in a resolution that he knew would draw the wrath of the Board of Trade in London, which later called the resolution “a measure of a most dangerous tendency and effect.”
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When Patrick Henry, in March of 1775, moved that “this colony be immediately put into a posture of defense” to prepare for a war that was—in his view—already underway (the celebrated “liberty or death” speech), Pendleton opposed the motion.
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It was adopted, however, and Pendleton was placed on the committee to organize the defense. He was included to assure that all shades of opinion would be represented and because he was one of “the men of business to whom Virginia turned when the decision had been made and trusted leaders were needed to carry it out.”
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This comment appears to explain Pendleton’s and the others’ inclusion as members of the committee of correspondence in 1773, long before the antagonism toward Britain had hardened into revolt. Despite his caution and hesitation to cut ties with Britain, Pendleton permitted himself to be included, along with Patrick Henry, on a “dangerous” committee of correspondence, demonstrating his belief that the vital interests of Virginia were at stake. This analysis also applies to Richard Bland, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Benjamin Harrison, whose names appear first in the resolution.

The publication of the resolution upset the British Board of Trade because it prepared the colonies to act in concert. Historian Theodore Draper explains:

The committees of correspondence transformed the struggle for power from agitation to organization. They were a radical innovation in the colonial struggle, extralegal if not illegal....Governors could and did dismiss or refuse to convene councils and assemblies, but they had no authority over committees of correspondence, which, in effect, existed outside the British imperial system. They again belied the old British assumption that the colonies were not to be feared because they were so diverse that they could not act together. From 1773 on, the colonies were prepared to meet any British threat with organized, collective opposition.
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Before the year was out, Samuel Adams and friends in Massachusetts—along with others in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—would demonstrate how “collective opposition” worked.

Just as the opinion in the
Somerset
case helped conservative Virginians to make a serious move toward revolution in March of 1773, the same judgment was being made in Massachusetts concerning a totally different issue. Within three weeks of Virginia’s resolution to establish intercolonial committees of correspondence, in far-off Boston letters written by Thomas Hutchinson in 1769 when he was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts began to circulate. These letters were written to Thomas Whately, a British friend of Hutchinson. Whately had been secretary to Lord Grenville, who had presided over the adoption of the Stamp Act in 1765.

These letters came into the possession of Benjamin Franklin in 1772 after Whately died. In December, he sent them to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts. Franklin was at that time the agent for Massachusetts in Britain. He asked that they not be printed, but shown to important Massachusetts political figures. It was surely too much for Franklin to expect they would not see the light of day.

Franklin said his objective was to demonstrate that the difficulties with Britain were the result of Hutchinson and other individual colonists’ despicable policies of secretly seeking to weaken colonial liberties, rather than the fault of the British government.
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This explanation sounds suspiciously like a Franklin satire, or else a desire to placate both the Massachusetts patriots and the British government at the same time. The letters were incriminating to Massachusetts eyes because they urged a restriction on colonial liberties. Here is a sample:

This is most certainly a crisis. I really wish that there may not have been the least degree of severity, beyond what was absolutely necessary to maintain, I think I may say this to you,
the dependence
which a colony ought to have upon the parent state, but if no measures shall have been taken to secure this dependence or nothing more than some Declaratory Acts or resolves,
it is all over with us
. The friends of government will be utterly disheartened and the friends of anarchy will be afraid of nothing, be it ever so extravagant.

    I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony three thousand miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony, when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connection with the parent state should be broken for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.
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Samuel Adams generated a demand that the papers be published, which they were, in June of 1773. The content of these letters led Adams, and other patriots, perhaps including Franklin, to conclude that there was a conspiracy between Hutchinson and others with the British to restrict the Massachusetts colonials’ exercise of their rights as Englishmen. If so, the time to move toward independence was at hand. This is the conclusion of historian John Ferling:

No one was more touched than John Adams by these occurrences coming one atop another; London’s apparent drive to deprive the provincial authority of its independence, the governor’s intransigent position on colonial autonomy, and the revelation of a possible plot among imperial officials to destroy the liberties of the colonists, all had a transforming impact on Adams. As if by alchemy, these events changed Adams. The uncertain patriot of the 1760s was at last recast. Never again would he see British policy as merely misguided. When Great Britain next moved against the colonies, John Adams emerged as a committed revolutionary.
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By the summer of 1773, the leaders of both Massachusetts and Virginia—approaching the issue from vastly different positions—had made the psychological leap from loyal subjects of the empire seeking their rights as Englishmen to rebels who would soon assert their right to govern themselves. With the initiative of the Virginia House of Burgesses’ call for colonial committees of correspondence, the colonists now had a mechanism for communicating with each other that was beyond the control of the colonial governors, but had legitimacy in the public mind because the committees had been created by colonial legislatures.

The Virginia Resolution from the House of Burgesses on March 13, 1773, calling for intercolonial committees of correspondence, merits a close analysis. It represented the decision of the leaders of the wealthiest colony that they were ready to defy British policies. This was a step taken seriously by the other colonies. It put Virginia into a leadership role at the Continental Congress in 1774. Decisions taken there, following Virginia’s instructions to its delegates, put the colonies on the collision course that led to revolution.

The Virginia Resolution appears here with paragraph numbers and comments added.
¹

(1) Whereas, the minds of His Majesty’s faithful subjects in this colony have been much disturbed by various rumours and reports of proceedings tending to deprive them of their ancient, legal, and constitutional rights.

This paragraph establishes that the House of Burgesses had a legitimate interest in addressing these “rumours and reports.” At the same time, the phrase “ancient, legal, and constitutional rights” is so broad that it encompasses the “original understanding” theories of both Adams and Jefferson that claimed the colonies had always had full control over their internal affairs. The resolution deals with Virginia’s interests. This is the foundation for the rest of the document.

As we have seen, both Massachusetts thinkers like Adams and Virginia thinkers like Jefferson had already developed a claim of “ancient legal and constitutional rights” that gave the colonies freedom to conduct their internal affairs without British interference.
²
The assertion of such rights is inconsistent with the repugnancy clauses in colonial charters as well as the declaration of Parliament in 1766 claiming the right to govern the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”