The Invisible Line (5 page)

In 1672 near Jamestown a woman named Elizabeth Chavis successfully sued for the freedom of a boy named Gibson Gibson, or Gibby Gibson. Chavis was a free woman, and Gibby was her son. In the previous decade, Virginia's rulers had sought to codify slavery, secure the labor force, and prevent slaves from forming rebellious alliances with servants. Among the enactments was a law mandating that the children of a union between a slave and free person would follow the status of the mother. Although this rule of maternal status—“birth follows the belly”—resulted in widespread rape and generations of light-skinned slaves, it also formed the basis for the first communities of free people of color. English servant women had children with African men in numbers that continually alarmed Virginia's lawmakers. In certain courts, practically the only record that slavery existed consisted of cases of “mulatto bastards” born to English women. In the seventeenth century, thousands of mixed-race people were born into freedom. After Gibby Gibson was set free, he and his brother Hubbard spent half a century amassing land and slaves.
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The lives of the Gibsons and other free families of color were not easy. Greatly outnumbered by both the slave and white populations, they went into and out of debt, had trouble holding on to property from one generation to the next, and remained vulnerable to enslavement. As the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth, Virginia's legislature steadily restricted the rights of free blacks to own property, travel, bear arms, and more. Although such laws were designed to lock free people of color into an inferior status, they paradoxically encouraged blacks to marry Europeans. Whites in the family gave their spouses and children stronger claims to freedom and had immediate economic advantages—while black women were subject to heavy taxes, white women were not. Increasingly harsh laws did not separate Africans and Europeans. To the contrary, they spurred some people of African descent to try to escape their classification.
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In the early 1720s Hubbard Gibson and his children left Virginia and bought property in North Carolina along with several other families of color. Virginia's legal restrictions had narrowed the opportunities for free people of color, but also set them in motion, driving them to places where they could experience something approaching liberty. In the mid-eighteenth century hundreds were migrating north into Maryland and Delaware and south into the Carolinas. Their ultimate destinations were places on the frontier that needed settlers. There the Gibsons and others could find land, wealth, status, and acceptance.
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Moving to South Carolina in 1731, the Gibsons traveled through the kind of wilderness where many people came to hide. Even so, the family's arrival managed to attract widespread alarm. At the time the colony consisted primarily of a stretch of rice and indigo plantations along the coast. Ten thousand free people were living among twenty thousand slaves. For more than two decades, South Carolina had been majority black, and every year thousands of new men and women, transported from the West Indies and directly from West Africa, walked in irons down Charlestown's and Georgetown's wharves. Most would work on the rice plantations, toiling in gangs that hardly ever saw a white face, speaking a language mostly of their own devising. Large numbers of slaves could produce thousands of barrels of rice; they made plantation owners rich. But by the 1730s, free colonists were reading regular accounts of slave uprisings in the West Indies, on slave ships—always nearby or drifting closer. Many grew convinced, as one ship captain wrote upon visiting Charlestown in 1734, that their slaves lived on a “Foundation of Discontent” and were “watch[ing for] an Opportunity of revolting against their Masters.” Colonists who encountered the Gibsons wondered if their caravan of dark men, pale women, and children somewhere in between would “be of ill Consequence to this Province,” flouting the strict line between slave and free that black and white had come to represent. Perhaps they were moving through the colony specifically to foment rebellion.
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When word of the Gibsons' arrival reached Charlestown in 1731, the Assembly convened a committee to investigate, and Governor Robert Johnson summoned Gideon Gibson's father—also named Gideon Gibson—for a personal audience. After meeting the man, the governor reported that the new arrivals were exactly the kind of people the province needed to settle the frontier. “The account he has given of himself is so Satisfactory that he is no Vagabond that I have . . . permitted him to Settle in this Country,” Johnson wrote. The elder Gibson was a carpenter who had owned land and paid taxes in Virginia and North Carolina, and his wife and others in their clan were “White women Capable of working and being Serviceable in the Country.” If Governor Johnson harbored any worries as to whether the family—by words, deed, or example—would encourage slaves to kill their masters, he was reassured that Gibson had come with “seven negroes of his own.” Gibson had a skilled trade, a white wife, and a personal stake in slavery. His racial designation seemed to lose its meaning. “They are not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor wrote .
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Not only could the Gibsons stay in South Carolina, but they also were granted hundreds of acres in the backcountry. Their land at Mars Bluff was in an area known as the Welsh Tract, where dozens of Welsh Baptists had moved from Pennsylvania intending to grow “Hemp, flax, Wheat, Barley &ca.” Other farm families soon joined them in the wilderness, Scottish and Irish and free people of color migrating from Pennsylvania and Virginia and North Carolina. Many were dissenters from the Church of England, Baptists and Presbyterians, receptive to charismatic “New Light” sects whose young, illiterate preachers railed against the Anglican ministry and other authorities tainted by devilment. A century later a Welsh Tract descendant would remember the original settlers as “more jealous of their liberties than even the English, and far more irascible.” The Gibsons—reputedly ornery, never content with their station, continually challenging attempts to classify them—fit right in.
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The family settled along the bluffs that rolled alongside the Pee Dee River, which offered the best protection from Indian attack, and began the endless task of clearing forests and draining bogs for cowpens and fields. They grew corn and cash crops and drove cattle and hogs to the coast. They endured “bilious fevers,” the reek of fermented indigo, and clouds of flies and biting insects. After slave rebels nearly sacked Charlestown in 1739, the province allowed people of color considerably less freedom, but suspicion and surveillance in the low country did not much affect the Gibsons' lives upriver. As the next generation came of age, they married into neighboring families. In 1767, when local landowners resolved to regulate the “Indolent, unsettled, roving Wretches” who threatened their property, it was only natural that Gibson would lead the way.
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It was unremarkable that a man of color could be a Regulator captain. Gibson was rich and respected. He conveyed no qualms that many of the people targeted by the Regulators had dark skin. He was secure enough in his status that he could insult a magistrate and coldly order his men to shoot at the local militia—their neighbors—and lash the survivors. By the time Gideon Gibson swore his allegiance to the Regulation, he was not black. He was not white. He was a planter.
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POWELL AWOKE ON MONDAY, August 15, 1768, expecting to receive his prisoner. Instead, a messenger arrived with a letter from Gibson “signifying that he had altered his Resolution” and promising to surrender at a later time. Perhaps stung that Gibson had flouted his authority and breached a pact of honor, Powell felt that he had been “egregiously mistaken” in his measure of Gibson and abruptly shifted his strategy. As the day grew hotter, Powell rode out to meet a troop of militia reinforcements, who had halted in the woods half a mile from his camp. He would not need to negotiate with Gibson any longer.
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Upon reaching the woods, Powell saw far more men than he had expected—“three hundred men and upwards,” by his estimate. Perhaps they would be able to capture Gibson with relative ease. He took three militia captains and two lieutenants aside. He described the “service expected from them” and ordered official proclamations read about Regulator violence that “demand[ed] their aid accordingly.” The officers did not hesitate in their reply. To Powell's astonishment, “they absolutely refused . . . Gibson they said was one of them (Regulators).”
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The officers then began enumerating typical Regulator gripes about “the want of County Courts and the Exhorbitant expence of the Law as it now stands.” Undeterred, Powell invited the men to ride to his camp for “Victuals,” convinced that he could bring them around to his position if only he could talk one-on-one with the “leading men,” as he had done with Gibson. They agreed, and as the men ate and drank, Powell “took great pains to point out to them the mistakes they were running into.” But to his astonishment, he failed to convince them to betray Gideon Gibson. In the late afternoon, he found himself facing three hundred armed men who seemed to delight in the prospect that his party would be “grossly abused.”
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Powell fled down the Pee Dee River and later that week, after a miserable journey, reached his plantation at Georgetown. Reflecting on his failed expedition, he penned a letter to the lieutenant governor. In shock that the Regulator disturbances had “so dismal a tendency,” and galled that “Turbulent designing persons” had succeeded in turning landowners into rebels, Powell resigned his militia commission and advised “speedy Measures” to end the standoff.
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When he returned to the Assembly, Powell suggested a more specific way to cripple the Pee Dee insurrection: make Gideon Gibson subject to provisions of a 1740 law called the Negro Act. Passed by the Assembly after a slave insurrection, the act waived “formal trial and condemnation” for “rebellious negroes” and allowed them to be put to “immediate death.” Powell had had no problem meeting Gibson face-to-face and talking to him as an equal. But for Gibson to assert his power at the expense of Powell's lofty status was another matter entirely. Gibson had outfoxed Powell and sent him running for his life. For that inexcusable offense—for giving Powell a glimpse of real equality—Powell would insist that Gibson was a “negro.” Almost forty years after the Gibsons had arrived in South Carolina, the Assembly once again found itself discussing whether the Gibsons were black.
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The proposition was not simple. In 1731 the Gibsons had escaped classification because they were useful, wealthy, and committed to slavery. In 1768 Gideon Gibson was decidedly less congenial to the colony's interests—but he could also claim many of the Pee Dee's prominent landholders as kin. To classify the Gibsons now as people of color would work to the disadvantage of everyone who had family and business connections with them. Even legislators who could justify any indignity or brutality to suppress a slave rebellion might hesitate to turn the sons and daughters and grandchildren of socially prominent people into blacks. The Gibsons were hardly the only family who were fashioning new identities for themselves. If the colony drew the color line too strictly, large numbers of established whites might be vulnerable to or otherwise touched by reclassification.
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When Powell raised the matter in the Assembly, Henry Laurens, a colleague who had made a fortune in slave trading, argued against it. Without a flexible rule, he suggested, few people could make a secure claim of being white. Gibson, he said, had “more Red & White in his face than could be discovered in the faces of half the descendants of the [F]rench Refugees in our House of Assembly.” “I challenged them all to the trial,” Laurens would remember. “The children of this same Gideon having passed through another state of Whitewash were of fairer complexions than his prosecutor George Gabriel [Powell].” Although Laurens thought that ideally the Gibsons should be classified as black—to “confine them to their original Clothing”—in the end he understood that the realities of life might outstrip the law. “Reasoning from the Colour carries no conviction,” Laurens wrote. “By perserverance the black may be blanched & the ‘stamp of Providence' effectually effaced.”
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The Assembly declined to target Gideon Gibson. Instead, for five thousand pounds sterling it bought out the provost marshal's royal monopoly on law enforcement and created a committee, headed by George Gabriel Powell, to draft legislation to establish courts, sheriffs, and jails to serve the backcountry. The provost marshal became the sheriff for Charleston and Beaufort, and Powell served as a judge in one of the new courts. Now that the Regulators' demands for local law enforcement were largely met, the backcountry rebellion disbanded in early 1769, and its participants filed petitions with the Assembly and governor for pardons.
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On Mars Bluff, Gibson was no longer a rebel. He resumed his role in the community as a prosperous planter, tending to his crops and cattle, managing his slaves. He enjoyed a few years of peace until a deadlier conflict wound its way up the Pee Dee. It involved a cause distinct from the Regulation but marked a return to the violence that had prompted Gibson's finest and most vulnerable hour. At times it was a small war, neighbors beating and shooting neighbors, stealing their cattle and firing their cabins. Periodically the local brutality blurred into battles between the greatest country in the world and the newest one. An entire people, the Gibsons included, was creating a new identity for itself. At times it seemed an impossible task. But in the South Carolina backcountry, black had become white. Surely, then, English could become American.
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