Slavery’s Long Reach

In early May the southern Scottish day lasts nearly 16 hours. In 1756, a young man from Virginia used that long seasonal stretch of daylight to traverse Scotland from Port Glasgow in the west to Edinburgh in the east. Jamie Montgomery was anxious to make Scotland his home; Britain offered freedom that Virginia denied him. That year Montgomery was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of enslaved African Americans who were fleeing their British masters but one of the few, if not the only, to do so in Scotland.

Montgomery’s native Virginia, the most densely populated of Britain’s American colonies, counted almost twice as many residents as Massachusetts, next largest among the Crown’s New World holdings. Between 1700 and 1755 Virginia and Maryland had imported more than 140,000 enslaved Africans to work on tobacco plantations, constituting almost 90 percent of the enslaved Africans brought into the region between 1619 and 1809. Supplementing the influx from Africa was a steadily rising birth rate among enslaved women.

The Virginia tobacco industry began spreading west toward the Appalachian Mountains. In about 1740, Joseph Hawkins established a plantation in newly founded Spotsylvania County. Hawkins’s subsequent prosperity led officials to refer to him in their records as a “gentleman” captaining a mounted militia.