Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia

By William A Link

Offering a provocative new look at the politics of secession in antebellum Virginia, William Link places African Americans at the center of events and argues that their acts of defiance and rebellion had powerful political repercussions throughout the turbulent period leading up to the Civil War.

An upper South state with nearly half a million slaves--more than any other state in the nation--and some 50,000 free blacks, Virginia witnessed a uniquely volatile convergence of slave resistance and electoral politics in the 1850s. While masters struggled with slaves, disunionists sought to join a regionwide effort to secede and moderates sought to protect slavery but remain in the Union. Arguing for a definition of political action that extends beyond the electoral sphere, Link shows that the coming of the Civil War was directly connected to Virginia's system of slavery, as the tension between defiant slaves and anxious slaveholders energized Virginia politics and spurred on the impending sectional crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9780807863206

William A Link

William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida.

Book preview

Roots of Secession

Civil War America

GARY W. GALLAGHER, EDITOR

Roots of Secession

Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia

William A. Link

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2003 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Set in Ehrhardt by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Link, William A.

Roots of secession: slavery and politics in antebellum Virginia /

by William A. Link. p. cm.—(Civil War America)

ISBN 0-8078-2771-1 (alk. paper)

1. Slaves—Virginia—Political activity—History—19th century. 2. African Americans—Virginia—Politics and government—19th century. 3. Government, Resistance to—Virginia—History—19th century. 4. Passive resistance— Virginia—History—19th century. 5. Secession—Virginia. 6. Virginia— History—1775–1865. 7. Virginia—Politics and government—1775–1865. 8. Slavery—Political aspects—Virginia—History—19th century. 9. Virginia—Race relations—Political aspects—History—19th century. 10. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes.

I. Title. II. Series.

E445.V8L56 2003 973.7’11—dc21 2002013316

A portion of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as The Jordan Hatcher Case: Politics and ‘A Spirit of Insubordination’ in Antebellum Virginia, Journal of Southern History 64 (November 1998): 615–48, and is reprinted here with permission.

07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

For my brothers and sister

Contents

Preface

Introduction

PROLOGUE

To Make Ourselves Slaves, That You Might Defend Yours:

Slavery and Constitutional Reform

CHAPTER ONE

A Slave Society: Virginia in the 1850s

CHAPTER TWO

Boastful and Belligerent Champions of Southern Institutions:

Slavery and Politics, 1851–1854

CHAPTER THREE

A Uniform Spirit of Lawlessness:

The Problem of Runaways

CHAPTER FOUR

A Spirit of License in the Guise of Liberty:

The Survival of Opposition, 1854–1856

CHAPTER FIVE

The Darkest and Most Perilous Hours of Our National Existence:

The Deepening Sectional Crisis, 1856–1859

CHAPTER SIX

A Black Demon of Fanaticism:

Harpers Ferry and the Election of 1860

CHAPTER SEVEN

To Light the Torch of Servile Insurrection:

The Secession Crisis

EPILOGUE

The Rending of Virginia

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

Henry Ruffner 12

John Minor Botts 22

Slave hiring 39

Broadside, 1845 48

O. Jennings Wise 71

Charles J. Faulkner 73

Beverly B. Douglas 75

Joseph Mayo 86

Runaway notice, 1854 101

Looking for runaways on a Norfolk steamer 102

Robert M. T. Hunter 130

John Moncure Daniel 135

John Buchanan Floyd 137

Muscoe R. H. Garnett 141

Roger A. Pryor 170

John Brown after his capture 181

Henry A. Wise 183

John Letcher 193

Waitman T. Willey 231

MAPS

P.1. Counties and Regions of Virginia, 1860 14

1.1. Railroads of Virginia, 1858 31

1.2. Slaves and Slaveholding in Virginia, 1860 40

6.1. The Presidential Election of 1860 in Virginia 210

Tables

1.1. Total Value of Market Gardens, Leading Virginia Counties 32

1.2. Urban Growth in Virginia, 1850–1860 33

1.3. Slave Population, 1860 37

1.4. Slave and Free Black Property Crime, Guilty Verdicts Sent to the Governor, 1850–1861 46

1.5. Guilty Verdicts in Slave and Free Black Violent Crime Cases, 1850–1861 50

1.6. Guilty Verdicts in Rape Cases, 1850–1861 55

1.7. Sentences in Rape Convictions, 1850–1861 57

1.8. African Americans Involved in Murder, 1850–1861 58

2.1. The Whig Vote in Virginia, 1848–1859 64

2.2. Democratic Core Counties, 1850s 65

2.3. Whig Core Counties, 1850s 66

2.4. The Whig and Opposition Vote in Urban Virginia, 1848–1856 87

4.1. Turnout of Eligible Electorate, 1851–1859 136

4.2. The Gubernatorial Election of 1855 136

5.1. The Democratic Majority in the Gubernatorial Election of 1859 174

6.1. Votes for Presidential Candidates in the Election of 1860 208

Preface

This book is an attempt to understand the political dynamics leading to secession and Civil War in a southern state, Virginia, and to consider its relationship to slavery and slaveholding. My path toward the writing of this book requires some explanation. The subject represents a departure from my previous research, which has focused on the postbellum South. Still, a constant in my work has been a search for the interconnections between social conditions and politics and an attempt to widen our understanding and revisit our view of the political system and governance. In no period in American history were these connections more important than in the late antebellum years. The advent of the Civil War was a political process, involving the most serious breakdown of the constitutional system in American history; absent that breakdown, there would have been no Civil War. Secession was a particular political act that reflected years of changes in electoral politics. At the same time, the Civil War crisis reflected the unique social conditions of the 1850s that were focused on slaveholding and slavery. During the late antebellum years, politics truly mirrored social conditions and tensions.

I had originally intended to write a very different book, a case study about society and politics in mid-nineteenth-century Virginia between the 1850s and 1870s. But I changed strategy after discovering two realities. First, I found that the 1850s were a highly complex decade that contained both intense social change and an accelerating political crisis. What brought the social and the political together was slavery, and reading the words and thoughts of white and black Virginians made it obvious that it was central to the late antebellum years. This complex mixture of factors forced me to conclude that the 1850s merited on their own a full-length study. Second, somewhat to my surprise I found the sources to be overwhelmingly abundant. I say somewhat to my surprise because some of my most serious challenges as a twentieth-century historian of the South have come from large archival sources and the daunting prospect of gathering oral histories. I was reassured by the belief that examining antebellum southern history would be simpler; the sources could not possibly be so abundant. I surmised wrong. Nineteenth-century Americans wrote frequently and published prolifically, and the middle of the century coincided with an explosion of printed sources, especially newspapers. This abundance of riches forced me to reconsider my original conceptualization. Because of the complexity of the subject and the richness of the sources, I have focused on one decade and one state: the ten years prior to the Civil War in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and one of the last to join the Confederacy.

Civil War historians will, I hope, forgive my trespass. I have always been fascinated with the inexplicable nature of the origins of the Civil War: tragic and seemingly inevitable, it was the greatest calamity in our national history. The decade of the 1850s was indisputably what previous historians have often described as a critical period in the life of the American Republic: in the Civil War, the Republic experienced its most serious crisis, as events leading to secession, wartime devastation, and the destruction of slavery were set in motion. It involved seemingly reasonable and righteous people engaged in a conflict of tremendous waste and destruction. And the keys to understanding this social, sectional, and national crisis are also the keys to understanding our collective national history.

In researching and writing this book, I have incurred too many debts to acknowledge adequately. I am grateful for the continuing institutional support of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, including the backing of Chancellor Patricia A. Sullivan, Provost Ed Uprichard, and Dean Walter H. Beale. Much of the research and part of the writing was completed while I worked in the dean’s office with Walter. During the late stages of this project, funds from the UNCG Excellence Foundation helped to defray research costs. A semester off from teaching and administrative responsibilities during the autumn of 2000 enabled me to complete the manuscript. At the Jackson Library, I relied on the expertise of Kathy Crowe and her co-workers in the Reference Department and on the patient professionalism of the Interlibrary Loan staff, including Gaylor Callahan and her colleagues. I appreciate the assistance of Gloria Thornton of UNCG’s Instructional and Research Computing, and she helped me understand the mysteries of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). In the dean’s office, I benefited from the support of Terry Riocci and Lori Wright; in the History Department, departmental assistants Bobbie Carter, Kristina R. Wright, and Adrian L. Whicker were models of efficiency and assistance. I must thank Kristina especially for her success in warding off distractions and assisting me in compartmentalizing my time.

Over the years, my graduate students at UNCG have provided invaluable research assistance in tasks ranging from basic bibliographical research to organizing and compiling photocopies. When I first began this project, Pat McGee helped me with bibliographic research and with an early assault on the voluminous newspaper sources. Lori Wright helped me to identify existing newspaper and manuscript sources, and she waded into those sources with an acute eye for detail. Denise Ettenger, Chris Patterson, and Brett Rumble later on assisted with various research tasks, while Karin Posser worked through newspaper sources documenting slave crime in the Richmond mayor’s court. Teresa Hall and Tracy Efird provided assistance in note checking and in the preparation of the manuscript. To all of my student assistants, I would like to express my profound gratitude.

I benefited from the support of others. A grant from the American Philosophical Society facilitated the gathering of research materials in various locations, while Mellon grants from the Virginia Historical Society permitted me to spend portions of summers at the Virginia Historical Society’s wonderful collections. Librarians and archivists elsewhere made my work much easier. I am grateful to the library staffs of the following institutions: Duke University, the Library of Congress, the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Virginia Historical Society, and the West Virginia University Library. At VHS, Nelson Lankford and Frances Pollard were especially helpful. At the Library of Virginia, I not only profited from its rich materials but also from the collegiality and helpfulness of its staff, particularly Sarah Bearss, Gregg Kimball, John Kneebone, Elizabeth Roderick, Brent Tarter, and Sandy Treadway. Aaron Crawford, at a very late stage, supplied invaluable research assistance with the John Janney Papers at the Virginia Tech Library. I appreciate the assistance of several people with illustrations: Audrey Johnson at the Library of Virginia, Elizabeth Dunn at Duke University, and Mike Plunkett at the University of Virginia.

The ideas in this manuscript received an airing in different forums. Some of the manuscript appeared in the Journal of Southern History. Subsequently, I presented a portion of the book to the University of Virginia’s southern history seminar in April 2000 and benefited from the criticisms offered by Michael F. Holt and Gary Gallagher, as well as others at the seminar. Mike Holt first stirred my interest in secession in his graduate seminar twenty-five years ago, and his suggestions, then and now, were always helpful. In September 2001, I presented another part of this book at the Southern Historians of the Piedmont seminar (SHOPtalk). I appreciate the suggestions of Michele Gillespie, Randal Hall, Sally McMillen, and Henry Kammerling, among others. Several individuals made valuable suggestions. Edward L. Ayers read a large portion of the manuscript at a very early stage and, with his usual acuity, diagrammed its basic flaws and deficiencies. Christine R. Flood reviewed an early version of the entire manuscript, offering stylistic and conceptual criticisms and serving as a sounding board for ideas about research, organization, and conceptualization. Cheryl F. Junk saw the manuscript at a later stage and offered very helpful stylistic and editorial suggestions. I imposed on the time and patience of UNCG colleagues Peter Carmichael, Phyllis Hunter, Loren Schweninger, and Allen Trelease, who critiqued the manuscript and assisted me in expressing my ideas with greater cogency. Pete very generously shared ideas and sources, and I appreciate his invaluable assistance in improving this book. Loren opened up his files from the Race and Slavery Petitions Project. Phyllis was equally generous with her time and ideas and read parts of subsequent revisions. Bill Blair’s editorial skills and extensive knowledge of antebellum Virginia and the Civil War era were very helpful. Steven Lawson was a great department head and remains a wonderful friend, and I thank him for his moral support and sense of humor. I greatly appreciate the hospitality of several individuals: Robert and Amanda Avery, Dave Douglas and Kathy Urbanya, Bill and Wayne Harbaugh, and Bruce Ragsdale. The staff of the University of North Carolina Press has been of great support over the years, and I truly appreciate the wonderful way in which they handle the editing and production of scholarly books. The two anonymous readers for the Press offered useful suggestions and urged me to temper some of my claims. David Perry was an insistent supporter throughout the various phases of the construction of this book. I appreciate also the assistance of Mark Simpson-Vos with the preparation of the manuscript for publication and of Ron Maner and Paul Betz with the final editing.

Closer to home, this project has marked various personal milestones. The research and writing of this book occurred while our children, Percy, Maggie, and Josie, grew into young adults. No doubt they consider this book to be one unchanging constant in their young lives; whether they will miss it is another matter. Certainly they have lived with it as part of our family history, and I’m confident that they will be relieved to see its passing, as it acquires its own independent existence. I must thank Maggie, who helped as a research assistant during part of one summer as we traversed the ins and outs of the secession convention. As always, Susannah has been a lifetime supporter in everything, a source of constructive skepticism, and, most of all, a provider of unending life partnership. It’s impossible to imagine anything happening without her wisdom, love, and friendship.

The dedication is for my siblings, Stan, Peggy, and James, all interested in history and avid readers, from their little brother.

Roots of Secession

Introduction

Today, few professional historians deny the central significance of slavery in the sectional crisis.¹ Yet despite the work of historians such as Kenneth Greenberg, who describes a political culture of slavery, or John Ashworth, who examines an intersection between slavery and politics, slaves remain on the margins. North and South, according to many historians, clashed not so much over slavery as an institution as they did over the political power of southern slaveholders. Most scholars agree that the political crisis of sectionalism arose from attempts to restrict the westward expansion of slavery and slaveholder control of the national government. But in their emphasis on slaveholders’ political power, historians have said little about how slaves’ actions affected politics or how politics affected slaves’ actions.²

This book examines the interconnections between slavery, slaves, and politics, and the impact that this relationship had on the origins of secession. White Virginians often referred to emissaries in our midst—agents whom they feared were engaged in subversion. Usually that meant northern abolitionists and their associates, but slaveholders meant much more by the term. Within Virginia society, warned House of Delegates member William H. Browne in February 1856, were secret yet efficient emissaries of Northern abolitionism. Browne so described free blacks who, he claimed, sought to poison the slave’s mind by inciting him, by unhallowed counsel, to insubordination and rebellion—seducing him, if possible, from allegiance to his master, and instilling, as far as practicable, into his mind false and fallacious notions of liberty and equality, wholly incompatible with the relations of master and slave. These emissaries were fit instruments for sapping the very foundation of our peace and happiness.³

Subversive emissaries meant not just free blacks: the term included the half-million enslaved African Americans whom slaveholders considered friends and foes, allies and enemies, family members and invaders. Slaves were emissaries of subversion in at least two respects: they represented forces of internal discord and of external invasion. This sense of emissaries within Virginia society was no wild slaveholder fiction: slaves resisted slaveholder domination, and their resistance often brought political consequences. These consequences included slaveholder paranoia, but scholars should also acknowledge slaves’ awareness of the political context of the 1850s. Although that awareness was often vague and unfocused and set apart from the white world of electoral politics, slaves occupied an important place in the antebellum political context. The extent to which slaves realized that the sectional politics of the 1850s were leading toward their freedom is difficult to document, yet there are many instances in which slaves willingly sought to exploit opportunities to undermine slaveholder authority.

I consider Virginia’s politics of slavery in two senses. I first examine the commonwealth’s experience during the ten years prior to the Civil War and attempt to explain why it left the Union. This is a powerful story, and I have sought to retain the excitement and energy that participants experienced in the political arena of the 1850s. Like other Americans, Virginians practiced politics enthusiastically through a political culture, ideology, and language that was attuned to mid-nineteenth-century social conditions. Few scholars have fully considered Virginia’s fascinating political history during the decade before the Civil War: Charles H. Ambler’s Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (1910) and Henry T. Shanks’s The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (1934) remain the only state studies that include the 1850s. While William Shade has provided a comprehensive history of politics during the Jacksonian era, Craig Simpson’s political biography of Henry Wise remains probably the best study of late antebellum politics in the commonwealth.⁴

I am concerned with the politics of slavery in another sense. Thanks to an entire generation of scholarship, we now know a great deal about life under the slave regime: how slaves struggled to create and preserve a distinctive identity, to protect their humanity under the slave system, and to resist oppression. Despite a large literature about the slave community, students of slavery have said little about its impact on political discourse. Recent scholars have widened our definition of politics to encompass various actions, often by oppressed groups, that involve a struggle for power. Certainly, the master-slave struggle must be so considered, but our understanding should expand to encompass the coming of the Civil War. From the institutionalization of slavery in the eighteenth century, a persisting theme in southern social and political life was the conflict between slaves aspiring to freedom and masters seeking to limit it. Despite safeguards imposed on the legal, constitutional, and cultural dimensions of the slave regime, slaveholders could never rest secure in this very human institution, and slaves continued to struggle for freedom.

Some answers to these questions can be found in one Border southern state. Virginia, America’s oldest southern colony, was the most populous state of the Confederacy and a major Civil War battleground. On the eve of a terrible war, Virginia, diverse and dynamic, contained major geographical, ethnic, economic, and social differences. In 1860, Virginia included the present state of West Virginia; the commonwealth’s territory extended from Chesapeake Bay to the banks of the Ohio River. The commonwealth contained a number of regions within the state, each with distinct personas. The East included the coastal Tidewater, a region that Europeans first settled during the early seventeenth century, and the Piedmont, dominated by tobacco culture and cash-crop plantation agriculture. In the center of the Virginia were two regions that were unusual for a southern state: the Shenandoah Valley and the Southwest. Although slavery did not dominate in either region, an active slave-holding class, with ties to the East, existed in both. There remained a fifth region: the Northwest, which included counties surrounding the Ohio River valley. By the 1850s, this region had become more oriented toward the northern nonslaveholding social system. The Virginia of 1860 was geographically diverse in yet another sense: it possessed major urban centers, such as Alexandria, Lynchburg, Petersburg, and Norfolk, and especially Richmond, the South’s leading antebellum manufacturing center. In spite of this diversity, Virginia’s social system in every region was rooted in slavery. Enslaved Africans first appeared in the Tidewater during the early seventeenth century; in 1860, Virginia was the largest slaveholding state, with about half a million slaves, more than a million whites, and almost 60,000 free blacks. In 1860, the commonwealth also possessed more slaveholders—more than 52,000 of them—than any other state in the Union. Virginia’s slave system encompassed a great range and diversity. Though most slaves lived in the eastern part of the state and though its slaveholders were exporting slaves by the hundreds of thousands in the antebellum period, slavery was a dynamic institution, expanding where the economy was expanding: wherever there was economic activity, slaveholders took the lead.

Valuable as it is, this sort of macrolevel discussion leaves out much of the story, particularly slavery’s human—and inhuman—dimensions. How had nearly 250 years of slavery up to 1861 affected Virginia society? How did slavery shape the commonwealth’s social and political institutions? On a day-today level, the owning of other human beings as chattel property often confounded slaveholders, while the experience of enslavement was debilitating, dehumanizing, and humiliating for slaves, even as they sought and obtained dignity, autonomy, and some degree of agency. The master-slave relationship involved an ongoing struggle, with profound psychological implications. Sometimes this struggle was subtle, played out in the constant infractions that took place as slaves engaged in labor on plantations and as slaveholders tried to determine more scientific methods of managing that labor. But very often the struggle was ugly, violent, and systematically brutal. Occasionally, it might involve outright rebellion, though this was rare and ultimately suicidal, and there are very few examples of such collective action. On the other hand, scores of slaves took individual action—torching their masters’ homes, poisoning the food of slaveholder families, assaulting overseers, and beating and murdering mistresses and masters. These individual actions are sometimes difficult to decipher. They appear in the scattered criminal records of antebellum Virginia, in a court system that scrupulously followed the forms of Anglo-American law but offered slaves little chance of justice—a system that reflected the acute fears, presumptions, and prejudices of the slaveholding class.

The slave system was profoundly political, though not in the sense historians are usually prepared to accept. The daily challenges that slaves offered to their oppressors were part of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls infrapolitics and the politics of everyday, recorded in what political anthropologist James C. Scott terms hidden transcripts. Through small, isolated actions, slaves engaged in a continuing struggle to assert their humanity in daily dramas: in understated forms of challenge, such as malingering, stealing, and property crime, or in overstated forms, such as violent and open resistance to slaveholder authority. The infrapolitics of slaveholder oppression dominated the thinking of masters and slaves: both were determined to shape the social system around them, while both realized that politics was the key to their determination. What Scott calls the official or public transcript of electoral politics reflected an infrapolitics of slavery.⁵

Applying these insights to understanding antebellum southern politics requires widening our definition of politics, and a number of scholars have urged a reconsideration of the pre–Civil War South. Masters defined themselves according to their ability or inability to control slaves, Kenneth Greenberg suggests, and they applied these habits of control to statehouse politics. Other historians pursue an approach more directly focused on slave resistance. Historian John Ashworth asserts that a causal significance existed between slaves’ desire for freedom and white anxieties about the sectional conflict. Black resistance to slavery shaped the way that slaveholders constructed their society, organized their government, and created and maintained their legal system. White southerners’ anxieties about an antislavery majority seeking to dominate the national government and to undermine the institution of slavery, he argues, reflected African American discontent. Had slaves been contented, slaveholders would have been less likely to respond violently, to restrict freedom of speech, and to require to political conformity. Behind every event in the history of the sectional controversy, Ashworth asserts, lurked the consequences of black resistance to slavery. Slaveholder politics and slave resistance thus hold keys to understanding the sectional dynamics of the 1850s. Both slaveholder power and slave resistance, William W. Freehling maintains, should be considered keys to secession’s dynamics. This newer political history and a reintegrated American multicultural history might cast the Civil War in a new light.⁶

Slavery became a metaphor for larger social tensions of the late antebellum period. These tensions affected nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike; both realized that changes were affecting Virginia society, remaking the social landscape and reorienting patterns of social, economic, and cultural life. Politics in Virginia, like politics elsewhere in nineteenth-century America, was partisan and participatory, with rich and elaborate rituals and a political culture that composed part of a larger spectacle. For most of the 1830s and 1840s, politics were highly competitive. Although the Democratic Party maintained a slight majority, Whigs remained dominant in urban areas, the Tidewater, and counties along the northern border. Democrats, in contrast, constructed a strong coalition of Piedmont slaveholders, Valley farmers, and western nonslaveholders. As in other parts of Jacksonian America, Whigs appealed to advocates of banks and commercial expansion, and they favored expanded public support for infrastructure such as transportation facilities. Democrats remained strongest on the periphery of the market economy; they tailored their message to small farmers and individual entrepreneurs. Whigs appealed to larger planters with slaves, and they saw their future in a dynamic market economy, aided by improved transportation. Democrats sought the votes of slaveholders on the edge—whether they were small slaveholders or slaveholders migrating into new plantation areas. Both Whigs and Democrats made slavery a central part of their message during the Jacksonian era, and their dialogue was framed around republican values and libertarian ideals. Both parties asserted that they protected slaveholders’ rights within the constitutional system; they claimed to do so as part of an effort to protect white males’ political liberties. But during the 1850s the partisan political system changed, and the changes in the system figured significantly in the coming of the Civil War.⁷

Rather than remaining static, seigniorial, and paternalist, Virginia changed rapidly during the 1850s. What James Oakes calls slavery’s fatal anomaly—its close association with an expanding liberal capitalist social and economic system—appeared prominently during the late antebellum years.⁸ The spread of railroads brought the new, dynamic economic forces of the marketplace. Towns and cities developed into important centers of commerce, trade, and manufacturing. As a result, economic, cultural, and social contact extended to the nation and the world, and this interaction fundamentally affected slavery. The market economy’s expansion helped to broaden slaveholding outside the plantation, into towns, commerce, manufacturing, and mining; prices for slaves and the capital values of slaveholders rose. But there can be little doubt that slavery in late antebellum Virginia, and the Border South generally, experienced an erosion of its traditional underpinnings. Virginia’s experience paralleled that of Maryland. In both states, the free black population grew by natural increase, while slaves assumed new roles. With the decline of traditional plantation agriculture in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, slaveholders faced a labor surplus, and they responded to it either by selling their slaves or by hiring them out to other expanding sectors of the economy in transportation and manufacturing.⁹

The increase in slave hiring became the most important example of changes affecting slavery. It partly accounted for a growing population of slaves who existed outside masters’ direct control. Hired slaves lacked supervision; slaveholders’ eroding authority, many believed, encouraged slave insubordination and even rebellion. At the same time, national events turned ominous. In the Compromise of 1850, the new Fugitive Slave Act evoked northern opposition; for white Southerners, the law became a symbol of the unwillingness of the federal government to honor traditional constitutional protections for slaveholders. With the decline of the Whigs as a national political party, slaveholders feared that politics had become an arena for sectional oppression. The Know-Nothings competed as the leading anti-Democratic party in the mid-1850s, but the new Republican Party eclipsed them by 1856. Black Republicans emerged as a new antislavery political party seeking to encircle slave society, limit its expansion, and eventually undermine the southern social order.

Believing fervently in republican institutions and the Union, Virginians embraced national notions of business enterprise and public culture. Most were enthusiastic capitalists, connected to the outside world and acutely aware of the market revolution.¹⁰ But their social and political world was tumultuous during the late antebellum period. In this world slaveholders feared a loss of control over slaves, and masters’ struggle to preserve domination control had political consequences. Philip Schwarz’s comprehensive study of slave crime suggests an increase in violence by slaves during the 1850s; cases of defiance of the slave regime appeared to be on the rise.¹¹ Although no comprehensive data exist to document whether crime was actually increasing, many Virginia masters believed that their authority was eroding. Slaves seemed more willing to challenge masters, usually by individual acts. Many slaves undermined the system by stealing, refusing to work, or confounding the efficiency of the plantation. Others, fed up with slaveholder brutality, fought back by assaulting masters and overseers, by engaging in murder, poisoning, or arson. Still others defied the slave regime by running away. Individual acts of slave resistance were not unique to the 1850s: what made them different was the changing political environment. Slaveholders’ elaborate legal, constitutional, and political safeguards appeared to be under attack, as the national debate focused on limiting, not protecting, masters’ political rights. Both slaves and slaveholders became acutely aware of the sea change in the national political atmosphere, and rising master-slave tensions colored the political dynamic in Virginia.

During the 1850s, infrapolitics and traditional politics occasionally converged: the private struggle became public, and this convergence energized the sectional crisis. A debate about state constitutional reform in 1850–51 became preoccupied with how much the political system protected slavery. In 1852, the case of Jordan Hatcher, a Richmond slave who killed his overseer, highlighted larger issues of slave unruliness and western Virginia’s disloyalty to the slave regime. In 1856, the unsuccessful attempts of slaveholder James Parsons to retrieve his family’s runaway slave in Pennsylvania inspired a controversy that revealed much about slaveholders’ anxieties. And the invasion of abolitionist John Brown and his army in 1859 also reinforced ties between private and public politics because of the extent to which it involved resisting slaves, disloyal nonslaveholders, and the Republican Party.

As in the rest of the South, in Virginia there existed an organized group of disunionists, most of whom had concluded by the time of the Compromise of 1850 that an independent southern nation was desirable. They saw a direct connection between slavery and politics; their own words provide the most revealing evidence of this. Eventually, the disunionists succeeded, in April 1861, in taking Virginia out of the Union. They believed that the Constitution, though originally conceived in part as an instrument to protect slaveholding, now threatened the slave republic. The Republican Party further perverted the Union, they believed, because it was dedicated to transforming the federal government into a vehicle to oppress slaveholders.

In Virginia, as in the rest of the Border South, secessionists faced frustration, for the sectional crisis played out in a complex and often surprising fashion. Because of its great diversity, Virginia does not fit the usual stereotype of secessionist domination, though its southern rights radicals were as determined as any in the South. Indeed, extraordinary public discussion accompanied the onset of political crisis in the commonwealth. Although political discourse became acutely polarized with the advent of an aggressive antislavery movement and of the Republican Party, Virginia’s social diversity translated into an intriguing dialogue about the Union during the period immediately prior to secession.

This dialogue reflected conflicting versions of the commonwealth’s identity. Closely affiliated with like-minded leaders across the South, disunionists favored a version that embraced a southern identity achieved through an independent Confederacy. In contrast, other Virginians, more moderate and Unionist in their inclinations, believed that the commonwealth should serve as an intermediary between the slave states and the North. The survival of a Virginia Whig coalition, with its orientation toward constitutionalism, underlay moderate Unionism and provided a counterweight to southern extremism. Even after John Brown’s invasion of Harpers Ferry, moderates succeeded in regrouping under the Opposition Party’s banner, which, in the presidential election of 1860, carried the commonwealth for John Bell. While partisan competition declined and antipartyism increased during the 1850s in other southern states, two-party competition survived in Virginia.¹² Unlike the Deep South, which seceded between December 1860 and February 1861, Virginia moderates held the balance of power until mid-April 1861. Like Maryland and Kentucky, which did not secede, and Tennessee and North Carolina, which delayed doing so, Virginia moved slowly toward disunion. Many of the moderates were not far removed from the extremists: they shared the belief that secession was constitutional and that any attempt by Abraham Lincoln to coerce the seceding southern states justified secession.

The emergence of a strong and separate political consciousness in the northwestern part of the state contributed to this Border state identity. The presence of the Northwest suggests a basic contradiction in late antebellum Virginia: though the nation’s largest slaveholding state, it also contained a large and increasingly alienated nonslaveholding class of western Virginians who nurtured longstanding grievances against eastern domination. Many of them mounted a critique of eastern slaveholding society, at first obliquely and then, increasingly, more directly. They complained about constitutional discrimination; not until 1851 did the West achieve a fuller measure of political power. Even then, the eastern slavocracy dominated the constitutional system: the new constitution of 1851, for example, preserved slaveholder influence in the state senate and maintained a highly discriminatory taxation system weighted heavily in slaveholders’ favor. For northwestern Virginians, the expansion of the railroad system only aggravated their sense of political isolation. They believed, with some justification, that state-supported internal improvements favored the East at the West’s expense. Despite the construction of a new Trans-Alleghany system, these East-West railroads linked the Northwest with northern markets rather than with eastern Virginia cities. Politically, the Republican Party made a small but significant showing in the Northwest after 1856, and that region became the most strongly committed to preserving the Union.¹³ By 1860–61, many northwestern Virginians, reaching a new political consciousness, offered an aggressive critique of the politics of slavery. Although it is possible to overstate the Northwest’s Unionism and to understate the power of partisan allegiances, the region moved in a direction different from the rest of Virginia in the years immediately preceding secession.

As David Brion Davis has recently asserted, the Confederacy’s postbellum ideological victory has thoroughly diminished, even somehow removed slavery as a driving cause behind the Civil War. Scholars should reexamine the political roles of slaves and slavery and reincorporate them into the narrative about the sectional crisis.¹⁴ Indeed, slavery’s influence on the political system extended even further. Slaves’ rejection of their bondage helped to create a particular sectional dynamic: it was their resistance that fueled slaveholder anxiety, and slaveholder anxieties fostered the political crisis. At several points, slave resistance and slaveholder anxiety converged, and throughout the 1850s slavery remained a focal point for political dialogue. Although the question of abolition rarely entered discourse in Virginia, the extent to which the state and federal governments protected slaveholders remained paramount; both parties attempted to persuade voters that they would better protect the Republic by guarding slaveholders’ rights. By the late 1850s, although the antislavery Republicans became prominent in the Northwest, the mainstream political consensus rallied around slavery, and the secession debate became a dialogue about the best methods of protecting the institution.

PROLOGUE

To Make Ourselves Slaves, That You Might Defend Yours

Slavery and Constitutional Reform

In an address to the Franklin Society and Library Company of Lexington in 1847, Washington College president Henry Ruffner made the stunning proposal of ending slavery west of the Blue Ridge. Wherever slaves outnumbered whites, slaveholding dominated life and unfairly distributed political power. What became known in its subsequent, published form as the Ruffner Pamphlet asserted that eastern Virginia’s political dominion frustrated western economic development, controlled the political system, and kept the West a dependent vassal. Favoring gradual emancipation rather than abolition, Ruffner painted a grim future in which the inevitable demise of southern slave markets would mean a stream of Virginia negroes flowing across the Blue Ridge like a river dammed up. Reviving the plan of gradual emancipation advocated during the state’s famous legislative debate of 1831–32, he opposed the future importation of slaves west of the Blue Ridge. Instead, Virginia should permit the export of slaves and emancipate slave children born thereafter once they reached the age of twenty-five. Under Ruffner’s plan, most free blacks would become West African colonists.¹

The Ruffner Pamphlet offered the last serious antislavery appeal in antebellum Virginia. Although public reaction was mostly negative, the episode underscores slavery’s contradictory role in Virginia’s political system. Like the American Union itself, Virginia was a political entity of geographical diversity and acrimonious sectionalism. The commonwealth contained the largest slave and slaveholder population in the Union, despite a massive out-migration of both during the antebellum years.² Yet slaveholding was undergoing major changes, with the export of slaves to the Cotton South, the decline of plantation agriculture, the extension of slavery to new economic enterprises in Virginia, and an ever-changing master-slave relationship. In the late antebellum era, Virginia’s socioeconomic system fit somewhere between slavery and freedom, somewhere between the slave economies of coastal Carolina and Georgia and the border economies of Maryland and Kentucky.

Henry Ruffner. Courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society.

In Virginia, geography shaped slaveholding, social organization, and economic activity. The great divide was the Blue Ridge Mountains: in counties east of it slavery dominated, while west of the mountains, it existed sporadically. In the Tidewater, the earliest settled region of the state, plantation agriculture defined a distinctive society; there, rivers extended east from the fall line to the coast, shaping commerce, patterns of life, and social organization. Plantation agriculture spread west of the Tidewater during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into the Piedmont counties of central Virginia. Beyond the Blue Ridge, in the Great Valley of the Shenandoah—usually called the Valley—prosperous wheat farms relied, to a degree, on slave labor. During the antebellum period, market agriculture also spread southwest, particularly in the New River valley. Farther west, across the Alleghany Mountains, by 1850 a diverse Trans-Alleghany region had emerged with pockets of market agriculture, mining, and manufacturing along the Great Kanawha, Greenbrier, and Ohio Rivers. Much of this region remained isolated from the slave economy; particularly in northwestern Virginia, economic development reinforced ties with the free labor society of the Midwest.³

As early as 1850, Virginians faced a constitutional crisis connected to the role of slavery in the political system. Many of the commonwealth’s leaders demanded a major restructuring of the state’s political system, which, since the adoption of the first state constitution of 1776, had deliberately favored slaveholders. During the antebellum era, the heavily slaveholding East continued to dominate the legislature, despite a westward shift in white population.⁴ In August 1850, voters elected a convention that was sharply divided on how much slaveholding should count toward representation, resulting in what became known as the basis debate. White-basis candidates, who favored awarding seats in the legislature according to white population, prevailed in the West; mixed-basis candidates, favoring apportionment according to white population and slaves, dominated the East. Convening in Richmond on October 14, 1850, the convention soon became deadlocked. A committee on representation, chaired by western Whig George W. Summers of Kanawha County and composed of twenty-four members from across the state, were unable to agree on an apportionment formula. On February 6, 1851, the committee proposed that the entire convention debate the issue.⁵

During the next three months, a convention debate ensued that underscored the ways in which in Virginia slaveholding permeated political discourse and exposed internal and external stresses. Many of these were sectional: as white population moved westward and Virginia’s regions diverged in their development, there was an increasing perception of inequitable political power and maldistributed public resources. But late antebellum political anxieties ran deeper than this. The entire fabric of Virginia’s legal, constitutional, and political system was woven into the slaveholding society, and social interests and political imperatives converged around slavery. Beneath a veneer of due process and legal protocol, local courts aided the brute force that slaveholders exerted over a restive slave population. Virginia slaveholders took local courts’ protections for granted, and, in the higher levels of the political system, they assumed that nonslaveholders would acquiesce in their preeminence.

MAP P.1. Counties and Regions of Virginia, 1860

In the name of republican political equality, westerners during the constitutional crisis of 1851 challenged assumptions that had governed public affairs since the colonial period. The western call for white basis profoundly unsettled eastern slaveholders. At home they dealt with a discontented slave population; outside the state, slave masters confronted developments in national politics that not only undermined constitutional and political protections for slavery but also seemed to limit its future vitality. While slaveholders’ apprehensions about slave resistance were growing during the late antebellum period, they watched antislavery groups assert themselves in the national political scene. In this context of heightened tensions about the politics of slavery, in what Craig Simpson has described as the greatest celebration of oratory in the antebellum period, the constitutional convention of 1850–51 remained in session until its adjournment on August 1, 1851. Although one contemporary judged its proceedings as amounting to interminable gibberish, the convention effected a sweeping restructuring of state government.⁶

The convention thus set Virginia’s political stage for the coming decade. The new constitution altered the political system and initiated, for the first time in the commonwealth’s history, mass democratic politics. Revolutionary era giants such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe had departed the scene; the dominant figures at the convention would remain the major voices of the 1850s. Delegates to the convention were fully conscious of the significance of the occasion. John Minor Botts, Henry A. Wise, and George W. Summers were political mavericks whose behavior ran in the face of political orthodoxy. Already a powerful force in the state’s Whig Party, Botts—known as the Bison because of his shaggy appearance—fashioned an urban political machine in Richmond known as Botts’ Tail that based itself on working-class votes. He would remain a major political force throughout the 1850s. As what the Richmond Examiner called the great progenitor of Richmond mobs, Botts enjoyed support from the urban working-class neighborhoods of Screamersville, Rocketts, and Butchertown. Predicting that Botts would become the master spirit of the convention, the Fredericksburg News described him as an orator of great power whose remarkable physiognomy was Napoleonic. Ambitious, intolerant and relentless, Botts possessed talents of the very first order. Suffering from a suspicious and uncontrol[l]able temper, Botts reached conclusions impulsively and then often obstinately defended them. His friends adored him, his enemies feared him.⁷

A former Whig who abandoned Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis, became a Whig, and then returned to the Democratic Party, Henry Wise was from the Eastern Shore’s Accomack County. Much like the constituency of his home region, he was isolated, erratic, passionately devoted to slavery, and ardently averse to coalition-building. Although other Democrats bitterly opposed him, Wise, achieving election as governor in 1855, became the party’s most influential leader during the 1850s. An early advocate of reform, he won election to the convention on this position. A compulsive tobacco-chewer, Wise appeared slovenly, with tobacco juice stains on his linen shirt; because of his vehement speaking style, the chaw would rush out with his words. Wise spoke loudly when excited, contorted his face into different shapes, and, with the blood rushing to his face, appeared to be strangling. Believing in a combination of states’ rights and white-basis positions, he was a maverick who was not governed by his constituents, but his constituents by him. One of Wise’s close political associates, Robert Tyler, described him as the most formidable man in opposition I have ever known; opposition was his natural element, with some screw loose. Anyone who was a Wise ally was required to work as a keeper of a Lunatic: if Wise was left alone, Tyler feared that he would attempt to cut his own throat or somebody else’s.⁸

Kanawha County’s George W. Summers would emerge as the most widely respected of the western white-basis advocates. An unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 1851, Summers remained a leading western voice and would play a key role in the secession convention of 1861. Born in Fairfax County, he was forty-seven years old when the 1850–51 convention began. A lawyer and substantial slaveholder who sat in the Virginia legislature during the early 1830s and served in Congress from 1840 to 1844, Summers became a leading western Whig. His political opponents feared Summers’s persuasive oratory as well as his analytical abilities. An easterner described him as having a strong headed manner, and, although a forcible speaker, his great forte was his cunning. According to another account, Summers was a statesman of enlarged comprehensions, a lawyer with few equals in the West or other portions of the State, and a gentleman . . . of fine appearance, with many external evidences of intellectual power, who would make a noise when he is heard.⁹

Between late February and early May 1851, the convention remained deadlocked over the representation issue. In the early months of 1851, convention delegates assembled daily at 10:00 A.M. to hear speeches; in early March, the convention expanded into evening sessions. Some speeches consumed an entire day, and the winter and spring marathon—lasting from February 17 to May 21, 1851—sorely tried delegates’ patience. According to one historian, exhausted delegates had to be hauled away, while their colleagues finished reading their remarks. Richmond delegate James Lyons described the debate as decided by physical strength and physical endurance, as much as by intellectual power and capacity.¹⁰

Fundamental disagreement about the relationship between slavery and politics was an underlying cause of the stalemate. Rarely were the commonwealth’s leaders so candid about the relationship between sectionalism, politics, and the institution of slavery, and rarely was Virginia’s political elite so honest about what slavery meant to them. Battle lines hardened early on; constituents expected their delegates to hold fast.¹¹ Western Virginia sought political rule by a majority of mere numbers, complained Fauquier County’s mixed-basis supporter Robert Eden Scott on February 17, and he believed that slaveholders deserved special constitutional and political protections. White-basis advocates maintained that the political system should primarily represent and protect Virginia whites, including the nonslaveholding majority. On February 18, Henry Wise declared that property should not merit any special political representation. Why should horses, cows, or other livestock be represented to any greater degree than slaves? Rather than representing property, equitable apportionment provided the highest protection to property. Ridiculing Scott’s notion that population-based representatives were inherently plunderers, Wise denied the consistency of democracy and property—which lay at the heart of the mixed-basis argument—and asserted that such a combination violated an important principle of republicanism.¹²

White-basis western Virginians believed that politically overvaluing slave-holding fostered inequality and undermined republican rights. They feared slavery’s hold over the state’s political system—and the inferior status that it imposed on the nonslaveholding white majority. The protection of property, said westerner William Smith, concerned 40,000 eastern slaveholders, a small portion and a mere fraction even of eastern Virginia’s white population. Were the "principles of free government to be