Highlights of Last Part of the Book

Highlights of Last Section of the book

Here are the most important points I picked up from chapters 14-18.

-Key transition from indentured servitude to slavery:

It is questionable how long Virginia could have continued on this course, keeping men in servitude for years and then turning them free to be frustrated by the engrossers and collectors of customs…That Virginia changed course and avoided such an outcome was owing to no conscious decision…But while Culpeper and Effing­ham and their immediate successors were striving to hold the free­men still for the fleecing, the colony was already moving toward a new social order, in which freemen would not have to be held still, toward a society that would nourish the freeman's freedom and at the same time make possible the unlimited exploitation of labor.

The problem was not, as in England, to find work for them but simply to keep them working for their betters. As we have seen, Virginians had coped with the problem in several ways: by creating an artificial scarcity of land, which drove freemen back into servitude; by extending terms of service…The bur­dens imposed on Virginia's workers placed the colony continually on the brink of rebellion…. There remained, however, another way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor without as great a risk of rebellion as Virginians had been running.

Slavery is a mode of compulsion that has often prevailed where land is abundant, and Virginians had been drifting toward it from the time when they first found something profitable to work at. Servitude in Virginia's tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England…² But for Virginians to have pressed their ser­vants or their indigent neighbors into slavery might have been, ini­tially at least, more perilous than exploiting them in the ways that eventuated in the plundering parties of Bacon's Rebellion…           

They converted to slavery simply by buying slaves instead of servants. The process seems so simple, the advantages of slave labor so obvious, and their system of production and attitude toward workers so receptive that it seems surprising they did not convert sooner…Why did they wait so long?  The high mortality rate made indentured servitude cheaper.

When the mortality rate declined, slaves became a better deal.

-The key transition to stability via slavery:  

Virginia had developed her plantation system without slaves, and slavery introduced no novelties to methods of production….The plantation system operated by servants worked. It made many Virginians rich and England's merchants and kings richer. But it had one insuperable disadvantage. Every year it poured a host of new freemen into a society where the opportunities for advance­ment were limited. The freedmen were Virginia's dangerous men.  The substitution of slaves for servants gradually eased and eventually ended the threat that the freedmen posed: as the annual number of imported servants dropped, so did the number of men turning free.

The planters who bought slaves instead of servants did not do so with any apparent consciousness of the social stability to be gained thereby. Indeed, insofar as Virginians expressed themselves on the subject of slavery, they feared that it would magnify the danger of insurrection in the colony….But slaves proved, in fact, less dangerous than free or semi-free laborers. They had none of the rising expec­tations that have so often prompted rebellion in human history. They were not armed and did not have to be armed. They were without hope and did not have to be given hope.  Plus, with slavery Virginians could exceed all their previous efforts to maximize productivity….There was no limit to the work or time that a master could com­mand from his slaves, beyond his need to allow them enough for eating and sleeping to enable them to keep working.

-The logic behind cruelty to slaves and their different treatment before the law:  The only obvious disadvantage that slavery presented to Vir­ginia masters was a simple one: slaves had no incentive to work… In the end, Virginians had to face the fact that masters of slaves must inflict pain at a higher level than masters of servants.  So in 1669 the assembly faced the facts and said masters would not be held liable for beating a slave to death.  The slaves’ protection would lie in the fact that a man would not want to destroy his own property.

-The transition to racism:

Virginians could be confident that Eng­land would condone their slave laws, even though those laws were contrary to the laws of England.  The English government had considered the problem in 1679, when presented with the laws of Barbados, in which masters were similarly authorized to inflict punishment that would not have been allowed by English law…It was not necessary to extend the rights of Englishmen to Af­ricans, because Africans were "a brutish sort of people” and a threat of rebellion because of their numbers… slaves were introduced into a system of production that was already in working order. The substitution of slaves for servants probably increased the produc­tivity and almost certainly increased the profitability of the planta­tion system. But slavery required new methods of disciplining the labor force, methods that were linked to racial contempt.

-How racist attitudes about blacks developed:

-What is important for an understanding of the role of race, masters, initially at least, perceived slaves in much the same way they had always perceived servants. Both displayed the same attitudes and habits: they were shiftless, irresponsible, unfaith­ful, ungrateful, dishonest; they got drunk whenever possible; they did not work hard enough or regularly enough….These were precisely the complaints that Eng­lish economists and statesmen were making against the English poor during the years when slavery was becoming the prevailing form of labor in Virginia. 

-Although the replacement of servants by slaves reduced the annual increment of poor freemen, the numbers already on hand were still sufficient to keep the threat of another Bacon in everyone's mind. If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.  The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only grad­ually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.

-It had been the original intention of the founders to exploit native labor. And as Virginians began to expand their slave holdings, they seem to have had Indians as much in view as Africans. If the natives of Vir­ginia were insufficient in number, substitute natives from other re­gions could be brought in, whether from other parts of America or from Africa. They were both, after all, basically uncivil, unchristian, and, above all, unwhite

-Preparing the groundwork in England for slavery in Va.: In practice the discipline of the poor in England stopped short of actual enslavement…Neither the workhouse nor its successor, the factory, enslaved its occupants, at least in any legal sense. But they can be seen as a step in that direction, and there were plenty of voices out­side Parliament crying for the next step…Proposals for enslavement did not come to fruition; but they suggest that the English poor of this time, seemed to many of their betters to be fit for slavery. The contempt that lay behind these proposals and behind many of the workhouse schemes is not easy to distinguish from the kind of contempt that today we call racism. The stereotypes of the poor expressed so often in England during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often identical with the descriptions of blacks expressed in colonies dependent on slave labor—the poor were "the vile and brutish part of mankind"; the black were "a brut­ish sort of people."

The union of freedom and slavery

-How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.

-Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he be­came less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could be­gin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.

Their interests were not, to be sure, identical. But, both wanted small poll taxes and were debtors and sellers.  So, it was appropriate for the large man to serve as a spokesman for the whole country.

What was more important for the future, the common interests that enabled the small planter to trust the large, also encouraged the large planter to trust the small.  Big men could afford to empower and pander to little men because their interests were comparable and because their prosperity no longer depended on wringing the last possible penny from him. A new generation of magnates…did not have to antagonize the lesser freemen to grow… The difference lay in the new confidence that the two felt in each other and in their colony. As their fortunes rose, the most successful did not think so much of exchanging life in Virginia for life in the old country…Unlike the English gentry they mimicked, Virginia's great planters’ fortunes rested less on extracting rents from tenants or taxes from freemen than on the labor they extracted from African men and women permanently enslaved to them. They no longer needed to exploit other Englishmen in the ways their fathers had.

***Central thesis:

-It may be coincidence that so many Virginians who grew up after the advent of slavery turned out to be ardent republicans. And it may be coincidence that among their predecessors who lived be­fore slavery became prevalent, so many were unrepublican, unat­tractive, and unscrupulous, not to say depraved. On the other hand, there may have been more than coincidence involved. Although it seems unlikely that slavery had any tendency to improve the char­acter of masters, it may have had affinities with republicanism that escaped Jefferson's analysis. The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant. Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.

-There it was. Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them. And because Virginia's labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free laborers and tenant farmers were too few in num­ber to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the men who assured them of their equality. Moreover, the small farmers had been given a reason to see themselves as already the equals of the large.

-The common identity that created the “easy familiarity” that made their commitment to republicanism safe: Virginia's small fanners could perceive a common identity with the large, because there was one, even more compelling than those we have already noticed. Neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.

-In the republican way of thinking, zeal for liberty and equality could go hand in hand with contempt for the poor and plans for enslaving them.

-The combination, which to us seems bizarre and unnatural, may become more comprehensible if we take a closer look at the role of the independent yeoman farmer and at the role of the not-so-independent poor in republican thought. We have seen that the corn­monwealthmen elevated the yeoman farmer and insisted on his inde­pendence to resist the encroachments of tyranny. By the same token they distrusted anyone who could be bent to the will of another (eg, women, children, and slaves who must be joined to independent men.)  It was the able-bodied poor, nominally but not actually independent, who spelled danger to liberty. Not only did they contribute nothing to the common welfare, but they sapped the independence of those who had to succor them…Some British republicans thought it better to enslave the poor than be enslaved by them or by the demagogic leaders that their condi­tion invited…

-The keep­ers of republican liberty must be wary of extending a share of it to men who were incapable of defending it and might become a means of destroying it. If the poor were already enslaved, would it not be wise to keep them so? Virginia, in spite of her abundant lands, had already encountered a rebellion of the unenslaved poor in 1676. Since then she had gradually replaced her free labor force with slaves, and by 1776 she enjoyed the situation that Andrew Fletcher had wished to achieve in Scotland. Two-fifths of Virginia's people were as poor as it is possible to get; but they were all enslaved, and all worked productively for private masters, who were thereby strengthened in their independence and able to take the lead in re­sisting British tyranny.

-The “flying buttress of freedom”: One wonders if it might not have been taken more seriously if Virginia's slaves had belonged to the same race as their masters. The fact that they did not made it easier for Virginians to use slavery as a flying buttress to freedom.

-In England, the poor were viewed almost as an alien race, but they needed special markings—the slaves did not require that.

-As the number of poor white Virginians diminished, the vicious traits of character attributed by Englishmen to their poor could in Virginia increasingly appear to be the exclusive heritage of blacks… Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England…felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty. There were too few free poor on hand to matter. And by lumping Indians, mulat­toes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single mas­ter class.