Conceived in Liberty (110 page)

Along with slaves came the threat of slave rebellion. Indeed, one of the chief functions of the Virginia militia was to guard against such a menace. In calling for an increase in the militia, Governor Spotswood frankly declared: “Freedom wears a cap which can, without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake off the fetters of slavery and as such an insurrection would surely be attended with most dreadful consequences, so I think we cannot be too early in providing against it, both by putting ourselves in a better posture of defense and by making a law to prevent the consultations of those Negroes.” Furthermore, Virginia provided that when a runaway slave should be caught, he be taken from one constable to another along the way back to his master; each constable was to whip the slave in his turn.

Despite these precautions, in 1722 a massive slave plot covering several counties was brought to light. Three slaves, Cooper Will and two Sams, were found guilty of conspiracy to revolt and were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The following spring, slaves in Middlesex and Gloucester counties were discovered to be plotting to gain their freedom; seven of the leaders were sentenced to banishment. Governor Hugh Drysdale called upon the Assembly to intensify legal punishment of slave rebellion: “You’re too well acquainted with the cruel dispositions of these creatures, when they have it in their power to destroy or distress, to let slip their fair opportunity of making more proper laws against them....”

The Virginia legislature was all too eager to comply, and passed new laws forbidding all unlicensed meetings of slaves, as well as the death penalty without benefit of clergy for conspiracy. Furthermore, the crackdown touched even the few free Negroes: they were deprived of the vote, burdened with discriminatory tax rates, and forbidden to possess arms. Moreover, even voluntary manumission of slaves by masters was restricted by the legislature and approval was required by the governor and the Council. When twelve years later the English Board of Trade wanted to know why free Negroes could no longer vote, Governor William Gooch, revealing the colony’s great fear of Negro revolts, explained: “There has been a conspiracy discovered amongst the Negroes... wherein the free Negroes and Mulattos were much suspected to have been concerned [which will forever be the case] and though there could be no legal proof, so as to correct them, yet such was the insolence of
the free Negroes [that the Assembly deprived them of the vote]... well knowing they always did, and ever will adhere to and favor the slaves... and to preserve a decent distinction between them and their betters....”

Despite all the restrictions, in the year 1729 a number of Virginia slaves rebelled, procured arms, ammunition, and agricultural equipment, and escaped west to settle in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There the former slaves harmed no one, but the force of their example could have been a standing reproach and a beacon light to the colony of Virginia and even to the entire system of slavery. Hence, Virginia mobilized a strong troop of whites to march against the Negro settlement to destroy it, which they did after a pitched battle. The Negroes left alive were taken back to bondage. Governor Gooch reacted by strengthening and training the militia to prevent similar episodes in the future.

Yet only one year later, in 1730, slave conspiracies were again revealed and suppressed in Virginia. An absurdly optimistic rumor spread among the slaves that the Crown had authorized the freeing of all baptized slaves. The spread of the rumor led to numerous meetings of slaves and “loose discourses” among them about individual liberty. Virginia promptly arrested and severely whipped the leaders of the discourses. A few weeks later, two hundred Negro slaves of Norfolk and Princess Anne counties gathered and chose officers for their imminent rebellion. But the plot was uncovered and four of the slave leaders were executed. Governor Gooch smugly conveyed to the Crown his hope that the slaves would now “rest contented with their condition.”

During the early years of the French and Indian War, when defeats were being inflicted on the English west of Virginia, the slaves took the opportunity to become rebellious. Governor Robert Dinwiddie (1751–58) remarked on the notorious “villainy of the Negroes in any emergency of government.” He ordered trial for any Negroes guilty of seditious talk, and placed a number of soldiers in each county to suppress any Negro revolt. In late 1767, Negro slaves near Alexandria revolted by poisoning and killing several of their overseers. In consequence, eight of the Negroes were brutally executed and their heads exhibited in the public square. A “mob of Negroes” also rioted in Frederick County in the same year. Altogether, slave revolts occurred in Virginia in the following years: 1722, 1723, 1729, 1730, 1755, and 1767.

*
Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown,
Virginia, 1705–1786: Democracy or Aristocracy?
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), pp.
72–77
.

**
Ibid.,
p.
67.

No sooner had the North Carolina proprietary suppressed rebellion in 1711 than the colony became embroiled in a crucial Indian conflict. The Indians in North Carolina had been growing increasingly restive. Not only was white expansion driving them from their proclaimed lands and hunting grounds, but a perhaps more embittering grievance was the common practice of kidnapping Indians into slavery. In fact, so notorious was this practice that Pennsylvania, in 1705, prohibited further “importation of Indian slaves from Carolina” since it had “been observed to give the Indians of this province some umbrage for suspicion and dissatisfaction.”

Most dangerous of the Indian tribes was the powerful Tuscarora in central North Carolina, one of the feared and disliked Iroquois nations. In the fall of 1711, the Tuscaroras, taking advantage of the turmoil of the late Thomas Cary rebellion, launched a general attack on the white settlements. The attack was particularly effective on the new and scattered southern settlements, but the main center at Albemarle escaped devastation because Tom Blunt, the Tuscarora chief in the vicinity, refused to join the war.

Governor Edward Hyde induced the Assembly to pass a law authorizing conscription of all males between sixteen and sixty, and called on the neighboring colonies for aid. The Virginia Assembly refused to vote the funds or permit Governor Spotswood to send troops. South Carolina sent a strong military force under Colonel John Barnwell. Barnwell’s troop again demonstrated the propensity of the Indians for mutual destruction—redounding to the benefit of the whites—for it consisted largely of Creek, Yamassee, and Sioux Indians. As was true of all other Iroquois, the aggressive Tuscaroras had incurred the enmity of the other tribes of the region. Barnwell decisively
defeated the Tuscaroras, captured one of their forts, and slaughtered the male inhabitants. The Indian allies got all the plunder and the female slaves. Barnwell wistfully regretted that “only one girl we got.” Finally, the Tuscaroras sued for peace and a peace treaty was signed, the beaten Indians agreeing to leave all the southern North Carolina land between Cape Fear and the New River.

Colonel Barnwell had expected to be handsomely rewarded by a grateful North Carolina for his supposed patriotism; he found, instead, that the ingrates, cozily far from the battle, were carping because he had not annihilated the enemy. The embittered Barnwell then decided to get willy-nilly what he had come for. Luring a large number of Indians to a spot near New Bern under pretense of a parley, Barnwell and his men fell on them in a surprise attack, seized them, and carried them off to South Carolina to sell the hapless Indians into slavery.

The Tuscaroras were understandably bitter at this treachery and, in the summer of 1712, resumed their war against a white foe who they were now convinced could not be trusted in any respect. Once again, however, Tom Blunt agreed to remain neutral and, indeed, to come partially to the aid of the whites. South Carolina again sent an armed troop, almost exclusively Indian as before, under Colonel James Moore. Moore crushed the Tuscaroras in March 1713, ending the war. The defeated remnants made their way north to New York to join their Iroquois brethren.

After the Tuscarora war, North Carolina politics settled down into the familiar colonial pattern of a proprietary party, centered in the appointive governor and the Council, stressing the prerogative of the executive, and confronting a popular and liberal force concentrated in the Assembly.

Wracked so recently by rebellion and war, North Carolina did not join South Carolina in the latter’s successful revolt against the proprietary in 1719. The popular party resisted such instances of executive tyranny as imposing conscription to fight against the Indians without Assembly approval. The most severe quarrel of the people with the proprietary occurred over that veteran irritant, the quitrent. The proprietary naturally wanted to be paid the quitrent in sterling. In this era, however, North Carolina’s underdeveloped economy used nineteen marketable commodities as media of exchange, or money, including beef, pork, butter, cheese, pitch, feathers, wheat, leather and hides, skins and corn, as well as the more usual tobacco. In 1715, the Assembly passed a law for payment of the quitrent in any of these commodities, at a fixed scale of relative prices, with the quality of the commodities established by two theoretically disinterested freeholders. The natural result was payment of the hated quitrents in whatever happened to be the least valuable commodity at the fixed scale, and of the poorest possible quality.

The proprietors, having had the usual difficulty in collecting quitrents, had decided at the turn of the century to appoint a network of agents to collect the payments. The agents were empowered to seize and sell the lands of those who failed to pay. In 1715, however, the Assembly deprived the agents of the power to place a value on the seized goods, the value being put into the books of the original owner and the purchaser. This act helped block effective
collection of the rents. All in all, since salaries of the chief officials were paid from the quitrents, the proprietors obtained little or no net profit from their colony.

The end of the Tuscarora war left the coastal area south of Albemarle free of Indians, and whites began to expand into this region. The proprietors restricted this growth, however, by closing their land office in the area and insisting on the sale of land at prices so high as effectively to discourage settlement. To make matters worse, payment for the land had to be made to the proprietors in London. To escape this restriction, the governor and the Council began to grant huge tracts of land to their favorites at rates as low as three pence per one hundred acres, in exchange for monetary payment—as so often happens in history, government officials having monopoly privileges at their disposal proceeded to sell them at the best bargains they could obtain. The biggest culprit among the governors was Sir Richard Everard, who signed away 400,000 acres of such so-called blank patent in 1728 alone.

During the 1720s, the proprietors more and more lost control over the affairs of the colony and over its land policy. In order to encourage immigration into the colony, the Assembly (the governor and Council approving) broke through the proprietary restrictions on land. Ignoring the proprietary order, the new law permitted settlers to enter the southern region, on paying a tentative quitrent of three shillings per one hundred acres, and guaranteed confirmation of their land titles.

The popular new governor, George Burrington, friend of the liberal party, had agreed to this measure but was removed by the proprietors shortly thereafter. He was removed at the instigation of Christopher Gale, chief justice and collector of the royal customs, who loosely charged Burrington with plotting revolution against the proprietary. Burrington had, in fact, threatened to commit mayhem on Gale, had broken up sessions of Gale’s court, and had also prevented the royal customs officers from enforcing their exactions. But the proprietors had good cause to regret Burrington’s successor, Richard Everard. Everard set up a tyranny so petty and so venal that even the Gale faction and the Council were forced to split with him. Abusing Council and Assembly alike, Everard exacted exorbitant and illegal fees and used the law courts as instruments to settle family quarrels and punish his enemies. The government of North Carolina was reduced to a violent three-way split. Thus, in 1725, the governor and the Council tried to dissolve the Assembly, which, however, denied such power and complained to the proprietors of the persecutions of the Gale clique. The faction seeking dissolution of the Assembly was headed by Gale, now chief justice and judge of the admiralty court, and his son-in-law William Little, the attorney general. At this point, Burrington, now a leader in the Assembly, denounced Everard and assaulted a constable. Riots by the various factions ensued at the capital, Edenton.

Finally, in 1729, the proprietors, disgruntled with the turbulent colony and
finding quitrents almost 10,000 pounds in hopeless arrears, were happy to sell all their rights over both North Carolina and South Carolina to the Crown for merely 23,000 pounds. North Carolina was now a royal colony. The only holdout was John Carteret, who refused to sell his one-eighth right. Fifteen years later, the Crown granted Lord Carteret, now the Earl of Granville, in exchange for his one-eighth proprietorship, the exclusive ownership of a huge land grant in northern North Carolina covering over one half of the whole area of the province and containing two-thirds of its population. Carteret was not only arbitrarily granted ownership over all the unsettled land in the area; he was also given the right to extract quitrents from the property owners already settled there. Carteret’s agents proceeded to charge excessive fees, which they insisted be paid in specie, to collect illegal quitrents, and to issue fraudulent deeds. This added to the already considerable turmoil over land and quitrents in the province.