The Formation of a Slave Society in Colonial Virginia
When talking about slavery, Patrick Henry(1) said that he was “drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them.”(2) The establishment of a slave society in Colonial Virginia led to large plantation owners maintaining wealth and power over slaves, small plantation owners and others. By using racial slavery, plantation owners maintained authority by perpetuating racist sentiment toward blacks from poor whites and small plantation owners. In doing so, the large plantation owners in the seventeenth-century attempted to create a patriarchal society, using divine authority to justify the use of free slave labor. The system of slavery did not only oppress slaves, but it helped maintain a system that divided slaves and the lower class so that the large plantation owners would maintain power generation to generation.
Labor in the early colonies was originally handled by indentured servants and poor whites. They came “by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America.”(3) However, eventually this labor supply either became too expensive or too scarce. The purchase of a black slave for his entire life became cheaper than to contract an indentured servant for ten years. Slavery, according to the early colonials, became necessary in Virginia due to the high demand for exporting a particular product and the lack of labor to provide that product.(4) Tobacco would eventually become that particular product, and the tobacco economy would experience cycles of booms and busts throughout its early life. Due to the size of land that was being purchased by new plantation owners, as well as a low supply of servants, the lack of adequate labor could hinder the wealth one could obtain from owning and working the land.(5) Large plantation owners began to illegally smuggle black slaves and claim head rights over their new slaves. “The great planters had ensured both a permanent, self perpetuating labor force and capital in land.”(6) Slave masters in southern colonies were speaking out about their belief in the institution of slavery during the period of forming a constitution. Rawlin Lowndes, a delegate representing the state of South Carolina said his state, without black slavery, would “soon be a desert waste” and it would “degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the union….Negroes are our wealth, our only natural resource.” (7)
One of the factors, or excuses, that plantation owners used to increase the importation of black slaves was for their agricultural experience, which was more than that of white indentured servants from England.(8) However, the market for tobacco was crashing, but in 1683, half of the crops were destroyed by a hurricane. To meet an even larger demand for a workforce, plantation owners began to directly import slaves from Africa, rather than by royal charters and the West Indies.(9) By 1698, black slaves reached nine percent of the total population of Virginia, but made over half of the bound labor force. By using a larger permanent slave workforce, as opposed to servants with expiring contracts, plantation owners could work their land more by working slaves for longer hours and in greater numbers.
The plantation owners established a slave society that led away from ideas of liberty and freedom in order to protect their economic status. The owners needed “to enslave blacks” to “establish a coercive state.”(10) Racial based statues prevented slaves from “rights of association, assembly, bearing arms, expression” as well as mobility and the right to protect oneself against “unreasonable search and seizure”. Slaves were, for the most part, also not protected from excessive violence toward them from their slave masters. One account from Isaac Jefferson, a slave of Thomas Jefferson, shows how his own slave master would not protect Isaac from a whipping by a house guest, in which Isaac claims gave him “more whippings than he has fingers and toes.” Jefferson would send Isaac to open the gates for his guest, Colonel Archibald Cary. When Isaac would not open the gates on time, Colonel Cary would “look about for him and whip him with his horsewhip.”(11)
Abusing the slaves is another way of maintaining “interests of the plantation system” so the plantation owner can have “maximum control of his economic destiny.”(12) The early colonials fought for liberty, but they fought against the interests of the lower classes by keeping slaves in a “subordinate position.” Slave masters created an image of slavery that made slaves appear to be “ignorant, helpless, and dependent as his masters said he was.”(14) These men talked of liberty and the immoral nature of slavery, but did not want to “inconvenience” the plantation owner by taking away his slaves as they did not want to see the “plantation system disappear.”(15) A Virginian politician would speak out against slavery, but he would need to satisfy the interests of his “constituents” to “do nothing to injure their interests.”(16)
Plantation owners “attempted to squeeze out class similarities” between black slaves and whites “by bringing racial distinctions to bear against the former.”(17) Slave masters had a constant concern about slave uprisings, as well as an uprising from poor whites and small plantation owners. By dividing the black slaves and whites, there would be even less of a chance of these two groups finding a common oppression, which might lead to some form of violent action toward the upper class. As Frederick Douglass said, “by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much of a slave as the Black himself….both are plundered by the same plunderer.”(18)
Black women as slaves were important to the control of labor, as black women worked the fields and women that were indentured servants did not. Female slaves were also subject to sexual exploitation by their masters. In some southern societies, it was acceptable for a slave owner to have sexual relations with his slave. The wives of plantation owners were not able to use this act of infidelity as a means for filing for divorce, as it was socially acceptable amongst the ruling elite.(19) Slave women were not protected from unwanted sexual advances, as it was believed at the time that “black women could not be raped, since they were naturally promiscuous.”(20) At times, slave women were successful in fighting back. A slave woman by the name of Fannie Berry boasted to other slaves how she fought off the master’s sexual advances, and how the master could not mention it to anyone as he would need to explain to his wife that he was trying to rape his slave.(21) Slave women also had to tolerate witnessing their children face brutal whippings from the slave master. Women had to deal with permanent separation from their children and other family, as it was common for slave families to be torn apart as a result of the sale of their children.(22) By creating an identity for slave women as naturally sexually promiscuous, the plantation owner could maintain control over both his black slave women and his wife.
The plantation owners formed a patriarchal society in which they were the great fathers that would use divine right to oversee the lower peoples, in order to maintain their idea of a stable and functioning society. The large plantation owners “likened themselves to biblical patriarchs” and claimed they were the head of “their families and the governors of society.”(23) In 1736, the Virginia Gazette published an editorial by the publisher, Williams Perks, in which he called for the upper class to be full of virtue. When Perks used the word virtue, he is referring to the ideology of patriarchy, as he goes on to say that a patriarch is “a man…born to an Estate” that “presided over land and laborers” with the authority of divine rule.(24)
Slavery was not a system that was established just for the sake of enslaving people that are of a different color of skin. The racist attitudes toward black slaves, created by great plantation owners, were to help suppress black slaves in order for the plantation owners to maintain power over every aspect of their daily as well as structuring the lives of small plantation owners and poor whites. The racism created by the plantation owners lead to horrible racial laws which guaranteed that permanent slaves were to be treated as nothing more than chattel. The institution of slavery was for the sole purpose of exploiting free labor in order to gain as much wealth as possible by having slaves work land too large for a normal labor force to handle.
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1 Patrick Henry is, among other things, famous for the quote, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
2 Aviva Chomsky. “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 other myths about immigration. (Beacon Press; Boston, 2007), xxi.
3 Howard Zinn. A People’s History of the United States. (Harper Perennial; New York, 2003), 43.
4 Anthony S. Parent Jr. Foul Means – The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. (University of North Carolina Press; Chapel Hill, 2003).
5 Ibid., 37.
6 Ibid., 44.
7 Ahmed Shawki. Black Liberation and Socialism (Haymarket Books; Chicago, 2006), 27.
8 Parent. Foul Means, 60-61.
9 Ibid., 69.
10 Ibid., 105.
11 Isaac Jefferson. Memories of a Monticello Slave. (University of Virginia Press; Charlottesville, 1951), 35.
12 Robert McColley. Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. (University of Illinois Press; Urbana, 1964), 4.
13 Ibid., 5.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Ibid., 34.
16 Ibid., 116.
17 Parent. Foul Means, 106-107.
18 Paul D’amato. The Meaning of Marxism. (Haymarket Books; Chicago, 2006), 171
19 Marylynn Salmon. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. (University of North Carolina Press; Chapel Hill, 1986), 65.
20 Brenda E. Stevenson. “Gender Convention, Ideals, and Identity Among Antebellum Virginia Slave Women”. More than Chattel eds. Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., David Barry Gasper. (Indiana University Press; Bloomington, 1996), 171.
21 Ibid., 172.
22 Ibid., 176-177.
23 Parent. Foul Means, 200.
24 Ibid., 207.
Israel has currently been launching its offensive against Gaza for the last seventeen days. As of 1:12PM EST, about 1,010 Palestinians have been killed; almost half of them are civilian women and children.
However, before any of this can be understood, a brief history of the Zionist movement and what it represents must be discussed. The Zionist movement gained a lot of momentum when Theodor Herzl wrote “Der Judenstatt” (The Jews’ State) in 1896. By 1897, the Zionist Congress called for an establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It called for the colonization of Jewish workers, establishing Jewish-only institutions, increasing awareness of Jewish nationalism and seeking “governmental approval for Zionsim’s goal”.
the conquests of the Old Testament, Israeli terrorist groups would slaughter men, women, and children of entirely Arab populated villages.
So what can be done? Why does Israel continue to have such large support from the United States, and the people of the United States? Why is Israel considered a victim when it is the aggressor? Some of the questions can be answered by looking at some of my other blog entries in the archive. In the future, I plan to continue to write on this issue. I will be presenting articles on the Zionist movement and AIPAC/CUFI. I also advise everyone to please check all of my citations for more information.