The ‘Peculiar Institution’ in and near Williamsburg – Daily Press

This is the second of a three-part commentary by Terry Meyers, a Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, at the College of William & Mary. Much of the material here is drawn from his essays on William & Mary and slavery. His pieces will appear leading up to the universitys dedication of Hearth: Memorial to the Enslaved on May 7.

Though many whites took a rosy view of slavery, not all did, of course.

Even in the deeply racist Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomas Jefferson saw the evil of slavery and its corruption of all involved. He called the whole commerce between master and slave a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal ... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

And George Wythe ruled as a judge that Virginias Declaration of Rights ... included African Americans among the all men born free and equally independent. They should, he said, be considered free until proven otherwise.

The English writer Thomas Day in 1776 described what appears to be a slave auction in Yorktown or Williamsburg in the 1750s or 1760s. Day likely drew some details from what he learned in talking with his mentor, William Small, who had taught at the College from 1758 to 1764. Day noted how the enslaved are brought into the market, naked, weeping, and in chains; how one man dares to examine his fellow creatures as he would do beasts, and bargain for their persons; how all the most sacred duties, affections, and feelings of the human heart, are violated and insulted.

Day further evokes slavery in the southern colonies in terms that are surely informed by what Small saw in and near Williamsburg: Black men and women, he wrote, were forced to labour naked in the sun to the music of whips and chains, being robbed of every thing which is now dear to your [whites] indolence, or necessary to your pleasures, goaded to every species of servile drudgery, and punished for whites amusement and caprice, their youth exhausted in servitude and finally abandoned in age to wretchedness and disease.

In a letter in 1762, Robert Carter Nicholas, a member of the House of Burgesses from York County, wrote of the enslaved in Williamsburg and nearby that they are treated by too many of their Owners as so many Beasts of Burden, so little do they [the owners] consider them as entitled to any of the privileges of human Nature.

And though St. George Tucker settled into easy comfort among those he enslaved, seeing them as members of his extended family (some of whom he willingly sold), he did see the incongruity between slavery and Americas values as professed in the Declaration of Independence. He did offer in A Dissertation on [the Gradual Abolition] of Slavery (1796) an impossible (and wholly ignored) scheme for abolishing it in Virginia. In Dissertation, Tucker calls America the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa. Even as Americans were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, they were, he wrote, imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions of which we complained.

In an essay on Benevolence and Slavery, Tucker recounted the harshness of local slavery:

But he [a slave owner near Williamsburg] always makes it a point of having, what is called, a smart Overseer, whose duty it is to keep them [the enslaved] tightly to their work. That is, the negroes are to be in the fields at the first dawn, of the day, and at their work, as soon as they can see to do any thing, in dark nights, when there is no moonshine; but, when the moon shines the latter part of the night, they must be at work before three O Clock, in summer, and before four in winter. And when the moon shines in the Evening, they are to continue at work until nine a-Clock, except in the Tobacco-season, when they are not dismissed until eleven ... By the bye, this class of men [overseers] are generally very unfeeling.

Philip Fithian in 1773 had described slavery not too far from here by quoting an overseer on how he disciplined the enslaved:

He said that whipping of any kind does them no good, for they will laugh at your greatest Severity; But he told us he had invented two things, and by several experiments had proved their success. For Sulleness, Obstinacy, or Idleness, says he, Take a Negro, strip him, tie him fast to a post; take then a sharp Curry-Comb, & curry him severely til he is well scrapd; & call a Boy with some dry Hay, and make the Boy rub him down for several Minutes, then salt him, & unlose him. He will attend to his Business, (said the inhuman Infidel) afterwards! But savage Cruelty does not exceed His next diabolical Invention To get a Secret from a Negro, says he, take the following Method Lay upon your Floor a large thick plank, having a peg about eighteen Inches long, of hard wood, & very Sharp, on the upper end, fixed fast in the plank then strip the Negro, tie the Cord to a staple in the Ceiling, so as that his foot may just rest on the sharpened Peg, then turn him briskly round, and you would laugh (said our informer) at the Dexterity of the Negro, while he was releiving his Feet on the sharpend Peg! I need say nothing of these seeing there is a righteous God, who will take vengeance on such Inventions!

Next: It is no wonder then that local Blacks right up until the 1940s celebrated Emancipation Day, January 1, with parades and festivities.

Originally posted here:

The 'Peculiar Institution' in and near Williamsburg - Daily Press