Slavery in the Colonial Chesapeake

by David Brion Davis

Book by Davis, David Brion

Genres: History

42 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1986

About the author

David Brion Davis was an American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He was a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of 17 books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis played a principal role in explaining the latest historiography to a broad audience. His books emphasized religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values.

Reviews

[Paul of Bethesda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavery existed in the English-speaking Chesapeake colonies before the Mayflower made its renowned landing at Plymouth Rock. The “peculiar institution,” with all the cruelty and horror and injustice inherent to it, was a part of colonial life from the very beginnings of English America, as David Brion Davis makes clear in Slavery in the Colonial Chesapeake.

As a Yale University historian specializing in the study of slavery, Davis is exceptionally well-qualified to tell this story. He begins this brief study by pointing out that “To a large extent, it was the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland that defined the nature of American slavery and that dramatized the paradox of slaveholders fighting for the inalienable rights of man” (p. 1).

It is good that Davis focuses upon that paradox, one that is just as apparent to us today. Four of the first five presidents of the United States of America – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe – were Virginians, and slaveholders. The national capital at Washington, D.C., was placed in the Chesapeake region, between the slaveholding colonies-turned-states of Virginia and Maryland, along what would one day be the battle lines of a civil war fought over slavery. All the more important, therefore, that an historian of Davis’s caliber take a close look at how slavery developed in the land where America, and American slavery, began.

Davis’s tone in Slavery in the Colonial Chesapeake is very much that of the cool, objective, analytical academic historian. But he is unflinching in setting forth how white racism as a societal prejudice became inextricably intertwined with slavery as a system of forced labour:

“The colonists’ long struggles with native Indians reinforced their tendency to think in racial terms. Increasingly, they drew a sharp distinction between white Christians and dark-skinned ‘savages.’ In 1682, for example, the Virginia Assembly held that all non-Christian servants imported into the colony were slaves for life….Since it had also been decided that baptism did not free a slave, the decisive factor was race. American-born blacks and mulattoes, captive Indians, and Africans were all lumped together as ‘natural slaves’ – that is, as people who could be free only as the result of exceptional circumstances” (p. 21).

Enslaved African Americans, facing hardships that defy the mind’s power to contemplate, formed a vibrant and imperishable culture that remained distinct in terms of cultural elements such as music, dance, and religion. And it is good that Davis emphasizes how enslaved people in the Chesapeake, in an ongoing assertion of their human dignity, constantly fought back in many ways against slavery:

“The slaves’ day-to-day resistance took many forms. Masters complained continually of delays, work slowdowns, and feigned illness or stupidity. Theft and pilferage were so common and so highly organized that no security measures could prevent the regular disappearance of large quantities of meat, fruit, sugar, wine, soap, candles, and other foods and household articles. Throughout the Chesapeake, blacks developed their own underground networks for trading in stolen goods. Sometimes they also engaged in overt acts of arson and sabotage. Above all, slaves resisted bondage by running away.”

The American Revolution changed many aspects of life in the Chesapeake, while leaving others remarkably consistent. What had been thirteen colonies of the British monarch became a new nation, the United States of America. Some slaveholders, realizing the inconsistency and hypocrisy of calling themselves slaves of King George III while themselves holding people in slavery, liberated the enslaved people on their plantations; but sadly, such acts were the exception rather than the rule. Davis closes on a grim note: “Although Maryland and Virginia entered the post-Revolutionary era with certain regrets concerning their slaveholding heritage, both states remained committed to the system of slave labor. White opportunity seemed to be irrevocably wedded to black oppression” (p. 40).

One of the most interesting aspects of Slavery in the Colonial Chesapeake, for me, relates to the book’s provenance. It was not published by a regional university press like Johns Hopkins or the University Press of Virginia; nor was it put forth by a major commercial publisher like Simon & Schuster. Rather, this slim volume (just 40 pages) was published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, as part of a series titled The Foundations of America. That fact interests me for a couple of reasons – and not just because I attended the College of William and Mary, where Colonial Williamsburg is literally across the street.

It is interesting, rather, because Colonial Williamsburg began to develop as an open-air museum in the late 1920’s – a time when, to say the least, the question of African-American rights was not much on the minds of most white Americans, particularly in the South. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation states on its website that its mission is “to be a center for history and citizenship, encouraging national and international audiences to learn from the past through the preservation, restoration, and presentation of 18th-century Williamsburg and the study, interpretation, and teaching of America’s founding democratic principles.” It all sounds quite high-minded; but just watch the TV commercials, with costumed re-enactors guiding happy families along Duke of Gloucester Street, and you’ll see that it’s being marketed as tourist entertainment, in competition with places like Myrtle Beach and Disney World. If tourists don’t go to Colonial Williamsburg for a week or two of family fun, everything stops.

Accordingly, Colonial Williamsburg has always had a tough time figuring out a way to deal with the more difficult aspects of colonial history – slavery most of all. Those difficulties were perhaps never more dramatically on display than in 1994, when Colonial Williamsburg re-enacted a slave auction, complete with people portraying members of the same enslaved family who wept and cried out as they were “sold” away from each other. It certainly took courage for the organizers of this wrenchingly painful re-enactment to do what they did; but no other event of the kind took place again – a tacit admission, perhaps, that this was not the right way to address the topic of slavery in early American society.

It is still a difficult subject to talk about; it always will be. For that reason, it is good that the people at Colonial Williamsburg sought out an historian of Davis’s caliber, put out this little book under the Colonial Williamsburg imprimatur, and (I assume) sold it at the great big bookstore and museum shop that is part of the main Colonial Williamsburg visitor center. I hope that people at the bookstore purchased this important little book, thought about the injustices of the past, and re-committed themselves to a more just future for all.

[Patti]

Easy and informative read