The planters responded to this challenge by adopting a three-part strategy to break the will, or at least the ability to fight, of a people who had been snatched from their homeland and brutalized and who were overwhelmingly “hostile to those who controlled their labor.”14 In a series of moves that would scar the United States well into the twenty-first century, colonial Virginia deployed this triad of brutal control. It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a “large-scale military machinery,” the militia, “to crack
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