What shall we do with the children?
Back when Kevin was getting organized to launch Rumproast Radio, he remarked about his hesitancy to begin anything that required a regular schedule. Man, do I know how he felt. I would like to blog, chapter by chapter, about Annette Gordon-Reed’s book The Hemingses of Monticello, but trying to do so leaves me worried about whether such an endeavor would gain traction with the Roasters, and whether I can consistently find time to write about it. It really is a remarkable book, though, or as Pulitzer winning author Joseph Ellis said, “It is not a pretty story, but it is poignant beyond belief.”
Indeed, it is.
Before moving on to the substance of this question, what to do with the children, let me just note two nutballs who are dissenting activists to the notion that Thomas Jefferson would have ever done that with a slave girl. The two would be, Paula Abeles, and Herbert Barger, the unofficial Jefferson family quack-historian (scroll down at the link for a flavor of his thinking.)
Barger tracks commentary about the book all over the web posting dissenting comments on every blog post, WaPo or NYT article, or any other article that appears. Just like all the Bush administration scientists who are sure to God there is no such thing as global warming, this nut has emphatic opinions about Jefferson’s proclivities, opinions which are unfettered by the cognitive dissonance thinking people experience when contrary evidence stares them in the face.
So getting to the first pages of the book, Virginia society in the mid-1600s faced a real conundrum (see title). Gordon-Reed describes how up till then, in Colonial Virginia, English tradition had determined a person’s free or slave status. But now that tradition presented a peculiar problem with regard to the property rights of important people, because: “Doubts have arisen whether the children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree”:
In England, you “were” what your father “was.” A person could be born free or as a member of a group of “unfree” people who existed during various points in English history—for example, a villein (serf) attached to the land of a lord or to the lord himself. Inventing [my emphasis] the rules of slavery, in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was.
What? Wtf?
This important departure from tradition had enormous consequences for the progress of slavery and the mapping of Virginia’s racial landscape. Why take this route? Although the preamble to the legislation states the impetus for the law—“Doubts have arisen whether the children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree”—there is no language explaining exactly why, in the context of Virginia colonial society, the ways of ancient Rome should emerge as superior to the more readily available and familiar English traditions. There are some reasonable speculations.
One way to think about it is to imagine what might have been the course of slavery in Virginia had the colonists followed the English tradition. White men, particularly the ones who made up the House of Burgesses, the legislature in colonial Virginia, were the masters of growing numbers of African women, owning not only their labor but their very bodies. That these women sometimes would be used for sex as well as work must have occurred to the burgesses. Inevitably offspring would arise from some of these unions. Even white males who owned no slaves could contribute to the problem by producing, with enslaved black women, children who would be born free, thus destroying a critical component of the master’s property right: the ability to capture the value of the “increase” when female slaves gave birth.
So the solution was Act XII passed into law in December of 1662:
Negro Womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother.
There. Problem solved. A master could screw the slave and know he wasn’t creating a free being with certain inalienable rights.
And speaking of inalienable rights endowed by, say, a Creator, lest anyone think the teachings of Christianity would trump the property rights of these all-important people, or that said people might have trouble sleeping at night, the burgesses took care of this problem as well. As explained in a footnote (yes, I read those, too), the solution was codified into Virginia law:
“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth, by charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by virtue of their baptisme be made ffree, it is enacted ... that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propogation of christianity by permitting ... slaves ... to be admitted to the sacrament.”
That was Act II, September 1667: An act declaring that the baptisme of slaves does not exempt them from bondage.
How nice of the masters to permit their slaves access to the teachings of Christ without risking their bondagehood.
The Virginia burgesses were truly exceptional Americans.
[NOTE: I’ll try to post chapter by chapter every couple of weeks or so, should anyone want to grab a copy of the book to read along and comment.]
Posted by poputonian on 01/14/09 at 03:52 PM • Permalink
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