The Internal Enemy

"During the early nineteenth century, Virginians thought of blacks in two radically different ways. On the one hand, masters often felt secure with, and even protective of, particular slaves well known to them. But when thinking of all slaves collectively, the Virginians imagined a dreaded 'internal enemy' who might, at any moment, rebel in a midnight massacre to butcher white men, women, and children in their beds."

So writes Alan Taylor in his informative if repetitive The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia 1772-1832, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year. Though the dates specified cover a sixty-year span, much of the book concerns the War of 1812, when Southerners (specifically those in the Chesapeake Bay area) were confounded by their slaves escaping to fight for the British.

"About 3,400 slaves fled from Maryland and Virginia to British ships during the War of 1812. After the War of 1812, most of the refugees resettled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Trinidad, while a few scattered throughout the global British Empire. In their new communities, the refugees confronted discrimination, but they achieved far more autonomy and material success than they had known as slaves in the Chesapeake."

One of the major themes of the book, which Taylor writes many different ways, is the basic hypocrisy of the American love of liberty: a people fighting a revolution for freedom kept thousands in servitude, simply because of their skin color. Whenever I've read books involving the U.S. versus some other foreign country, my natural jingoism has always had me root for the home team, but in this case I found myself delighted with scenes of Virginian plantation owners vexed by mass escapes of their chattel to British warships. It's almost a shame that the U.S. won the war (though they did so because the British tired of it, and were dealing with Napoleon at the same time.

In any event, these bon mots of hypocrisy are delicious to read: "Preferring to think of themselves as champions of liberty against British tyranny, Americans hated being cast instead as barbaric for their colonial practice of un-English slavery. Indeed, British imperialists derided their colonial critics as canting hypocrites who preached liberty while practicing slavery." Plantation owners cried foul over British warships excepting slaves, although when they were recompensed after the war they didn't want the slaves back, they wanted money.

And what should a psychologist make of a people who believe that slavery is good and true and right, only to be always worried that these same slaves will rise as one and murder masters in their bed? Deep down, it seems to me, they knew what they were doing was wrong, but rationalized the hell out of their crimes.

Of Taylor's discussion of the fear of slave revolt, it's amazing to see how little grounded it was. Only one insurrection, that of Nat Turner's in 1831, involved murder on a mass scale (100 killed), and he receives scant attention in this book. "Despite their bloodthirsty reputation as 'the internal enemy,' the enslaved bore their blows with remarkable restraint, rarely killing their tormentors. Between 1785 and 1831, the Virginia county courts convicted only 148 slaves of killing a white person; about three per year in a state with a white population in excess of 500,000. Far more often, slaves faced trial for arson or theft." One man was hung for stealing a pig.

Part of this fear was stoked by the revolution in Saint-Domingue, today known as Haiti. This boiled the blood of everyone in the South, not excluding our great champion of liberty, Thomas Jefferson. "His administration also sought to to isolate and impoverish the new republic of Haiti (the renamed Saint-Domingue), which he dreaded as a dangerous example to American slaves: 'The existence of a negro people in arms, occupying a country it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations.'"

There are some major ideas I was unaware of that the book discusses, such as the fierce animosity between the Federalists of New England and the Republicans of the South. The New England states contemplated secession. The Virginians were hopping mad they they were left with little defense along their shores, mainly because their fighting men were routed up north for a futile attempt to invade Canada.

I also found funny the hatred between Americans and British. Of course, the Revolution was still fresh in everyone's minds, but the British really hated their cousins. "British officers detested most Americans as greedy cheats, long on cunning but short on scruples. 'They will do anything for money,' a captain concluded." Things haven't changed much.

Most uplifting is the valor with which escaped slaves fought their liberators. Some British were skeptical, and were no different from Americans who thought them lazy and stupid. They won them over, though, and also benefited from their knowledge of the terrain. This would be repeated during the Civil War, when blacks fought for their own freedom.