The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
of royal government.”80 The king was now sovereign; it was evident that he, not Berkeley, determined who would live and who would die. The force required to back that sovereignty was evident in the presence of well over a thousand British military personnel garrisoned in Jamestown. Virginians did indeed notice the difference, especially when the commissioners followed the Crown’s instructions and held hearings to investigate and right the policies that had led to the revolt. The colonists largely preferred sovereignty held by a distant king to a sovereignty held by Berkeley’s exploitative cohorts. That is, most planters, including the elites who had supported Bacon, preferred the king’s sovereignty.81
What the poor and unfree thought is another matter. All free men, regardless of property ownership, had briefly had the right to vote as part of the laws passed by Nathaniel Bacon and the other new assemblymen elected during the rebellion. Once the rebellion was quashed and Berkeley was temporarily back in power, that law and others that leaned toward a leveling of inequality were all repealed. Those property requirements remained in place until well into the 1800s. In the mid-1700s, only about fifteen percent of the Virginia white population could vote, and in 1723, all Indians and all people with identified African ancestry, regardless of property, were disenfranchised.82
So the Crown succeeded in ending Berkeley’s relatively independent government of the colony, put down the rebellion, and denied most of the demands of the dispossessed. At the same time, it met some of the rebel leaders’ demands by making entrance into the governing elite more accessible to a wider range of white, property-owning men.83 Though the better-off had backed down, and even poorer planters—property owners and thus voters—were pacified, the threat of a workers’ revolt remained, as the frightened planters well knew. The Crown, having removed Berkeley, had instructed the Virginia elites that their system of labor control was inadequate—it would take an army to keep such desperate workers under control, and the Crown was not about to pay for even the troops still in Virginia.84 Even though the elite had been brought to heel and made to pay taxes like everyone else, supporting an army would require taxing even more heavily. Considering that planters, large and small, were already up in arms, this was hardly a viable option.
Since the state was not strong enough to turn the mass of laborers permanently into the extremely exploitable people the planters wanted without maintaining an army to prevent revolt, planters needed a different strategy to control their entire English, African, and Native workforce. Poor English must never again join with African workers in revolt, for that had been the true backbone of the most threatening aspect of Bacon’s Rebellion. Their solution was what makes Bacon’s Rebellion a watershed in American history, leaving a legacy that haunts the country today.85
THAT SOLUTION, THE STRATEGIES ADOPTED to prevent another rebellion, shifted Virginia from being a society with slaves, one in which only a few people were actually enslaved, to a slave society, one in which slavery was the central organizing principle of the social structure.86 The principal labor force, those most seriously exploited, would no longer be English—the state couldn’t compel their labor on a permanent basis without provoking revolt. The timing of this shift coincided with a changing attitude among England’s elites. For the colony’s first half-century its system of dependence on English labor worked. But by the 1660s or so the calculus was shifting. London elites now wanted to keep the poor as wageworkers in England. They began to claim that “only the poor can make wealth.” And “fewness of people is real poverty.”87 Sending the poor off to indenture in the colonies no longer made economic sense to England’s elites.
And an English workforce had a huge disadvantage as far as planters were concerned. Over the previous centuries, England’s working class, members of the polity, had won some rights, and they took those rights with them to the colonies. Meager though they were, they did limit the planters’ ability to exploit. English could be indentured, but not enslaved. Servants had the right to take planters to court for excessive cruelty or violation of contract, and occasionally the courts actually upheld their rights. Whatever rights Africans had gained in their polities of origin, however, did not apply in the colonies, so they were more exploitable.88 Armed and angry English colonists couldn’t be kept from appropriating land and attempting to keep them landless clearly was dangerous. The gradual invention of racialized chattel slavery of non-English Others became the answer to supplying labor in the context of a relatively weak state, a context we will come back to in several more of these ancestor tales.
To make this solution work, English workers had to learn to see themselves as totally, irreconcilably, different from other workers, a difference that could not be made to disappear by conversion to Christianity or by learning the English language and English ways, a permanent difference that would make joint cooperative action practically impossible. That difference was the contrived concept of race. Divide and rule requires a wedge with which to divide, and whiteness was invented to provide that wedge. That process created white privilege and whiteness itself as a separate identifiable category—though who was white, given several generations of mixture, was often dependent on having sufficient power to claim that English was the ancestry that counted. The shift meant that your most basic identity, along with gender, was that you were white, not English, not Christian. That new identity carried the advantage that it could exclude Christian Africans and also be expanded to include a wider range of Europeans, not just the English.
Divide and rule may well have been cheaper than maintaining a permanent army to control the labor force, but the punishment a weak elite needed to use when moving further toward state formation meant it was not cheap in terms of lives lost, as historian Lerone Bennett makes clear in describing the decades after the rebellion in both the South and the North (which, like the South, also depended on unfree black and white labor, though to a lesser degree):
The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white and to kill many blacks to keep them black. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass conditioning. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the road as warnings to black people and white people, and opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. Some rebels were branded; others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system.89
In the aftermath of the rebellion, legislation enhancing the already existing but often ambiguous legal differences between African and English, between slavery and indenture, accelerated dramatically. In the other North American colonies, laws surrounding slavery and racial differentiation gradually tightened as well. Those laws created the necessary difference between black and white.
In Virginia punishment for whites who ran away was worse if they ran with blacks than with whites, for instance. Interracial alliance and cooperation became dangerous, and whiteness became the wedge for dividing and ruling the entire labor force.90 Whiteness became a real material advantage. White privilege gave whites the illusion that they had something to gain from supporting the regime that provided their racial privilege—but at the cost of accepting their own lesser, but real, exploitation and continued class subservience.
The privilege was also real. Whites were free, or had the expectation of freedom after indenture. Since they couldn’t be enslaved, they were far less likely to be blackmailed into submission by threats to enslaved loved ones. They could whip blacks; they could testify against other whites in court. White servants could own possessions such as livestock, whereas slaves could have their possessions appropriated by their owners. White servants could take cases of mistreatment to court, and sometimes actually did. In 1675, land ownership was formally limited to whites. Whites could own guns, and were to receive a gun when they were freed. Gun ownership was thus a symbol of freedom as well as a symbol of racial distinction that denied blacks the possibility of membership in the racial fraternity of military manhood. Even free blacks were excluded from the militia in 1723.91
Laws like these and those that disenfranchised free people of color were gradually tightened to include anyone identified as being of African descent. New laws made slavery