The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
even when the father was white. Those laws were sharpened with laws that punished with banishment white women who had sex with black men.92 Such laws prevented the further development of a free biracial population; you would be either white and free or black and enslaved. Thus, slavery was slowly turned into the inherited racial slavery that became the cornerstone of the colonial, and then US, economy, North as well as South. Toward the end of his life, Bruen Radford might have begun to feel the effects of white privilege in addition to class and male privilege. By the time his son George was an adult, however, whiteness and white privilege would have been as natural to his identity as being male. Lives, mostly black, continue to be lost to maintain that wedge, which continues to enable the system of divide and rule that serves elite interests. The legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion is still with us.
THE LEGACY OF BACON’S REBELLION is still with us also in that it led to the next step in state formation. In the process of both laying to rest the rebellion and undermining the solidarity of the unfree and the poor, control of punishing became further centralized. As we saw earlier, back in X Radford’s day establishment of the court system in 1634 had, to some extent, taken control of punishment from neighbors who policed one another and from the church, and placed it in the hands of local elites who ran the courts and frequently defied the governor and council. There was a running battle between local elites and the regional elites who, with the governor, nominally governed the colony. With the takeover by the Crown in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, both lost power relative to the Crown. It is hardly surprising that war led to another step in state formation, with greater coercive power on the part of the state—we saw this effect after the events of 9/11.93 In Virginia, the governor-general, appointed by the king, would now be answerable only to the king, not to the elected legislature or to a council composed of other colonial elites, as governors had previously been. Virginia’s laws were now subject to royal approval or veto. The wealthy had to pay taxes. The Crown’s court, with Crown-appointed justices, gained greater jurisdiction—thus control of punishment was moved a bit further out of local elite hands.94
So long as slavery remained, poor whites and enslaved Africans stood little chance of uniting in revolt. Divide and rule worked, and the elite no longer feared a white uprising. But the enhanced control of the colony by the Crown and of the workforce by the elites came at a price—the shift from indenture to slavery meant an exponential increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Virginia, and with that shift came a new fear: slave revolt. Enslaved Africans were being imported after Bacon’s Rebellion in ever-increasing numbers, and the earlier ambiguities that somewhat mitigated African servitude had been legislated out of existence. As Governor Spotswood warned in 1710, “Freedom Wears a Cap which Can without a Tongue Call Together all Those who Long to Shake off The Fetters of Slavery and Such an Insurrection would surely be attended with Most Dreadfull Consequences.”95 And indeed, resistance and revolt among the enslaved was endemic.96
This was a new Virginia, one where whites, at least for a while, were no longer to be feared. Instead, the fear of black revolt and the use of black labor shaped all lives, white as well as black. And Indians, with military power and diplomatic skill, continued to limit white expansion and at the same time mediated, and fought in, the imperial struggles of competing European states. This was not the world of X or John Radford. Instead this was a world in which George Radford and Ann Massey, who became his wife, inherited privilege and where Alexander Davidson, marrying Sarah Ellis, eventually adopted it, owning Venis and Adam. So we turn to their story, the story of Venis and Adam and Davidsons, and the continuing struggle over punishment and dispossession.
CHAPTER 3
Ancestor Tales of Slavery, Slaving, and Women with Voice
FEB 13, 1748
… APPRAISED YE ESTATE OF ALEXANDER DAVIDSON:
As follows: Negro woman named Venis ..... 30.0.0
One Negro boy named Adam ...................... 25.0.0
Into the story now come two sets of people propelled to Virginia by the two elite uses of force in the pursuit of power and wealth: war and punishment.1 The first set were Africans, a “Negro woman named Venis” and a boy named Adam. Africans were captured in wars between rival kingdoms, wars defined by the Christian religious hierarchies and the English state as “just,” making it legally and religiously acceptable to sell those taken captive. Or, equally justified by African elites, they were taken to pay off debts, to punish misbehavior, or handed over as religious sacrifices.2 The second set now entering the story were Scottish Jacobites, including Alexander Davidson, “choosing” to be sold, also with the approval of Christian religious hierarchies and the English state, rather than risk execution as punishment for participation, willingly or not, in a war between elites contending for sovereignty. Alexander, Venis, and Adam were all unfree laborers, but unlike Venis and Adam, Alexander’s servitude was temporary, probably for seven years. He died eventually as the owner of the unfree laborers listed in the appraisal of his estate. His ownership gave him the freedom to punish; he was the recipient of the benefits of the now well-established racialized difference between indenture and slavery, between whites who could not be enslaved and Africans and Indians who could.3
So first, Venis and her life in Igboland; then, in chapter 4, Alexander and his flight from Scotland. Finally, in chapter 5, Sarah Ellis enters the story. Born in Virginia, she became Alexander’s wife, and so starts the intertwining of the stories, Igbo, Scottish, and English Virginian, free and enslaved in a slave society.
“VENIS,” A NAME TO WHICH SHE SURELY answered, but quite likely not her own. “Negro,” a well-honed legal identity by 1748 but quite likely not the one she was born with. “Woman,” another well-honed legal identity but quite likely carrying implications far different from those where she was born. Thirty pounds, a monetary value placing her worth above all else Alexander owned, higher than a boy’s, and many times that of the cattle she was appraised with at Alexander’s death. It is likely, according to statistical analysis, that, described as a “woman,” not a “girl” or a “wench,” or an “old woman” and valued at thirty pounds, she was somewhere between twenty and thirty years old at the time of the estate evaluation. Adam, as a “boy,” could have been anywhere between childhood and twenty years of age, but given his above-average evaluation for a “boy,” he was quite likely in his late teens.4 Venis could have been his mother … or not. Alexander died intestate, so there is not even a will that might have indicated the relationship between Venis and Adam and might have given clues to where she came from, or what was to happen to her after Alexander’s death. So that is all I know of her—a brief surfacing in a court record in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, but otherwise invisible, despite living a life every bit as real as that of those Radfords and Davidsons whose traces are far more visible.
What follows is therefore fiction, at least as far as the actual person is concerned who was identified as “Venis” by those who held her enslaved in Virginia. But what happened to nine and a half million people, including Venis, and what they themselves did, in Africa and in the Americas, is not fiction, and it is that story I want to tell about punishment and state formation and people’s lives.5 So I am briefly borrowing Venis to be the central character who carries us from her life as a very young woman in what is now Nigeria to becoming a human commodity in the hands of Aro traders from the southeastern edge of what is now called Igboland, where I am assuming she lived.6 Apparently deemed unsuitable for purchase into a wealthy Aro or Igbo household, she would have been sold to English traders on the coastal Bight of Biafra sometime around 1730 or a bit after.7 Eventually she found herself the property of Alexander, perhaps a gift or a purchase to relieve Sarah, Alexander’s wife, of the female outdoor physical labor that marked a white Virginia family’s lower-class status. The contrast between these two ways of life, that of the Igbo town and of the recently formed Spotsylvania County, must have been stark, despite the fact that people lived enslaved in both.
Obviously, I have just made an enormous leap, from a mere