The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
Radford arrives in the Chesapeake, the Powhatan are the dominant polity in that world, which they consider anything but new. They have been consolidating their power through the late 1500s and early 1600s, and now have a paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, whose reach and demands for tribute are becoming ever more extensive.
And, somewhere and sometime in Africa, war captives are sold, who, like that early Radford, would become some of the first non-Native people to enter the world of the Powhatan. Perhaps it was two of their descendants who are known, at least by whites, as Venis and Adam, and are held enslaved in the 1740s by that baby boy born in Dingwall, Scotland. More likely, however, they, or their parents or grandparents, arrived well after the first Africans at Jamestown. Africans arrived by ones and twos during the early years, and it wasn’t until after 1680 that they were brought and bought in large numbers. Statistically, Venis and Adam most likely arrived in the early to mid-eighteenth century. So they will enter this story after those early Radfords. And many years later, people who might be their descendants, Judah and Depha and eleven others, will enter the story, enslaved in the household of Alexander’s son.
Finally, there is Sarah Ellis, the last of the “founding generation” to enter these tales. She is a second- or third-generation English Virginian, born in 1717 in Christ Church Parish of Middlesex County. Most of her life is a bit of a mystery to me, hidden as it is, like that of most women, from official view under the “cover” of their husbands and fathers. Rules of coverture kept women, for the most part, off tax lists and out of the records of county court orders and of judicial proceedings. They are counted but nameless in early census documents. Regardless of whatever managerial power or influence they might have had in their own families and communities, it was mostly husbands and fathers and brothers who carried out public business. So, women don’t show up much in the records we can search today, making their lives even harder to document than the lives of men of that time. But what is clear is that Sarah later marries that baby born in Scotland, Alexander I, and that she bears a son, and dies in her mid-thirties. Alexander II, her son, marries and moves his family to North Carolina just before the Revolution, and then moves on to the Barrens of central Kentucky just after it became a state of the fledgling United States. Alexander I and Sarah Ellis are my seventh-generation grandparents; that first Radford is my eleventh-generation grandfather.
So it is these people and their descendants who will carry these ancestor tales—first Radfords, whom I will rudely abandon as soon as there are Davidsons to follow in Virginia. It was my father’s identification with Scotland, and my own curiosity about Davidson family mythology, that started this search, and that, rather than the story of the Radfords, is the track I will be following. But I will equally rudely abandon the Davidsons in the 1820s, just before my great-great-great-grandparents, Alexander II’s son Hezekiah and Eleanor Wilson Davidson, left Kentucky. The final chapter of this book, having left the ancestors, does a fast forward to the present, following the themes of these tales, so that the past can illuminate some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century.
I HAD HEARD ALL MY LIFE, growing up in Pennsylvania, that “we were abolitionists in Kentucky,” and that my ancestors had left Kentucky about when Lincoln did. There was also the story that my father’s great-uncle Ben Radford (the third of that name) had watched Abraham Lincoln playing horseshoes in Illinois when Lincoln was a young lawyer. It turns out that none of this is exactly true. It was Uncle Ben’s father-in-law who did the watching.2 Lincoln left Kentucky considerably before the Davidsons did. Were they abolitionists? Well, that question will take some unraveling when we get to Kentucky in these tales.
Ancestor tales had never impressed me much, and even when I moved to Kentucky myself, and even when I wrote Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky, an anthropological history focused on the two central Kentucky counties where I live and work, I continued to ignore that family history.3 Ignore is actually the wrong word; it never crossed my mind to wonder whether my family history had any relevance to the book I was writing. And I had at that time no idea that my Davidson ancestors had settled less than an hour’s drive from where I now live—Hezekiah and Eleanor had lived in my own county. Coincidence?!
The story I am weaving now is, in a sense, my attempt to place that family history within the context of the understandings of class and race—particularly whiteness—that I developed in my first book. This included what I thought of as my search for my “one black drop,” which I was sure must exist somewhere among all those European ancestors. I never found it, though it quite likely is there, given the flexibility in the early days of colonial Virginia of what we now call race.
But more important, my goal is to use that family history as a vehicle for talking about the right to use force, and how that relates to the formation of governmental structures called “states”—entities that claim and enforce a monopoly on the use of force to exercise punishment. For ultimately, the state must punish to be a state, and, bottom line, this is what states and the force they control are for—to protect the ability of the few to set people up so that they have little choice but to hand over to them the value of the work they do. The citizens of some states have fought, with some degree of success, to limit or mitigate exploitation, and as a result states have varied enormously in the degree of security they provide for those who cooperate. But ultimately all depend on their power to punish those who don’t.
Using family history to do this will be tricky. This will be a story partially constructed from known facts, and partially a story constructed from likelihoods—a fiction, but not a baseless fiction. I don’t know, for instance, that in 1607 or even in 1652, a Radford was seasick on a ship bound for Jamestown. I do know that many people on those boats were, and my Radford might well have been one of them.4 And though I can know little of the men, I know even less of the women, and less again of the enslaved, of Venis and Adam and the others listed in my ancestors’ inventories. So this will be a creative reconstruction, a tale that illustrates not really my family history, but the history of many families as forming states that claimed from them the right to punish.
This story will start with the people who were there first, and in whose hands rested the fate of the ancestral Radford, if he actually arrived early, and of the others who arrived to risk their lives to create wealth for the already wealthy investors of the Virginia Company—safe, for the most part, in England.5 In that early period of colonial encroachment, two corporate not-quite-states confronted each other as Powhatan aristocrats decided how to deal with the Virginia Company’s officers and vice versa, and as both attempted to spread their use of force beyond the confines of their own groups. Even as they pushed outward to absorb more land and people, however, that use of force was contested within each polity. Punishment was contested both by those who suffered from it and by those who wished to gain the right to punish—to rule—for themselves. To clarify, “polity” is a term I will use frequently because it indicates a political, resource-managing, self-governing entity but leaves its actual form of organization ambiguous, and thus is very useful in talking about the process of state formation.
The struggle over the use of force within the Virginia English polity had, by John Radford’s arrival in 1652, become central and would in twenty years lead to Bacon’s Rebellion, a class-based uprising in which exploited Africans and English workers joined together against the elites who exploited them. In the aftermath of that rebellion, the racial distinctions were legally constructed that eventually justified hereditary racial slavery for those who would be defined by African descent, and enabled continued poverty for many of the others, now defined as white. Thus, separated by race, they were not likely to join again in a class-based challenge to the elites’ right to exploit—a classic example of divide and conquer.
That racialized distinction would endure despite the fact that enslaved Africans and English indentured servants did much the same work and lived in comparable physical misery, both exploited by the planter elites. By Alexander’s time these distinctions set indentured people, including probably Alexander himself during his first years in Virginia, apart from enslaved people like Venis and Adam. While John Radford may well have been involved in Bacon’s Rebellion—most people in Virginia were—by the time Alexander Davidson arrived, the rights of free white men to own and punish the enslaved and to temporarily own and (within some limits)