Holly Brewer

In this chef d’oeuvre, Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.

The current historical consensus is that English common law was somewhat confused, but that coerced servitude was legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach, because it was “beyond the line” of English justice. The common law is characterized by an effort to see continuity and consistency, and historians (despite our natural desire to track change) often look for those patterns too. Such efforts to provide a consistent overview of an England that was free and colonies that created slavery on their own—have obscured the vibrant struggle over slavery within the English judicial system—the common law—over more than a century. Not only did the common law on slavery change profoundly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the common law became an instrument of crown policy. It did so within a federal empire, wherein colonial legal norms had to adhere, in crucial ways, to that common law. English high court judges thus p...

This essay focuses on how the religious debates circumscribed the legal relations between sovereign and subject and master and slave. I am particularly interested in how the debates over baptizing slaves connected to larger issues of sovereignty and power and hereditary status. Religious arguments could make the king divine, or the people; they could sanctify oaths of loyalty, or justify breaking them. They could define who was subject and who was slave; who had claims to many rights, or to little but obedience.  Varying principles of sin and obligation led to different constellations of power and inclusion. Debates over the status of subjects and the nature of sovereignty also had implications for slaves, who were sometimes defined as aliens because they could not swear oaths of allegiance. The paper focuses on a proposal in John Locke's 1698 plan for Virginia law reform wherein he suggested that the children of "negroes" should be "baptized, catechized, and bred Christians." It suggests that Locke intended thus to void the hereditary legal status of slavery and enable the children of slave mothers to gain access to the rights of English subjects. The arguments that Locke was contesting were those that held that sin and crimes could be hereditary, per the English law of attainder. The article concludes by suggesting that the American revolution built on a logic of more inclusive citizenship that did not need the religious element necessary to earlier English conceptions of the status of subjects.

In February 1751 the churchwardens of Frederick County, Virginia, bound Hester Ryan,a month-old infant,to the man her mother had declared to be her father—Joseph Roberts. Her mother of the same name was already indentured to Roberts. Hester was apprenticed to him in lieu of his providing a guarantee to the parish that he would reimburse them if they had to pay for her nursing and care in her first few years of life. The churchwardens bound Hester without her mother’s consent. Instead of custody of her daughter, Hester’s mother received 25 lashes on her bare back. While Roberts could have paid a fine to let Hester avoid that lashing, he refused to help. When she finished her indenture, she had to leave her daughter behind.1 In fact, the courts left few illegitimate children with their mothers or even with their fathers unless, like Roberts, they were masters themselves. Masters often assumed custody of the illegitimate children born to their servants. The vestry book of Frederick County also gives numerous examples of infant bastard children supported by unrelated families, and the court records reveal that illegitimate children were bound as apprentices at an average age of barely four (4.4) years during the 1750s. Children whose fathers died with little property, if their mother had no broader family to rely on,were also bound soon after their father’s deaths. “Poor”children,when their families turned to the county or vestry for relief, were quickly apprenticed, at an average age of 6.6 years during the same decade. All in all, 7.3 percent of all children were bound as apprentices in Frederick County during the 1750s, many at a very young age. 184 children bound to labor Apprenticeship in colonial Virginia, and especially in Frederick County, was both a way of accessing and controlling children’s labor, at the same time that it was the main welfare policy. While it was exploitative—indeed,in its treatment of the poor, it bears some resemblance to hereditary slavery—it was not simply the thirst for labor in early Virginia that shaped this institution. Taking apprenticeship seriously means taking hereditary status seriously in early Virginia.

In 1776 Jefferson said that the most important change he made to make Virginia laws more democratic was his bill to alter Virginia's inheritance law. His bill allowed for land and goods of those who died without a will to be equally divided among his or her children (with a life interest of part of the estate to a wife or husband) and the breaking of entails. Entails had locked a great portion of the land into hereditary descent by primogeniture: on the eve of the revolution about 3/4 of the land in Virginia's tidewater was locked into entails. Such restrictions were called "feudal" by contemporaries: It is especially interesting because Virginia laws allowed enslaved people and their progeny to be "attached" to estates. This article challenges received scholarship (pre-1997, when it appeared) to argue that what contemporaries called feudalism was alive and well in colonial Virginia and the revolution brought some radical reforms. What it meant for enslaved people was more complex, since they could afterwards be more easily sold and divided among the children of the testator.

IN October I776, three months after drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson began to amend Virginia's laws to con-form with the principles of the Revolution. Above all, Jefferson proposed to abolish entail, a legal institution that, once invoked, enforced primogeniture ...