WILLIAM FERNANDEZ HARDIN “This Unpleasant Business”

Slavery, Law, and the Pleasants Family in Post- Revolutionary Virginia

n 1799, the Virginia Court of Appeals decided the case of Pleasants v. Pleasants .1 John Marshall, future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme ICourt, persuaded the court to free more than 400 slaves according to the will of their deceased former master. It was the largest judicial manumission in American history, and yet it has received limited attention. 2 The case is often overlooked, it seems, because the facts are unique and the decision itself was not cited extensively. 3 In addition, the reasoning supporting the decision is extremely technical and complex, making it difficult to decipher. Judges and lawyers of late eighteenth-century Virginia did not, it must be observed, esteem brevity or clarity. The historical value of the Pleasants case, however, comes into view when it and the family dispute that drove the case are placed in a historical context. Presented in this manner, the Pleasants dispute demonstrates how the legal relationship between manumission and the law shaped the lives of Virginians at a pivotal period in the formation of American slavery. In 1790, Virginia was home to more slaves and slaveholders than any other state in the nation, and it would continue to be so through the 1860 census. After the Revolution, slaveholders in Virginia for the first time faced well-organ - ized politically savvy opponents who denied the legitimacy of slavery along moral, religious, and legal lines. Always a small minority of the white popu - lation, nonetheless, antislavery activists compelled slaveholders to justify their slaveholding in religion, morality, and law. Reconstructing the

William Fernandez Hardin, J.D., Ph.D., is a history teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee.

VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY VOL. 125 • NO. 3 212 • Virginia Magazine

Pleasants dispute provides a fresh insight into how lesser-known slavehold - ers in the post-Revolutionary period responded to the challenge of antislav - ery along these lines. In the dispute, larger forces—the law, antislavery, religion—helped to shape and define a generational debate over slavery at a critical moment in a critical place in the history of emancipations. That debate, spanning a number of years, forced the court to consider the nature of manumission and how it would function in the common law. The court would decide if manumission was the restoration of a natural right to freedom or the ultimate largesse, the gift of a benevolent slaveowner to a grateful slave.

THE DISPUTE BEGAN WITH the will of John Pleasants III, a wealthy slavehold - ing Quaker. His plantation, Curles Neck, sat on a marshy peninsula along the James River fifteen or so miles downriver from Richmond. The estate, it was said, abounded in “riches, negroes and grandeur.” 4 On a summer evening in 1771, John Pleasants collapsed in his hallway and died soon after. 5 Like many Virginia planters of the time, his wealth was in his slaves. Numbering 212, they were valued at £10,000; the total value of his estate, slaves included, was tabulated at £12,000. 6 Earlier that year, he had revised his will with the assistance of his eldest son, Robert—a committed abolition - ist, political activist, and religious elder in the Society of Friends (known as the Quakers). 7 After retiring from commerce, the elder Pleasants took an increasingly active role in the Society just as it was attempting to rid itself of slaveholding members. Father and son, in accordance with Quaker antislav - ery imperatives, drafted a will they hoped would free the slaves. There was one major problem: private manumission (the act of freeing of a slave) was illegal in colonial Virginia. Freedom would have to wait until the law changed. According to John Pleasants’s will, elderly slaves of his household—Joe Cooper, old Suckey, Fanny, old Robin, Carpenter Will, old Nat, old Cesar, and Aggy—were set at liberty to live with any of his children they chose and enjoy the “benefit of their [own] labour.” But the trustees of the estate were empowered to revoke their liberty. Freedom was often conditional under the will and contingent, in some cases, on continued economic productivity. Charles White and his sons, for example, were permitted to ply Virginia’s Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 213

waterways as a batteauxmen as long as White “proved honest” by remitting two-thirds of his earnings to the estate. 8 Other people were retained as quasi- servants under unique terms. 9 The vast majority of Pleasants’s slaves were, however, distributed by lots. Samuel Pleasants of Philadelphia, Robert’s brother, was assigned one-third. Jonathan Pleasants (Robert’s half-brother) and Robert himself each received the remaining thirds. All the slaves were bequeathed according to the following condition: “all of [the slaves] as I shall die possessed with shall be free if they choose it when they arrive to the age of thirty years, and the laws of the land will admit them to be set free with - out their being transported out of the country. I say all my slaves now born or hereafter to be born, whilst their mothers are in the service of me or my heirs, to be free at the age of thirty years as above mentioned, to be adjudged of by my trustees their age.” 10 The antislavery imperatives of the Quakers dovetailed in this case with Robert’s responsibility as executor of his father’s will. 11 That responsibility was doubled when his half-brother Jonathan died and left a similar, but more expansive, provision in his 1777 will. 12 But little could be done until manu - mission became legal. In 1782, the General Assembly, responding to Quaker petitions and political lobbying, did so. 13 Some in the Pleasants family immediately freed their bondsmen—most did not. 14 Robert Pleasants spent the next two decades trying to convince a lot of his kin to emancipate his father’s former slaves. The duty to emancipate was a straightforward issue for Robert Pleasants. By accepting custody of the slaves, family members had implicitly endorsed the beneficent purposes of the freedom provision. Slaveholding family members were, in this view, more like custodial guardians rather than slaveowners. 15 This line of reasoning appealed most strongly to heirs who inherited slaves directly under the will. But it found little traction among heirs who received title to slaves from secondary sources. For example, Jonathan Pleasants, Robert’s half-brother who died in 1776, stipulated that his one-third share of the slaves (received under the will of John Pleasants III) were to be divided among his own heirs under the same freedom provi - sion. And it is this group of subsidiary, often former Quaker, slaveholders that were the most resistant to emancipation and most active in responding to calls of emancipation with proslavery formulations. 214 • Virginia Magazine

Robert’s half-sister Mary “Molly” Pleasants is a good example. As a young girl she inherited approximately fifty slaves under her late brother Jonathan’s will. Her parents had died and Robert Pleasants was tasked with her upbringing. Fearing that she might fall prey to “some designing fellow,” he sent her to Philadelphia to live under the watchful care of her Quaker rel - atives. She soon met Charles Logan, the very sort of fellow Pleasants hoped she would avoid. 16 He was the high-born, low-achieving grandson of the esteemed colonial statesman, James Logan. 17 Molly’s fifty or so slaves, along with the land she inherited in Virginia, undoubtedly helped attract Logan’s attention. However, under pressure from Quaker family members and friends, the couple signed a written promise to free the slaves. 18 They, how - ever, reneged on that promise and moved to Virginia and Molly’s sizeable inheritance. Both were subsequently expelled by the Quakers for their con - duct. 19 Robert Pleasants demanded that they fulfill their promise to emanci - pate. 20 When they refused, he consulted Edmund Randolph, one of Virginia’s most respected lawyers, who concluded that the promise could not be legally enforced. Because the deed of emancipation was signed just moments before the wedding ceremony, the law supposed a groom in Logan’s position to be under “particular influences” that were deleterious to sound judgment. Nuptial bliss forestalled by a request to sign the deed, Randolph explained, may have put Logan under sufficient mental duress to negate his legal consent to the manumission. 21 Randolph also concluded that Logan did not possess the right to free Molly’s slaves because the marriage had not yet taken place when the promise was made. 22 Lastly, the promise would fail because Molly was “under age” and lacked the legal capacity to emancipate the slaves or to consent to their manumission. 23 It was a matter like the transfer of any other valuable property under common law. A slave’s humanity, according to Randolph, lacked relevance in a purely legal consid - eration of the matter. Pleasants was not dissuaded, however, but he was troubled. Logan, he suspected, was selling slaves out of state and was wait - ing for a “suitable opportunity” to sell many more. 24 Pleasants therefore enlisted the aid of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) to assist in the matter. 25 The PAS had previously assisted Pleasants in several other freedom cases, and he hoped its members could persuade Logan. 26 Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 215

Mentor and former law partner of John Marshall (1755 –1835), Edmund Ran- dolph (1753 –1813) represented the slaveholding defendants in the Pleasants case. He had returned to his Richmond law practice after resigning as George Washington’s (1732 –1799) secretary of state. ( Virginia Historical Societ y, 1858.5 )

Attempting to prevent him from selling any more slaves, the PAS pub - lished the wedding promise in the papers. 27 Interested buyers, it was thought, might shy away from purchasing slaves encumbered by a claim of freedom. 28 But beyond this measure, the PAS was hesitant to take further action. “We desire not to throw out unmeaning threats against Charles,” they wrote to Pleasants, “we wish not to injure him.” Perhaps it was hoped that Logan would eventually comply with the “advice of his Friends” and uphold his “solemn engagement” on his own accord. The PAS reassured Pleasants, nonetheless, that if “milder measures fail we shall be obliged to use the [Instrument] of the Law.” 29 Despite his suspicion that further conversations would fail, Pleasants nonetheless journeyed to Logan’s house in Powhatan County for a meeting. Logan remained defiant. 30 His intransigence was relayed to the PAS, which then contemplated legal action. 31 But, little came of the idea. PAS lawyers likely concluded that the wedding promise was not enforceable. Its involve - ment in the matter soon ceased. Not dissuaded, Pleasants sought the 216 • Virginia Magazine

opinion of other lawyers in Virginia. Petitioning the General Assembly directly was one recommendation. 32 If the petition were defeated, a lawyer informed him, it would not “in the smallest degree prejudice the right of the claimants [the slaves]” to file a future action. 33 Pleasants also consulted one of the “leading men” of the General Assembly (most likely Patrick Henry) who gave him some contrary advice. The legislator was convinced that it would be best if a suit was filed in a court of law first. If the case were defeat - ed or dismissed, then the “the assembly could with more propriety take it up.” 34 Pleasants knew from first-hand experience that legislative petitions could achieve results, but a petition would make the family dispute a polit - ical matter leading, perhaps, to an increased resistance to manumission. 35 A court case, on the other hand, would be expensive and could drag on for years. Pleasants decided, after some reflection, to petition the General Assembly in 1790. 36 He knew that his family would make “all the opposi - tion in their powers,” but he was convinced that there was a “fair prospect” of success. 37 Charles Logan and Samuel Pleasants, Jr. (“Sammy”), who was Robert’s nephew and former ward, filed a counter-petition. While on his deathbed, Sammy’s father asked Robert Pleasants to take custody of the young man and raise him as a Quaker. 38 Despite Robert’s efforts, Sammy left the Society of Friends and its abolitionist principles in his past. 39 When pressed by his uncle and ward to emancipate according to the will, Sammy argued that because it was probated in 1771, when manumission was illegal, its provisions were null and void. Accordingly, the slaves received by him and others were bequests unencumbered by any duty to manumit. After all these long years of undisturbed possession, Sammy claimed it was unjust to deprive him of his well-established property. Logan and Sammy also contended that emancipation would cause economic “ruin” for family members. 40 Such considerations as these, in their estimation, were best adjudicated in court because this was not a “proper Subject of Legislative interference.” 41 Denigrating emancipation more broadly, they claimed that it had given former slaves the “liberty of doing evil”; freedom was best delayed until some “general plan” was put forward that would transform the “habits of slavery” into those of useful citizens. At present, they concluded, “exemption from Labor” resulted in idleness and vagrancy among free Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 217

blacks. 42 Both petitions were sent to the Committee for the Courts of Justice for consideration. Robert Pleasants’s petition was rejected because it involved “private rights” best resolved by a court. Committee members avoided any consideration of the emancipation issue. 43 In 1791, Pleasants tried a differ - ent argument in a subsequent petition. 44 He contended that the heirs had accepted a quasi-contractual duty to emancipate and that holding the slaves contradicted “the express conditions” of the testators’ intent. Members of the committee did not agree. 45 Pleasants gave up the idea of petitioning the Assembly. Sammy and Logan were not the only relatives Pleasants aimed to per - suade. He focused on his own son, Robert, Jr., but his son had increasingly resisted Pleasants’s paternal guidance. When pressed to explain his decisions to his father, Robert, Jr., would respond, “I must think for myself.” 46 He stopped attending Quaker meetings, and as the American Revolution inten - sified, he flirted with the idea of military service to the great distress of his father. Ultimately, Robert, Jr., decided not to enlist, but the episode irrepara - bly damaged his relationship with his father. His subsequent marriage to the daughter of a prominent slaveholder exacerbated the tension. Elizabeth “Eliza” Randolph, Robert, Jr.’s wife, was the daughter of Thomas Mann Randolph, a wealthy slaveholder and former business associate of the fami - ly. 47 The elder Pleasants suspected that Eliza had aided and encouraged Robert, Jr., to leave Quakerism, and this resentment, in turn, may have pushed the elder Pleasants to criticize Eliza’s fitness as a mother. Robert, Jr., was often ill and, at times, near death, and the care and custody of the chil - dren was a recurring concern. “Make a will & leave one or more of thy dear Children to the Guardianship of some honest steady friend [a Quaker], who would be more likely to attend to their religious education,” the elder Pleasants counseled his son. Eliza could not, he declared, be trusted with his grandchildren’s spiritual welfare: “altho I love their Mother [Eliza], how grievous would it be to see my only surviving descendants brought up in the accustomed follies and vanities of a dissipated and Irreligious age.” 48 Eliza was aware of her father-in-law’s feeling, and it certainly hurt her, but she refused to suffer his accusations and insinuations without protest. In a heartfelt and moving letter to her father-in-law, Eliza comes across as an intelligent and spirited woman who is a reluctant, yet nonetheless con - 218 • Virginia Magazine

firmed, defender of slavery. 49 She wrote that after years of “endeavoring to please [Pleasants]” she was at this time as far from it as ever. But regret even - tually gave way to indignation. She chided Pleasants for his low opinion of irreligious women. According to Eliza, he believed that the “conscience of a Woman void of religion can easily be lulled to sleep, whenever she wishes to satisfy her Carnal inclinations.” Generally, Pleasants did indeed believe that religion elevated moral considerations from the din of individual desires. But she resisted Pleasants’s intimations that women were more susceptible to “carnal” inclinations, an idea she found patronizing. He was concerned that if his son should die, his grandchildren’s welfare could be endangered by a hasty, ill-conceived remarriage. She rejected his condescension: “I do not think my offspring will be injured from the irregularity of my conduct.” 50 Eliza then addressed the issue of parental custody and the pain Pleasants caused her: “I cannot get over Dear Father mentioning to you that my feel - ings are wounded in a most sensible manner at your wish to have my children taken from me should I survive their Father.” 51 He may have used the promise of an inheritance to try and steer the couple toward manumis - sion, but they rejected his offers: “Their poor Mother, not having the happy art to please will I do not doubt deprive them of their earthly patrimony[, but] if the almighty thinks fit to spare me, I will endeavor through his divine assistance to make amends for it—believe me, Dear Father.” Eliza also challenged her father-in-law’s religious and moral surety. 52 She wrote: “I should probably be without Religion . . . for what do we frequent public places of worship but to set an example to others?” Religion, to this daughter of Virginia aristocracy, was a social duty and not a personal engage - ment. 53 Furthermore, the idea that adherence to a “discipline,” a set of arbitrary rules by which God should be worshipped, struck Eliza as unap - pealing: “Can I possibly suppose the supreme judge of all, so capricious a being, that unless I serve him in a particular manner, he will think me unworthy his attentions? Can I be so vile that a secret prayer put up to the Merciful Creator will not find admittance?” 54 Eliza countered Pleasants’s denunciations of her slaveholding conduct by skillfully weaving strands of humanitarianism, practicality, and religion. Slavery in this way exacerbated preexisting tensions within the family. Eliza chose her words carefully when Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 219

she utilized aspects of the Golden Rule, the bedrock principle of Quaker moral decision making, as a defense of slavery: To do as we would be done by is certainly a very great virtue and pleads more forcibly against slavery than anything I can hear from others—but experience has taught me, setting aside all interested motives, that the situation of the Negro, brought up in slavery, and ignorance, is far more eligible under the direction of a good Master than sat at large in the World—without principle or industry which is the case with nine out of ten. 55 The Golden Rule, she implied, justified the continued enslavement of black people because they could thrive only under white supervision. In con - trast to Pleasants’s optimistic vision of emancipation, she believed that it would only further increase the troubles of her slaves. She resigned herself to the present intractability of slavery in Virginia. Thus she wrote: “nothing is left for me to do but to make the lives of those that custom has put in my power, as happy as I can when the Work is ripe for execution, my heart will not be hardened.” 56 Eliza assumed a passive posture in regard to emancipa - tion; she saw it as something external to her influence whereas Pleasants saw himself as possessing the ability to effect change. Robert, Jr., died a few years later of tuberculosis. 57 Whatever enmity had developed between Eliza and Robert Pleasants, Sr., it was painfully resolved in their shared loss and in the shared responsibility of caring for her three young daughters. Not long after her husband’s death, Eliza also contracted the dreaded disease. Pleasants dutifully traveled to his daughter-in-law’s bed - side. The father-in-law she could never please sat next to her as she lay dying and spoke kindly to her. 58 Robert Pleasants, as we have seen, deftly wove together law, morality, and religion his efforts to persuade family and neighbors to manumit. His efforts did not go unnoticed among the enslaved. As the dispute metastasized, slaves pushed themselves into the discussion forcing Pleasants and family members to consider their voices. 59 In the year following the manumission act, Miriam Hunnicutt Pleasants, the widow of John Pleasants III, had promised some of her slaves freedom. Although she subsequently freed several individuals, Miriam’s later conduct belies any notion that she favored a general emanci - pation. She supposedly freed a man named James, but the manumission was not registered with the county court. 60 James’s right to freedom, therefore, 220 • Virginia Magazine

lacked legal recognition. Using this to her advantage, Miriam re-enslaved him. Her sons kidnapped James and took him back to their plantation. When he protested his imprisonment, they beat him. But James understood the dynamics at play within the family and used that knowledge to aid his situation. Having heard of Robert Pleasants and his antislavery activism, James contacted him for assistance. Upon hearing James’s report, Pleasants confronted Miriam’s sons. 61 When they reported it to Miriam, she demanded an explanation from Pleasants. “I believe my conduct,” he replied, “hath clearly manifested a belief that Negroes are as much entitled to freedom as myself” and so he would not stand idle in the matter. The re-enslavement of James, he charged, was “very inconsistent with thy public declarations and Solemn Act under hand & Sealed duly acknowledged.” 62 Miriam’s conduct violated the natural law principle that held, according to Pleasants, that manumission irrevoca - bly transformed a slave into a person with full legal personality. 63 Absent her cooperation, there was little he could do. He lacked standing to initiate a suit on James’s behalf, therefore he tried to convince Miriam to release James using biblical analogies. 64 Jeremiah had castigated his fellow Judeans for re-enslaving their former slaves; speaking with the Lord’s voice he thundered: “Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim a lib - erty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.” Pleasants’s biblical allusion was two-fold: Miriam’s actions put her salvation in jeopardy; and the actions of those like her put the country’s future in jeopardy as well. The Revolution, according to Pleasants, signaled a new covenant with God that required emancipation as one of its terms. Beyond such appeals, Pleasants could do little more. Other slaves, who rec - ognized a right to freedom in the wills of John and Jonathan Pleasants, took more direct action. Running away at critical moments, they forced family members to countenance the slave’s clear desire for freedom. Finding refuge among the small free black populations of southeast Virginia, they remained linked to enslaved populations by kinship, necessity, and proximity. The manumission act helped stoke a growing free black population, thus provid - Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 221

ing spaces where former slaves could remake themselves into free men and women without sundering personal and familial relationships. The Pleasants heirs placed ads in the paper seeking the capture of escaped slaves. 65 In 1785, Miriam advertised for the return of Thornton, “a likely black fellow.” She believed he was in Robert Pleasants’s neighborhood working the “river business” as a free man. 66 She also searched for Jacob, an eighteen-year-old slave last seen in the city of Richmond, where a free black population was growing. If Jacob was not in Richmond, she also suspected he might be in Pleasants’s neighborhood living as a free man. 67 Petersburg, home to another burgeoning free community, was a second possibility. 68 She also believed that the two men, if they undertook to leave Virginia, would do so by boat. Therefore, she warned local captains and shipmasters not to employ either man. 69 Although she re-enslaved James and sought the return of Jacob and Thornton, Miriam, nevertheless, did free three slaves, writing that “freedom is the Natural right all mankind” in the deeds of emancipa - tion she signed. 70 These emancipations, clearly, did not signal a renunciation of slaveholding in general. Miriam was not the only Pleasants family member whose mastery was challenged by the enslaved. Charles Logan, when he arrived in Virginia, was wholly inexperienced with slavery. In December of 1784, John Gray (as Logan called the young man) or Jack as he called himself, ran away from Logan’s plantation. 71 Jack, according to Logan, possessed an “impudent countenance” and a “sulky disposition.” He disobeyed commands, drank liquor, and gambled unrepentantly. 72 Jack, like Thornton and Jacob, took a variety of clothes with him and intended to pass as a free man. Like the others, it was assumed that he would make for the James River to find employment. Like Miriam, Logan warned local ship captains that hiring Jack could be perilous. Following Logan’s death in 1795, an advertisement appeared in the Virginia Gazette, and Richmond Advertiser seeking informa - tion or the capture of a pair of runaway slaves formerly of Logan’s estate: Joe was a nineteen-year-old man wearing the dull clothes of a field hand; his companion, Sam, was a red haired mulatto man and an excellent cooper. 73 Sam, it was supposed, planned to pass himself off as a free laborer and crafts - man. Adept at a valuable, in-demand trade, he would have found a lot of work but lower wages than his white peers. Joe, as a former field hand lack - 222 • Virginia Magazine

ing knowledge of a skilled trade, may have found life more difficult. In the short term, the clothes they took with them could also be sold for cash or be used to help reshape their identities. As we have seen, Logan, Sammy, Miriam, and Robert, Jr., and Eliza, defended slaveholding vigorously and sought the return of runaway slaves. Other members of the Pleasants family displayed varying degrees of commit - ment to slaveholding. The elderly Thomas Pleasants, Jr., of Goochland County (Robert’s Uncle Thomas) freed slaves he believed he was personally compelled to by the terms of the will (and loyalty to his brother’s memory) but supported his wife’s decision not to emancipate slaves she inherited under the same provision. 74 Elizabeth Langley, Robert Pleasants’s sister, received a number of slaves from her husband, who had inherited from John Pleasants III as well. Langley’s refusal to emancipate them opened emo - tional rifts between the two siblings. 75 The dispute also poisoned family gatherings. 76 And it spread to the next generation of the family. Langley’s daughters married non-Quakers who had no qualms or moral reservations concerning slavery. 77 All three couples held inherited slaves from the Pleasants’s estate. When one of the daughters died, her husband received nineteen people, and he subsequently refused to free them. 78 Elizabeth the younger, the second of the trio, and her husband received six slaves under the will. They also refused to manumit. Peggy, the third niece, married a non-Quaker who likewise refused to emancipate. These refusals wounded Robert Pleasants, but it was his nephew Sammy’s obstinacy that disappoint - ed him more. Sammy Pleasants, much to his uncle’s disappointment, held scores of slaves that should have been freed by the will. 79 By 1799, he claimed 189. 80 The next largest slaveholder was Mary “Molly” Logan, who, like Sammy, had inherited slaves from both wills. While the estate of her deceased hus - band, Charles Logan, was being settled, Molly married a distant relative named Robert Cary Pleasants. Thus, on the eve of litigation, Robert Cary, as Molly’s husband, claimed 160 slaves under the wills. 81 Molly held posses - sion, in her own right, to twelve more slaves. 82 Isaac W. Pleasants, like Robert Cary, was also named a defendant on account of his wife, Jane, who claimed ten of the disputed slaves. 83 Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 223

By 1797, it was clear to Robert Pleasants that legal action was the only remaining way to force the issue. Funding a lawsuit, however, was a concern. 84 He considered representing the slaves himself as a cost-saving measure, but he concluded that it would be “utterly out of my power” and would do a “great injustice” to the slave’s prospects for freedom. He also con - sidered, but ultimately rejected, asking his brother Samuel for a loan. 85 Nonetheless, Pleasants somehow secured the resources to hire an attorney— a local lawyer of good reputation that Pleasants had retained in the past. John Marshall, the future Supreme Court Justice, most likely represented Pleasants in his chancery suit and certainly litigated the case before the Virginia Court of Appeals. 86 The intent of the wills was clear enough—freedom for the slaves when the laws would permit it. If the right to freedom was treated like an option on a gift then the rule against perpetuities might apply. The rule limited the amount of time that a contingent property interest, like a conditional gift, would remain enforceable in court. 87 With these issues in mind, Marshall and Pleasants filed suit in the High Court of Chancery. 88 As a court of equity, it was more concerned with providing just remedies than simply assigning payment of damages. Marshall most likely shepherded the case through the evidence gathering phase of the chancery process in the spring of 1797 and then left for France in June on a diplomatic mission (the infamous XYZ affair). Before he departed, he asked that the slaves be turned over to Robert Pleasants “in trust” for the purpose of fulfilling the wills. 89 The court of chancery investi - gated the facts in Marshall’s absence and issued its decision in September of 1798. 90 George Wythe, the chancellor deciding the case, was a well-known opponent of slavery. 91 Emancipation, for Wythe, was the restoration of nat - ural equality because slavery lacked any foundation in natural law—slavery was, to him, purely a statutory condition. 92 Wythe therefore focused on three main questions: Did Robert Pleasants have standing to bring his suit? Did the Manumission Act of 1782 make enforceable the freedom provisions of the wills? And finally, did the rule against perpetuities apply to the freedom provision in order to limit a bequest of liberty? 93 On Pleasants’s standing to sue, Wythe ruled that the will functioned as a trust intended to benefit the enslaved. Robert Pleasants was the trustee and 224 • Virginia Magazine

John Marshall represented Robert Pleasants in the case of Pleasants v. Pleasants . At the time of the decision, Marshall was one the most respected lit - igators of the Richmond bar. ( Virginia Historical Society, 1988.8 )

could bring suit to enforce the freedom provisions. Enforcing a trust was squarely within the jurisdiction of his equity court. 94 Concerning the man - umission act of 1782, the chancellor ruled that it restored a slave’s “natural right to freedom” and thus was firmly anchored in natural law. 95 But could the act, which passed after the wills were written (1771 and 1777), effectu - ate the freedom provisions? Yes, because the freedom provisions required manumission only when it was legal to do so—legalization of manumission was the exact contingency stipulated by the wills. Therefore, neither provi - sion required the performance of an illegal action. The wills were good in this regard. But how should a judge conceive of manumission? If it were regarded as a conditional gift of property, then might the common law rules governing conditional gifts apply? Wythe thought legal doctrines governing the inter-generational transfer of property rights had little applicability in cases where “human liberty is challenged.” Freedom could only be enjoyed while one was alive. 96 Wythe, therefore, ruled in favor of the enslaved and Robert Pleasants. Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 225

In addition to being the sole chan - cellor of Virginia’s Court of Chancery, George Wythe (1726 – 1806) was also America’s first law professor and taught Thomas Jeffer- son (1743 –1826), John Marshall, and Spencer Roane (1762 –1822) among others. Like Robert Pleas- ants, Wythe also freed his slaves. (Virginia Historical Society, 2003. 437 )

After finding in favor of the plaintiffs, he ordered his staff to prepare a “catalogue” listing the date upon which individuals should be released from slavery. The defendants were also ordered to pay reparations. Because the former slaves had labored for the Pleasants when they should have been set free, Wythe reasoned that they were entitled to the benefit of their labor. They were to be paid lost wages for each year unlawfully detained since 1782. If the precedent for reparations stood, it would have encouraged slave masters to manumit slaves where title to the slave was in dispute or hard to prove. As it stood, a slaveowner who kept a person illegally detained for years would suffer no penalty except for the loss of that slave. It made more sense, economically, for a slave master to keep a slave even if the slave had a right to freedom. On 16 September 1798, the defendants filed an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals—the highest tribunal in the commonwealth. 97 Spencer Roane and the other justices of the court confronted a difficult dilemma: 226 • Virginia Magazine

they had to reconcile the traditional liberty of a property owner to dispose of his estate as he saw fit, in the context of slavery, with common law prop - erty rules developed for landed estates. 98 The judges recognized that Wythe’s ruling had the potential to deprive slaveowners of their indemnity for wrongful enslavement, and yet, the intention of the will was clear; judges were supposed to defer to the intent of a testator within reason. It would not be an easy decision and both sides prepared for the appeal. Edmund Randolph and John Wickham, two of the best litigators in Virginia, were retained by the family. 99 Robert Pleasants had consulted Randolph previous - ly in 1788 on the question of Molly and Logan’s prenuptial pledge. 100 Randolph was, by most accounts, an accomplished lawyer and able politi - cian. 101 Wickham, the other attorney on the team, had made a fortune as a trial lawyer. 102 Each side was ably represented by the elite of the Virginia bar. Marshall began by reminding the judges that people, not tracts of land, were at the heart of this case. If the common law of estates were to be uti - lized to decide the matter, then the law had to be applied with discretion and flexibility. Strict application of the rule against perpetuities, developed as it was to limit feudal estates, was unreasonably doctrinaire according to Marshall. Unlike landed property, which passed from one generation to the next, freedom expired with the death of the individual who held it. It was a unique benefit that expired with the death of each person under the will. Wickham, in response, claimed that Wythe’s decree did not adhere to the testators’ intention to “erect the slaves into a distinct kind of property”— service until thirty and freedom after. 103 Doing so, he noted, would create “a new species of property subject to rules unknown to the law” and no man can create new forms of property, thus the provision was unenforceable. 104 His argument missed the fact that adjudicating slavery using the common law was, in effect, creating a new species of property within the law. The only way that a slaveowner can manumit his slaves in Virginia, according to Wickham, was through rigid adherence to the terms of the statute; “there - fore,” he explained, “any case which is not strictly within the terms of the act of 1782 will come within the operation of that of 1748.” 105 Marshall, follow - ing Wythe’s ruling, retorted that the manumission act was based in natural law and therefore superseded any previous statutes. Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 227

After hearing arguments, the Court delivered its rulings in three separate opinions on 6 May 1799. 106 The first issue was whether the rule against per - petuities applied to the bequest. All of the judges agreed that it did not prevent enforcement of the freedom provision. Judge Spencer Roane thought that because the rule was formulated in response to “considerations of public policy” and shaped by concerns of “judicial convenience” applica - tion was in the discretion of the presiding judge, and he refused to apply it in the Pleasants case. 107 Even if the rule could be applied to manumission, the bequest was still good. The gift of freedom could only be enjoyed by each individual person during his or her own life; if a manumission act did not pass during a slave’s life the gift was extinguished with his death. 108 Judge Edmund Pendleton concurred with Roane that it would be “too rigid” to apply the rule in this case. Paul Carrington, the third opinion writer, also agreed. Thus the Court held that all the slaves devised under the wills of John Pleasants III and Jonathan Pleasants, who were held by the family in 1782, and were more than thirty years of age were to be set free. Those held as slaves in 1782, but not thirty years old, were free when they turned that age. But the judges disagreed on the issue of persons born to mothers who held a right to freedom but who were under thirty when they had a child. Would the child be enslaved until thirty years of age as well? The clause was void, Roane decided, because it attempted to “detain in slavery, persons that are born free.” 109 Because the mothers already possessed a determinable right to freedom, their children were not born in slavery per se and could not be held to a prenatal labor contract. The other judges dis - agreed. The requirement to serve until thirty—and the “hereafter” clause— was founded, in Judge Pendleton’s estimation, upon “a consideration of the interest of his family and that of the slaves.” Carrington agreed and found “no difficulty” in determining the intention of the testators. The testators intended to free their slaves just after their own deaths, but the law stood in their way, and so they made “temporary devises” to friends and family with the freedom provision attached requiring service until thirty as an off-set to “the trouble and expense of taking care of the aged or infirm, and rearing the children.” 110 The Court held that the children born under the “hereafter” clause were, in effect, indentured servants from birth. 228 • Virginia Magazine

On the issue of reparations, the judges were unanimous. Roane feared that the threat of repartitions might induce slaveholders to manumit slaves they “rightfully held.” The ruling, if it stood, would have forced masters to consider not only the loss of economic value of the slave or slaves in a free - dom suit but also the potential costs of remuneration for the slaves’ lost “profits.” It had the potential to alter drastically the calculus of manumis - sion, and it was this aspect of the Wythe’s ruling that most troubled Roane: “There is yet one part of the Chancellor’s decree,” he lamented, “which I could have wished had not been made.” 111 There was not one instance, Roane remarked, “among a thousand cases of palpable violations of free - dom,” of a court awarding a person “profits” upon “recovering his liberty.” Freedom was so valuable that privations of liberty could not be recompensed by the mere “power of money.” Because the Pleasants family had supported “all the children born of the female negroes” since 1782, Roane held that the family had already contributed monetarily to the slave’s welfare. It was, in his mind, “not an unreasonable set-off” against any future profits owed to those illegally enslaved. 112 Carrington was likewise troubled by Wythe’s unprece - dented “decree for profits.” He believed that “reductions for the trouble and expense of taking care of the aged and infirm” as well as the cost of rearing of the children nearly offset the profits earned and would yield “very little.” The claim for reparations was legally speaking, de minimis .113 Pendleton decided that an accounting of lost profits would be “unusual” in such cases and “less reasonable in this very difficult one.” 114 He would not support any claim for repayment for lost profits. And so, after eighteen years, the 215 original slaves had doubled to 431. Of these, 185 were to be emancipated immediately by the terms of decision; the other 246 would serve until thirty years of age as would their children, if they were born before their mother reached the age of thirty. 115 None of them would receive any finan - cial recompense for their illegal enslavement. They were on their own. Few records survive illuminating how they fared, but there are some remaining fragments in the historical record. Mourning Logan was a former slave freed by the Pleasants decision. Previously owned by Charles and Molly Logan, she retained their last name, became a tenant farmer, and saved enough money to buy her own forty-two acres of land near Chesterfield, Virginia, where she raised a family and kept Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 229

some horses. She owned a couple of slaves at some point, but the circum - stances surrounding her ownership are unknown. It was not uncommon for former slaves and free blacks to purchase slaves in order to set them free or facilitate freedom at some later date. 116 When Mourning died in 1832, she passed the land on to her grandchildren. 117 Whatever their particular situa - tions, enslaved people putatively set free by the ruling surely faced many challenges achieving that freedom in antebellum Virginia. If an owner was disinclined to manumit (a very distinct possibility), a person’s only recourse was to file an action in the county court—no easy task if one were enslaved and illiterate. Some of the enslaved, however, decided to free themselves. Simon and Gaby, upon learning of the decision ran away, intending to pass as “a part of the negroes that obtained their freedom under the will of John Pleasants.” 118 The pair’s former master was none other than Miriam Pleasants, John Pleasants’s third wife and the one-time antagonist of Robert Pleasants. The decision, in this example, created a small pocket of uncertainty, a place where whites could not assume that every black person was a slave. It was this uncertainty that the runaways hoped to exploit; they were not the only ones either. In 1809, Sammy Pleasants offered a reward of fifteen dollars for “Fanny, a bright Mulatto Girl” who was “one of those entitled to liberty” under the ruling. Born in 1792, she refused to wait for her scheduled man - umission in 1822 and perhaps ran away to Petersburg, Curles Neck, or Richmond, areas home to scores of former slaves of the Pleasants family. Back on his plantation, Sammy complained that the decision had made some of his bondsmen “very ungovernable” as many of their friends and rela - tions had been set free by the decision. 119 Proximity to freedom, it seems, emboldened them. Two years after Fanny left, Sammy died, and some of his former slaves, on account of the Pleasants decision, were freed as well. 120 Following manumission, freed slaves were supposed to leave the state with - in one year, but the law was often ignored, evaded, and only haphazardly enforced. The risk of re-enslavement, however, loomed heavily as a potential penalty. About a year after the decision, Robert Pleasants died at the age of sev - enty-nine. 121 In his will, he tried to mend fences and settle outstanding debts. 122 Pleasants’s major concern, however, was with his former slaves, and 230 • Virginia Magazine

he assumed responsibility of supporting those too old to work. For the young folks, he instructed his heirs to build a school: I have had a school house built on my land called Gravely Hills Tract containing by estimation 350 acres, the use and profits whereof I give to that use forever, or so long, as the monthly meeting of friends in this County may think it useful, for the bene - fit of the Children and descendants of who have been Emancipated by me, or other black Children whom they may think proper to admit. 123 A small group of tenants already resided at the property. During the tur - bulence of the war years, Pleasants freed a number of his father’s former slaves and settled them there. Years later, new arrivals joined the original set - tlers. They had been granted life-estates under Robert Pleasants’s will to use the property. 124 Quakers in the neighborhood assisted in supervision of the school. They hired a teacher, bought books, and helped keep it running for more than twenty years. 125 In 1808, the local Quaker meeting reported that the surrounding black community was contributing to the payment of the school’s expenses and that a small tuition was collected from the attending students. In 1811, the school closed for a year but soon reopened. In 1819, the General Assembly declared that all schools for blacks, whether free or enslaved, were unlawful assemblies. 126 Despite the law, the school continued to operate. In 1823, it received a grant of funds from the Quaker Yearly Meeting in London, enabling it to remain open. 127 But at some point after 1824, the local monthly meeting no longer had the resources, financial and administrative, to continue operating the school. 128 Squeezed by finances, prejudice, and the law, the school finally ceased all operations. The Quaker population of tidewater Virginia had dwindled. Meeting houses that had been established in the late seventeenth century were collapsing into ruins. Friends were moving west to escape slavery. 129 Those who remained did not campaign for emancipation, choosing instead to accommodate slavery with silence and inaction. 130 Historian David Brion Davis notes that domestic antislavery sentiment, however weak in the post-Revolutionary period, compelled the South to “test the limits of dissent and to resolve a moral challenge by assimilating and transmuting it” thereby laying the groundwork for antebellum proslavery thought. 131 Religious and moral idealism were eventually co-opted and refashioned into a form of “Christian trusteeship,” a form of proslavery Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 231

paternalism grounded in notions of Christian duty and racial prejudice. The Pleasants dispute demonstrates that a similar process occurred in law during the post-Revolutionary period; legal challenges, originating in domestic society, were assimilated by the judicial system to the ultimate benefit of slaveholders. The manumission act of 1782 was interpreted by the court as an extension of the property rights of slaveholders while reparations for unlawful enslavement were rejected as impractical and unwarranted. The emerging law of slavery accommodated libertarian property rights advocat - ed by antislavery activists while protecting a slaveholder’s immunity from damages for unlawful enslavement. Virginia’s transformation from the cradle of liberty to the intellectual and demographic center of the slave South is not simply a story of John Marshall, George Wythe, and the intellectual giants who argued and decided such cases as Pleasants v. Pleasants . It is also the story of lesser-known people who shaped that transformation in the places where the vast majority of debates over slavery and emancipation usually took place—outside the courtroom; among friends, neighbors, and family; and between people who called themselves masters and the men, women, and children they claimed as their property.
232 • Virginia Magazine

NOTES

The author wishes to acknowledge the support of Vanderbilt University, the Folger Institute, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, and the Virginia Historical Society. Their support made research for this article possible. In addition, many thanks to Dan Sharfstein and Richard Blackett, as well as those anonymous readers whose many suggestions greatly improved this article. 1. Pleasants v. Pleasants , 2 Call. 319 (1800). 2. Annotations of the lengthy and complex decision, along with editorial commentary, are pre - sented in Charles F. Hobson et al., eds., The Papers of John Marshall (12 vols.; Chapel Hill, 1974– ), 5:541–49 (cited hereafter as Papers of John Marshall ); Paul Finkelman, The Law of Freedom and Bondage: a Casebook (New York,1986), 116–23. The story before the trial held some interest for historian James Kettner, but his focus was mainly on the ruling itself. He saw a fundamental ten - sion in the case that pitted property against liberty and saw the court’s decision resulting from “two powerful ideological forces”—religion and political ideology—in “Persons or Property?: The Pleasants Slaves in the Virginia Courts, 1792–1799,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Launching the ‘Extended Republic’: the Federalist Era (Charlottesville, 1996). Legal scholar Robert M. Cover discussed the case in relation to issue of legal standing to bring suit in “For James Wm. Moore: Some Reflections on a Reading of the Rules,” Yale Law Journal 84 (1975): 718. Cover also used the case to explore the issue of judicial construction of freedom statutes in his book Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975), 67, 69, 205. Thomas D. Morris mentions the case in the context of a broader discussion of manumission and testamentary provi - sions in Southern Slavery and the Law 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 404–6, 408–9, 416, 419–21. Legal scholar Timothy Sandefur concentrates on the formal reasoning of the case in “Why The Rule Against Perpetuities Mattered in Pleasants v. Pleasants ,” Real Property Probate and Trust Journal 40 (2006): 667. Finally, chapter six of my dissertation, “Litigating the Lash: Quaker Emancipator Robert Pleasants, the Law of Slavery, and the Meaning of Manumission in Revolutionary and Early National Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2013), examines the ruling in some detail. 3. Historian Eva Sheppard Wolf asserted that the decision had little impact on southern socie - ty or law (Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion [Baton Rouge, 2006], 153–54, 156). 4. Benjamin Ferris, “Of the Life and Travels of Benjamin Ferris, Son of David Ferris, of Wilmington, Delaware,” Friends Miscellany 12 (1839): 254. 5. For John Pleasants’s death, see William Rind, “Personal Notices from the Virginia Gazette,” William and Mary Quarterly (cited hereafter as WMQ ), 1st ser., 8 (1899): 190. 6. Robert Pleasants, in a letter to his brother Samuel, noted that his late father’s estate was val - ued at “£12, 143.11 of which £9, 722.10 are Negroes” (Robert Pleasants [cited hereafter as RP] to Samuel Pleasants, 28 Aug. 1773 in Letterbook of Robert Pleasants, Vol. 4, in “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845, Transcribed from the Original Records Held by the Orthodox Friends, Baltimore, Maryland,” Valentine Richmond History Center, Richmond (cited hereafter as Letterbook). Historian Robert McColley observed that “almost always, where a Virginian was wealthy, most his wealth was contained in the value of his slaves” (Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia [1964; Urbana, Ill., 1974], 79). Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 233

7. John Pleasants’s will has been transcribed in Edward Pleasants Valentine and Clayton Torrence, eds., The Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers, Abstracts of Records in the Local and General Archives of Virginia Relating to the Families of Allen, Bacon, Ballard, Batchelder, Blouet, Brassieur (Brashear) . . . (Richmond, 1927), 1117. For Robert Pleasants generally, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975; New York, 1999), 196–98. 8. Batteuax were long flat bottomed boats generally worked by crews of three that transported hogsheads of tobacco and other goods along Virginia’s rivers and runs (see Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York, 2004), 151–55. 9. Phil, for instance, was to be paid 4 percent annually over and above his expenses and could choose to live with Pleasants’s former wife or any of his other children. 10. Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1117. 11. Robert Pleasants, as part of a general antislavery campaign, sought to repeal the ban on pri - vate manumission. In 1770, Pleasants wrote Col. Richard Bland asking him to submit a manumis - sion bill to the House of Burgesses. The bill was ultimately defeated (see RP to James Pemberton, 30 Sept. 1785, Letterbook. See also, RP to Col. Richard Bland, 3 Mar. 1770, ibid. 12. Jonathan Pleasants’s will declared that “all mankind have an undoubted right to freedom.” His will also provided for their education so that they may “enjoy the full benefit of their labor.” The ultimate goal was to prepare his former slaves for freedom so that they could enjoy it “in as full and ample manner as if they had never been in bondage” (transcribed in Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1130–33). See also, RP to Samuel Pleasants, 17 May 1776, Letterbook. 13. See Hardin, “Litigating the Lash,” 57–60. For the law itself, see William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (13 vols.; Richmond, 1809–23), 11:39–40. 14. By the 1780s, the ban on manumissions was being ignored by some in the family. Thomas Pleasants of Goochland County, John Pleasants’s brother, freed the twenty slaves he inherited under the will in 1781 (see “Manumittion Papers,” in “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845, Transcribed from the Original Records Held by the Orthodox Friends, Baltimore, Maryland,” vol. 3, Valentine Richmond History Center). 15. “Be just to them,” Robert Pleasants counseled his family, and “restrain [them] as much as you can from Vice,” and show them “the beauty of a religious life” (RP to Margaret, Robert, and Ann T. Pleasants, 16 June 1781, Letterbook). 16. RP to Samuel Pleasants, 17 May 1776, ibid. 17. Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 144. Charles Logan (1754–1794) was, by all measures, “the lesser son of greater sires.” His grandfather, James Logan, was William Penn’s personal secretary and later the mayor of Philadelphia. He was also a noted naturalist and scholar. His 3,000-volume library was donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia (see Loganian Library, First Supplement to the Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Loganian Library: To which is Prefixed the Deed of Trust Constituting the Foundation of the Library [Philadelphia, 1867]). Charles Logan’s brother was Dr. George Logan (1753–1821), who, as a state legislator, met with French minister Charles- Maurice Talleyrand prompting Congress to pass the Logan Act, which forbids U.S. citizens from 234 • Virginia Magazine

non-authorized negotiations with foreign governments and officials. Dr. Logan would later become a U.S. senator. He also became good friends with Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson was secretary of state (see Worrall, Friendly Virginians , 273, and Deborah Norris Logan, Memoir of George Logan of Stenton [Philadelphia, 1899], chaps. 3 and 4, 127). Note that the text of the Logan Act is includ - ed on page 164 of her memoir. Charles Logan seems to have been a source of embarrassment to the family. In the Memoir , written by George Logan’s widow, Charles is never mentioned in the text, and the lone reference to him is in a genealogical chart located in the appendix of the book. (Logan, Memoir of George Logan , 32–33, 36, 127). 18. “Grahame’s Colonial History,” The Friend 20 (1847): 233. A Quaker poet, inspired by this gesture but ignorant of the subsequent history, composed a poem to honor the occasion (“A Pleasant Celebration of Marriage,” The Friend 16 [1843]: 124). 19. Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 145; William Wade Hinshaw and Thomas Worth Marshall et al., comps., Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (7 vols.; Baltimore, 1969), 2:584, 6:258. Kettner identified the slaveowners in the Pleasants case: John Pleasants’s grandson, Samuel Pleasants, Jr., (Samuel’s son and Robert’s nephew) and John Pleasants’s daughters and granddaugh - ters were noted as the “obstinate” ones (see Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 143). Samuel Pleasants, Jr., was considered a “lukewarm” Quaker (RP to Samuel Pleasants, Jr., Letterbook, 7 July 1779; Papers of John Marshall , 5:541). 20. RP to Jacob Shoemaker, Jr., and others, the Committee appointed by the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slaves, 12 May 1788, Letterbook. 21. It seems possible that Robert Pleasants, as Molly’s guardian, may have required Logan to sign the deed in return for his assenting to their marriage. Pleasants may have been concerned that Logan was marrying for money and had no intention of manumission. In this light, a court may have found that Pleasants exercised an undue influence and that Logan had never given legal con - sent to emancipate the slaves. 22. Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 145; RP to Jacob Shoemaker, Jr., et al.,12 May 1788, Letterbook. For Edmund Randolph, see John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York, 1975). 23. RP to Jacob Shoemaker, Jr., and others, 12 May 1788, Letterbook. 24. Ibid. 25. For the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, see Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002). The PAS was as a model for other antislavery societies formed in its wake—Wilmington, Delaware (1788); Washington County, Pennsylvania (1789); Rhode Island (1789); Virginia (1790); Maryland (1790); and Connecticut (1790). Overseas, an abolition society formed in London in 1787 and was soon followed by another in Paris a year later. Leaders of the PAS sought to correct imperfec - tions in the existing social order, not to create a new one; beyond lobbying and petitioning, the society sought “strict enforcement of existing laws,” especially against kidnapping and enslaving free blacks (Jeffrey Nordlinger Bumbrey, “A Guide to the Papers of The Pennsylvania Abolition Society,” Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice 1490–2007 , www.slavery.amdigital.co.uk/Essays/con - tent/PASguide.aspx [accessed 6 July 2017]). 26. Robert Pleasants had given Thomas Pleasants, his son-in-law, custody of a slave girl named Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 235

Lydia, who held a right to freedom when she reached eighteen years old. Thomas took her to Philadelphia and sold her. Her right to freedom was ignored or forgotten during the several subse - quent changes of ownership. It seems she may have been legally free but was bound as a servant until she turned twenty-five. Pleasants was “uneasy” with the situation and informed the standing committee of his concerns. The committee applied to the courts of Philadelphia, and a trial was set in the matter. The PAS continued to pursue the matter (The Pennsylvania Abolition Society Minutes and Reports; Acting Committee, Minutes 1784–1810; Minute Book 1789–1797, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers (cited hereafter as PAS Papers), series 1.4, section 2, 2, Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice 1490–2007 , www.slavery.amdigital.co.uk/.aspx (accessed 6 July 2017). 27. Minutes and Reports; Acting Committee, Minutes 1784–1810; Minute Book, 1784–1788, series 1.4, section 1, 148, PAS Papers. 28. If the slave were legally freed, the buyer would not receive compensation. More broadly, slaves who believed they had a legal right to freedom could prove intractable and more trouble than they were worth for a slaveholder. 29. Ibid., 149–50. 30. Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795, series 2.2, 153–55, PAS Paper. 31. Minutes and Reports; Acting Committee, Minutes 1784–1810; Minute Book, 1784–1788, series 1.4, section 1, 191, PAS Papers. It should be remembered that Jonathan Pleasants’s will con - tained the same provision as his father’s. 32. It is not clear who the attorney Pleasants consulted may have been. 33. See RP to James Pemberton, 13 Nov. 1790, series 2.2, Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795, 2–221, PAS Papers. 34. Ibid. 35. He had successfully lobbied members of the General Assembly to adopt freedom provisions in two other Quaker wills (Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795, series 2.2, 1–145, PAS Papers. Pleasants thought that the case of Charles Moorman was particularly on point and was a good precedent that argued well for his case (Robert Pleasants to James Pemberton, 13 Nov. 1790, , series 2.2, Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795, 2–221, PAS Papers; Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1786), 88, 121–22; Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1787), 40–41; Hening, The Statutes at Large , 12:613–16 (for the legislative history of the Moorman case, see page 615). Christopher Johnston, the executor of the estate, with the aid and support of Robert Pleasants, would travel to South Carolina and Georgia. Johnston, a Virginia Quaker lawyer, was retained by Pleasants and the Virginia Yearly Meeting to seek the release of people sold illegally between 1788 and 1796. Johnston tried to track them down and filed suits for their release. Things did not go well. County courts generally met once a month and Johnston found himself rushing from one county to the next. He found “disappointments again in Georgia, occasioned by the courts being altered with respect to time.” He was delayed for months. The three suits he managed to file were dismissed without a hearing. Pleasants prepared an accounting of Johnston’s expenses, and the Quarterly Meeting paid it with Pleasants making a personal contribution (Christopher Johnston to 236 • Virginia Magazine

RP, 20 Aug. 1792, “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845,” vol. 3, 17–18; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [Ithaca, N.Y., 1966], 197; Charles O. Paullin, “The Moorman Family of Virginia,” WMQ , Ser. 2, 12 [1932]: 178). Christopher Johnston squared off against a young John C. Calhoun in the case of Johnston v. Dilliard , 1 S.C.L. 232, 1 Bay 232 (1792). The result of the case remains uncertain (Linda O. Smiddy, “Judicial Nullification of State Statutes Restricting the Emancipation of Slaves: A Southern Court’s Call for Reform,” South Carolina Law Review 42 (1990–91): 610–11. Jay Worrall found that Johnston had made fourteen separate trips between 1788 and 1797 and traveled more than ten thousand miles (Worrall, Friendly Virginians , 231). In the second petition, the General Assembly confirmed the freedom of about 170 slaves set free under the will of Joseph Mayo of Henrico County (RP to John Townshend, 12 Feb. 1788, Letterbook; Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795, series 2.2, 1–145, PAS Papers). James Currie wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the number of slaves at issue was between 150 to 157, and the will and the Mayo will “astonished” neighbors and family members and provoked active agitation among the slaves affected by the will. Currie, a local planter, reported that “the report has caused 2 or 3 combats between slaves and their owners, now struggling for the liberty to which they conceive themselves entitled” (James Currie to Thomas Jefferson, 5 Aug. 1785, in Julian Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson [42 vols.; Princeton, 1950– ], 7:342–43). For the legislative history, see Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1786), 10, 18, 22, 36, 37, 102, 106; Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1787), 10, 12, 25–26, 30, 41, 78–79, 98. 36. “Notice is hereby given, that a petition will be presented to the General Assembly, to pass an act in confirmation of the last wills and restatements of John and Jonathan Pleasants, late of Henrico County, deceased, which direct and all the slaves then held by them, together with their increase, to be made free at a certain age” ([Richmond] Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser , 8 Sept. 1790). 37. RP to James Pemberton, 13 Nov. 1790, in series 2.2, Correspondence, Loose Correspondence, Incoming 1784–1795 , p. 2–221, PAS Papers. See Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1790), 57–60, for the House of Delegates treatment of the petition. 38. RP to Samuel Pleasants, 7 July 1779, Letterbook. 39. Robert Pleasants wrote to Sammy in 1778: “I have had too much reason to apprehend from thy late conduct, that anything I say, either from my own experience, or the anxious desire of a deceased Parent, will little avail, towards thy establishment in the way of Truth and Righteousness; but whether thou wilt hear or forbear, I wish to discharge my duty to thee, and to all mankind. Signed, ‘Thy afflicted but Loving Unkle’” (ibid). See also, RP to Samuel Pleasants, 31 May 1784, Letterbook. 40. “The Memorial of Charles Logan, and [Samuel] Pleasants in behalf of themselves, and divers other persons in [Courts] as legatees of John, and Jonathan Pleasants,” Henrico County, 20 Nov. 1790, folder 43, box 116, Legislative Petitions, Henrico County, 1777–1820, Library of Virginia, Richmond. 41. Journal of the House of Delegates (1790), 78. 42. Petition of 20 Nov. 1790, box A (1778–90), Legislative Petitions, Henrico County, 1777–1820, Library of Virginia, Richmond. Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 237

43. Journal of the House of Delegates (1790), 107, 126. 44. [Richmond] Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser , 10 Aug. 1791. 45. Journal of the House of Delegates (1791), 14, 45, 63. No record of the brief or the lawyer who presented it survives. In the year previous, Pleasants had retained John Marshall in another case, Asselby v. Pleasants (Papers of John Marshall , 5:330–33. 46. RP to Robert Pleasants, Jr., 9 Sept. 1778, Letterbook. Some of Pleasants’s urgency regarding his son’s choices, especially in regards to religious and moral matters, is related to Pleasants’s recog - nition of his son’s delicate constitution. He told his son, “Our life in this world is properly compared to a vapor; short at most & altogether uncertain as to its continuance” (ibid.). 47. For Thomas Mann Randolph and his family, see Cynthia A. Kierner, “‘The Dark and Dense Cloud Perpetually Lowering over Us’: Gender and the Decline of the Gentry in Postrevolutionary Virginia,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 185–217. Eliza was the second of ten children born to Anne Cary Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph. Randolph remarried after Anne Cary’s death. His teenage wife gave birth to a son in 1792. The infant received a large portion of the “debt-ridden” estate and the residual was divided between the remaining ten children in 1793. When Eliza passed in 1796, the once great Randolph family was in serious decline (ibid., 191–94). Like the Pleasants family, the question of inheritance created tensions within the Randolph fami - ly. 48. It must be noted that these letters to Robert Pleasants, Jr., are not included in the Haverford version of the letterbook but are in the typed transcripts of the letters held at the Valentine Richmond History Center. Certainly, Pleasants’s conduct in this matter is less than admirable. He suggests to his son that Eliza would be unfit to raise the children in the event of Robert, Jr.’s demise. Robert, Jr.’s health was clearly an issue: “I desire thou wilt let me hear from [you] by every suitable opportunity, in respect to thy health, as well as [Eliza], and what effect the exercise, the air, or the Water have on you and may the Lord bless and preserve you” (RP to Robert Pleasants, Jr., 14 July 1792, Letterbook. 49. Eliza Pleasants to RP, 17 Oct. 1792, in “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845, Vol. 3, Miscellaneous Materials,” Valentine Richmond History Center. The episode with Eliza shows how law, race, slavery, custom, and family dynamics could all be intertwined in early Virginia communities. Tatiana Van Riemsdijk studies another such intersection of these forces in Lancaster County (Van Riemsdijk, “His Slaves or Hers? Customary Claims, a Planter Marriage, and a Community Verdict in Lancaster County, 1793,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (cited hereafter as VMHB ) 113 (2005): 46. Eliza was indeed well educated by private tutors along with all of her sisters (Kierner, “The Dark and Dense Cloud,” 188–90; RP to Robert Pleasants, Jr., 20 Oct. 1792, Letterbox). 50. Eliza Pleasants to RP, 17 Oct. 1782, “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845,” vol. 3. 51. Ibid. 52. Eliza was in this regard quite the opposite of at least three of her sisters: “Like many troubled gentlewomen of their generation, the Randolph sisters sought and found solace in evangelical Christianity.” See Kierner, “The Dark and Dense Cloud,”196. 53. Eliza’s experience corroborates Rhys Issac’s conclusion that it was “evident that Virginians, 238 • Virginia Magazine

whatever their rank, did not affect postures of grave piety and that on Sunday at church they took for granted the close proximity of the profane to the sacred.” See Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 60-1. 54. Eliza Pleasants to RP, 17 Oct. 1782, “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845,” vol. 3. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. RP to Elizabeth Langley, 26 Jan.1796, Letterbook. 58. Ibid.; RP to Samuel Pleasants, 16 Jan.1796, ibid. 59. Calvin Schermerhorn has demonstrated how slaves in the Chesapeake “sought to order their world” through a set of “strategic ties and sets of exchanges” with patrons and allies (Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom [Baltimore, 2011], 24). 60. Miriam Pleasants was an ambivalent emancipator. In 1782, she had recorded her intention to free Benjamin, an enslaved sixteen year old, when he reached the age of twenty one (Henrico County Deeds, 3 May 1784, reel 11, 210, Library of Virginia, Richmond). James Kettner dated this emancipation in 1783 (Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 143. Certainly, she knew the legal pro - cedures for emancipation, and she was confident enough and brazen enough to ignore them when it was in her interest. 61. RP to Miriam Pleasants, 14 Jan. 1784, Letterbook. Miriam was related to Pleasants, but to what degree I have not been able to tease from the tangled genealogical records of the period. What is certain is that Miriam married Pleasants’s father, John Pleasants III, shortly before his death. She was aware of the will’s intentions, and the tensions between Miriam and Robert are noticeable in the correspondence. 62. Whether the deed was ever recorded is an open question, but it seems clear that Pleasants had heard Miriam say she had freed James and produced some sort of written record of it. 63. Freed slaves and free blacks often faced the threat of re-enslavement (John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 182–208.The manumission act stated that after emancipation, former slaves “shall thereupon be entirely and fully discharged from the performance of any contract entered into during servitude, and enjoy as full freedom as if they had been particularly named and freed by this act” (Hening, Statutes at Large , 11:39. 64. He cited Jeremiah 34:10, which reads in the 1769 King James Bible: “Now when all the princes, and all the people, which had entered into the covenant, heard that every one should let his manservant, and every one his maidservant, go free, that none should serve themselves of them any more, then they obeyed, and let them go” ( King James Bible Online , http://www.kingjames - bibleonline.org/ [accessed 30 June 2017]). 65. Advertisements for runaways provide some of the best and most detailed descriptions of indi - vidual slaves in America and have provided historians with rich material about slaves and their masters (see McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia ; John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South [New York, 1972], 192–222; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia [New York, 1972]; Lathan A. Windley, A Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 239

Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787 [New York, 1995]; and Lathan A. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 [4 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1983]. The successful runaway slave has been shown to be a sort of self-fashioned confidence man of the period, especially in the mid-Atlantic (see David Waldstriecher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” WMQ , 3rd ser., 56 [1999]: 243–72). John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweininger’s Runaway Slaves is the most complete book on American run - aways. 66. The waterways of Virginia at times offered free blacks and the enslaved an occupational space of relatively uncharacteristic freedom from white observation and direct control (see Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War [New York, 2004], 151–55; and Schmerhorn, Money over Mastery , 63–98). 67. Jacob planned to play the part of a free man, and he chose a blue cotton coat with matching breeches, an olive colored Virginia cloth coat, and a red cape with matching red cuffs. He also brought “sundry other clothes” that he may have intended to sell. Slaves adapted and invested their clothes with social and personal meaning. Runaways used their clothing to pass as freemen or to sell to other free blacks or slaves (see Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Past and Present 148 (1995): 149. 68. For the free black population of Petersburg and the area in general, see Suzanne Lesbock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984); Michael L. Nicholls, “‘Strangers Settling among Us’: The Sources and Challenge of the Urban Free Black Population of Early Virginia,” VMHB 108 (2000): 155; Michael L. Nicholls, “‘Passing through this Troublesome World’: Free Blacks in the Early Southside,” VMHB 92 (1984): 50. 69. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements , 233. 70. Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1158. 71. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements , 368. 72. Franklin and Schweninger found that the average reward for a prime Virginia field hand in 1800 was $18 or about 5% of the average sale price of $350 (Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves , 176–77). 73. Virginia Gazette and Richmond Advertiser , 23 July 1795. 74. Hardin, “Litigating the Lash,” 260–62. 75. Pleasants apologizes for not visiting his sisters (Elizabeth Langley, Anne Atkinson, and Dorethea Briggs) and says it was not intentional. Although he admitted being in their neighbor - hood and not visiting them, there was no “abatement of brotherly affection.” He encourages them to turn from the “the love, the pleasures, and the delusive friendships of the World” and turn toward God (RP to E. L., A. A., & D. B., 22 December 1781, Letterbook). See also RP to Elizabeth Langley, 22 Feb. 1788, Letterbook. When Pleasants’s beloved, but troubled daughter, Ann Thomas died, Elizabeth Langley did not visit her brother, which resulted in Pleasants’s ire and resentment (see RP to Elizabeth Langley, 15 Nov. 1791, Letterbook). 76. Pleasants complained to Elizabeth Langley of one particular neighbor who had offended him. This neighbor was most likely a slaveholder as Pleasants described him as engaging in “wicked and 240 • Virginia Magazine

profane” practices. But Pleasants would not be deterred, and told his estranged sister that he would not visit the neighbor ever again unless he repented of his practices, but his “unjust & abusive treat - ment of me will never have such an effect on my mind as to prevent my doing anything that had a prospect of tenting to his real good or that of any that appertain to him.” It is likely that the “neighbor” was one of Pleasants’s sisters’ husbands, perhaps Roger Atkinson, husband of Anne (RP to Elizabeth Langley, n.d., in “Records of Quaker Meetings in Virginia, 1672–1845,” vol. 3 . 77. RP to Margaret Langley, 23 Feb. 1777, RP to Ann May, 3 Feb. 1783, RP to Ann May, 3 Nov. 1785, all in Letterbook. 78. Virginia: In the High Court of Chancery, March 16, 1798. Between Robert Pleasants, Son and Heir of John Pleasants, Dec’d., Pltf., and Mary Logan,Widow and Administratrix of Charles Logan, and Divisee of John Pleasants and Jonathan Pleasants, Deceased, Elizabeth Pleasants, Administratrix of Joseph Pleasants, Deceased, Isaac Pleasants and Jane His Wife, Samuel Pleasants, Junior, Thomas Pleasants, Junior, and Margaret His Wife, Robert Langley and Elizabeth His Wife, Daniel Teasdale and Margaret His Wife, Late Margaret Langley, Elizabeth Langley the Younger, and Anne May, Defendants (1800), at Early American Imprints , Series I: Evans, 1639–1800, Imprint 38963, NewsBank InfoWeb , http://infoweb.newsbank.com/search (accessed 6 July 2017). 79. RP to Samuel Pleasants, 7 July 1779, Letterbook. Sammy’s father, Thomas Pleasants of Cedar Creek, was at times a wayward Quaker. “Loose and unthinking” in some respects was how his brother Robert described him (RP to Samuel Pleasants, 16 Sept. 1775, Letterbook). On 17 May 1776, Robert Pleasants wrote to Samuel, his brother in Philadelphia, sharing news of the death of Jonathan Pleasants and Thomas Pleasants: “Thus we have lost two Brothers in the prime of life in less than five months: we two brothers now only remain, perhaps to see more trouble and afflic - tion” (RP to Samuel Pleasants, 17 May 1776, Letterbook). 80. Sammy Pleassants, Jr., was entitled to a one-third share of the residuary clause under John Pleasants’s 1771 will and nine more persons under Jonathan Pleasants’s 1777 will (see “Caesar 50; Nelly 40; Cuffee 70, Sukey 40, Betty 40, Nanny 40, Solomon 30, Young Caesar 20, Patt 55 valued at £385.00” in Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1134). The court of Chancery records him having 180 persons in total ( Pleasants v. Logan [1798], 8). 81. Pleasants v. Logan (1798). 82. Under the will of John Pleasants, she received eight people. Under the 1777 will, she received eighty-six persons valued at £4,205 (Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1134). 83. Isaac W. Pleasants was a gentleman, an overseer of the poor, a militia captain, and justice of the peace in Goochland County as well an administer of the estate of Francis Cocke, a free black man in Goochland County (Court of Chancery Commissions; Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1014–17). 84. Because slaves formed the vast majority of his inherited wealth, his decision to emancipate wiped out most of his estate. In addition, a failed business venture also contributed to Pleasants’s relative penury. Along with his son, Robert, Jr., and Thomas Pleasants, he had formed a trading company, Robert Pleasants & Co., which had not been very successful, and although it had long since dissolved, Pleasants was still settling its affairs years later. He also assumed responsibility for the care and religious education of Eliza and Robert, Jr.’s three children. In May, “Robert Pleasants (grandfather and guardian) requested that Eliza, Anna, Mary and Margaret Pleasants, daus. of Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 241

Robert and Eliza Pleasants, dec’d, be joined in membership” (F. Edward Wright, Quaker Records of Henrico Monthly Meeting and Other Church Records of Henrico, New Kent and Charles City Counties, Virginia [Baltimore, 2002], 80). Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1213–14, 1256. Anna would die the following year at seven years old (Wright, Quaker Records of Henrico Monthly Meeting , 85). 85. RP to Elizabeth Langley, 26 Jan. 1796, Letterbook. 86. John Marshall was an experienced litigator in the Chancery court and had studied law under George Wythe at the College of William and Mary, although he was not close to Wythe like for - mer pupils Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay. Pleasants hired Marshall to settle the tangled affairs of Robert Pleasants & Co., a company he operated with his son and nephew that failed, resulting in litigation from 1790 to 1794. As for the Pleasants case in chancery, Marshall was in Virginia until June of 1797 before departing for France on the bungled diplomatic mission known as the X.Y.Z. Affair. Marshal made arrangements to continue his legal practice and maintain his client base during his absence: “I should return after a short absence, to my profession, with no diminution of character, and, I trusted, with no diminution of practice. My clients would know immediately that I should soon return and I could make arrangements with the gentlemen of the bar which would prevent my business from suffering in the meantime” (quoted in Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation [New York, 1996], 185). See also, the prefatory note to Asselby v. Pleasants (1794) in Papers of John Marshall , 5:330–33. Little is known of Marshall’s career as litigator because few records have survived to this day. The contents of his law office have “large - ly vanished” and “virtually all the records of the higher courts of Virginia that sat in the capital were destroyed by fire in April 1865” ( Papers of John Marshall , 5:xxiii–xxiv). It should also be noted that clients usually paid Marshall for resolution of the entire legal case, including appeals. The editors of the Marshall papers noted that his typical modus operandi in cases was “to state the law in terms of general principles, laying down one or more premises from which he deduced the consequences and conclusion that inevitably followed. To decide a case, he characteristically remarked, it was ‘only necessary to recognize certain principles.’” An appeal to broad easily understood principles characterized the practice of law in Virginia ( Papers of John Marshall , 5:lviii). 87. Vesting confers a legal right or property interest on a person. In order for a property interest to vest, there must be a “someone” whom the court can identify as able to hold that property inter - est. 88. See Bryan Garner, ed., Blacks Law Dictionary (7th ed.; St. Paul, Minn., 1999), 560: “Equity,” n4. Equity law is the system of law or body of principles originating in the English Court of Chancery and superseding the common and statute law (together called “law” in the narrow sense). Equity Court is a court of extraordinary jurisdiction whose express aim is to do justice and is not bound by the letter of the law. Equity law, by the 1790s, was “a highly organized and rational sys - tem of law that operated as a kind of adjunct, or supplement, to the dominant system of common law . . . administered by a separate tribunal, the court of chancery.” Chancellors of the equity courts “had power to intervene and to see that justice was done in extraordinary cases. . . . The chancellor decided cases not by fixed rules but according to the dictates of his ‘conscience,’ a human reflection of divine justice. Equity was thus discretionary; it proceeded ad hoc from case to case. An equity decree acted upon the person, not the thing or property in dispute. It compelled a person to do something he was bound in conscience to do (convey property, for example) or refrain from doing something (such as bringing vexatious lawsuits) that was against conscience.” The pro - 242 • Virginia Magazine

cedures of the High Court of Chancery were also unique. Instead of parties exchanging evidence, the chancellor appointed commissioners who deposed witnesses. The chancellor played a much more important role in ascertaining the facts of the case than a common law judge. Institutionally and conceptually, the Court of Chancery was distinct from the regular common law courts (see Papers of John Marshall , 5:xxviii, 53–57). 89. As stated earlier, there are actually two wills with nearly identical provisions. Jonathan, Robert’s uncle and John’s brother, had died in 1777. The cases were consolidated as the issues and facts were nearly identical. 90. The forms of equity were well established at this point in Virginia. After some procedural machinations involving injunctions, subpoenas, filling of bills of complaint, etc., the defendant would answer and offer his or her defense. Wythe would interrogate the party directly as “the defen - dant was a witness to his own cause, and his answer took the form of a deposition.” Instead of questioning witnesses before a jury, “commissioners” appointed by the court (usually magistrates of the county where a witness resided) spoke with the witnesses and gave them a chance to tell their story. Each side got a chance to look at the depositions and the chancellor decided all matters of fact and law based on the accumulated court record. Based on his interviews and review of the legal filings, witness depositions, and briefs, Wythe would make his ruling (Hobson, Papers of John Marshall , 5:59). “To succeed in the a court of chancery it was essential to establish the ‘equity’ of the complaining party’s case, to show he had no remedy at common law or that such remedy was inadequate. Indeed, one important measure of a lawyer’s professional acumen was his ability to dis - cern what kinds of cases properly require equitable relief” (ibid., 5:61). 91. George Wythe was “a lawyer, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, [and] Speaker of the Revolutionary Assembly” (John T. Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks [Los Angeles, 1976], 29). See also, Wythe Holt, “George Wythe: Early Modern Judge,” Alabama Law Review 58 (2007): 1009–39; Timothy Sandefur, “Why the Rule Against Perpetuities Mattered in Pleasants v. Pleasants ” Real Property Probate and Trust Journal 40 (2006): 669; and Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 95. 92. “Human freedom for Wythe was an ‘inherent’ natural law right of all humans, confirmed by the language of the first article of Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights, which recited that ‘all men are by nature equally free’” (Holt, “George Wythe,” 1009). 93. Ibid. 94. Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 148. 95. Cover, Justice Accused , 62. 96. Holt, “George Wythe,” 1028. 97. In 1788, a general court was created consisting of eighteen districts with one judge in each and a chancery court with one chancellor. The Court of Appeals was a separate court with five judges—it was “the final statement on the vast majority of substantive and procedural issues that found their way to the Virginia court system” (John Thomas Wren, “Republic Jurisprudence: Virginia Law and the New Order 1776–1830” [Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1988], 13). Wren found that one of the outstanding legal issues following the Revolution was how to accommodate the “English legal heritage to the requirements of the new republican order.” But the Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 243

court was not “slavishly devoted to the common law” (ibid., 64–65). One area where the Court of Appeals “did evince a resistance to the pattern of adherence to common law rules” was in the case of wills, especially in cases “involving the interpretation of the intent of the testator (the writer of a will) in the application of the provisions of the will.” Judicial departure was justified by common law ambiguity, contradiction and conflict. Arguments could be had on the merits, but judges were unable to agree on what constituted “settled rules of construction.” The court threw up its hands and conceded that “cases on wills serve rather to obscure, than illuminate.” Decisions tended to be very case specific. The relative clarity of the testator’s intention determined the degree to which common law cases would apply. In order to frustrate clear intent, adverse cases must be “strong, uniform and apply pointedly before they will frustrate that intention” (ibid., 82., quoting Edmund Pendleton). 98. The integration of common law property concepts with the realities of an increasingly com - plex institution of slavery proceeded after the American Revolution. It was not clear how common law concepts developed to serve feudal and early modern English landholders applied to slaves in early national Virginia. In the colonial period, the law of slavery was more or less a collection of police regulations; no attempt had been made to conceptually integrate the common law with slav - ery. After the Revolution, Virginia lawmakers explicitly adopted the common law as the law of the land. It was up to the judges and lawyers to figure out how that integration would occur. 99. Randolph and Wickham would also team up to represent Aaron Burr for the killing of Alexander Hamilton. Wickham’s family papers are held by the Virginia Historical Society (see Wickham Family Papers, 1754–1977, Mss1W6326a FA2, reels C371–75; Mss1W6326c FA2, reels C375–79). 100. RP to Jacob Shoemaker, Jr., et al. 12 May 1788, Letterbook. For Edmund Randolph, see Reardon, Edmund Randolph (1975). 101. Kettner, “Persons or Property,” 148. 102. There is little written on John Wickham. R. Kent Newmyer commented that Wickham has “been undeservedly ignored by history—perhaps because he ignored it. Like Marshall, Wickham was so confident of his own gifts that he felt no need to advertise them.” Wickham occupied his time litigating cases, “looking after his numerous children, breeding racehorses, and tending to his investments, his two plantations and many slaves.” He was one of the richest me in the state (R. Kent Newmyer, The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr [New York, 2012], 81, 186–87). Newmyer also called Wickham a “southern gentleman,” but it seems that Wickham may have born in New York and was perhaps a Loyalist. After the war, he moved to Virginia and began studying law at the College of William and Mary. He was good friends with his neighbor, John Marshall. Wickham’s practice was very successful, coupled with some very remunerative marriages. He eventually became the wealthiest man in Richmond. Wickham was also noted for his horse breeding talents. “Boston,” considered America’s first great racing horse, was the outstanding member of his stable. Finally, his most tangible legacy is the Wickham-Valentine House in Richmond. It is a national historic land - mark and considered one of the finest examples of Federalist architecture from the period. For his “splendid” house, see “The 1812 Wickham House,” Valentine Richmond History Center , https://thevalentine.org/exhibition/the-1812-john-wickham-house/ (accessed 3 July 2017). The only contemporary accounts regarding Wickham are by William Wirt, another leading member of the small, cliquish Richmond bar. Wirt described him as “exceedingly ingenious, subtle, quick in argument, and always on the alert to take and keep the advantage by all logical arts” (John 244 • Virginia Magazine

Pendleton Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney General of the United States [2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1860], 1:311–12). In Wirt’s The Letters of a British Spy , he describes Wickham as having a “quickness of look, a sprightly step, and that peculiarly jaunty air, which I have hereto - fore mentioned, as characterizing the people of New York.” Wirth criticized his rival for putting on “artificial” affectations and gestures. Wirt praised Wickham’s wit and ingenuity and calls says that Wickham “unites in himself a greater diversity of talents and acquirements, than any other at the bar of Virginia” (William Wirt, The Letters of a British Spy [3rd ed.; New York, 1875], 214–19). 103. Pleasants v. Pleasants , 2 Call. 319 (1799). 104. Ibid., 327. 105. Ibid. 106. Judge William Fleming concurred in the result without comment. 107. Pleasants v. Pleasants , 340. For Spencer Roane, see Note, “Judge Spencer Roane of Virginia: Champion of State’s Rights Foe of John Marshall,” Harvard Law Review 66 (1953): 1242–59. 108. Legal scholar Timothy Sandefur pointed out: “It would have been extremely easy for a judge wedded to the notion that a slave was nothing more than property to overlook what Roane saw: the validating lives were the slaves themselves” (Sandefur, “Why the Rule of Perpetuities Mattered,” 671). Roane wrote in his opinion: “Thus a limitation to one, in esse, [while living] in fee or in tail, after a dying without issue, is not good, because the contingency, the dying without issue, is too remote. But such a limitation to one, in esse, for life is good; because the contingency must hap - pen, if at all, so as to vest the estate, within a life in being, viz. that of the remainderman; that is to say, the limitation in remainder for life restrains the previous disposition, in the same manner, as if it had been expressly limited to the remainderman, on the event of dying without issue, in his life time.” Translated into simpler and less archaic terms, Roane is pointing out a very fine distinction: the benefit (freedom) can only be enjoyed while the objects of his bounty are living (in esse). Roane explains, “unless it [freedom] happened within their lives, it might as well, as to them not happen at all . . . this restrains the happening of the contingency . . . and makes the executory devise good . . . to all who are within the legal limits” ( Pleasants v. Pleasants , 2 Call. 338 [1799]). 109. Pleasants v. Pleasants , 2 Call. 339 (1799). 110. Ibid., 347. 111. Ibid., 342–43. 112. Ibid., 343. 113. Ibid., 348–49. 114. Ibid., 356. 115. The full list of persons to be freed is found in the commissioner’s reports submitted to the Court of Chancery following the decision of the Court of the Appeals (see Virginia: in the High Court of Chancery, March 16, 1798. Between Robert Pleasants, Son and Heir of John Pleasants, dee’d. Plif. and Mary Logan, Widow and Administratix of Charles Logan, and Devisee of John Pleasants and Jonathan Pleasants in Evans Early American Imprint Collection , http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ N29256.0001.001 [accessed 3 July 2017]). 116. See Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery and Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984). Hardin— ”This Unpleasant Business” • 245

117. Rachel Baker Lipowicz, “Mourning Logan: A Free Woman of Color’s Achievements,” Chesterfield Observer , 16 Feb. 2011, http://www.chesterfieldobserver.com/news/2011-02- 16/News/Mourning_Logan.html (accessed 3 July 2017). 118. Virginia Argus , Aug. 1799. 119. Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1282. 120. Ibid., 1153. 121. Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1259. 122. Robert Pleasants’s will is abstracted in “An Extract from the Will of Robert Pleasants dated February 6, 1800, and Admitted to Probate in Henrico County, Virginia, April 6, 1801” Journal of Negro History 2 (1917): 429–30. The full text is found as follows: “The Will of Robert Pleasants, 6 Feb. 1801, Probated in Henrico County, Virginia 6 April 1801,” Pleasants Family Papers 1745–1850 in Brock Collection, 41008 Misc., reels 4,238–241, Library of Virginia. 123. Ibid. 124. Pleasants instructed his executors to allow his “old servant Philip [Gardner] and his Wife Dilcy” to settle on any part of the estate as long as they did not interfere with the school’s opera - tion. He also gave them some money to build a house and some cows and pigs. In addition to the old couple, four women lived on the property—Effee, Sarah, Dilcy, and Elcy. Pleasants stipulated that they were to continue to live rent free for the rest of their natural lives. Moses, Mingo, Tarence, Daniel, and Ben Robinson were afforded the same privilege. 125. Hinshaw and Marshall, comps., Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy , 4:208; Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1260; William C. Dunlap transcribed the monthly meeting records regarding the school in Quaker Education in Baltimore and Virginia Yearly Meetings with an Account of Certain Meeting of Delaware and the Eastern Shore Affiliated with Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1936), 173. 126. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, William Waller Hening, and William Munford, comps., The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being a Collection of All such Acts of the General Assembly, of a Public and Permanent Nature . . . (2 vols.; Richmond, 1819), 1:426–27. 127. Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1244–45. 128. Hinshaw and Marshall, comps., Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy , 4:208; Valentine and Torrence, eds., Edward Pleasants Valentine Papers , 1214, 1259, 1261. 129. See Philip J. Schwarz, Migrants Against Slavery: Virginians and the Nation (Charlottesville, 2001). 130. Quaker historian Stephen Weeks concluded that “slavery was not a subject which attracted much attention among Virginia Quakers, comparatively speaking, after the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Society had by that time succeeding in clearing its own skirts of the insti - tution. It never became a slaveholder as it did in North Carolina. It waged few battles with the Legislature in the shape of petitions, it did not appeal to the courts as often, nor to the Federal Government, nor did it seek to forward the colonization of blacks. It was weaker, less virile, less aggressive, and less successful in the amount and character of work accomplished” (Stephen B. Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery: An Institutional History [Baltimore, 1896], 217). 131. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 211–12.