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Litigating the Lash: Quaker Emancipator Robert Pleasants, the Law

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Litigating the Lash: Quaker Emancipator Robert Pleasants, the Law LITIGATING THE LASH: QUAKER EMANCIPATOR ROBERT PLEASANTS, THE LAW OF SLAVERY, AND THE MEANING OF MANUMISSION IN REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL VIRGINIA By William Fernandez Hardin Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History May, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Richard J.M. Blackett David L. Carlton Daniel J. Sharfstein Daniel H. Usner Copyright © by William Fernandez Hardin All Rights Reserved To Jessica, for loving a grumpy man, and to Ainsley, for making him less grumpy. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Virginia Historical Society and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg for their support in the research of this dissertation—both collections proved invaluable and the staff helped a fledging graduate student navigate unfamiliar terrain. I would also like to thank the Folger Institute’s Center for the History of British Political Thought in Washington D.C. and my fellow participants in the “Changing Conceptions of Property” seminar for the opportunity to spend a summer discussing the relationship between English property law and colonial governance. I would also like to thank the Vanderbilt history department for its generous support. It has been a pleasure to learn the craft from such a distinguished group of historians. Professors Michael Bess, Bill Caferro, Katie Crawford, Dennis Dickerson, and Elizabeth Lunbeck, each—in vastly different ways—helped me discover new ways of considering the past and the people who lived there and I thank them for it. I would also like to thank the Vanderbilt Americanist Works-in-Progress Seminar for graciously allowing me to present my work and the invaluable comments and critiques provided. A special thank you to the friendly and gracious history department staff: Jane Anderson, Brenda Hummel and Heidi Welch for always helping out and making life a little bit more manageable. I would also like to thank the members of the dissertation committee who have been so generous with their time, experience and knowledge. Prof. Dan Usner repeatedly pushed me to consider how people pushed from the halls of power, nonetheless exert iii power in a myriad of ways—a central tenet of this dissertation. Prof. David Carlton taught me a history of the American South free of sentimentality or nostalgia, but sensitive to the role sentimentality and nostalgia played in shaping it. More importantly, he helped me see it as a place of social aspiration and economic activity by chopping down the “Moonlight and Magnolia” myth and using the wood to fuel “factories in the field.” Special thanks to my dissertation adviser, Prof. Richard Blackett, for his patience, advice, humor and willingness to endure sixty page drafts. When told that the many of the Virginia court records that I desired had been destroyed during the Civil War, he replied, “Good. That means this dissertation can’t get any longer.” And finally, I would like thank Prof. Dan Sharfstein. More than anyone else, this dissertation bears his influence. Prof. Sharfstein taught me how to weave together law and history in a way that opens up new areas of investigation. He pushed me to look behind the façade of legal institutions to see how ordinary people use the law in unexpected ways. And, he showed me how judges and lawyers select from a range of possible legal doctrines to decide cases. I owe him a debt of gratitude, both personally and professionally that can only be acknowledged but never paid in full. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Maria and Steven Hardin, and my brother, Francisco Hardin, for their continued love and support. I would also like to thank Jessica Tosh for all of her love and understanding and most importantly for bringing our beautiful daughter Ainsley Elizabeth into this world. I would also like to thank Gayland and Rebecca “Gammy” Tosh for their support. Without them, it would have been a herculean task to raise a child and write a dissertation simultaneously. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ........................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………....iii INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 Chapter I. ANTISLAVERY AND THE WILL OF JOHN PLEASANTS .................11 II. THE MANUMISSION ACT OF 1782 ......................................................57 III. 1785: THE FAILURE OF EVANGELICAL ANTISLAVERY .............129 IV. THE VIRGINIA ABOLITION SOCIETY ..............................................163 V. THE PLEASANTS FAMILY AND MANUMISSION ..........................212 VI. THE DECISION ......................................................................................258 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................326 BIBLIOGRAHY ..................................................................................................339 v INTRODUCTION The case of Pleasants v. Pleasants was the largest manumission case in American history. It was decided by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in 1799. Robert Pleasants, the plaintiff, petitioned Chancellor George Wythe to order Pleasants’s son-in- law, siblings, nieces, and nephews to manumit over four hundred and forty slaves. Wythe prepared the order and the defendants appealed. At the Court of Appeals, family members were represented by Edmund Randolph and John Wickham—two of Richmond’s most prominent lawyers. Pleasants retained John Marshall, future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, to represent his side. The case turned on an interpretation of the Rule Against Perpetuities and whether it applied when human freedom was at stake. Imbued with revolutionary notions of liberty, Spencer Roane wrote for the majority of the Court to free the slaves. It was his opinion that the Court should rule in favor of liberty when it was legally permissible and reasonable to do so. The ruling defined in many ways the meaning of manumission and its legal character in light of the American Revolution. The case pitted America’s finest legal minds against each other in a highly technical case and scholars have explored the case decision in some detail. But what is often lacking in these legal histories is a sense of the parties involved. By focusing strictly on the case decision historians have obscured obscures the permeability between the law and society. “Litigating the Lash” demonstrates how religious, ideological and cultural conflicts among litigants—prior to the filing of a case—come to shape judicial decision- making. The Pleasants case provided a forum in which Virginia’s legal elite tried to square the promises of the Revolution with slavery. Slavery, in this period, was adapted to new market opportunities despite the widely shared belief that it inhibited long-term 1 economic development as well as the notion that stunted the cultural development of a society. The number of slaveholders in Virginia increased despite these long standing concerns. Short-term private interest overrode public concern. Economic concerns were not the only objections to slavery. The Quakers, who were unconcerned with converting others to their faith, worked to cleanse their Society of slaveholders. But, after having substantially accomplished this task, most Virginia Friends did not extend their antislavery mission to non-Quakers. The leadership of the Methodists and Baptists, following the Quaker lead, promulgated antislavery requirements for congregants. But local preachers shelved antislavery rhetoric in order to appeal to the masses. Most white Virginians focused less on the consequences of slaveholding and more on the perception that free blacks undermined social order and were potential catalysts of rebellion. For many whites, the problem was not slavery; the problem was manumission. Laws were passed to silence Virginia’s abolitionist societies and inhibit their efforts to free slaves. But manumission, slavery and its relation to the American Revolution could not be avoided in legal debates. In the Pleasants case, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, George Wythe, Spencer Roane and Edmund Randolph all were forced to confront the issue in a very specific context revealing how these luminaries of the law helped to develop the legal architecture for slavery in the new republic. The ruling itself, its logic, its meaning, its conflicting interpretations, are fore grounded in previous accounts providing insight into how Virginia’s legal elite tried to accommodate libertarian common law principles to chattel slavery. Absent in these accounts, however, is a different, equally significant, perspective on these questions drawn from the arguments of family members leading up to the filing of the lawsuit—Pleasants v. Pleasants was the end of a very long road. 2 While legal scholars and historians have touched on this case, no one has placed the technical legal issues in dialogue with the broader understandings of race, liberty, and manumission embedded in its history. In bridging the two, “Litigating the Lash” demonstrates how legal history interacts with other forms of history. It reveals how a short clause in a Quaker’s will became the basis for a major lawsuit challenging conceptions of liberty and slaveholding. The history of the case forced Virginia’s elite to declare their positions on slavery and its relationship
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