How Slavery Destroyed Virginia

Tracing a decline from economic and intellectual powerhouse to backwater.

In the first years of the republic, Virginia was America’s wealthiest, largest, most populous, and most powerful state. A fifth of the new nation’s citizens lived there, as did four of the first five Presidents. Planters grew rich in the eastern Tidewater region, enjoying the peaceful idyll of overseeing wholesome work in the soil. A little more than half a century later, miles and miles of barren fields lay fallow across the state. Illiteracy was skyrocketing, planters were in debt, and a steady stream of Virginians were fleeing to other states or territories. Why?

The ideal of the genteel Virginia farmer’s way of life was crumbling long before the death of the Confederacy at Appomattox. In Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (Perseus, 310 pages, $26.95), Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College and author of Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800, shows how the state was brought low by the institution it valued most.

“No subject preoccupied Virginians—and even visitors to Virginia—more than slavery,” Dunn writes. “Spending a long rainy afternoon in a Petersburg tavern in 1815, English tourist Morris Birkbeck commented that the prevailing topic of conversation among the men was slavery: ‘an evil uppermost in every man’s thoughts; which all deplore, many were anxious to flee, but for which no man can devise a remedy.’” Much as they may have professed to oppose it, in the end the planters did whatever was necessary to keep the institution alive. They had invested as much as half of the state’s capital in slaves, and to free their black workers would mean forfeiting that investment; nationwide abolition would ruin the entire planter class.

So the Virginia elite developed a phobia of anything that even remotely threatened their investment in human chattel. They were “fearful of the federal government, fearful of taxation, and, above all, fearful for the security of their property—their human property—the principal source of their wealth,” Dunn writes. “That was always the bottom line.” Judicial review, federal tariffs, a national bank: To the many powerful Southerners quoted in Dominion of Memories, all were the acts of a power-hungry central government determined to crush state sovereignty and, ultimately, slavery. Many rich Virginians, not least of all Jefferson, began to consider themselves Virginians first, Americans second; their state’s interests came before the good of the nation.

Even the state’s own needs bowed to the protection of slavery when they conflicted. A chapter in Dominion of Memories shows how federal plans to build railroads and canals in Virginia—where badly maintained roads all but marooned residents of the coal-producing Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains—met with fervent opposition from Tidewater planters. Dunn distills the unspoken fear underlying their arguments: If the national government could interfere with the state’s transportation infrastructure, couldn’t it also meddle with slavery?

Dunn maintains that the planters had another reason to oppose large-scale projects in the mountains: Anything that benefited the largely non-slaveholding western part of Virginia (now the state of West Virginia) posed a threat to the Tidewater. A rail connection to Atlantic ports and markets might have transformed the Allegheny coalfields into an industrial center, shifting power and population density away from the agricultural east. “Virginia’s elite had no desire to spur the rise of a new class of men who might compete with them politically and economically,” Dunn writes. Slave owners risked losing their skewed representation in the state and national legislatures, which, for the time being, blocked any abolitionist sentiment.

For the same reason—preserving their status within the state—the planters opposed free public education and universal white male suffrage. (“And so education for young Virginians, like all the other vital signs of their society, fell victim to the protection of slavery.”) As a result, the state’s white underclass was poor and illiterate. Beyond that, the existence of slavery made work dishonorable for them. To labor was to be no better than a slave. Virginia’s working and middle classes were nonexistent, as was its industry and manufacturing sector.

For Jefferson, this was ideal. Dunn explains: “The only truly virtuous, free, ethical, and republican way of life, [Jefferson] believed, was that of independent, self-sufficient, literate, self-governing farmers. Living and laboring on the land, they could enjoy great personal autonomy as well as a socially stable community. There could be no ‘corruption of morals,’ Jefferson asserted, ‘among people who work their own soil.’” But, Dunn argues, Jefferson’s vision ignored the realities of the nineteenth century. “The eminent Virginians who inherited the Revolution looked backwards, clinging to the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books, and slaves on lovely Tidewater plantations, loyal to the agrarian myth of yeoman farmers leading independent, virtuous lives on the sacred soil. This generation of nostalgic Virginia leaders located the future in the past—and in the South.”

Dunn makes no bones about conflating industrialization and urbanization with progress. Decrying what she calls “a deplorable scarcity of industry” in Virginia, she writes: “The South’s staggering investment in human property, even if quite profitable, nevertheless starved the development of new industries. . . . A backward-looking society, mired in the economics and culture of slavery, could not foster the kind of mentality that would have propelled Virginia forward.” As much as they would have disagreed with Dunn, the state’s planters came to regret their untouched pastures in the 1860s, when Virginia’s dearth of railroads and infrastructure crippled Confederate supply lines in the Civil War.

But that’s jumping ahead in time. Dunn devotes the second half of Dominion of Memories to the story of how Virginia changed from a state that outwardly decried slavery and hoped, one day, to abolish it, to a state willing to secede from the Union to preserve it. The first step came in response to the Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831, in which 60 white people were killed. The Virginia legislature held an open debate on slavery, at which several plans for gradual abolition were presented. Since few of the delegates could imagine, much less support, a society in which blacks—whom they considered lazy, intellectually inferior, and prone to violence—intermingled with whites, most of the proposals involved deporting freedmen to Africa or the Caribbean. These plans proved fraught with complications and prohibitively expensive.

In the end, the legislature only tightened restrictions on blacks in Virginia. “The Virginia debate of 1831–1832 marked one of the last chances the nation had to reverse course before the tragedy of the Civil War,” Dunn writes. “If Virginia had shown true leadership, if they had courageously and farsightedly voted on a plan to abolish slavery, perhaps American history would have flowed in a different channel. . . . Still, the debate did mark a turning point. Before 1832, Virginians had often openly proclaimed their regret, if not their antipathy, for slavery. . . . But after 1832, those apologetic, embarrassed, ambivalent words largely disappeared, as did the old vague and evasive promises to end slavery at some future time. Instead, people began to bow to the inescapability of slavery. Over the next twenty-five years, a new mood of resignation replaced the old hopes for abolition, for there seemed to be few realistic alternatives to slavery.”

Northern abolitionists only united the Southern ranks when they began to flood mailboxes with antislavery pamphlets. Yet Virginians remained so ambivalent that the state did not finally secede until after Fort Sumter fell. “Union might be important,” Dunn writes, “but not as important as half of the state’s wealth.”

And what of the two eminent Virginians mentioned in the book’s title? Dunn never unveils a single overt portrait of Madison or Jefferson: There are no extended biographies, psychoanalyses, or explication of their philosophies. Instead, she lets them weigh in on each issue she discusses. The picture that emerges is not altogether flattering to either founder. Madison, desperately hoping for stability for the young country he helped birth, swings wildly between sectionalism and nationalism. Jefferson, on the other hand, grows more and more parochial with age. “Jefferson had undergone an astonishing transformation. He had once embodied, as few men in America, the critical, inquiring spirit of the Enlightenment,” Dunn writes. “The cosmopolitan former minister to France, the sophisticated intellectual who had dabbled in political theory, the far-sighted former president of the republic who doubled the size of the nation became, in the years before his death, simply—and militantly—a Virginian.”

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.