Richmond and the American Dream: Revolution & Reality

Banner Lecture, Virginia Historical Society, 6 February 2016, by the Rev. B. P. Campbell

Richmond became the capital of Virginia in 1780 and was incorporated in 1782. It is, in a sense, the child-city of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution enclosed within itself one major, deeply disturbing contradiction: It proclaimed equality and liberty for every human being, in words and actions that went around the world. But it also firmly established a system of race-based segregation and enslavement for half the population of Virginia. Liberty was stated publicly as a goal; enslavement was established firmly as a practice.

The contradictory pattern of this Revolution is the shape of Virginia, perhaps from its beginning in Jamestown. The pattern is the template for much of what has happened in Richmond since 1782. To a large extent – how much we must explore — metropolitan Richmond still follows this pattern in 2016.

Virginia history, authorized and taught for two centuries in the schools and universities of the Commonwealth by the free half of the population, has largely ignored the unfinished half of the Revolution which our conflicted forefathers bequeathed to us. Therefore, the problems and situations of those beyond the wall of privilege in metropolitan Richmond are viewed publicly as anomalies or unfortunate defects in an otherwise successful Revolutionary city, rather than the predictable result of the original design.

In Richmond, the crazy imbalance of the original design continues to play out, with destructive consequences. One of the world’s 500 largest cities, Richmond is governmentally and economically fragmented. Four different jurisdictions compete for location of businesses and location of the poor, leaving the highest tax burden on the poorest part of the city. The state and Federal government have spent over $1 billion in the last several decades on new highways pulling the city outward and drawing commerce from the center. Metropolitan Richmond’s urban sprawl is in the top one percent of the world’s top 500 cities. The central city has virtually exhausted its bonding capacity and has $600 million in deferred capital costs for education alone. Poor children in the inner city are jammed into racially and economically segregated schools which cannot possibly lift them out of poverty without either social integration or major increases in staffing and expenditure. The jail is jammed with persons who have no chance of employment when they have served their term. And the wealthy but fragmented metropolitan city cannot even manage a public transportation system to get citizens to work and job training.

It would be easy and accurate to say that issues of this sort afflict many American cities. But three things are unique about the issues of metropolitan Richmond.

• First, we can trace them year by year from their origin directly through decades and centuries – sometimes even back to Jamestown.
• Second, in almost every case metropolitan Richmond has the full resources needed to address these issues effectively. All that is missing is the political and social will.
• And third, Richmond once aspired, and may still desire, to exemplify the original greatness of the world’s greatest nation – based on the principle of liberty and justice for all.

The dysfunction of metropolitan Richmond surely belies the intentions of its citizens. Historic attitudes of racism and class warfare have diminished. Education levels have grown. Power has been diffused. We might fulfill our destiny.

But there are powerful unconscious forces, it seems, which create havoc and decisively inhibit healthy consensus. These forces are masked by the repetition of a false historical narrative that describes Richmond to have been founded on a revolution which established equality and liberty for all. It was not. The principles were proclaimed as if for all, but intended for only half the population. At the same time, pervasive political, legal, and economic structures were erected which decisively prohibited both liberty and equality to the other half.

The hypothesis I am exploring is this: These discriminatory structures passed into the unconscious reality of Virginians. Even while no one will consciously advocate for them, their shape and spirit remain in place and will stay in place until identified and consciously dismantled. Moreover, the shame and guilt, the passivity and rage, and the collective helplessness before evil which these hypocritical structures created continues to paralyze the population even after they are gone. Richmond is trapped in a stew of hereditary hypocrisy. It systematically denies half its history.

There are measures for the magnitude of this denial. I have a copy of the 4^th Grade textbook approved by the State Department of Education and required to be used for the foundational teaching on Social Studies by every child in Virginia as late as 1965. This means that it was the basic teaching for any Virginian who is 60 years old today, and for many who are younger. Out of 180 pages, the book refers to black Virginians on only three. Two refer to the benevolence of slavery at the time of the Civil War. The other mentions Booker T. Washington. There is no mention of the enslavement of half the population following the Revolution; no mention of torture or violence; no mention of Gabriel’s attempted Revolution; no mention of the extensive system of racial segregation established following the Civil War; and of course no mention of Jim Crow or the Civil Rights movement. How is this possible? What is more essential knowledge for Virginians?

The most stunning measure of metropolitan Richmond’s denial of its history is the hiddenness for more than a century of Richmond’s central role in the Downriver Slave Trade. This human trafficking involved from 300,000 to 500,000 persons of African descent who were sold from Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom between 1830 and 1860. At its peak, the trade itself represented more than $100 million per year in gross revenue, not counting the economic activity of the related industries and shops surrounding the market. The sale of persons occupied 30 blocks at the center of town, at the foot of the Capitol, surrounded by churches and synagogues. It accounted for 50% of the economy of a city of barely 40,000 persons. It was certainly a major factor both in Virginia’s entry into the War and in the complete silencing of opposition to slavery in Richmond in the 20 years leading up to the War.

How did this deep and long-lasting economic history escape the attention of Richmond historians for more than 120 years? It is strange: A city that is considered one of the most history-minded places in the nation is actually hiding from its own history. The true history of Virginia and of Richmond, its capital city, went underground in the collective psyche. Over and over again, regardless of the stated developments in legislation and policy, these destructive patterns have reasserted themselves, subverting the revolution itself.

My book Richmond’s Unhealed History simply tells the history of Richmond and Virginia for 500 years, allowing the reader to discern these patterns, if they indeed exist, for himself. But in today’s lecture, I am going to identify several of the most significant patterns which I believe act to subvert the intentions of the American Revolution in its own city of Richmond. The most important of these is the Compact of White Privilege. So I’ll describe the development of this pattern in detail, and then briefly identify repetitive patterns in Capital Formation, Dual Education, and the Disposal of Surplus Labor.

1. White Privilege

At its beginning in 1607, life on Powhatan’s River was not in any way a satisfactory compact for English settlers. They were used without warning by the public-private partnership of the London Company as an invading army in a foreign country. 900 of the first 1000 died in the first three years. When Captain John Smith came to the Falls of the James in 1608, attempting to buy one of Powhatan’s villages for a permanent settlement, he actually traded a young Englishman, Henry Spelman, in payment for the village. Three years later, when Sir Thomas Dale attempted to move the main settlement to a high bluff called Henrico, nine miles below the Falls, Dale tortured and killed settlers who failed to obey his martial law. Most settlers had no rights.

Life for the majority of English settlers was miserable and deadly, not only because of the opposition of native Americans, but also because of the tyranny of their own countrymen. By 1620, Virginia tobacco had become so valuable in London that thousands of unemployed, misdemeanant, or credulous men were being shoveled off the streets of London and shipped in bondage to the Virginia tobacco fields. The king gave 50 acres of land to anyone who would import such a servant. The importing landowner then earned a 700% return in the first year and, if the man survived, 1500% profit in the second year on the bonded laborer. 50% of the imported laborers died in their first year. The white “servants,” as they were called, were slaves in everything but name. They could be bought and sold, and before 1660, few lived out their indenture of seven or more years.

Virginia was ruled by the Crown. In 1619 the House of Burgesses came into existence. It was to Virginia what Magna Carta had been to England. It gave to a few of the so-called “Great Men,” the wealthy plantation owners who had acquired vast tracts of land in Tidewater counties and controlled hundreds of servants, the ability to share some power with the King’s Governor.

There were a number of attempted revolts by white servants in the first 50 years, none of them successful. By 1660, some of the servants had managed to live out their indentures, and poor independent farmers were finding their way to the frontier. In 1676, Nathanael Bacon, who had acquired land on Curles’ Neck below Richmond and on Bacon’s Quarter Branch near Richmond’s Gilpin Court, gathered men to fight the Susquehannock Indians across from Westmoreland County on the Potomac. As his armed rebellion grew, it turned against Governor Berkeley. Bacon burned Jamestown and chased the Governor to the Eastern Shore. Mercurial in temperament and chronically unhealthy, Bacon died of “the bloody flux.” British warships finally subdued the rebellion at West Point, on the York River. The army that surrendered was composed of about 800 bonded men and tenant farmers. The army was half black and half white. At the time of Bacon’s Rebellion there were 8,000 bonded servants in Virginia, 6,000 of whom were of European heritage and 2,000, of African ancestry.

The threat of an interracial, class-based rebellion was not lost on the Governor or the Great Men. Over the next 29 years the House of Burgesses assembled what became the most important social charter of Colonial Virginia – the Virginia Slave Codes, completed in 1705. These codes established Virginia’s policy of “white privilege.” The codes assumed that the population of Virginia would include a large number of persons in bonded servitude. But they carefully distinguished between “white” servants and Negro slaves.

The word “white” was invented for the codes, used for persons of European heritage where the word “Christian” had formerly been used. The racial distinctions in the Slave Codes were not primarily economic. They were social distinctions which were clearly intended to “privilege” white servants over the Negro, Muslim, and other bondsmen working beside them in the fields. If a Negro and a white servant got into a fight, only the white servant’s testimony was accepted in court. The Negro was subject to whipping. The child of a Negro slave was automatically enslaved. In contrast, the Codes established physical protection for white servants:

[A]ll masters and owners of servants, shall find and provide for their servants, wholesome and competent diet, clothing, and lodging, and shall not, at any time …whip a christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” [Hening, Statutes at Large, III:447.]

As Theodore Allen has shown in his remarkable work, The Invention of the White Race, the Virginia Slave Codes were patterned on a colonial policy already developed for the British West Indies. By giving privileges to white servants and yeomen, the Crown established a Compact of White Privilege which created a buffer class who would fight on its side to keep the black slaves in subjection.

This Compact of White Privilege, in the form of the Virginia Slave Codes, became the charter for the economic growth of 18^th Century Virginia. At the beginning of the century England took over Virginia’s transatlantic slave trade from the Dutch, and Virginia’s Great Men shifted their eyes to Africa for free labor. During the 18^th Century 114,000 captured Africans reached the shore of Virginia. In 1718 London also began exporting convicted felons to the fields of Virginia and Maryland, and 40,000 of these persons were sold to planters for terms of 7 to 15 years. Other European countries sent indentures and settlers to the Piedmont and the Valley. In the 18^th Century, nearly 75% of emigrants to Virginia were in some form of bondage. Virginia’s transatlantic slave trade with Africa ended in 1774. By that time there were 300,000 white persons and 300,000 persons of African descent in Virginia.

The Great Men remained in charge, but they could not themselves fight a war. The American Revolution was dependent on the Compact of White Privilege. Our official narratives of the American Revolution never mention this unspoken compact. But it clearly offset the concept of human equality and liberty so far as half the population was concerned. In 1780, meeting in Richmond, the General Assembly voted to reward every soldier with a bounty of 300 acres and a “healthy sound Negro.” [Hening, ed., Acts of Assembly (Oct. 1780) X:331]

In Richmond, established in the last years of the Revolution, white privilege was seldom articulated, but always protected. A half-century later, the thousands of poor white boys who charged the Union artillery and were massacred on Malvern Hill in 1862, urged forward by the officer-descendants of the Great Men, were fighting, whether they knew it or not, to retain that scrap of white privilege. The overt racial segregation policies and laws developed in great detail in the period from 1880 to 1958 in Virginia, were affirmations of white privilege. The ascendancy of Harry Flood Byrd and his Democratic machine to dominate Virginia politics in the 20^th century, was to guarantee white privilege. Byrd stood in the place of the Great Men, a direct descendant of William Byrd of Westover, who laid out the city of Richmond.

The General Assembly of Virginia, when it could no longer guarantee white privilege by overt laws of racial segregation, secured white privilege for the next half-century by forbidding annexation to the majority black city of Richmond. It firmly established in March, 1971, a wall of racial and economic segregation in the metropolitan city, giving enormous economic advantages to the mostly white surrounding suburban counties. The Compact of White Privilege was intact.

2. Capital Formation:

Virginia’s initial capitalization was based on free land and free labor. An investment from England, through the London Company, was combined with land taken by force from Powhatan’s people and labor compelled from enslaved workers. The pattern assumed that capital, with its opportunity for growth and accumulated wealth, would belong to one small group of people, and that the great majority of people would live in a non-cash economy.

In 17^th Century Virginia labor was a capital asset. One owned one’s laborers. A laborer was not only without capital or the ability to accumulate capital – his person was actually a part of someone else’s capital.

The Virginia Slave Codes revised this distinction, maintaining a virtually absolute wall between capital and labor, but moving it to accommodate the Compact of White Privilege. Whites who were not Great Landowners might anticipate eventual ownership of property. But Negro slaves were themselves carefully defined as “real property.” The wall had moved. Half the population might hope eventually to acquire capital. But the other half was deliberately excluded.

There was no abolitionist movement in Virginia – laws even prohibited the importation of abolitionist pamphlets into the state. Debates on ending slavery, when there was debate, focused on the impossibility of allowing hundreds of thousands of formerly moneyless persons to join the economy. Freed African-Virginia slaves were required to leave the state within 12 months. The only anti-slavery movement focused on Colonization of former enslaved Virginians in Liberia.

In the 1830’s slave owners discovered, through the rapid expansion of the cotton economy in the South, that their slaves were now valuable sources of Capital. Homes were destroyed, and settled men, women, and children were stolen from their communities.

The pattern: A significant portion of the population would never participate in the cash economy and never be able securely to do its own capital formation.

Black citizens established communities throughout Richmond in the second half of the 19^th Century and the first half of the 20^th. But in the mid-20^th century, through a policy called Urban Renewal, the white-controlled city government invaded or destroyed every major black neighborhood in Richmond. One third of the land was taken for roads, one third for industrial development, and one third was used for dense public housing. Black investment, which had been growing, was destroyed.

Jackson Ward, where black investment and leadership had been concentrated since the 1880’s, was torn apart by the building of the Richmond Petersburg Turnpike. That road, which had been rejected in two public referenda, was forced on the city by Virginia’s General Assembly. It displaced one-tenth of the black population, destroyed 18 blocks of housing, and cut the black community in half. It is still stunning to realize that only four blocks north of the massive 80-foot deep canyon cut by the roadbuilders is a natural valley, still unoccupied, that could have carried the same roadway easily, inexpensively and without destroying a single home.

After 1970, the majority black center city of Richmond, representing 5% of the metropolitan city, was left in such debt that it could not renew its capital fabric, and its necessarily higher taxes and unavailability of new land provided a disincentive to capital investment. By leaving the historic city’s debt and expenses in the black district, the surrounding counties became low-tax enterprise zones. The state and federal governments built capital improvements to spur suburban development, including a $1.1 billion circumferential highway. All of the subsidized housing remained in the central jurisdiction – the fourth highest concentration of public housing in the nation. Full service public transportation stops suddenly at the borders of the central city. It is assumed that a significant portion of the population will never fully participate in the cash economy and never be able to do its own capital formation.

3. Dual Education.

Between the time of Virginia’s first Revolution and the Civil War, it was against the law to teach slaves to read. Some did, of course, and some white persons – including notably Stonewall Jackson – disobeyed the law. The prohibition was designed to inhibit rebellion and prevent economic advancement.

The pattern is to assume that a significant portion of the population does not need to be educated or should not be educated beyond a certain level.

Following the Civil War, white public education began and blacks in Virginia developed schools. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Richmond underfunded its segregated black schools. Black teachers received much lower salaries. Some black schools in Richmond were in session only four months a year.

Virginia was unwilling to provide higher or professional education for black persons. This policy lasted so long that Henry Marsh, the first African American mayor of Richmond, and Doug Wilder, the first African American governor of Virginia, were both sent out of state to Howard Law School.

Virginia maintained racially segregated schools, and fought so hard to maintain them that, under Massive Resistance, it was prepared to close all of the public schools of the Commonwealth in 1958 rather than permit blacks and whites to go to school together. When, under Federal court order, Virginia could no longer overtly maintain racial segregation, it developed a more modern and sophisticated policy of racial segregation by political jurisdiction. Today many of the schools of Richmond and other Virginia cities are more segregated by race than they were in 1970, and are now segregated by income as well. The state notoriously underfunds these schools, and has threatened them with sanctions because they cannot produce the same test results as well-funded suburban schools whose students are the offspring of professional, college-educated parents.

4. Disposal of Surplus Labor.

Enslaved labor, once it was not needed in the economy, became a cost-drag on capital. In the 1830’s, as black population continued to grow and farming became increasingly difficult, it was judged advantageous to seize 300,000 persons and sell them downriver, and to send as many thousands as possible of those remaining to an American colony in Liberia.

In the period following 1970, unemployment in the center city has reached as high as 40% in some neighborhoods. The jails are full. The state makes little or no effort to help children graduate from high school. And there is no public transportation to 80% of the metropolitan city’s jobs.

The pattern is that a significant proportion of the population is considered to be unentitled and disposable.

How might it be different?

Richmond is the child-city of the American Revolution. Are these the patterns that our ancestors intended? Are they accidental and inadvertent? Or are they a horrible violation of our ancestors’ ideals? How might they be different?

As I said at the beginning of this lecture, the entire population of Virginia was inspired by the grand vision of the American Revolution. This vision spread throughout the world: All men are created equal; Give me liberty or give me death. But from that beginning there has been a hidden, dark side to Virginia’s participation in this revolution, played out in the capital city of metropolitan Richmond.

The dark forces of discrimination, with their rigid legislated walls between haves and have-nots, subverted the vision. Even when it is no longer politically correct to push such policies overtly, they seem to control by unconscious or subversive pattern the continued development of our city.

There are signs of hope. The walls of discrimination are still firm, but they no longer are coterminous with race. The jurisdictions of metropolitan Richmond are much more inter-racial than they were. Moreover, African Americans have successfully entered the capital-owning class in increasing numbers. This too blurs the lines.

Once, at the time of the first American Revolution, Virginians articulated the dream of the nation and its people. Many of the leaders lived in the new city of Richmond. They led in the formation of a single nation, even while the seeds of subversion were developing in the child-city of their dreams. Right up to the siege of Fort Sumter, Virginians fought the secession of the state and the establishment of the Confederacy, only to have Richmond become its capital and their state its battleground. But Virginians then surrendered the pursuit of their own ideals to the Federal Government, and joined those who promoted discrimination and division. In 1861 and 1956 Virginians made the Federal troops and the Federal Government insist on what had been Virginia’s ideals of freedom and equality while we defended the opposite.

Is it too late? Can the people of this metropolitan city, and of this seminal Commonwealth, reclaim the ideals of our ancestors and once again lead the nation? Paradoxically, because of its delayed development, because of its denial, metropolitan Richmond may be in a position to lead by example and be economically successful. Most people do not believe in racial discrimination. Most people do not believe in abandoning the poor. Most people do believe in employment and education.

This city lies at the crossroads of one of America’s greatest port systems and America’s great north-south road – a position of great economic strength. Only its historic division holds it back, unconscious, repetitious, powerful. It reproduces itself in destructive patterns. Hypocrisy has drained our strength, locking us in conflict, passivity, and denial.

But the citizens of metropolitan Richmond are not racists any longer, are they? Are we? Are we that passive? Are we the exhausted victims of a confusing and hypocritical past? Is it possible to hope that we can renew our efforts to change the future? Can we believe that we may take up the quest for liberty again and, finally, complete here in Richmond the Revolution that our forbears proclaimed to the world?

by the Rev. B. P. Campbell
Banner Lecture, Virginia Historical Society
6 February 2016