1619: Racial Slavery, Representative Democracy, and…Empire?

I’ve never quite understood memes. But one, of a young man in a subway station pretending to stop a train by holding onto its side as it arrived in the station, and then, as it prepared to leave, pretending to push it, captures something fundamental about causation and how appearances can deceive. The young man, of course, has little to do with the arrival or departure of the train. It is on tracks, with a powerful engine; much planning went into where it goes, when it leaves, and how it moves. His only real chance to stop it would be lying on the tracks, a drastic move.. This video meme reminded me of the current equation oftwo events from 400 years ago: 1619 marks both the first elected assembly in Virginia and the beginnings of racial slavery in what would become the United States. But the connections between the two are not obvious or direct. The real power was elsewhere, in Britain’s Empire — with its king, laws, navies, merchants, its political structures and political struggles. It is as though we assert a connection between  the young man and the train’s movement without considering the building of the subway station and the tracks, the government that paid for it, the city through which it moves, and the reasons why it was built in the first place.

From the New York Times’ special issue to an edited volume on 1619 published by the Omohundro Institute, to a slew of individual papers and conferences such as those at the University of Mississippi, UCLA & Mt. Vernon, the joint commemorations have framed a theme. Democracy and racial slavery are inextricably connected: indeed many of the recent discussions have pushed further to create a causal relationship, contending that representative governments in the colonies gave birth to racial slavery. The recent scholarship has been building on Edmund Morgan’s famous paradox from American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) but pushes his arguments backward to also erase the significance of the American Revolution, asserting that on some level racial slavery was in the DNA of American democracy, right from the beginning, America’s “original sin.”

I comment here mostly on the academic volume, edited by Paul Musselwhite, Peter Mancall, & James Horn, Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America. It is a rich resource, full of thoughtful essays. But while I am glad that we are memorializing both, the focus on freedom & slavery (and in this volume, dispossession) projects an illusion.  Not of racial slavery, per se, though it took longer to fully develop. Nor of dispossession, though that too was often contested. It is an illusion of self–governance.

As the introduction and title emphasizes, freedom led directly to slavery and dispossession: “the importation of enslaved Africans, the construction of colonial political institutions” (and native dispossession) all worked together to make Virginia a “model for a global settler empire.” While the introduction acknowledges the existence of debates over governance, the volume ends with Jack Greene’s tendentious claims that representative governance was well established from the beginning, and certainly by the “second quarter of the seventeenth century.” Would the heyday of self-governance be during the era of the Dominion of New England, between 1685 and 1689, when all elected legislatures in the five northern colonies were abolished? Or perhaps when Royal Governor Effingham proclaimed in the 1680s that, just as James II was not bound by Parliamentary laws, he was not bound by Virginia’s? The aftermath of the Glorious Revolution provoked imperial reform in the colonies, and did make those colonies somewhat more representative, but they were still overseen by appointed governors with instructions from the crown and consistent oversight. The illusion of self-governance takes us to unrelenting and undifferentiated settler colonialism, a murky lens that obfuscates complex struggles over who should have power, struggles that had immense implications for both slavery & dispossession.

As Lauren Working points out in her essay for the volume, the first meeting of the assembly (the “Burgesses”) in Jamestown in 1619 was summoned merely to ratify laws already agreed upon in London by the Virginia Company. In 1623 William Cavendish agreed that “The government [of Virginia] is not democraticall” and that to claim so would be slanderous and seditious. “The government cannot be termed democraticall wher the Kinge onely hath absolute power.” The first 1619 assembly, elected only by those few with a share in the Virginia company, was a feeble attempt to rein in that company’s authoritarian governor, Thomas Smythe. While there were others, like Cavendish, Edwin Sandys, and Francis Wyatt who thought Smythe too autocratic, and sought to act for the good of the broader commonweal, they did not seek democracy.

Virginia’s assembly met only intermittently until the 1640s. There is no evidence that the Burgesses gathered between that initial meeting on July 30, 1619 and April, 1624, a gap of nearly five years. There is another long gap between 1633 and 1640. They had to be summoned by the Royal Governor, who called them only rarely and briefly to consider specific issues. The King appointed much more powerful governing bodies, a Governor and his Council, which was also the General Court, that met monthly. In his edited volume of the Burgesses’meetings, published in 1924, H. R McIlwaine suggested that because laws/orders/edicts were issued in Virginia during the 1630s, that the Burgesses must have met to approve them, even if we have no evidence of such meetings. Perhaps. But why should we assume that the Burgesses had to authorize laws in Virginia in the 1630s, when in England Charles I and his privy council (together they made up the Court of Star Chamber) were making laws via proclamation and court decision? The balance of power between Virginia’s Governor and Council was also being adjudicated by the Star Chamber in England. In 1636, upon Governor Harvey’s request to the king, they tried and then imprisoned two members of the Virginia Council in the Fleet Prison. Virginia was part of a kingdom convulsed by two revolutions over questions of power in the seventeenth century.

The equation between democracy and slavery is fudged in this volume by the catch-all concept of “settler colonialism.” It can be a helpful frame for analysis. But in this case it obscures more than it explains. When used here, it somehow implies democracy and erases larger power structures. It also tends to erase change over time and differences between colonies, blending the early seventeenth century directly into the nineteenth. The use of this concept in 17th century British America also tends to erase the relevance and influence of the intellectual debates over power that shaped laws and policies over two centuries in the Anglo-Atlantic. “Democraticall” governance, principles advocated by the levellers in England in the 1640s, was often correlated with attempts to limit large estates and bound labor, including slavery. The two centuries that followed 1619 were marked by fierce debates over such principles and policies, over questions of power and justice and inclusion. It was never a simple paradox.