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By Root 1710 0

not all Hampton slaves were lashed daily—and, moreover, that quite a few spoke of their masters as decent, even kindly, people. Some slaves here, as in other places, were left to lead more or less independent lives, working aboard oyster boats on the Bay or practicing trades in town, and simply remitting most of their earnings to their masters. The town’s location also offered them unusual access to information about the outside world. In the decades before the war, a summer resort called the Hygeia Hotel turned Hampton into a popular watering place for wealthy visitors, including men of national prominence. John Tyler, Winfield Scott, and Roger Taney, among others, became familiar faces. Indeed, Tyler and his family purchased a beachfront villa right next door to the Mallory estate; when they arrived each summer they would erect a temporary cabin behind the house to accommodate their retinue of slaves. As these visiting blacks mingled with Hampton’s local Negroes, they must have confided a good deal of inside political news and high-class gossip that James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley would have given their eyeteeth to acquire.25

And yet Hampton’s picturesque, shabby-genteel exterior hid far shabbier, and far less picturesque, realities under its surface. One visiting Northerner, asking an elderly slave if she had a “good” master, was assured that the man was “a kind—a werry kind massa!” And then she added: “Why, bless de Lor’… he nebber put wires in his cowhides in all his life!” The woman, of course, was making a larger point: a whip without metal wires woven into it is still a whip. There was no such thing as a “good” slaveholder; no such thing as a gentle version of bondage.26

In July 1850, an article titled “New Way of Raising Pigs” appeared in a magazine called The American Agriculturalist. “Dr. Mallory, of Hampton,” it began, “has a new way of keeping both pigs and negroes out of mischief.” It went on to explain that the esteemed doctor—he was the colonel’s elder brother, Francis—made a practice of giving each of his slaves one or two piglets every spring to tend and feed throughout the rest of the year. Then, at slaughtering time, half the butchered hog would go to the master, the other half to the slave. It was an efficient way to fatten swine, the article noted—“and besides, it is contrary to negro nature to run away and leave a fat pig.”27

That was how slavery worked in Hampton. As beneficent as a master might be, he ultimately had to treat his Negroes as a type of livestock—a type, moreover, that could be damnably hard to keep from straying off. This was no small matter, as Virginia’s slaves were growing more and more valuable over time. With the Old Dominion’s best soil long since exhausted, its farmers could only gaze enviously southward at the bountiful fields of the Cotton Kingdom. Yet the good fortunes of the Gulf States did not bypass Virginia entirely. The Chesapeake became America’s own Congo River, its new slave coast.28 The higher the price of cotton in New Orleans (and in Lowell and Liverpool, for that matter), the higher the price of Negroes in Richmond. Indeed, it was often said that black folk were Virginia’s only worthwhile cash crop.

The old fortunes of the tidewater stretched thinner and thinner with each new generation. Heirs multiplied; debts multiplied; a gentleman from even one of the finest bloodlines might easily find himself in financial embarrassment. Meanwhile his Negroes had multiplied, too—more mouths to feed; more backs to clothe; more hands to do the same amount of work. Their Increse to him & his heirs for ever. Then one heard about the most remarkable prices being fetched: two thousand dollars for a prime male! It was beyond exorbitant—it was insane; it couldn’t last. It was also, by coincidence, the exact amount of the note of hand that one had imprudently signed two years ago, back when it had seemed, briefly, that grain prices must rise—the note of hand that would fall due next quarter, and nary a cent of cash to pay it with. The slaves’ rations had already been cut