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By Root 1829 0

at the Academy assailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, telling the students that since Southerners were “taught from youth to believe, and being better assured of it from the studies of our manhood, that the institution of slavery is divine in its origin,” it was their responsibility to create a new body of American literature to counter Mrs. Stowe’s book.

20. Henry Reed Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia (Hartford, Conn., 1955); Robert Alonzo Brock, Virgil Anson Lewis, Virginia and Virginians, vol. 1 (Richmond, 1888), pp. 689ff.; “F.M.” [Francis Mallory], “Colonel Mallory,” The Virginia Historical Register, and Literary Companion, vols. 3–4 (1850), pp. 24ff; Memorial, Virginia Military Institute: Biographical Sketches of the Graduates and Élèves … Who Fell During the War Between the States (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 352ff.

21. Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys, p. 15.

22. Walter Minchinton et al., eds., Virginia Slave Trade Statistics 1698–1775 (Richmond, 1984), passim; Starkey, pp. 34–36; U.S. Census data, Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1790–1860. One interesting case of a transition from slavery to freedom was that of Caesar Tarrant, a slave who served during the Revolution as a pilot for the Virginia Navy, aboard vessels with names like Patriot and Jefferson. Some years after the war, the General Assembly rewarded his valuable service by passing a special bill to purchase his freedom—with state funds, no less. Tarrant and his children went on to become fairly substantial landowners in the county.

23. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Starkey, The First Plantation, p. 38; WPA interview (1936) with Moble Hopson (born near Hampton in 1851) in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972), series 1, vol. 16, Virginia Narratives, pp. 31ff. Despite the persistent literary convention of writing blacks’ spoken words as “Negro” dialect, recent historians have suggested that at least in antebellum Virginia, the dialect of enslaved blacks was quite similar to that of poor whites. See Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War (New York, 2004).

24. Shepard Mallory census data, 1870–1920.

25. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John & Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York, 1963), p. 442.

26. New York World, June 11, 1861.

27. American Agriculturalist, vol. 11, no. 7 (July 1850), p. 203.

28. I’m grateful to Ned Sublette for permission to borrow his idea of the Chesapeake as America’s slave coast, the subject of an important book now in progress.

29. Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820. For the Virginia trade, see Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York, 1861), pp. 49–59; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), esp. chap. 4; Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union (University Park, Pa., 2001), esp. part 2. For more on Jefferson’s views, cf. Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York, 2007), pp. 45–48.

30. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

31. L. C. Lockwood, “Decennial Report,” The American Missionary, vol. 15 (1871), pp. 196–97; former slave William Roscoe Davis in the New York Times, Jan. 14, 1862.

32. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, June 23, 1859 (Library of Virginia).

33. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Nov. 26, 1859.

34. Ibid.

35. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005), pp. 329–33; see also Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York, 2009), pp. 55–56; Barton Haxall Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York, 1899), p. 150. Wise would go on to be a Confederate general.

36. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary