"A Perilous and Grievous Burden"
Bibliography
A Note on Sources
John Hartwell Cocke and his family left behind a massive manuscript collection that includes deeds, wills, advertisements, bills and receipts, war memorabilia, diaries, letters and other correspondence. Cocke's wide range of interests—business, public and private—joined with his seeming inability to throw away even the most insignificant piece of paper provide for the historian one of the best sources available for examining the life of the planter elite in Virginia during the period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Two individual collections of the Cocke family papers are housed at the Alderman Library (University of Virginia) in Charlottesville, The Cocke Papers and the Bremo Recess Papers. In addition, Cocke's library at Bremo is still largely intact; his penciling is legible in the margins of many of the volumes; and many of his letters exist in other collections.
Secondary sources on Cocke are extremely rare and for the most part confined to the architecture of his estate, Bremo. Clement Eaton included a chapter on Cocke, "John Hartwell Cocke of Virginia: The Liberal Mind in a Southern Context," in The Mind of the Old South, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1964). A short biographical sketch is included in Randall M. Miller's "Dear Master": Letters of a Slave Family, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). The most comprehensive treatment of Cocke to date is by Boyd Martin Coyner, "General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo: Agriculture and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South," (unpublished Ph.d dissertation, University of Virginia, 1961). As the title implies, this work revolves around the twin themes of agriculture and slavery. However, Coyner includes many other aspects of the General's multi-faceted and interesting life.
J. L. Urbach made Cocke's second wife the object of an informative "venture in microhistory," "God and Man in the Life of Louisa Maxwell Holmes Cocke: A Search for Piety and Place in the Old South," (unpublished Ph.d dissertation, Florida State University, 1983). Leslie Howard Owens featured Cocke's slave, George Skipwith in the chapter, "The Black Slave Driver," in This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Carolyn Anne Richgels did an undergraduate honors thesis, "The Turning of an Evangelical Mind: John Hartwell Cocke, 1780–1866," (Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, 1982). Two unpublished University of Virginia documentary editing projects from the Cocke Family Papers are John F. Kirn, Jr.'s, "'Our Chief Bessetting Sin': The Anti-Tobacco Papers of John Hartwell Cocke," and my "'She Taught Me How to Live': John Hartwell Cocke, Death & Bereavement in the Early Nineteenth Century." Finally, an incomplete biography by Armistead C. Gordon, Jr., can be found in the Armistead C. Gordon, Jr., Papers, (University of Virginia).
Bibliography
Books
Adams, A. D. Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America, 1808–1831. Boston, 1908.
The African Repository, 1826–92. Washington: J. C. Dunn, 1835.
Archibald Alexander, D.D. A History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa. Philadelphia: William S. Martin, 1846.
Annual Report of the American Colonization Society. Washington, 1818–1910.
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.
Barnes, Gilbert Hobbs. The Antislavery Impulse 1830–1844. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933.
Barraud, E. M. The Story of a Family. London: The Research Publishing Co., 1967.
Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York, 1974.
Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric. New York: W. E. Dean, 1852.
Brown, Thomas. Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Bruce, Philip Alexander. History of the University of Virginia (1920–22).
Cocke, Philip St. George. Plantation and Farm Instruction, Regulation, Record, Inventory & Account Book for the Use of Managers on the Estate of Philip St. George Cocke. Richmond, 1852.
Cullen, Charles T. St. George Tucker and Law in Virginia 1772–1804. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987.
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr., ed.
Dabney, Prof. Robert L., D.D. A Defense of Virginia, [and through Her, of the South.] In Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party. New York: E. J. Hale & Son, 1867.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
____. Ante-Bellum Reform, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967.
____. Slavery and Human Progress, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Davis, Richard B. Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia 1790–1830. Chapel Hill, 1964.
Degler, Carl N. The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974.
Dew, Thomas Roderick. Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. Richmond, 1833.
Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating to the Hugenot Emigration to Virginia. Richmond, 1886.
Drewy, William Sidney. The Southampton Insurrection. Reprint of the 1900 edition. Murfresboro, N.C., 1968.
Dumond, Dwight. Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961.
Eaton, Clement, and Albert D. Kirwan. The Civilization of the Old South: The Writings of Clement Eaton. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.
Eaton, Clement. The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940.
____. The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790–1860. New York: Harper, 1961.
____. A History of the Old South. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949.
____. The Mind of the Old South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.
d'Entremont, John. Southern Emancipator Moncure County, The American Years 1832–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Faust, Drew Gilpen. A Sacred Circle the Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Fox, Early Lee. The American Colonization Society 1817–1840. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1919.
Foote, William Henry. Sketches of Virginia, Historical and Biographical. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1852.
Frazier, Thomas R., ed. The Underside of American History: Other Readings. Vol. 1, to 1877. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1982.
Freehling, Alison. Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Gallaudet, E. M. Life of Thomas Gallaudet.
Gallaudet, Rev. T. H. Life of Josiah. Natural Theology. Repentance. New York: The American Tract Society, 1837.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Gordon, Armistead C. William Fitzhugh Gordon, a Virginian of the Old School: His Life, Times and Contemporaries (1787—1858). New York and Washington, D.C.: The Neale Publishing Company, 1909.
Gurley, R. R. Mission to England, in Behalf of the American Colonization Society. Washington, D.C.: Wm. M. Morrison, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1841.
Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.
Harrison, Jesse Burton. Review of the Slave Question by a Virginian. Richmond, 1833.
Hatch, Edwin. The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1880. London: Rivingtons, 1882.
Holifield, E. Brooks. The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978.
Isaac, Rys. The Transformation of Virginia: 1740–1790. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Jay, William. An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835.
Jones, Charles Colcock. The Religious Instruction of the Negroes. 1842.
Lewis, Jan. The Pursuit of Happiness: Family & values in Jefferson's Virginia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Lewis, Ronald L. Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715–1865. Westport, Conn., 1979.
Lifton, Robert Jay, ed., with Eric Olson. Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.
Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America From the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619–1808). Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965; reprint of 1901.
Mallard, R.Q. Plantation Life Before Emancipation. Richmond, 1892.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, vol. 6. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.
Mathews, Donald G. Slavery and Methodism: A chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845. Princeton, N.J., 1965.
Marwick, Arthur. The Nature of History. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1970.
McColley, Robert. Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1964.
McTyeire, Rev. H. N., Rev. C. F. Sturgis, Rev. A. T. Holmes, Duties of Masters to Servants: Three Premium Essays. Charleston, S.C.: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1851; reprint edition, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971).
McTyeire, H.N., D.D. Duties of Christian Masters. Edited by Thomas O. Summers, D.D. Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1859.
Mercer, Charles Fenton. An Exposition of the Weakness and Inefficiency of the Government of the United States of America. 1845.
Miller, Randall M. "Dear Master": Letters of a Slave Family. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Morton, Louis. Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville, VA, 1941.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Random House, 1982.
Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion. New York: Mentor, 1975.
Owens, Leslie Howard. This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Pres, Inc., 1976.
Page, Thomas Nelson. The Old Virginia Gentleman & Other Sketches. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.
____. The Old South Essays Social and Political. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1892.
Paxton, John D. Letters on Slavery; Address to the Cumberland Congregation, Virginia. Lexington, KY: Abram T. Skillman, 1833.
Pollock, John. Wilberforce. Belleville, Michigan: Lion Publishing Corporation, 1977.
Rice, John Holt, D.D., and Benjamin Holt Rice, D.D. Memoir of James Brainerd Taylor. New York: The American Tract Society, 1833.
Roark, James L. Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977.
Robert, Joseph C. The Road from Monticello: A Study of the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1832. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941.
____. The Tobacco Kingdom. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1938.
Rosengarten, Theodore. TOMBEE: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, with the Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890). New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.
Ruffin, Edmund. Address to the Virginia State Agricultural Society on the Effects of Domestic Slavery. Richmond, VA, 1853.
Russell, John H. The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619–1865.
Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Baton Rouge, 1966.
Simms, Henry T. The Rise of the Whigs in Virginia, 1824–1840. Richmond: The William Byrd Press, Inc., 1929.
Slaughter, Philip. The Virginian History of African Colonization. Richmond, 1855.
Slave Insurrections Selected Documents. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970. Originally published in 1822 by A.E. Miller, Charleston.
Smith, Elbert B. The Death of Slavery: The United States, 1837–65. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Smith, James L. Recollections. Norwich, Conn., 1881.
Thomas, John L., ed. Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.
Tragle, Henry Irving, ed. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831. Amherst, Mass., 1971.
Tucker, St. George. A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1796.
White, Rev. H. M., D.D. Rev. William S. White, D.D. And His Times. [1800–1873]. An Autobiography. Edited by his son. Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1891.
Whitefield, Theodore M. Slavery Agitation in Virginia 1825–1832. Baltimore, 1930.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969.
Articles
Allmendinger, David F., Jr. "The Early Career of Edmund Ruffin, 1810–1840." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 93 (April 1985), 127–54.
Berlin, Ira. "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society." American Historical Review, 85 (February 1980), 44–78.
Bruce, Dixon D. "Religion, Society & Culture in the Old South; A Comparative View." The American Quarterly, 26 (Oct. 1974).
Egerton, Douglas R. "To the Tombs of the Capulets: Charles Fenton Mercer and Public Education in Virginia, 1816–1817." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 93 (April 1985), 155–74.
Eggleston, George Cary. "The Old Regime in the Old Dominion," The Atlantic Monthly, 36 (November 1875), 603–16.
Fladeland, "Compensated Emancipation: A Rejected Alternative." The Journal of Southen History, 42 (May 1976), 173–81.
Gaines, William H., Jr. "A Home Dedicated to Service." Virginia Cavalcade, 1 (Autumn 1956), 20–29.
Gordon, Armistead C., Jr. "John Hartwell Cocke." Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone. New York, 1928–26.
Hughes, Sarah S. "Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782 to 1810." William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), 260–86.
Jackson, Luther P. "Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia from 1760 to 1860." Journal of Negro History, 16 (April, 1931), 168–239.
Kimball, Fiske. "The Building of Bremo." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 57 (January 1949), 2–13.
Klein, Herbert S. "Slaves and Shipping in Eighteenth Century Virginia." Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1975), 384–85.
____. "The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700–1790." William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), 229–31.
Main, Jackson T. "The One Hundred." William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (July 1954), 354–84.
Matthews, Pat. "Joseph Jenkins Roberts: The Father of Liberia." Virginia Cavalcade, 23 (Autumn 1973), 4–12.
McGuffey, W. H. "Gen. John Hartwell Cocke." Central Presbyterian (clipping in Cocke Papers).
Minor, Lucian. "General John H. Cocke of Virginia." American Temperance Magazine, 2 (March 1852), 130.
Moore, William Cabell. "General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo, 1780–1866. A Brief Biography and Genealogical Review with a Short History of Old Bremo." William & Mary Quarterly, 13 (July & October, 1933), 150–52, 207– 13.
Nicholls, Michael L., ed. "News from Monrovia, 1834–1846: The Letters of Peyton Skipwith to John Hartwell Cocke." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 85 (1977), 65–85.
Page, Thomas Nelson. The Century Magazine, 78 (May 1909), 3–21.
Pulley, Raymond H. "General Cocke and the Temperance Crusade." Virginia Cavalcade, 15 (Summer 1965), 21–27.
Southall, Jas C. P. "A Memoir of the Cocke Family." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 3, 4, 5.
____. "Cocke Genealogy." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 27 (July 1929), 231–33.
____. "Origins of the Cocke Families of Virginia." William & Mary Quarterly, 9 (January 1929), 49–59.
____. "Richard Cocke of Bremo and his Children." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 44 (April 1936), 136–51.
Stanard, William G., and Mary N. Stanard. The Colonial Virginia Register. Albany, N.Y., 1902.
Virginia Land Patents, 12 (1724–25), 333, 236(2), 237(2); 29 (1749–51), 261–62. Richmond: Virginia State Library.
"Virginia Militia in the Revolution." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 6 (Jan. 1899), 277; 7 (Oct. 1899),153.
Wiecek, William H. "The Statutory Law of Slavery and Race in the Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America." William & Mary Quarterly, 34 (April 1977), 258–80.
Manuscripts
American Colonization Society Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Barbour Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Bremo Recess Papers, Alderman Library, Charlottesville, VA.
Cabell Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Cocke Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Gordon Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Jefferson Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Mayo Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Reports and Minutes of University Board of Visitors. Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Doctoral Dissertations
Boles, John Bruce. "The Religious Mind of the Old South: The Era of the Great Revival, 1787–1805." University of Virginia, 1969.
Coyner, Martin Boyd, Jr. "John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo: Agriculture and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South." University of Virginia, 1961.
Dann, John C. "Humanitarian Reform in the South." College of William & Mary, 1975.
Hickin, Patricia P. "Antislavery in Virginia, 1831–1861." University of Virginia, 1968.
Strictland, Scott. Black South Carolina: The Conversion Experience. University of North Carolina.
Sutton, Robert Paul. "The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30. A Profile Analysis of Late-Jeffersonian Virginia." University of Virginia, 1967.
Urbach, J. L. "God and Man in the Life of Louisa Maxwell Holmes Cocke: A Search for Piety and Place in the Old South." Florida State University, 1983.
Master's Theses
Allen, Carlos Richard. "The Great Revival in Virginia, 783–1812." University of Virginia, 1948.
Babcock, Theodore Stoddard. "Manumission in 1782–1806." University of Virginia, 1974.
Click, Patricia Catherine. "Slavery and Society in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, 1790–1830." University of Virginia, 1974.
Conner, Valerie Jean. "The Failure of the American Colonization Society." University of Virginia, 1969.
Fritschle, Elizabeth Ann. "Prescriptive Literature and Courthsip Ritual in the Upper South 1800–55." University of Virginia, 1986.
Hickin, Patricia P. "John Curtis Underwood and the Anti-Slavery Crusade 1809–1860." University of Virginia, 1961.
Hodson, Peter. "The Design and Building of Bremo: 1815–1820." University of Virginia, 1967. Published by author privately in 1968.
Knight, J. Stephen, Jr. "Reform Sentiment in the Antebellum South as Revealed in the Political Party Newspapers of Georgia and Virginia, 1830–1848." University of Virginia, 1973.
Schroeder, John Herman. "Virgnia Whig Leadership, 1834–1842." University of Virginia, 1967.
Snell, Melinda. "'Never Clash One With the Other,' Love, Friendship, and Marriage in Virginia Families, 1800–1825." University of Virginia, 1988.