"A Perilous and Grievous Burden"
General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo was one of the largest and most successful planters in antebellum Virginia. He was born near the end of the Revolutionary War, in 1780, into a family with French Huguenot origins. While attending the College of William & Mary, he was exposed to Enlightenment ideas and the antislavery ideals of George Wythe and Bishop James Madison. By the time he came of age at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Cocke had inherited, along with over one hundred slaves, several thousand acres of lucrative farmland along the banks of the James River. (7)
During his long life (he died after the Civil War in 1866), Cocke augmented his role as gentry planter by becoming involved in an endless array of reform projects aimed at stablizing, modernizing, and institutionalizing society. Either by direct involvement, or philanthrophy, he was at the forefront of many new progressive movements that were to play a significant role in Virginia and American history. An "original," Cocke's "unusual independence of mind" in an age of reform led him to be, in Armistead Gordon, Jr.'s words, a "pioneer of modern social reform." (8)
Cocke's reform fervor touched every area of life. He practiced scientific agriculture long before the celebrated Edmund Ruffin began his experiments. (9) He became an arch-foe of tobacco early on and his incessant opposition culminated in an 1860 pamphlet, Tobacco, the Bane of Virginia Husbandry, in which he argued that tobacco was not only debilitating to the soil but also harmful to men's health and morals. About a decade after he became an evangelical Christian, Cocke took the pledge not to imbide alcohol. He became actively involved in the formation of temperance societies for both slave and free persons and became president of the American Temperance Society in 1836. He also joined, immediately upon their creation, the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Education Society. From 1823 to 1829, Cocke served on the Virginia Board of Public Works and from 1836 to 1841 sat on the Board of the James River and Kanawha Company.
Cocke knew and felt at ease with prominent Virginians like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Joseph C. Cabell, Charles Fenton Mercer, and John Floyd. He regularly communicated with the state's leading political spokesmen and on several occasions had Virginia governors beholding to him financially. But unlike those men, he avoided running for any political office, though he was seriously considered for governor on at least one occasion. He called politics "a muddy pool" even after he became a resolute and loyal Whig, mostly due to Andrew Jackson's rise to prominence in national politics. He did lead a company of the Virginia militia for several decades, however, and commanded two Army camps during the War of 1812.
Cocke left to posterity a beautiful architectural legacy situated in the Piedmont on his Bremo plantations overlooking the James River in Fluvanna County, halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville. In late summer 1803, the Cockes visited Bremo in the first of several annual pilgrimages to escape the harsh climate of the Virginia low country. That same year the house at Bremo Recess was begun. A series of building projects followed, including a granary in 1804, a tobacco house and stable in 1806, and an ice house and a carpentry shop in the winter of 1806–1807. In 1808, Cocke sold Mount Pleasant, his native Tidewater plantation directly across from James Town at Swann's Point in Surry County, to his sister Polly and her husband Nicholas Faulcon. In 1809, the Cocke family, with a cortege of slaves, moved permanently to Bremo.
The War of 1812 caused a temporary cessation of Cocke's building projects as he spent most of his time away from Bremo serving in the Army. Then, in 1814, he began plans to build an elaborate mansion two miles up the James beyond Bremo Recess, where he could overlook his major fields. Before he began construction of the mansion, he completed at Recess a stone barn and several stone buildings, which still stand. The same year, 1815, he began experiments in Pisé, which he found to be easier to build and cheaper but as "durable as stone." Those Pisé buildings which stand today, along with one Cocke had constructed in Brunswick County, are the only ones that have survived in Virginia. Also in 1815, Cocke began another stone barn, at Upper Bremo. The second barn is a large structure, thirty-three by eighty-five feet, with a two story portico supported by tuscan-columns. It is perhaps the only stone Palladian barn in the world and certainly exhibits the architectual talent of the builder. In the barn's bell tower hangs a gift from General Marquis de Lafayette to Cocke in gratitude for a shipment of wild turkeys—a bell which occasionally still may be heard ringing at dinner time.
One of the most important avenues of reform into which Cocke ventured was antislavery. At the College of William & Mary he was exposed to the antislavery views of George Wythe, Bishop James Madison, and St. George Tucker. More progressive than many Virginians of the period, Cocke considered blacks capable of moral and educational equality and self-government. He resolved to free his slaves upon reaching his majority but reconsidered after brooding over the social position of free blacks. He accepted the prevalent belief that centuries of subjugation and persecution of blacks by whites would prevent the two races from ever living alongside one another in tranquility. After deciding against immediately freeing his own slaves, he began to support the emancipation and colonization scheme which St. George Tucker published in 1796. That decision determined the route Cocke's antislavery impulse would follow and fostered his life-long commitment to the American Colonization Society (founded 1816), of which he served as a vice-president.
Cocke's antislavery impulse, when combined with an evangelical spirit and other reform tendencies, led him to consider several unorthodox measures on behalf of his slaves. In defiance of the law and his neighbors, he began in the early 1820s to educate slave children in a little brick schoolroom he had constructed at Bremo. In the same decade he put up a building for worship by the slaves and began to reward them for taking the temperance pledge. He hoped to develop responsible citizens for life in Liberia who would support themselves and lead the new nation. The number that eventually sailed for Monrovia were small and composed mostly of branches of Cocke's most trusted and capable slave family, the Skipwiths.
Cocke's unremitting attempt to train his slaves for freedom and emigration eventually produced a unique experiment in the history of the antislavery crusade. In the 1840s he purchased a cotton plantation, Hopewell (which he renamed New Hope), in the Black Belt territory of Greene County, Alabama, to which he sent a number of slaves and allowed them maximum control of their affairs. This "school for freedom" was supposed to train the slaves for their future life in Liberia as free citizens by developing their work skills, teaching them reading and writing, and imbuing them with the Christian religion. If the slaves were able to make a profit on their business they could use what they made to purchase their freedom and pay for their transit across the Atlantic. Cocke's plan was a notable expression of benevolence by a southern slaveholder, but it failed to achieve its intended purposes.
By the time John Hartwell Cocke was born in 1780 a movement to eliminate slavery in the emerging republic already had begun. The philosophical underpinnings were set in place and the first series of political maneuverings nearly completed. After debating from 1776 to 1779, a plan for the gradual emancipation of Virginia'a slaves prepared by Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton, and supported by other eminent Virginians, was shelved by the legislature. Like Jefferson's 1769 manumission plan, it was considered premature because of the "unpreparedness" of the public mind. Other schemes failed to emancipate slaves. But the two decades of agitation did culminate in Virginia's prohibiting the importation of slaves in 1778. Four years later, in the same year that Massachusetts abolished slavery in the Quock Walker case, an act was passed in Virginia that eased the restrictions on voluntary manumissions. By 1788, Virginia Quakers, the state's most vocal emancipationists, had freed practically all their slaves.
In 1789 a new round of debates over slavery began when a U. S. congressional committee argued over a ten-dollar importation tax on slaves. The strongest antislavery expressions came from Virginia representatives. By the time this series of debates ended, however, in 1807, Gabriel's Rebellion had occurred and the state had passed the Deportation Acts of 1806. As a result, Virginia's antislavery sentiment became considerably less widespread and the state turned completely against restricting the domestic slave trade.
For Cocke a crucial point in his life came in 1798, his first year at William & Mary. Cocke recorded attending a series of lectures wherein the legitimacy of holding humans in bondage was not questioned. The unnamed speaker recognized the inequalities of birth with the consequence that some men had a higher station in life than others. Cocke, who had been called "young Master" since boyhood, listed rules in his notebook for promoting the general happiness of his "inferiors." According to his instruction, charity required that servants never be insulted by harsh language or required to labor unnecessarily. To refuse them harmless pleasures was cruel. Often they could be encouraged by "pecuniary bounty." All in all, for a rich man to maintain his servants with the principles of virtue and religion, those servants ought to be treated "as we would a companion." (10)
Yet another of Cocke's lecturers at William & Mary did question the system of slave ownership; he put forth the argument that slavery and justice were mutually exclusive terms. Cocke was taught that the first law of nature is self-preservation and its consequence liberty. No one can be for another man the "most proper judge of his own preservation"; thus everyone needs the liberty to act in his own perceived best interest. Accordingly, slavery is wrong. A man may enslave another, Cocke recorded, and he may make him work, as a whole people can alienate the liberty of another, but possession of the power to carry out such a design does not make it right. Unlike an army, which might have the right of conquest in a war, "the right of making slaves," the lecturer declared, "is null and void," because the slaveholders' sole authority is found in convention. Thus, "a convention which stipulates on one side absolute authority and on the other implicit obedience is contradictory and futile." (11)
This same lecturer went on to remark that indolence is the result in societies that labor in common and thus whites should not be "surprised to see the unfortunate slave, slow and lazy in the performance of their daily task." Realizing that the most enlightened philosophers had given their attention to the evils of slavery, the lecturer lamented his own inability to do justice to the subject. He saw how little progress he had made in its investigation, but he did take consolation in comparing himself with the poets, who "feel with sensibility and describe with force" the workings and weaknesses of nature and man. After all, "the age of Homer and Hesiod long preceded that of Thales and Socrates." (12)
Cocke's other notes of 1798 reveal the influence of a teaching concerning a particular relationship between habit and virtue that would remain central to his thinking in the ensuing years. Happiness consists, he wrote, "in the pursuit of some engaging end" and "depends upon the prudent constitution of habits." Further, an engaging end must include fulfilling the moral obligation to promote the public good in obedience to the will of God. Man is guided into that public good by the four cardinal virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. (13)
Archdeacon William Paley divided these virtues into three accustomed duties: toward God, other men, and ourselves. They conform with the law of honor, the law of the Land, and the law of the Scriptures. The Scriptures did not present literal "specific direction" but general rules and guidelines, a moral sense consistent with Jeffersonian ideals of natural, alienable, and unalienable rights. The cultivation of good habits is important since "a man acts from habit rather than reflection." A creature of habit, man abstains from many evils and "performs many acts of virtue" without thinking of God, his fellowman or his own happiness—the true objects of all virtue. (14)
Cocke's fascination with Paley stemmed from the latter's ability to fuse components of ancient classical philosophy, the Holy Scriptures, and the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy. Such a fusion seemed apparent to Cocke as he matured. Growing up on a slave-holding plantation, indeed with slaves being his best friends until he left for the grammar school in Williamsburg in 1794, Cocke was able to observe that often the bondsmen gave complete obedience to the will of the master without any apparent thoughts of rebellion or without any positive incentives for their obedience, such as material or vocal rewards. Likewise, he often saw the overseer and other whites demand and receive the performance of many tasks that any rational being would shirk, without the commander giving a moment's hesitation to the consequence of his demands. Both whites and blacks in many, if not most, instances acted out of deeply ingrained forms of habit that precluded their reflection on the correctness of any given action or its intended or unintended results. This being so, in Cocke's way of thinking, Paley's insights were valuable because if the cultivation of good habits would help an unthinking man to do good, how much more would they help a man who consciously held the true objects of virtue in high esteem to promote the welfare of all humanity. (15)
Paley's philosophy also included an explicit antislavery component. He vehemently denounced slavery as a "radical errour" that had resulted in many "miseries," creating in "the unhappy Africans" an "incitement to mutual wars." To him, the "horrid complexioned trade" in human property had "been clearly proved to be incompatible with the natural rights of man, contrary to the priciples of religion and morality, founded in extreme injustice, and the causes of many cruelties." Paley suggested a patient emancipation and colonization scheme by which the "friends" of abolition could "act with firmness and moderation" to eliminate the "diabolical traffick." Since the cause was for "humanity and justice," Paley argued, "there are strong reasons to believe, that their generous exertions will in time prove successful." (16)
In Paley we can thus see several ideas and themes that would become prevelant in Cocke's life: reliance on habit; duty toward God and society; morality and natural rights; moderate solutions to vexing problems; denuciation of slavery; the eventual triumph of justice. Paley exemplified moral philosophy; it was not unnatural that young Cocke was deeply affected by the antislavery component. As E. Brooks Holifield has pointed out,
Moral philosophy occupied an exalted position in the intellectual life of the Old South. Practically every college had a required course on the subject, usually taught by the president and fashioned to preserve the values of Victorian culture. The courses were ethical in the broadest sense, embracing mental philosophy, political theory, social decorum, religion, and civil duties. They transmitted the culture's values to each new generation of students, trying to make inherited moral expectations seem plausible and persuasive.
To Cocke, a moral sense, instinctive yet somehow rational, meant that "ethical obligation was implicit in moral knowledge." The supreme irony of this is that the Southern clergy moralists rejected the antislavery Paley as a utilitarian ethical relativist by the time they had vindicated slavery and Southern nationalism in the 1850s. (17)
In 1796, while Cocke was submerged in his studies at William & Mary, his tutor, St. George Tucker, replaced George Wythe as professor of law. Tucker befriended Cocke, and the two men remained close until the former's death in 1826. Cocke's second son, Philip St. George, was named for the judge. (18)
Seventeen hundred and ninety-six was also the year that Tucker published A Dissertation on Slavery. This plan for the gradual abolition of slavery in Virginia was akin both in spirit and in some particulars to plans presented by the American Colonization Society exactly twenty years later and supported by Cocke for the next fifty years. Tucker's plan called for the gradual emancipation of Virginia's slaves with a corresponding toughening of black codes. The black codes would be redesigned to create an atmosphere so oppressive that most freedmen would leave the state immediately and the few who remained would never step out of line. (19)
According to popular belief, two centuries of prejudice would prevent the society's integration of whites and blacks. Blacks, Tucker asserted, were used to being ruled by "a rod of iron," thus they could not be restrained by mere laws, the "milder restraints" of civilization, once they were freed. If slaves were retained among whites after emancipation, they would be miserable and idle, and, without means of subsistence, would become the "caterpillars of the earth, and the tigers of the human race." (20)
Tucker believed that gradual abolition of slavery in Virginia was both expedient and practicable. The next generation could be expected to face the prospects of living with some two million slaves, a weight which threatened their public and private happiness. Posterity, he wrote, would be extremely grateful to be "relieved from a perilous and grievous burden by the timely adoption of a plan" aimed at ridding Virginians of their slave problem. The belief that the slaves could be freed and transported out of the state at a minimal cost, and with very little trouble if the public would but rally with support, was an idea that Cocke was still clinging to some sixty years later, when the nation's black population had swelled to over four millon. (21)
Virginians in the last decade of the eighteenth century experienced no little excitement over the question of slavery. The 1780s had been the "pinnacle of antislavery zeal." But in the 1790s, there was a decline of antislavery sentiment and somewhat of a reversal of the goodwill formerly expressed. The hopes of many whites were frustrated by the poor conditions and treatment of the free blacks. The 1793 Dominican slave revolt, though a thousand miles away, was still close enough to make Virginians shudder at the idea that potentially murderous rebels might be in their own midst. A 1795 statute passed in Virginia carried a penalty of one hundred dollars against anyone who assisted a slave's claim to freedom, if that claim failed to be substantiated. (22)
The nineteenth century began with a great portent for Virginia's slaveholders. Gabriel's insurrection against Richmond in August 1800, thwarted only at the last minute by a slave who did not want to see his master killed, confirmed the worst fears of Virginia's whites. Even though the rebellion was planned by slaves, it was blamed on Richmond's large free black population, who, the whites believed, carried fire in its bosom and could only be trusted to plot murder and destruction against whites. (23)
Gabriel's plot considerably weakened the state's already waning antislavery zeal. Cocke, who was barely coming of legal age at this turning point in Virginia history, had previously determined to set his slaves free when he came into his inheritance. He began to reconsider that earlier decision. (24) From his Tidewater home in Williamsburg, where he was studying law, he wrote his brother-in-law, Nicholas Faulcon, asking to be kept abreast of any legislative actions regarding slavery. (25) Faulcon responded from Richmond that although there were some debates and proposals, "no regulations respecting those unhappy people have yet been made," nor would be made, except, he thought, that the manumission law probably would be repealed or made ineffective. Faulcon asserted that the politicians would "increase, rather than diminish the evils which they attempt to remedy." (26)
Faulcon instructed his younger friend about the recently discovered rebellious spirit "among those restless people." He believed such outbursts for freedom could never "be totally eradicated, so long as slavery exists in this Country." His own opinion was "that the more we ameliorate the condition of these people the less disposed will they be to renew their efforts to release themselves from those chains, by which they are bound." He hastened to add that the slave owners must be compensated for their losses when freedom occurred, and that the whites' safety "from the machinations of these unfortunate people" would lie in armed and regular patrols of the police and state militia.
Cocke returned to William & Mary on July 4, 1801, to deliver an Independence Day speech. He launched into a lengthy discourse about democracy and republicanism by remarking on a "whole people" (i.e., slaves) living among his fellow Virginians whose lives, liberty, and property remained in the hands of a separate group of men—slaveholders. After having arrogated "to themselves authority over the rest of their species," these men controlled that population without impunity, motivated by an interest completely distinct from its welfare. Cocke said,
When I reflect upon the large portion of the human species which now groan beneath the heaviest shackles tyranny can impose, I feel an irresistible impulse to announce to subjugated man the injustice of his sufferings.
He explained that God created and gave the black man rights which "gigantic force cannot eradicate or Earthly power affect." (27)
Cocke continued by alluding critically to the General Assembly's failure to deal with the slave issue. Representatives ought to declare the will of the people because the tendency of "the general will of the whole society" is to conform to its spokesmen. Representatives were to be servants in a republican government, and not impose their own will. Most Virginians, Cocke believed, wanted a solution to the slavery issue before it exploded into crisis. But if a vocal minority got its way in such an important area of concern, Cocke said, it would establish an aristocratic, anti-democratic "precedent which will extend to the justification of Despotic power." Cocke argued that man is constituted with certain principles that when violated insult his human character and degrade him "below the dignified station which by his creator he was destined to attain." Liberty and self-determination were central among those principles. The enslavement of a whole race offered the possible introduction of an aristocratic rule that would threaten to put shackles on the white man's liberty also.
In the months following the William & Mary speech, Cocke continued to seek solutions for the contradiction of owning slaves in a land of liberty. He had written to his former classmates, asking for ideas about what method might work in abolishing the evil. One close friend, Joseph Watson, responded at length. Watson began with a reminder that their sentiments and concerns were identical. He deeply regretted that men such as they were forever doomed to melancholy owing to the existence of slavery, especially in light of their impressions of "the dignified rank which humanity is designed to hold in the system of Nature." Slavery was holding back the progress of mankind, and what was worse, Watson lamented, only the "selfish principle which first gave rise to the evil," and its continuance, can be looked to as a reasonable cause of its abolition. Slavery will be around until people see it as in their interest to have it abolished, Watson concluded, and "I confess myself much at a loss" as how to extirpate the curse. (28)
Though Cocke was indeed often melancholy while reflecting about the great question of slavery in Virginia, he was not completely consumed by this paradox of owning and directing slaves in a land of liberty. His life was full and he ran his plantations with great zest. He courted and fell in love with a gentle young lady named Ann Barraud, from Tidewater. On Christmas Day, 1801, they were married. Ann and John Cocke were to be perfect mates, providing each other tenderness, stability and companionship. (29)
Ann's homelife had been the more secure; her family, still living, was close-knit and loving. Mr. and Mrs. Barraud warmly accepted the young planter who had lost both his mother and father as a youth. Ann imitated her mother in making her home comfortable and Cocke felt very fortunate to have such a supportive wife. Their marriage reflected the trend of the period toward companionate marriage. (30) When Cocke was away from home on his frequent trips to oversee the work of his other plantations, Ann conducted affairs on the homefront with care, keeping her husband informed by mail of her progress. Their almost daily habit of letterwriting kept them eagerly anticipating each reunion, and helped to fill the sad void that each of them felt upon separation. (31)
By 1806, the Cockes were contemplating a move from Swann's Point in Tidewater to Bremo, their fertile Fluvanna County plantation along the rocky and hilly Piedmont section of the James River. That same year, the Virginia General Assembly repealed the manumission law and replaced it with another. The new law severely restricted most Virginians' willingness to free their slaves because it required any newly freedman to leave the state within one year of obtaining his emancipation. Cocke's response to the Deportaton Act of 1806 has not survived but he would have been adamantly opposed to the measure, not because he was against encouraging freedmen to leave the state, but because its restrictions discouraged slaveowners from freeing slaves at all.
Cocke's sympathies would always lie with those of Jefferson and Tucker, who held that the two races could not coexist peacefully without one dominating the other. Indeed, that belief would continue to permeate Cocke's antislavery beliefs and hinder his emancipation schemes. Like most men of that period, Cocke failed to see how his prejudice limited his perspective, though he did take note of the prejudice of others.
At this stage in his life, Cocke wanted the government to shoulder the heavy burden of manumission, which meant passing laws to effectively permit and encourage emancipation and to find ways to help finance it. He believed that most Virginians wanted to be free of the slave system and would support the government in any attempt to eliminate it. Cocke thought that an enlightened legislature ought to carry out designs aimed at eradicating evil and encouraging progress, but he offered no guidelines or solutions himself. Some years later he would turn to private reform groups as the means in propelling the people toward voluntary emancipation, but as yet Cocke had not formulated any specific plans.
After their move to Bremo, the young Cocke family threw themselves heartily into plantation life. Ann, like her husband, struggled with the slave system. In late summer of 1807 she informed her mother that country life at Bremo made her happy; only "one great drawback" kept her pleasure as Mistress from being complete. The formation of her nature prevented Ann from not being overwhelmed with the plight of the slaves.
I think no subject has caused me so much uneasiness as this. I have reflected on every conduct most calculated to make these beings who call me Mistress, happy. I can not be content without seeing them comfortable around me and it is a work from which I shall experience great satisfaction. This subject is little thought of, but what hours of self delight will it not afford me at home, and even in the gay company of a ball-room: it would thrill pleasure through my heart, and say when I return home how much more enviable would be my situation at being received with joyful faces than cold indifference!—My husbands sentiments on this point are perfectly congenial with mine.
Cocke's sentiments were one with his wife, but his deep affection for Ann could not circumvent their inability to manage the plantations without slaves. (32)
As the first decade of the nineteenth century came to a close, Cocke's worries about the slave problem receded for a time as he got involved in other projects incidental to the running of his plantations. He seriously considered a career in the military, after rising to the rank of Captain in the Virginia militia, and later, during the War of 1812, to Brigadier General and Camp Commander in the army. His experience overseeing slaves made it seem likely that he could step into the role of commander, but his tendency to treat the enlisted men with strict discipline— not unlike that he used with blacks on the plantations—caused resentment and led to a number of courts-martial. He justified his strictness by pointing to his regiment's unusually low disease-caused death rate. After disastrous defeats around Washington in 1814, Cocke resigned his commission before the war was concluded. The extended separation from his family ended and, once home, he quickly settled back into the routine of plantation life. Any further military career dreams ceased. (33)
In the spring of 1816, a slave rebellion was attempted in Spotsylvania County. Cocke's son, John Jr., was attending school nearby at Lewis' Store. The boy wrote his father that the uprising had been subdued, the participants tried and four blacks condemned to death. George Boxley, the leader, was awaiting trial. Cocke responded that he had heard of the "contemplated insurrection headed by the deluded and short sighted wretch Boxley."
It is another among the many examples, which are to be met with in the world, of the fatal and monstrous errors which ignorance and bad passions may lead a man to attempt. The sensible part of Society can feel nothing but contempt for so weak and depraved a monster. The fate of the poor misled negroes is really to be deplored—tho' policy dictates that they shou'd be made examples of. (34)
Cocke's belief that the leader of a slave rebellion was "deluded" and a "wretch" tells us how he understood the desire for freedom. Anyone who chafed under the system and attempted to liberate slaves by his own hands appeared to Cocke a threat to society. He expected blacks to contribute to the stability and peace of the system, like whites, even though they did not derive the same benefits. He empathized with their plight, but demanded that they be patient and wait for whites to legally free them.
That slave rebellions might occur and involve members of his own family was a thought which Cocke did not like to contemplate. Though such insurrections were doomed at their outset to failure, it was only a matter of time before one would result in the death of whites. It had been only a few years since the British had raided Cocke's sister's plantation with the aid of some of her slaves. Back then, he had "shuddered" when he thought what the British might have done to his sister and her family if they had not fled in time. Near the same time, "quarrelling among the negroes" had, for Ann, turned Bremo into "a place of purgatory." Cocke's extended absences aggravated his lack of peace. Now his son was in a neighborhood where blacks were rebellious. But as a wealthy planter and large slave-holder he had to wait a respectable length of time before removing John, Jr., from Mr. Lewis' School. (35)
An intensely personal man, Cocke always craved the home life that had been cut away from him early in his childhood. Ann and the children gave him the family security he had been denied. He wrote that his only "source of comfort" in the world was derived from his family life. (36) When his sister Polly had died, Ann had advised her distraught husband to call on God for refuge. Soon after, several friends and acquaintances died in an epidemic of bilious-pleurisy. A few months later, Cocke received the announcement of the death of his young niece, Sally Bowdoin, the daughter his sister, Sally Faulcon. (37) These deaths, mingled with the aftereffects of the war, created a vague sense of foreboding in Cocke. When Ann developed complications during the birth of their sixth child, Sallie, a presentiment captured Cocke immediately and his already anxious state increased daily, (38) until the appointed time when he was "to see an angel die." (39)
Ann's death sparked a new beginning in Cocke, even though his emotions were "torn to pieces." It also ended a period of intense uncertainty about the meaning of life and his achievements in the world. Ann's lingering dissolution began to work a rejuvenation in him that was to endure for the next fifty years. He remarked soon afterward that, as the Savior had given life to all men in his death, she too in her death had shown him what life was. (40)
Cocke's diary and correspondence indicate that Ann's death marked a major turning point in his life. The process of confronting Ann's death caused significant changes in Cocke. As a direct result of Ann's pious life and unexpected death, Cocke converted to evangelicalism. Cocke experienced not only a radical transformation in values but also in goals and the means of achieving them. What previously had been a mere inclination within Cocke to improve society suddenly became an impelling inward (and in his view, divinely sanctioned) force to reform fundamentally American life in the nineteenth century. (41)
The foremost implication of evangelicalism for Cocke was that it supplied a religious orientation to the worldview that had been inculcated at William & Mary in his youth. As a major motivating force behind the many contemporary reform movements, "evangelical thought provided an ideological and emotional context in terms of which individuals approached many of their society's most pressing problems and within which they legitimated their consequent social actions." (42) Planters were to be church pillars and thus patterns for society to imitate. (43) Cocke already had a profound "sense of stewardship," believing "in the appointment of some men to be the guardians of others." (44) Though hardly egalitarians, the antislavery evangelicals believed that non-slaveholers were the best examples. (45) Thus Cocke's conversion instilled in him a sense of "missionary purpose" that would extend into every aspect of his life, and which would always require him to seek to abolish slavery. (46)
Dozens of friends wrote and visited to comfort Cocke and his family. St. George Tucker sent him a beautiful poem about death and comfort. But the love and support of family and friends, though valuable, paled beside the comfort that Cocke began to derive from his growing faith in God. Three months later, he was approvingly reinforced in his decision to move into "that channel" by his uncle, E. B. Kennon of Norfolk, who wrote a long and affectionate letter of comfort and instruction. Christianity, wrote Kennon, does not call for "a stoical insensibility of afflictive events" because the Lord "approves each compassionate movement of the soul." He continued:
We are born to troubles, to various disasters, which await all in every condition; from which neither grandure, nor power, nor wealth, nor wisdom, nor even innocence, can give a protection. They are common to the greatest, the wisest, and the best.
Let the Lord do as He will, Kennon urged. Even though it seems hard, it is good. We are not expected to do the impossible, just the possible. Ann, "the beloved of your soul," Kennon wrote, was an instructive and bright example who submitted to "a dutiful and humble acquiescence, to the divine dispensations." (47)
Cocke's faith began to increase slowly. Week by week the Sabbath took on new meaning. Bible study became more consistent and prominent, prayer more meaningful. (48) He received that "melancholy relief" for a "feeble nature" that another uncle wrote him about. (49) His religious development followed a Latin dictum which characterized the way in which he conducted his life: festina lente (make haste slowly). Still, by the following fall, though greatly encouraged in the Lord, Cocke was still weak in the flesh. Fearing his own death, he wrote a will, dividing his estate among his children, with instructions for their care and education.
Cocke's will of l817 is significant because it discloses that he had renewed his sense of stewardship upon pondering the brevity of life after his wife's death. In the will he made his attitude toward his slaves known. Cocke demanded that his estate take care of his slaves in their old age by providing for their comfort and seeing to their happiness. They must never be permitted to want for adequate food, clothing, or lodging. He wanted to be sure that they attained a comfortable standard of living that "the just and generous will surely acknowledge." In particular, Cocke wrote, Lucy and Lizzy, "on account of their attention to my children," and Ned, "for his general good conduct," were to receive an extra quantity of superior clothing every year.
Of greater consequence was the fact that Cocke did not plan to free his slaves at his death. He certainly could have afforded it. The resulting loss would not have disallowed his heirs an elegant standard of living. His decision was directly linked to the similar one during his last year at William & Mary in which he repudiated his original resolve to manumit his slaves upon reaching majority. Realizing that this might trouble some spectators, he attempted to explain his motives. In doing so he voiced an impression about manumission that almost any antislavery sympathizer of that transitional era would have found familiar:
The mass of human happiness would be diminished by it—The general observation that indiscriminate Emancipation has not resulted in the happiness or well doing of but an inconsiderable minority of the Individuals liberated, satisfies me that views of humanity regarding only the Slaves themselves, forbid the practice—By those who are not thus satisfied. I trust the motives will not be impugned, which I have deliberately determined to carry before the Tribunal beyond the Grave— (50)
Exactly three months after Cocke made his last will and testament, his debt-ridden brother-in-law, M. M. Robinson, expressed relief that Bremo could accommodate some of his slaves. He was so confident of the General's humanity toward those under his domination that he had no need to fear for their welfare. Since he trusted Cocke to act toward the bondsmen as he would himself, Robinson took the liberty to instruct two slave women, Ursa and her daughter, Mary, not to work in the fields because unaccustomed labor would go hard with them. Robinson believed that slaves' welfare and an owner's interest in them were compatible; thus, as far as possible, masters always ought to "consult their [slaves'] wishes" in order to make them "as comfortable and as happy as we can." (51)
John Cocke's belief that a master should seek the general welfare of all his "people" stirred his interest in a new institution created to inspire antislavery zeal across the country, the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour, later known as the American Colonization Society. In the eyes of many Virginians, the "strongest recommendations" of the American Colonization Society would be the "indirect but powerful influence" it would have on the system of slavery. It was hoped that "by keeping the public mind fixed on the subject, and by showing the practicality of removing the unhappy race," Americans in slaveholding states would rally to eliminate the curse they inherited. In April of l8l8, General Cocke was appointed vice-president of the Society in the place of Gerritt Smith of New York, who declined the position. (52)
Charles Fenton Mercer, the most active proponent of the Society in Virginia other than Cocke, wrote the General a congratulatory letter when he heard of Cocke's appointment. Mercer stated that during the war with Britain, "We ardently participated in a common and honorable cause" which is "but of little moment in comparison with that, which now unites our zeal and our labour too." The American Colonization Society, which in the twentieth century has been called nothing but a "shaky coalition of men with little in common save the conviction that the black man belonged in Africa," was to Cocke, Mercer, and other Southern liberals, as well as many Northerners at that time, an institution that offered an unprecedented chance for men to discuss publicly the slave problem and privately to influence the nation's leaders to begin seeking solutions. To Cocke, thinking in his new evangelical framework, the Society was "a heaven directed measure" which he "embraced at once, without conferring with flesh and blood." (53)
It was only natural that Cocke seized upon a plan which resonated so much with the twenty-year-old proposal by his friend, St. George Tucker. It was similar, but had two great changes. First, the new plan was completely voluntary. It had none of Tucker's demands that the state require manumission by slaveowners or that the legislature pass laws creating an oppressive atmosphere for free blacks. Ideally, free blacks would emigrate because they desired the freedom an African colony would offer. Slaveholders would voluntarily emancipate only slaves who wanted to go and who were physically and morally capable of capitalizing on their liberty. The exiting process from American soil, as well as their acculturation in Africa, was to be as humanely executed as possible. (54)
The second great change from Tucker's plan was the evangelical atmosphere surrounding the Colonization scheme. Liberia was to be a republican missionary center, transporting the gospel of Christian light and the benefits of western civilization first to the coast of Africa and then deep into the most remote outposts of "heathen darkness." To those who questioned the possibility of "civilizing" Africa came the refrain, "Consult history!"
Was Italy—was Greece the cradle of civilization? No. As far back as we can trace the first rudiments of improvement, they came from the very head waters of the Nile, far in the interior of Africa; and there are yet to be found, in shapeless ruins, the monuments of this primeval civilization. To come down to a much later period, while the west and north of Europe were yet barbarous, the Mediterranean Coast of Africa was filled with cities, academies, museums, churches, and a highly civilized population.
Light was to dawn for those who sat in darkness, because for a "patriotic and benevolent" society, "obstacles are nothing." (55)
Even with the support of zealous and influential promoters like General Cocke, the American Colonization Society failed to capture the imagination of even a solid minority of Virginians. (56) Many whites were not opposed to slavery. (57) Most who were against it realized the impractibility of transporting hundreds of thousands of people to Africa. (58) The next summer Cocke received a letter from a Richmond supporter who said his city would not support an auxiliary society. With "every heart in its favor, and every reflecting mind" ardently wishing for the success of "the cause you have so much at heart," he wrote, "it is most prudent, that the friends of the Society should for the present, be silent." After all, the Richmonder reasoned, if the respected gentleman, Charles Fenton Mercer, was ineffective in drawing support and his arguments turned back against him, how could anyone else expect to succeed? (59)
Cocke was deeply affected by ambitious plans. He was already collaborating with Thomas Jefferson in the establishment of the University of Virginia, which they envisioned as America's citadel of republican thought. They had walked the grounds envisaging classrooms and bustling students when the hills were but a dusty old farm. Now Cocke was overseeing the construction of the magnificent Rotunda. But the spacious and elegant architectural wonder was too indulgent and impolitic for Cocke's practical nature. (60)
At the same time Cocke was deploring the building of Mr. Jefferson's Academical Village, he was planning an imposing and elaborate mansion for his family which would be built between 1818 and 1821 and known as Bremo. When the cornerstone was laid the house was dedicated to God for Cocke and his posterity. He lamented the death of Ann and commented on life in this world, using Solomon, "—Vanity of Vanities— —All is Vanity!" Then he beseeched God that he might show "justice and humanity towards all men, especially that unfortunate race of dependents, who if neglected by their masters, are too frequently the victims of cruelty and misrule." (61)
A few months after the cornerstone ceremony at Bremo, Thomas Jefferson requested Cocke to administer the will of Thaddeus Kosciusko. (62) The Polish patriot left his estate to America on condition that it would be used to purchase, educate, and free slaves. (63) Cocke declined the old former president's proposal after several pleas. (64) He expressed his opinion that white prejudice and the limited availability of proper education facilities would likely prohibit the success of any private efforts. His refusal was not suprising since Cocke, in general, only supported endeavors that were institutional in nature and that could secure at least the marginal support of either the public or its leaders. And eventually, after some years, money from Kosciusko's estate was funnelled to the American Colonization Society. (65)
By such firm resolve, Cocke was able to categorize and keep separate the major components of his interests. Though flowing from a single inspiration created by a fusion of enlightenment ideals and evangelical Christianity, the avenues of Cocke's reform measures seldom crossed. Even when requested, he would not entangle the directions of the American Colonization Society with the Bible and Tract Society, the Agricultural Society, the Temperance Society, (66) the University of Virginia or internal improvements. This certainly enabled him to maintain friends who might otherwise have been put off by his participation in one or another of the various organizations. (67) But that might also explain why some of the different coalitions never solidified or managed to achieve, to any considerable extent, their aims. (68)
It was perhaps inevitable that Cocke's interests in so many avenues of reform would lead him to a like-minded lady who became his second wife in 1821. Louisa Maxwell Holmes was a "somber and uncompromising" widow from Norfolk who more than matched Cocke's penchant for religion and shared his intense concern for eliminating slavery. (69) As an "active Christian" who "was far more committed to Christian communitarianism than to her own personal cultivation," (70) Louisa belonged to at least six voluntaristic groups seeking to improve society. (71) Before her marriage to Cocke, Louisa was most active in the American Colonization Society, whose missionaries to Africa she greatly respected and praised. In addition to attending meetings and donating money, she distributed tracts and sewed clothes for the colonists. (72)
At first Louisa seemed to be unsure about remarriage. Her religious devotion did not allow time for much else and she feared becoming an instant mother of a large family. Her overprotective brother tended to drive suitors away. (73) But deep down she was anxious about approaching middle age without a husband. She was ready, in the words of Armistead Gordon, Jr., for "almost any suitable man." (74) Cocke was warned by one friend not to marry her; his position did not warrant it and haste would be regrettable. (75) Nevertheless, Cocke proposed to Louisa just eleven days after they first met in May of 1821 and they were soon married. Gordon argued that Cocke had undergone a dramatic change since Ann's death, "otherwise he would have sought out another type of helpmeet to ease his loneliness." (76)
The atmosphere at Bremo with Louisa contrasted sharply with that of the previous marriage. At first Louisa's presence at Bremo was a great benefit to Cocke and his children. But as the decade wore on, Louisa became more and more unhappy with the loneliness of plantation life, the overseers Cocke hired, (77) and Cocke's frequent business trips. (78) Louisa's diary records a marriage relationship strained by a ceaseless tension that oscillated between periods of superficial peace to that of minor eruptions of acrid remarks by both spouses. (79) Many times Cocke must have measured Louisa "against the charming Ann Barraud before recalling that such a comparison was simply impossible, absurd." Cocke may have come to regret his marriage to Louisa but he wisely kept it to himself. (80)
Louisa was able to find some fulfillment at Bremo by attempting to amelioriate the conditions of the slaves. She instructed the children in the catechism, taught some slaves to read, and conducted weekly Scripture readings. (81) Within eighteen months she had built her private congregation up to about fifteen Bremo slaves and several from surrounding plantations. (82) But soon, like Ann before her, Louisa began to express her unhappiness in having to be mistress to those "unfortunate people." She was especially upset when whippings occurred, or worse, when unruly slaves were occasionally sold South (as Cocke was himself).
To day too, our unfortunate blacks were sent off (eight in number) but I was spared the pain of hearing their lamentations as they set out from the lower place. My dear husband was greatly distressed at the circumstance, & I had to exert myself to cheer him—Alas! what an unfailing source of sorrow does this unhappy race prove to us! We are daily punished for our sins against them. (83)
Cocke supported Louisa's efforts to teach and proselytize slaves, but her routine defense of slaves against plantation overseers usually fell on deaf ears. Slave discipline was too important a matter for Cocke to delegate to anyone whom he could not hold personally responsible. Much to Louisa's dismay, Cocke stepped in only when unusual cruelty was involved.
Despite their less than tranquil domestic life, the Cockes were united in their overall efforts to lessen the harsh realities of slavery. They combined their evangelical outlook with classical ideas and patriarchal notions to create a peculiar reform vision. Like Abraham of old, the Christian master would be God's intermediary in the world. His mannner of life would show the way and inspire others to follow his example. Instead of using politics to achieve their ends, enlightened gentlemen would set a personal example in their own family and among their own "people." Eventually, as individual members of society caught the vision, mankind would progress in its understanding of the will of God. Then the ills of society could be solved. (84)
Like most Southern evangelicals, Cocke avoided "creedal statements" in favor of "intensity of emotion," choosing the "wisdom of the heart over the dispassionate logic of the head." They believed God's will could be carried out on earth; that personal integrity, dignity, and discipline led to a personal transformation that would in turn lead the way to social transformation; that evangelicalism was adaptable to different classes and conditions; that social conflict could be avoided when individuals, either bondsmen or free, assumed "the responsibilities and obligations appropriate to their social rank." They were suspicious of politics but carried with them the ideology and rhetoric of the revolution, which, like their notions of piety, were inconsistent with slavery. (85)
Neither Cocke nor other evangelicals were looking for "a day of vengeful emancipation." Though intense, their religion was not one of "enthusiasm"; Presbyterian evangelicals were not given to "revivalism and outward emotional breakdown." Toward slavery they exhibited "an ambivalence of outrage and attack" tempered by a "timid caution." The Cockes were drawn into a public drama of reform and benevolent activities, but not abolition. God was a God of order; anything that could lead to chaos was repugnant. (86)
Louisa encouraged her husband's impulse toward reform and public service. His missionary zeal matured considerably by the mid-1820s. His development took on more and more dimension as his peace and confidence grew. Never one to gain complete control of his temper, Cocke began to deal more easily with setbacks. A runaway female slave did not provoke his wrath. The quick departure of a series of ministers and teachers at Bremo did not create tension. As he juggled his many diverse activites, overseers were delegated more responsibility. Warnings to "tread lightly" in pushing the colonization plan were taken in stride. And, significantly, the deaths within four months in 1826 of his close friends, Nicholas Faulcon and Thomas Jefferson, did not cause him to revert into the morbid gloominess that had obsessed him a decade before. By then Cocke and Louisa were planning a brick school house for their slaves. A meeting house had been constructed for slave worship shortly after Louisa's arrival. (87)
In 1822, Denmark Vesey's conspiracy in Charleston had reminded slaveholders across the South that justice would not linger forever. As interest in the struggling colony on the African shores began to picked up in the mid 1820s, Cocke moved into the role of visionary, saying that missionaries were invading "the deepest and darkest recesses of Heathen desolation." Colonization, Louisa wrote, "is a subject that greatly interests him at this time, & indeed seems to be creating a deep interest throughout our country at present. God grant his blessings upon it." She supported Cocke by praying daily with and instructing the black children in preparation for colonization's final triumph. Charles Fenton Mercer, greatly encouraged, wrote Cocke from Richmond, "There is no internal improvement; not the union of all the waters of the Globe, by navigable canals, [that] is half so important, to Virginia, as the removal of the coloured race from her bosom." By the "providence of God," he concluded, Virginia was about to "rise from the ashes of humilation, and enjoy a triumph, alike brilliant, and enduring." (88)
Cocke was busy preparing his slaves for that "glorious" day when they (and Virginia) would be free. He prepared instructions which would help guide and discipline his overseers. An overseer should set a proper example, being the first to step on the grounds in the morning and the last to leave at night. He should give reasonable orders and see that they are executed. He ought to punish according to justice and reason, with discretion and proper severity, not indulging his temper or passions. It would be best to encourage good and industrious conduct among the slaves with the reward of free time. All work could be planned several days in advance, and the quality and appropriateness of their tools regularly examined. Most importantly, any man in charge of slaves must never scold them but make his "presence worth more than blustering and threatening." Finally, any overseer who could follow those instructions would command the respect of his slaves and earn wages more liberal than he could imagine. Slaves needed instruction and correction, but "never," Cocke regretted, had he the good fortune yet "to have an overseer, who attended half as much to this as he ought—to have done—" (89)
By the late 1820s, John Hartwell Cocke was intimately involved in a number of projects and willing to take on more: he rented Monticello after Jefferson's death in an attempt to establish it as a school, and to prevent it from being sold to pay the ex-President's debts; he quietly supported the Anti-Jackson Committee, still holding to his view that politics were a "muddy pool"; (90) he intensified his involvement in Virginia's public works system; and he lent slaves to Lynchburg to work on the canal. During a three-month tour of the North, in 1829, Cocke met with Reverend Thomas Gallaudet in Hartford, Connecticut; there he discussed plans for opening a school for young black children and he secured Gallaudet's help in procuring a teacher for that end. Cocke returned to waiting pleas that he be the first president of the African Education Society of the United States. Though he was sympathetic with their "aim to afford persons of color destined to Africa" with an education, and a friend of the Society's organizer, R. R. Gurley, he declined acceptance. He predicted unsympathetic whites who opposed educating blacks would turn against the American Colonization Society. Nevertheless, in the next few months he stepped up his personal activities with the blacks in his area by forming the Fork Union Temperance Society for Colored Persons. (91)
During the same period, the alliance that became the new Whig party attracted Cocke. The Whigs were drawn together by several factors, all of which coincided with Cocke's social engrossment. First was the opposition to Jackson's augmentation of the executive branch. Southern Whigs believed in state sovereignty and feared the intrusion of a powerful federal government. They distrusted politicians and party government and idealized the statesman. Next, Whigs (and Cocke is a good example) felt as though they were the inheritors of the true republican ideology of the revolution, with its emphasis on patriotism, self-restraint, and the belief that public virtue flows from private virtue. Third, they criticized Southern backwardness, favored a diversified economy, and promoted industrialization of the South. They were idealistic about the economy and hopeful of the future. As a result, they favored an orderly social framework for reconciliation and consensus; they sought national unity and harmony through institutions. (92)
By 1830, Cocke had every reason to look at his many endeavors with a positive hopefulness. He had "faced the reality of hard alternative" and somehow skillfully managed to balance disharmonious complexities with a considerable equanimity. In his and Louisa's eyes, several years of instruction had "transformed" the children of their slaves out of "their wretched state of ignorance" into fine little "scholars" who greatly impressed them. But when David Walker's pamphlet Appeal was found in Richmond in 1829, Virginia responded by prohibiting the employment of persons to teach blacks to read or write. Cocke was aghast with indignation at "the monstrous position" of the legislature. "The more religiously and intellectually, the slave is made, the better for himself his Master and the public." Instruction continued in the "Infant school of colour'd children" even though Cocke was "sensible that this bold experiment may be unpopular." Courageous Christians would support him, Cocke decided, and "I shall not change my course for the Worldly-wise—for we have the authority of Scripture that their wisdom is foolishness with God." (93)
On August 14, 1831, Cocke learned of the insurrection in Southampton County led by a slave preacher, Nat Turner. His initial response to the report that twenty families were murdered was to call it an exaggeration. Even so, he declared that "partial insurrection must be looked for until the Colonization scheme shall have diminished or drawn of[f] more of the free blacks from our Community." (94)
The next week Cocke accused the nullifiers and "the whole herd of constitution-mongers" of using the rebellion to implant a fear of northern conspiracies into the minds of the people. A week later he expressed frustration at "such proof of the folly and weakness of our people" that had been displayed "since the Southampton Affair." Rumors of insurrection were alive in every quarter even though there was reason to believe "that the Massacre of Southampton was without any previous plan or concert." An attorney who attended the trial of a Prince George slave accused of abetting the insurrection, according to Cocke, "says he has no doubt that the poor negro condemned there is innocent and had not the least knowledge of the movement in Southampton." (95)
If most Virginians feared more revolts after Southampton, Cocke did not. He told his closest friend, Joseph Cabell, "I do not think there is the least reason for alarm." If stricter laws to restrict blacks "would quit the public mind," then they would probably be introduced, but Cocke thought such measures unnecessary and questioned the blacks' "facilities for promoting insurrection." At this point in his life, Cocke seemed beyond indulging the typical anxieties that affected his fellow Virginians. Whether this was due to his Christian faith, his position in the Virginia militia, his firm conviction that the relative strength of the slaves was miniscule compared to the whites, or a combination of all these, his concern was not insurrection but emancipation, removal and colonization. He had always expected "rebellious schemes" as the only natural consequence of a heart held in bondage. The shame was, for him, that "whenever blood is once shed—the evils that will be sought on the surviving slaves will make humanity shudder." (96)
Not until September of 1831, in the weeks following the Southampton affair, did Cocke write at length about what he considered to be part of the answer to the question of slavery:
Far be it from me to presume, that I have solved the mighty problem, but I regard it a duty which every Virginian owes to his State, and as an American to his Country, if he thinks he has caught a glimpse of light upon this all important subject, which promises if followed to lead to the reduction of the evil, to pursue it, and interest as many followers as he can.
Cocke's "glimpse of light," not suprisingly, was colonization. The moment had come for Virginia's public, "awakened to a sense of their danger," to cooperate in recognizing "a more enlightened system of Moral and political economy." A united public interest would recommend to the legislature that it could adopt the means by which the evils of holding slaves "would as naturally be carried away—as water flows down to the Ocean."
Cocke outlined again the plan to remove slaves to "a distant country where they might enjoy Freedom." Emancipation with deportation was the only choice: "as to emancipation without removal—its interdiction by the Laws gives but an imperfect idea of the deep and unusual execration that would fall upon the man who would venture to abolish it." The plan would operate slowly at first, with the intellectually and morally advanced "confidential domesticks" and skilled "mechanicks" emigrating first and building the community already in existence. As these servants "are sufficiently enlightened" to become "beneficial to any free community," owing to their previous vocation, they would be able to make liberty useful to themselves. Meanwhile, those remaining would have to be educated and trained for freedom. Because of their ignorance, if they were allowed to emigrate they would sink "below the lowest grade of menial servants, and in their present state must be hewers of wood and drawers of water in any community enlightened enough to live under a civil government." (97)
It would be gross and shocking to humanity to separate children from their mothers and fathers, or to separate the aged from their children, or send house servants who are not willing to go to Africa in exchange for freedom, thought Cocke. In addition, gradual and voluntary removal of the evil would be less objectional because it would not devastate the planter economy. No distinct period would bear the brunt of the adverse effects which such a drawing off of so large a percentage of the labor force would produce.
In my opinion [eliminating slavery] can only be done by a process so slow as to preclude the men of any one generation from the honor of its accomplishment. The evil has been two centuries growing up—it will probably require the lapse of one to eradicate it—The worst habits take the strongest hold of our natures—
General Cocke was aware of the many obstacles that might limit the success of his scheme. He thought that great planters, like himself, were more capable financially and most liberal philosophically, and thus most likely to support such a design. He estimated that they, like he, could immediately remove two-thirds of their slaves and actually profit financially, since one-third were children and another third too old to earn their keep. But owing to inheritance and property division, the older class of slaveholders was mostly gone. He noted how the largest number of slaveholders were now mainly former overseers who had increased their holdings over a number of years through hard work, thrift, and cultivation. Often they had paid high prices for valuable slaves and had to maximize their profits. Therefore, they would be the least likely group to part with their property. And, finally, the small slaveholders often were members of the lower class and owned few slaves. They tended to treat their servants better, bringing them up on a footing more closely aligned to their own. Thus, thought Cocke, their slaves were more intelligent and better fitted for liberty, but less likely to want to leave and more valuable to their owners.
Then, to complicate matters, there existed a sectional division. Southside Virginia slaves were spread among more owners. The northern Piedmont contained a few large slave owners and the bulk of the middle-class drivers who held their "slave property tenaciously." Another group also lived in middle Virginia: the landless slaveholders who rented their slaves and lived off the income. Neither would they give up their property. In the mountains, asserted Cocke, most slaves were owned by a small, lower class of whites who needed them for survival. Thus, they would not be so prompt to unite in any emancipation scheme. (98)
Cocke stressed that for his scheme to be practical, it had to be gradual. Whites must be protected from upheavals and the blacks from being thrust into an unimproved and overcrowded African settlement. The greatest chance for success would be for the leading politicians to take the initiative. But they were "naturally divided by sectional interests" and refused to bear the burden of responsibility. Thus, concerned citizens must look elsewhere. Where? Ironically, wrote Cocke, to the slave system itself. (99)
Cocke thought the country was outgrowing slavery. (100) He believed that the lands of the west, owing to the African's incompatibility with the climate and soil, and to lower acreage yield, were not profitable enough to support the slave system. He wrote that the slaves in the west were rented out in the towns and one by one sold off to pay their owner's debts. There were only a few "breeding Farms of human stock" which were an embarrassment to most masters. In the traditional slave states there was a decrease in profits, (101) which would lead to more emancipation schemes. What was more, Cocke asserted, there was a corresponding relaxation of discipline and government of slaves which further accelerated the growing unprofitability of the system and also encouraged insurrection—always the result when slaves were most indulged. Add to that a movement in the North of radical abolition and it would only be a matter of time before "Slavery," as Cocke's friend Mercer later wrote, "will take care of itself."
Cocke concluded his plan of emancipation with his reaction to the Turner rebellion and his belief that more insurrections were slated for the future as long as the slave system was intact. He expected further attempts, but no successful insurrections, because the large numbers of whites were not only superior in intelligence and power, but needed only moderate foresight to maintain their power. Even if the slaves grew to outnumber the whites five to one, he still regarded "the chance of successful rebellion as a mere bug-bear."
The time had come for Cocke to give public utterance to the plan he thought was sent from heaven by God. He still preferred to work behind the scenes and outside politics. But his correspondence began to include the subject at an unprecedented rate. After Southampton, anxious citizens wanted him to step up his work. Others asked him how they could help. Some sought his help in getting rid of their slaves. Auxiliary Socities for colonization were formed as interest picked up throughout the south. Cocke was encouraged. Finally, the public was being stirred. (102)
It had been thirty-five years since Cocke had first heard such a plan proposed in 1796. Twenty years passed before a fledgling institution could be established in 1816. Five more years passed before the colony was settled and another five years had brought the recognition of Liberia's independence. The five years before Turner's rebellion had seen a dramatic rise in concern about the slave question. Northerners were becoming more extremist in their calls for abolition; William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator had appeared only a few months before Turner's Insurrection. Southerners were becoming more agitated and defensive; black codes had been strengthened. The question of how to eliminate slavery demanded an answer and colonization's steady progress begged for recognition. Cocke believed his patience was paying off.
"Overnight African colonization revived in Virginia" in reaction to Nat Turner. (103) A "beneficient Providence," Cocke wrote R. R. Gurley in October, would "overrule" this "tragedy" to the "ultimate ends of Justice and Mercy." (104) He was greatly inspired by the steady growth and strengthening of the colony of Liberia, the widespread advertisement of African colonization principles, and the penetration of the Society's agents into every region of the country and the resulting formation of numerous auxiliaries. Colonization supporters' "dreams of an American empire seemed to be nearing fulfillment." (105)
Cocke's dreams, however, were short-lived. Within two years the interest in colonization had peaked and the American Colonization Society was in crisis, besieged by internal divisions and financial problems. (106) Thomas Dew's In Defense of Slavery, which had begun to be widely disseminated in the South, gave those who wanted it a defense of the proslavery position. (107) On the other hand, Garrison and other antislavery zealots were beginning to draw individual defectors from the colonization camp in the North who were disillusioned. The population became "more sensitive than ever to the topic of abolition," and the word "emancipation" could not even be used in the South. (108)
By 1830 Cocke was a middle-aged man firmly set in his ways. His resolution to attack the slave system through colonization was unalterable. He could recognize neither the immediatism of the abolitionists nor the positive good arguments of the proslavery supporters. Thus during the 1830s and 1840s Cocke even more vigorously worked toward his goals. In 1833, he sent his first group of slaves to Liberia. "I have now fixed upon my first emigrant. He is a stone mason by trade, a professor of Christianity." Peyton Skipwith was also a husband, the father of six children, and a strong supporter of temperance. The Skipwiths, who represented Cocke's most educated and religious slaves, were also skilled enough to begin a successful business and pave the way for other emigrants. In October of 1833 the family was freed and, after a fifty-six day voyage across the Atlantic, began a new life in Monrovia. (109) Soon afterwards other former slaves trickled into the colony with Cocke's help.
In the early 1840s Cocke began a more radical experiment to achieve his emancipation and colonization goals. He purchased a cotton plantation in Alabama and sent several families of slaves South to learn the affairs of self-government. The idea was that slaves who could learn to read and write in addition to becoming self-supporting through skilled labor, and who were moral examples, could purchase their freedom with the profits of the plantation. George Skipwith, Peyton's brother, was selected to manage the plantation with maximum freedom, under the watchful eye of one of Cocke's relatives. But, alas, George had a weakness for alcohol that interfered with his executing faithfully the discharges of his position and he was removed and restored several times. Even though Cocke made annual pilgrimages to New Hope, the long distance involved prohibited the plantation from achieving his desired ends and it was not until the 1850s that the undertaking in Alabama yielded its first group of emigrants. (110)
Cocke's unique experiment was the working out of his initial embracing of the nation's most progressive reform notions as regarding slavery. He consistently held to those ideas throughout his life. He could never become an abolitionist; few Southerners did. But neither did he succumb to the tidal wave of proslavery sentiment that engulfed the South in the last three decades before the Civil War. The ideals he had inherited from the generation of the founding fathers served him well but were insufficent to handle the growing sectional disparity between the North and South. As time passed him by, Cocke became a living anachronism.
Cocke's dilemma over slavery was due to more than the political and legal context by which he was bound. The gist of the evidence affirms that other factors greatly influenced him: the social context into which he was born, with its emphasis on liberty and incongruous sanction of slavery; the prominence of moral philosophy in his education; the early exposure to gradualism as the means to ending slavery; the personal relations with family and acquaintances; the evangelical reform fervor; and, finally, historical events beyond his control. All these factors informed Cocke's thinking and propelled him in certain directions but at the same time limited the ways in which he approached problems. His fear of social instability and desire to maintain his own status led him to act within the bounds set by his generation. By flirting on the edges of those boundaries, Cocke tried to eradicate some of life's pernicious contradictions. Even so, like most men, he chose to ignore others.
John Cocke defies placement in traditional molds or categories. He was a cautious liberal, a conservative reformer. He wanted to absorb all the best of enlightenment thought and progressive ideas in science and education. He was outspoken about the evils of slavery and genuinely wanted to eradicate it from his home state and the country. But he feared and distrusted all radical measures as injudicious and potentially anarchistic. Whether supporting education, internal improvements, antislavery, or one of the many "moral" movements, Cocke was always idealistic in his goals but pragmatic and usually prudent in the means to them. He was bold yet wary, short-tempered but not overbearing. Cocke passionately coveted his privacy and family life even as he lent himself to all kinds of causes. His vision was of a society where mature and responsible if somewhat aristocratic men would lead the nation through private virtue and personal example and where other men would naturally follow.
As one of Virginia's most wealthy citizens, born with the republic and educated by republican statesmen, General John Hartwell Cocke was accustomed to grandiose ideas and schemes. The American Colonization Society was but one of many institutions by which Cocke and the men of his era attempted to come to grips with the problems inherited from their previous generation. By building on the patterns already in existence, and attempting to transcend them, such men hoped not only to rid the country of the obvious evil of slavery but to extend the values and achievements of their civilization to those less fortunate. Their own crisis would be resolved by resolving the crisis of the American black man. Their own identity would be found in giving the African an identity. The closing of the great transitional period of the first third of the nineteenth century marked the failure of another generation of distinguished men to solve the dilemma of the most crucial and vexing problem ever to face Americans. The perpetuation of the evil of slavery, which would bewilder the country for another thirty years, along with slavery's critical part in the rupture of the Union, dramatically underscores that generation's failure and represents the most notorious example of communal pathos in American history.