The Cost of Justice

Reading from “The Internal Enemy”

Maria Pappas

Dr. Nancy Yamane

HIST370

April 14th, 2015

 The War of 1812 impacted American Slavery in Virginia on three levels: from the slaves

to the plantation owners to the British.

First of all, the fight between the British and the Americans caused a crisis that stretched

an ocean’s length and everywhere in between.

The fight can be represented through the colonial marines, who made up a total number

of 300 men by September, 1813. On June 1st, 1814, the British assisted Captain Robert Barrie’s

attack on the American gunboats in the Patuxent River in Maryland. Increasing tension was

building up, expressed in tobacco barn burnings, the liberation of slaves on plantations and on

June 25th, the capture of an Accomack County militia battery. The British built refugee camps

and set up Fort Albion on Tangier Island, which was occupied by Cockburn since April, 1814.

The island was a mosquito-infested, marshy hotspot of tension ready to burst between the British

and the Americans.

The crisis is evident “tobacco houses, canoes, carts, oxen, horses and negroes are floating

down the river, coming from above, without we are able to save any thing”. There grew an

apparent division between the Northern and Southern colonists. Virginians “asserted their

patriotic superiority over New England Federalists” during the War of 1812. The Federalists, on

the other hand, considered the Virginians to be “arrogant bullies” and continued to insist that

Southern states needed the protection of troops in the North. As of 1813, fear of a slave revolt in

the South was high on the rise. As a result, spokespeople from the South attempted to spread the

Pro-Slavery opinion of slaves as “docile, stupid and happy”. Special Agents used by Monroe and

others to persuade refugees and runaways to return to slavery added on to include that Africans

were “incapable of liberty” and needed the protection of their masters.

Monroe’s desire was to exploit the British as liberators.

 Thomas Jefferson’s view of the Missouri Crisis expresses the growing fear as “a fire bell

in the night, [which] awakened and filled me with terror”. Slave owners, like Jefferson, saw the

immorality of slavery and the pursuit of justice on one side of the scale, and their own livelihood

on the other: what they chose then, was self-sufficiency.

Slaves had gotten their taste of Freedom through murmuring rumors of the town of other

slaves who had become freed, educated and were living now better lives than their masters;

Slaves who had escaped on boats to England, learned how to use weaponry and who would soon

return to collect their family members and bring them to Britain. After this small taste, many of

them yearned to escape from their lives in slavery and captivity, and attempted to run away,

sometimes at the costs of their own lives.

As described by Sir Thomas Jefferson, the balance was on one side justice and on the

other self-preservation for the plantation owners. They knew the immorality and the

contradiction of their practice of slavery, but at the same time depended on it for their own

livelihood. Rather than being a matter of human rights for all, it was a matter of human rights for

us or them. Many of the actions of the plantation owners can be explained through their personal

interests as well as their terrible fear of a slave revolt from the “internal enemy”. Through panic,

fear and ignorance, they reacted in such a way as to strike terror in the slaves, using increased

brutality, dehumanization, and separation tactics.

The British, in turn, played on the immorality of the South Atlantic slave trade to their

benefit: boasting that any slave that stepped foot in English territory would be free. This created

the idealized vision of the “Liberator King” of England, who would come to their rescue. They

shared their knowledge of the Chesapeake’s wild landscape with the British soldiers to help them

in their battle with the Americans.