Foul Means: the Formation a Slave Society in Virginia 1660-1740.

Foul Means: The Formation a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. By Anthony S. Parent Jr. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 291. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5486-7; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2813-0.)

In this revision of a 1982 doctoral dissertation, Anthony S. Parent Jr. uses class analysis to explain the formation of a slave society in Virginia. Parent argues that racial slavery did not emerge from "an 'unthinking decision" on the part of a wide variety of aspiring planters who were responding to market and labor forces" (p. 2). Instead. it was the conscious product of "a small emerging class of great planters with large landholdings and political connections" (p. 2). This elite dealt with class conflict with less privileged whites, and with blacks who strenuously resisted their enslavement, by articulating "an ideology of patriarchism and a strategy of slave proselytism" (p. 2).

Foul Means has several virtues. It provides an excellent description of how the elite garnered a disproportionate share of available land by seizing it from Indians, by amassing headrights through importing servants and slaves, by using their offices (especially after Bacon's Rebellion) to bend the rules regarding patenting, grants, requirements for development, and payment of quitrents, and by successfully obstructing land-use reform. The book provides a good summary of the development of the law of slavery in Virginia, as well as of instruments of control, underscoring the extent to which violence undergirded the evolving slave regime. Additionally, Parent presses for an explanation of elite slave owners' shift from ignoring the spiritual condition of their human property to, among some, an active concern with instructing creole blacks in religion and baptizing them into the Anglican church as a further means of control.

Coming down on the side of agency of the enslaved, Foul Means chronicles the considerable resistance, more often violent than scholars tend to suppose, that blacks were able to mount. Parent's characterization of events from 1676 to 1740 as "a tapestry of black resistance and white response" is persuasively argued (p. 135). Blacks' struggles against enslavement began with shipboard insurrections. Organized resistance on the mainland included participation in Bacon's Rebellion and a series of attempted insurrections in the 1680s, 1710s, 1720s, and 1730s. Resistance at first included both servants and slaves, making it essential to divide "the class of exploited, making them enemies rather than allies" (p. 147). Elites extended special privileges to white servants, employed poor whites as overseers and patrollers, and enlisted Indians in hunting fugitive maroons and runaways. Elites thereby turned the "threat of insurrection to their advantage by using it to divide, control, and set against each other blacks, Indians, and lower-class whites" (p. 172).

Strategies for maintaining elite hegemony also included a shift from engrossing land for resale or leasing to ex-servants to building great estates retained in perpetuity through entail. Elites tried various methods of reducing overproduction of tobacco and the expansion of slaveholding during the early 1700s but came into conflict with fellow colonials, slave traders, and the British government. The entrance of Bristol and Glasgow merchants, who dealt directly with ordinary planters, into the tobacco and slave trades diluted the great planters' control over both forms of commerce. Meanwhile, the Colonial Debts Act of 1732 allowed the seizure of elite debtors' land and slaves. Controversies over stint acts and tobacco inspection in the 1720s and 1730s not only produced popular discontent but also revealed splits within the ruling class. Overall, the planter elite's dominance was severely challenged during this period.

Recent scholarship calls Parent's treatment of some topics into question. Parent dates the transition from a servant to a slave labor force among the elite to the 1680s. Africans, he argues, were more exploitable, already familiar with tobacco culture, and could make tobacco more cheaply than white laborers could. While the transition indeed occurred in the 1680s for the Chesapeake population as a whole, John C. Coombs's "Building 'the Machine': The Development of Slavery and Slave Society in Early Colonial Virginia" (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2004) conclusively demonstrates that, despite difficulties in obtaining a supply of African slaves, the Virginia provincial elite had made the transition to enslaved workforces as early as the 1650s and that county elites became thoroughly committed to slavery by the 1670s. As a consequence, Parent's argument that great planters embraced slavery in the 1680s to solve the problems of indentured servant shortages and low tobacco prices will need to be revised. By that decade elite planters already held more slaves than servants, and by the 1690s their labor forces were almost exclusively enslaved. Further, Coombs's earlier timing better accords with Parent's finding that great planters began fashioning racial slavery in the courts by 1640 and made it colonial law by the 1660s.

The discussion of the slave trade provides valuable information on how the interests of the planter elite, ordinary Virginia planters, English merchants, and the imperial bureaucracy diverged between 1680 and 1730, leading to struggles over issues of debt, organization of the tobacco and slave trades, regulation of tobacco growing and processing, and duties on slaves. However, since Parent did not make use of the additional information on the Chesapeake slave trade recently available in David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), the numbers presented on the timing, volume, and geographic foci of the trade, while not grossly misleading, are far from complete.

The ideology of "patriarchism," Parent contends, was an exercise in "investing in the myth of the plantation slave society rather than dealing with its reality" and emphasized patriarchy, order, provincialism, and pastoralism (p. 201). Parent's explication is based almost exclusively on the writings of William Byrd II and Virginia Gazette publisher William Parks. Adaptation of the ideology by other elite planters is thinly documented, and some of patriarchism's manifestations--the building of great mansions and adoption of genteel behavior--were hardly unique to Chesapeake slave owners. A more strongly based argument is that "the rate and progression of slave baptism are important indicators of the crystallization of patriarchism" (p. 253). Analyses of registers for St. Peter's Parish, New Kent County, reveal an upsurge in black infant baptism in the 1730s, a strategy that "affirmed the virtue of the great planters ... and reinforced the dependence of blacks" (p. 253). The efficacy of proselytism for bolstering control of blacks is questionable, but elites did succeed in "prostituting Anglicanism into sanctioning slavery" while not letting Christianity interfere with day-to-day operations (p. 266). Although the links between the co-opting of religion and other aspects of patriarchism are not, in this reader's opinion, conclusively demonstrated, an ideological change is the best explanation offered so far for great planters' sudden embrace of religion as an additional instrument of coercion.

One cannot argue with Parent's conclusion that "If slave-produced tobacco had been the means to the formation of great family estates, then social control of blacks, despite its psychological costs, had to become the means to keeping them" (p. 265). Despite problems of incomplete evidence on the slave trade, incorrect timing of the elite's shift to enslaved labor, and questions about how widely adopted patriarchism was. the book makes an important contribution in its impassioned closing argument that in Virginia "The choice of slavery was deliberate, odious, and foul" (p. 265). In the future it will be more difficult to characterize elite Virginia planters as mere passive victims of impersonal market forces, or those they enslaved as largely incapable of mounting resistance to their condition.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

LORENA S. WALSH