Jack Moseley - Slave Childhood in Revolutionary Virginia

Jack Moseley was born to a slave mother about 1758 on Edward Hack Moseley's 560 acre Rolleston Hall, Princess Anne County, Virginia, close to the port of Portsmouth on Chesapeake Bay. His master, (and probably his father), Edward Hack Moseley, one of the most prominent Virginia planters, a burgess in the Virginia General Assembly, militia colonel, sheriff and vestryman at Lynnhaven Parish Church, bestowed the name, Jack, on the boy. Young Jack bore the surname all his life, though for a brief time in London, either as an assertion of his independence, or as a criminal alias to avoid detection for defrauding the Royal Navy, he was known as John Shore. One of his enduring childhood memories was undoubtedly of Hack Moseley's 'famous wig and shining buckles', though not as enduring as the memory of being a slave with every facet of his life controlled at Moseley's whim or the memory of the hard labour to which he would soon be put.¹

Practically from the day of his birth, Jack was carried into the tobacco fields 'tied onto [his mother's] back with a bandage.' There he would be laid down uncovered on the ground, and suckled for a few minutes when hungry. Some masters, and Moseley was probably one, were solicitous of the mothers and newborn, while others were not, ordering their overseers not to allow the new mothers to interrupt the hoeing and planting by stopping to feed their babes, at the risk of a flogging. Once weaned, though, Jack was left behind at the slave quarters to play in the care of the very old or of children barely out of infancy themselves, while his parents went off to work in the tobacco or wheat fields 'sunup to sundown'. Such an idyll would not last long.²

At the age of five Jack would have been put to work in the tobacco fields for the first time, probably in the summer. His job, alongside the other young children new to the fields, was to pick off the tobacco worms and their eggs which grew on the underside of the leaf. The work was only part-time. At nine, or perhaps as early as seven, Jack was expected to be half as productive as the adults. Weeding and transplanting began in April once the frosts were gone. Children did not engage in the frenetic task of making beds for the tobacco, at the rate of 350 a day at less than two minutes per bed, a speed that left workers near collapse with exhaustion by sunset. About 28,000 plants were seeded every day. Transplanting the new shoots of tobacco from these seedbeds after each summer shower had to be done quickly. Every slave on the plantation was put to the task, again at a speed that fatigued. Soon enough, Jack Moseley was old enough to join them, as part of a hard-pressed work-gang. Inexperienced workers like Jack were not allowed to remove the selected plants from their beds. They took on the less skilled tasks of weeding and replanting, which took all summer. Children in the gangs quickly learned from their elders to progress at the pace set by fellow-workers, always one slower that that demanded by the white overseers. In the late summer the vast numbers of tobacco stalks were split and left to wilt. Gathered up, the plants were left to hang and dry in the tobacco houses all through the fall and winter. Early the next year a closely supervised Jack would kept stripping, sorting, bundling and packing the tobacco leaf in hogsheads, this latter job one that required great physical effort and left one with aching muscles, and shoulders bruised by the rod if not done fast enough. Much of that work was done at night by firelight,breaking into the slaves' sparse recreation time.³

Tobacco cultivation was not the only onerous duty demanded of Jack and his fellows. Particularly during Moseley's childhood Virginia was in the grip of a tobacco glut. One observer noted 'the country is so excessively poor that even the industrious frugal men can scarcely live, and the least slip in our economy would be fatal.' Planters diversified into wheat and corn in a desperate attempt to recoup a profit. Slave-owners shortened or got rid of the lunch break in the field. Holidays other than Christmas, Whitsunday and Easter were cut. On some plantations Saturday became a full working day. Wheat was sown in the autumn, and sowing was a task well suited to children Jack Moseley's age. Harvest came in July, after the tobacco had been transplanted, and again, all hands were put into the field to work quickly before the wheat fell to seed. Then came the threshing, sometimes into the night, further encroaching on limited leisure time.⁴ By the earliest age young Jack Moseley saw before him nothing but a life of endless exploitative toil, bother for himself and any future progeny.

At ten Jack would have left his mother's quarters and gone to live with relatives or in an all-male barracks. Wherever he moved to, it would have been to a log house, the gaps between the logs caked with dried mud, surprisingly cool in summer and warm in winter. Quarters were sparsely furnished, but Jack perhaps acquired an iron pot and ceramic bowls and jars to eat from. Food was coarse, usually a ground corn-meal that could be baked while in the fields into a cake, molasses and possibly some buttermilk. Whisky and rum were kept for Christmas, though Moseley does not seem to have been much of a drinker. His garb, at least as a field hand, was 'an old blue jacket and trowsers', and presumably 'coarse shoes'.

The slaves would gather together every night to play music, especially the fiddle, and dance, however hard the day's work. On Saturday they could tend to their own gardens, if they had a pass from the master visit family or friends on nearby plantations. On Sundays there was gambling, usually on cockfights, sleeping and church. Jack Moseley appears to have been brought up a devout Christian, probably Anglican, because his master was Anglican, though the Baptist fervour of the first Great Awakening would not have passed him by. He worshipped up the back of the Lynnhaven Parish Church, where Edward Hack Moseley was a vestryman. Thus, he again came to his master's notice.⁵

Jack's piety was impressive enough for Edward Hack Moseley to apprentice him as a waterman. The job was not prestigious; he still came into regular contact still with the field-hands loading and unloading at the plantation wharf but it was not as monotonous or backbreaking as working in the tobacco fields and houses. The work gave him mobility, transporting hogsheads and bags of wheat in scows to nearby Portsmouth and busy Norfolk. Here, too, he probably got to know and fell under the influence of a slightly older slave named Daniel. Apparently he was able to make some money working for himself, which was not unusual for watermen, who could hire themselves out for the rest of the day like any other slave artisan once they had completed their allotted tasks. He grew familiar with Chesapeake Bay and 'most of the Rivers in Virginia and Maryland.' With the fulfilling work came a sense of pride and self-worth. Before long, his master was describing him as 'artful' with 'a surly look' which can probably be read as meaning he was intelligent and developing a sense of independence. Like many watermen he began to dress with a sense of style. By the age of seventeen he had Sunday apparel of 'a new dark Russia drab coat and breeches with white metal buttons'; and owned '2 shirts' and '2 white jackets.'⁶

Shortly afterJack Moseley's eleventh Christmas brought news on the slave telegraph of a bloody slave revolt upstream in Hanover County Forty or more slaves seized the overseer on their plantation and whipped him 'from neck to waistband' in revenge for their own frequent punishment and fought back, trapped in a barn when local whites tried to bring the rebellion to an end. In a lesson to slaves everywhere, three blacks were killed and five others wounded in retribution. Many of the others were tried and hung. In January 1770, the next year, in Hanover and in the counties of York and James City news of an increasing number of runaways from there spread through the black community. Then, in the spring of 1771 Virginia had the greatest flood in its history, swelling the James and Rappahanock Rivers. It wiped out those same counties already plagued by an increased incidence of runaways. The 'almost general Calamity' took 150 lives, swept away or submerged riverside warehouses, drove larger vessels ashore, capsized many smaller boats, endangered shipping with uprooted floating trees, and washed topsoil and thousands of hogsheads of tobacco away. Neither Portsmouth nor Norfolk are singled out in accounts of the Great Freshet so we can assume Ralleston Hall was affected only by minor flooding, if at all. Nevertheless, unease was heightened by the possibility of Britain going to war with Spain over the Falkland Islands. Troops were recruited in Norfolk. Rumours swept the blacks working on the wharves and ships, Jack among them, that 'in Bermuda Owners of Vessels generally' procured ' passes for their Slaves as Freemen, in case they should be taken by the Enemy.' One Bermuda-born slave, on this basis, laid claim to his freedom. Whipped up by sailors and watermen like Jack, frissons of hope swept the slave households, horror the whites. Gossip about the eagerly awaited new Governor, who people knew had been forced to give up the more lucrative post of New York for Virginia, and deeply resented having to do so, did not impress the white majority.. In a drunken midnight frolic John Murray, Lord Dunmore, 'destroyed the coach and cut the tails from the horses' of New York's Chief Justice. When he was expected to arrive, only his dogs and baggage sailed down from New York. When he finally did turn up, in September 1771, women pronounced him handsome, men, in hindsight, thought 'his chin a little too weak, his mouth petulant.' Apart from his penchant for drunkenness, cruel practical jokes and his beautiful wife, he seemed yet another nondescript, boorish, imperial official who would come and go with little effect on the fortunes of the colony.⁷

1Ralleston Hall, Virginia, http:www.ralestonhalluk/hall/virginia.htm ; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, p.8; Ann Waters Yasinke, Virginia Beach. A History of Virginia's Golden Shore, Charleston, 2002, p.66;Gary B. Nash, 'Forging Freedom. The Emancipation Experience in the Northern Seaport Cities', in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, Charlottesville, 1983, p.23; Old Bailey Proceedings Online. (www.oldbaileyonline.org version 6.0 17 April 2011) April 1784. John Moseley t17840421-17; Allen Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves. The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800, Chapel Hill, 1986, pp. 387-388.

2Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake & Low-country, Chapel Hill, 1998, p.200; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, pp. 73, 94, 372-3; Michael Mullin, Africa in America. Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831, Urbana, 1994, p. 169; Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home. Family Life in the Eighteenth Century, Williamsburg, 1952, pp. 65-66; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800, London, 1988, p. 462.

3Kenneth M. Stamp, The Peculiar Institution. Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, New York, 1956, p. 49; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 19, 167,188,198. It is estimated there were about 80 slaves working on the various home plantations of the 100 leading Virginia planters, among whom Edward Hack Moseley should certainly be included. Cf. Thad. W. Tate, The Negro in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg, Williamsburg, 1965, p. 21; John Richard Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763-1789, Urbana, 1957, p. 19; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, p. 373.

4Joseph A Ernst, 'The Political Economy of the Chesapeake Colonies 1760-1775: A study in Comparative History', in Ronald Hoffman, J. McCusker, Russell R. Manard, & Peter J. Abbott, (eds.) The Economy of Early America. The Revolutionary Period, 1763-1790, New York, 1960, p. 183; Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire. The Origins of the American Revolution, Ithaca, 1988, p. 145; Loren S. Walsh, 'Slave Life, Slave Society and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620-1820' in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, (ed.) Cultivation and Culture. Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, Charlottesville, 1993, pp. 179-180; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America, Cambridge, Mass. 1998, p. 116; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 170-172.

5Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, pp. 369, 371; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, (ed. Frank Shuffelton), New York, 1999, p. 158; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 111, 114; Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 2^nd. Edition, Urbana, 1973, pp. 61-63; Virginia Gazette or Norfolk Intelligencer, 26.7.1775 http.www.etext.lib.virginia.edu/ 24.4.2012, Virginia Runaways Project; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black. American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, Baltimore, 1969, p. 131; Stephen A Marini, 'Religion, politics and Ratification' in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, (eds.) Religion in a Revolutionary Age, Charlottesville, 1994, p. 197; Holton, Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era,p. 3.

6 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 238, 234; Virginia Gazette or Norfolk Intelligencer, 26.7.1775 http.www.etext.lib.virginia.edu/ 24.4.2012, Virginia Runaways Project; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks. African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, p. 25; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion. Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia, Oxford, p. 51.

7Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution. The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, London, 2007, p. 117;Tate, The Negro in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg, p.113; Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast. A Maritime History of the Chesapeake in the Colonial Era, Baltimore, 1984, pp. 58-59; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War. Race, Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia, Williamsburg, 2007, pp. 24-25; John Shy, Toward Lexington. The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution, Princeton, 1965, pp. 391-392; Philip D. Morgan, 'British Encounters with Africans and African Americans circa 1600-1780' in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, (eds.) Strangers within the Realm. Cultural Margins of the First British Empire,Chapel Hill, 1991, p. 195; Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation. A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776, Indianapolis, 2004, pp. 392-393; Alf J. Mapp, '' 'The Pirate Peer”: Lord Dunmore's Operations in Chesapeake Bay' in Ernest O'Neill Eller, Chesapeake Bay in the American Revolution, Centreville, 1981, p. 56