המתת השור

It is a story that, in all the richness of detail, recalls the other grand narrative of colonial Virginia, Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1976). The influence of Morgan's powerful reading of Virginia's "ordeal," the wrenching transition to slave labor and the concomitant reordering of Virginia society along the axis of racial difference, is everywhere apparent in Brown's book. Like Morgan, she identifies Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 as the key turning point in the colony's political trajectory, the resolution of which placed the colony firmly on the path toward a new racial (and, she adds, gender) order. In this new order the political and social privileges of white men (the right to vote, to bear arms, to own the fruits of their labor, and to discipline their dependents) would be defined not only by reference to their racial prerogatives but also by their possession of a masculinity that consisted in the rights denied to African men. Virginia's planter elite enacted their own "possessive investment in whiteness" in the decades following the brutal suppression of Bacon's Rebellion as they passed laws to create a male popular culture delimited by sexual access to women and martial prowess: thus the increasingly harsh prosecution of interracial sex (especially that between white women and black men) in the 1690s and the early 1700s, and the progressive curtailment of the rights of free black men to vote, own property, participate in public bodies, and -- most crucially -- own guns.

The net effect of these various legal reforms was to enshrine patriarchy at the ideological core of Virginia's slave society. The reinvigoration of patriarchy in eighteenth-century Virginia is a familiar story whose basic contours were laid out by Rhys Isaac and Allan Kulikoff some years ago and since then explored in more psychological depth by Kenneth Lockridge. In his ethnographic descriptions of great...