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The Origin of Violence in Virginia: A Brief History
By Jonathan Scott
The present is also history.—José
Carlos Mariátegui
While Seung Hui Cho
was purchasing the two Glock 9 mm handguns as well as
fifty hollow point bullets he would use a few months
later on his classmates and professors at Virginia Tech,
the state of Virginia was into its third month of
spirited quadricentennial festivities dubbed by the
state "America's 400th Anniversary."
There is certainly
a great deal of distance between the two events, and
Seung Hui Cho himself appears to have been either
oblivious or completely indifferent to the fact that he
was carrying out single-handedly one of the worst
massacres in Virginia history at the exact same time the
state was proudly remembering its historical beginning.
All the same, Seung
Hui Cho's elaborately planned act of gruesome revenge
against Virginia Tech is now having the effect of a
sudden paradigm shift, from romantic and windy
invocations of Jamestown's iron-willed Captain John
Smith and his enabling and admiring Indian mistress
Pocahontas, to Virginia's totally unregulated gun weapon
market: in a word, to America's culture of
blood-curdling violence.
In this spirit, let
us review Virginia's history of violence, for it's truly
second to none. Before that though it should be noted
that so-called "Pocahontas" and the precious legend of
her passed down for the past three centuries is pure
fiction. As many American Indian historians have pointed
out, "Pocahontas" was entirely the invention of Captain
Smith. In fact, as Jill Lepore points out in recent
article ("Jamestown at four hundred," New Yorker, April
2, 2007), American historian Henry Adams had already
proved in 1867 that Smith made it all up. Smith's story,
wrote Adams, is nothing more than a collection of
"falsehoods of an effrontery seldom equaled in modern
times."
Virginian violence
is by now a many-headed hydra, yet it has a singular
historical origin. Because of the necessarily schematic
presentation here, I've reduced violence in Virginia to
three salient characteristics: (1) the preference for
mass murder along ethnic lines or genocide; (2)
capitalist barbarism aimed at workers; and (3) racial
terror of the kind that in the late 1930s had an envious
Hitler sending Nazi scouts to the US to closely study.
This distinctly Anglo-American style of violence is
intimately familiar to most of the world's poor and
oppressed, but unfortunately it continues to be barely
recognizable by most Americans themselves.
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In terms of the
first, the systematic slaughter of the Powhatan Indians
by Governor Berkeley's colonial militiamen reached its
apogee in Virginia during the 1650s, yet it proceeded
without interruption until the entire Chesapeake had
been ethnically cleansed of its diverse indigenous
peoples. Estimates vary on the number of Chesapeake
Indians dispossessed and massacred for their rich
tidewater lands, but whatever figure to which historians
eventually agree is beside the point. All acknowledge it
was conscious and deliberate genocide. By the end of the
seventeenth century only charred remains were left of
Chesapeake Indian society. Virginia colony
administrators referred to the genocide as "land
improvement." |
The second is the
massacre of Virginia's tenantry. While massacring the
Chesapeake Indians, colony elites were also seeing to
the massacre of Virginia's laboring classes. Here they
didn't use long smooth bore-iron guns, for the aim of
course was not to murder the new emigrants but rather to
reduce them to chattel. Between 1607 and 1625 only one
of out every six of the immigrants who came during that
period was still breathing by the end of it. The death
rate was seven times that of the England, around 80
percent. It takes no genius to understand why. The
English emigrants arrived in Virginia in the midst of
the English imperialists' rapid and aggressive
encroachment upon the land. The new immigrants from
England were mere cannon fodder. The Anglo-American
plantation bourgeoisie achieved the massacre of the
tenantry by attacking the social status of the laboring
people in the colony. They used two tactics.
First, every share
of Virginia stock entitled each capitalist investor a
free title to 100 acres of land. The four incorporators
of Berkeley Hundred, for example, purchased forty-five
shares of the company and were given a patent for 4,500
acres of Virginia's finest soil. That is, the newly
arrived laborers had no rights that a wealthy planter
was bound to respect: unless they were capitalist
investors, they had no legal claim to either land or
civil rights.
Second, the wealthy
planters devised a "headright" system whereunder each
laborer they brought to the colony earned them fifty
acres of free land. This is how America's slave trade
began, not along the coast of West Africa (that would
come next) but rather from London and Liverpool, where
tens of thousands of poor English were "spirited away,"
as they called the practice of legal kidnapping, to
Virginia by slave traders. Consequently, by the end of
the seventeenth century Virginia's laboring people
consisted mostly of bond laborers, 70 percent from
England, Scotland, and Ireland and the other 30 percent
from Africa via Barbados colony.
A traveling London
merchant to the area in the late seventeenth century
recorded his impressions. Those in bondage, comprising
more than sixty percent of the people in Virginia
colony, endure conditions "far worse than the poorest
gypsy in England," he noted. "Their usual food is maize
bread to eat, and water to drink, which sometimes is not
very good and scarcely enough for life, yet they are
compelled to work hard. Thus they are by hundreds of
thousands compelled to spend their lives in Virginia in
planting that vile tobacco, which all vanishes into
smoke, and is for the most part miserably abused. The
servants and negroes after they have worn themselves
down the whole day, and gone home to rest, have yet to
grind and pound the grain, which is generally maize, for
their masters and all their families as well as
themselves" (see James Horn,
Adapting to a New World,
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994, p. 275).
The third component
of Virginian violence is racial slavery. As seen in
components one and two, the English capitalists that
founded Virginia colony in 1607 possessed a singular
vision of America, in which all the indigenous were
violently disappeared, all the laborers violently
reduced to chattel, and gargantuan profits accumulated
instantly without the annoying presence of parliaments
and other such regulatory bodies. They were corrupt and
scheming right-wing royalists recently forced out of
England by Cromwell's army, their sights set solely on
fertile Virginia tidewater land and how they might
exploit it to the fullest.
Thus it comes as no
surprise that these particular men were eager to get in
on the African slave trade. Yet they soon found
themselves in a very difficult dilemma, for the newly
transported Africans entered an already chattelized
labor force. It's true that the kidnapped Africans were
sold into lifetime hereditary slavery whereas the
kidnapped English, Scots, and Irish had been sold into
limited-term slavery. Yet in the oligarchic plantation
monoculture of seventeenth-century Virginia, the two
groups of bond laborers found themselves in exactly the
same boat. They lived together in the same slave
quarters, fell in love together, escaped together,
revolted together. Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77 was the
outcome of their common chattelization under Virginia's
plantation bourgeoisie in which thousands of African
slaves and thousands of European slaves took up arms
together (15,000 in total), seized control of Virginia
colony, murdered slave-owners, and drove the entire
ruling class of capitalist planters into exile for more
than eight months straight.
This third
component of Virginian violence, racial slavery, is the
most barbarous for obvious reasons and it's not
necessary to delve into it here. Suffice it to say that
Virginia's planter elite responded to Bacon's Rebellion
by masterminding a system of racial slavery through
which they could continue the chattelization of
Virginia's laboring people by now imposing it
exclusively on African Americans.
Bacon's Rebellion
had forced the capitalist planters' hand: to continue
with chattel slavery in Virginia they had, from now on,
to prevent such bond-labor uprisings in advance,
preemptively. This they achieved by passing laws in the
early eighteenth century prohibiting the enslavement of
European Americans (now called "whites," for the first
time incidentally). In return, that is to say the
condition on which they had the right of non-enslavement
conferred on them, these poor and propertyless European
Americans were to make certain that African American
bond laborers stayed under the lash and had their labor
exploited by capitalist planters as efficiently as
possible; thus the birth of the "poor whites" as
overseers, patrollers, slave-catchers, county sheriffs,
and lynch mobs.
The scarcely
comprehensible scale of violence in Virginia that
followed the imposition of racial slavery and racial
oppression, the hundreds of thousands of nameless
African Americans starved, raped, lashed, kicked and
beaten, tortured, and murdered, which then spread like a
cancer everywhere else in America, is really just
beginning to be felt and understood by Americans, thanks
largely to our greatest writers, beginning with the
antislavery activists and authors of the nineteenth
century (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Fred Douglass,
Ida B. Wells), down to Charles Chesnutt (his 1901
masterpiece
The Marrow of Tradition is one of the
fullest descriptions of it) and W.E.B. Du Bois. Then
Mark Twain, Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis, Langston
Hughes, William Faulkner, John O. Killens, Margaret
Walker (Jubilee), William Styron (The Confessions of Nat
Turner), August Wilson, Toni Morrison (Beloved, of
course, but it's in all her novels). There are many
others. It's difficult to come up with a good American
writer who hasn't been preoccupied with this society's
most dominant tendency, that of violence on a mass
scale.
Yet and still, we
can expect the corporate media to go on calling Seung
Hui Cho an unfathomably bizarre lunatic and all that. He
was clearly a sociopath, but compared to Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, who said she felt the mass
murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, through starvation,
under her and Clinton's sanctions policy was "worth it,"
he's small fry. And with the so-called US Left, we're
already seeing their predictable response: they blame it
all on non-existent gun laws in Virginia and are barking
again for tighter restrictions.
In a country whose
origin is so deeply drenched in the blood of workers,
Indian, European, and African, and that has never for a
moment strayed from this origin but rather expanded and
systemized it in the most horrific and catastrophic ways
imaginable, including against the nation of Korea where
between 1950 and 1953, the US military murdered more
than a million civilians, through death squads and
napalm, tighter gun laws are at best a political
diversion and at worst a transparent means to keep
America's laboring people in the same defenseless
position they've always been, where the sociopaths above
have all the guns and everyone below is at their mercy.
American violence and mass murder, which began in
Virginia, will not be prevented by gun control laws in
Virginia today or any time in the future. This kind of
violence can only be ended by putting a stop to the law
superseding it and every other one, the law of rich eat
the poor and the use of imperialist war to keep the rule
of money continuously functioning.
In communiqués to
NBC that the network aired and that the authorities are
now trying to suppress, Seung Hui Cho returned again and
again to the class character of his violent rage. While
the comparison of himself with Jesus Christ seems
outrageous and beneath contempt, it was after all Jesus
who said, "Woe unto the rich! For ye have received your
fill." He was also known to violently attack loan sharks
doing business in the temple of God.
Only the
faint-hearted and delusional will try to twist Seung Hui
Cho's massacre at Virginia Tech and his explicitly
stated reasons for doing it into the work of an isolated
psycho. Had we only acted more decisively on his obvious
cries for help, so they say, he could have been heavily
medicated and then properly disposed of in some local
lunatic asylum.
What he did was
barbaric, and this barbarism is what made Seung Hui Cho
finally into the true American he always wanted to be.
Source:
Black Agenda Report / Read also, Theodore
Allen's
Invention of the White Race
Jonathan Scott
is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University
in Abu Dees, the West Bank, and the author of
Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
.
jonascott15@aol.com
posted 2 May 2007 * * *
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* * updated 4 October 2007 |
