The Origin of Violence in Virginia: A Brief History
by Jonathan
Scott
"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."
"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.
"Virginia's history of violence, for it's truly second to
none."
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.
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 systematic slaughter of the Powhatan Indians
proceeded without interruption until the entire Chesapeake had been ethnically
cleansed of its diverse indigenous peoples."
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.
"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."
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.
"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."
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 superceding 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.
Jonathan Scott is the
author of Socialist
Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes. He can be reached at [email protected].
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