Primary Sources: Black People Built America. The Nottaway Plantation Is Proof
The fire at a Louisiana forced labor camp sparked white tears, Black joy and social media memes. It should remind everyone who built this country.
No matter how you feel about capitalism, excess and whether billionaires should exist, it is impossible to deny that Jay-Z, Beyoncè Knowles-Carter and Elon Musk embody the mythical concept of the American Dream.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour is on track to gross $325 million because of the music she made, recorded, promoted and released. She’s rich because her fans give her money. Jay-Z is considered, by many, to be the GOAT of the most popular musical genre on the planet. And aside from owning an automotive company and a social media platform, Elon Musk is also a majority shareholder in the president of the United States. But if no one had ever heard of Lemonade, Hov or a Hitler-saluting apartheid advocate (maybe this hypothetical person was kidnapped in 1998 or they’re a visitor from another planet), there is one item that exemplifies that someone has mastered the game of American wealth-building:
Look at the house they live in.
The Hitler-saluting CEO doesn’t just own the White House. On June 12, 2021, Musk sold his 16,251-square-foot home in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. The 14,400-square-foot compound Musk owns in Austin, Texas, pales in comparison to the 40,000-square-foot home that made Jay-Z and Beyoncé owners of the most expensive home ever sold in California. But popularity, talent or literally having all the money in the world can’t match the wealth and privilege provided by one American occupation:
Owning slaves.
On May 15, a mysterious fire completely destroyed a historic forced labor camp three times larger than the residence of the wealthiest man in the world.
“The South’s biggest surviving antebellum mansion was reduced to rubble by a massive fire, which was still under investigation Friday,” the Daily Beast reports. “The Nottaway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, started burning around 2 a.m. on Thursday morning and was completely destroyed within hours despite the efforts of 40 firefighters. At 53,000 square feet, it had been almost as big as the historic core of the White House and was used as an events venue.”
Upon hearing about the hilarious act of God horrific accident, Black social media users immediately began mourning the demise of the historic hotel and wedding venue.
While sad, the Nottaway concentration camp’s origin story offers a lesson in history, economics and the people who powered the intergenerational wealth machine of chattel slavery. Once you examine the primary sources, you are left with one conclusion:
Look at the house we live in.
In 1851, Herman Melville released Moby Dick, one of the handful of books that would vie for the title of the “great American novel.” While most people think of the classic tale as a simple story about a whale hunter, many literary scholars believe Melville’s magnum opus is a slave narrative about a fugitive slave who (spoiler alert) ultimately sinks the boat filled with overzealous hunters who are obsessed with him. The book was released after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. Abolitionists often used the whale as a symbol for an institution that would sink America.
Eleven days later came New Year's Day of 1863, and Mr. Lincoln, still unsubdued in spirit, attached his name to the Emancipation Proclamation, remarking to Secretary Seward, who had brought him the engrossed copy for signature: "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper. ' ' And to another he remarked : ' ' We are like whalers who have been on a long chase. We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer, or with one flop of his tail he will send us all into eternity."
Lincoln in Caricature: A Historical Collection with Descriptive and Biographical Commentaries
What does Moby Dick have to do with Nottaway?
Well, the first page in the first chapter of Moby Dick, Melville writes:
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes…
Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.
The “Randolphs” Melville mentions are the descendants of William and Mary Isham Randolph, the wealthy American aristocrats known as “the Adam and Eve of Virginia.”
Born in 1650, William Randolph was a poor, uneducated son of an English servant who moved to the Virginia Colony when he was around 19 years old and began building barns. By the time he was 25, he was a lawyer with 591 acres of prime real estate on Turkey Island, a stone’s throw from where the first white settlers arrived in America.
How did a carpenter end up with so much money?
Human trafficking.
The first white people who invaded America didn’t know how to farm or feed themselves. They were so inept that they ate each other. To prevent its colonizing experiment from failing, in 1618, the Virginia Company of London instructed Virginia Gov. George Yeardley to offer 50 acres of free land to anyone who paid for a skilled laborer to move to the colony of Caucasian cannibals:
And for Every person which they shall transport thither within seven years after Midsummer Day One thousand six hundred and Eighteen, if he continue there three years or dye in the mean time after he is Shiped, it be of fifty Acres
— “Instructions to George Yeardley,” Virginia Company of London (November 18, 1618)
In August 1619, a few months after the “headrights” law passed, Gov. Yeardley made an even better deal. He traded a few snacks to a pirate in exchange for a shipful of stolen booty (not that kind):
About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point-Comfort…
He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, which [Yeardley] the Governor bought for victualls (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could.
Letter from John Rolphe to Edwin Sandys, (December 1619)
Slavery had come to America.
In 1638, a scammer named George Menefie filed for 3,000 acres of free headrights. But instead of listing the 60 names that amount of free land would require, his patent application only included 37 names. Fortunately, the records had a note that explained the discrepancy.
In the foregoing list there apears 37 names, while this record states for transportation of three score. Before the list of names appears the following: "Negroes I brought out of England with me." (The white persons were named, the unnamed Negroes making up the difference.
— Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623-1800
A year later, Menefie secured headrights for another 15 people he enslaved. When Virginians realized they could get free land for the people they enslaved, human trafficking skyrocketed. On October 1, 1674, a Virginia barn builder who had been saving his money received a shipment and was finally ready to cash in.
On that October date he received his patent; from Governor Berkeley for 581 acres on the north side of Swift Creek, "this said land being due William Randolph for the transportation of 12 persons into this Colony."
After profiting from slavery, Randolph became a successful “transatlantic merchant” and politician. He served as sheriff, coroner and longtime legislator of Henrico County, helping turn it into “the largest slave trading center in the upper South.” The plantation patriarch also helped found the College of William and Mary, the oldest public university in America and the country’s second college.
But:
In terms of monetary wealth it is difficult to assess the Randolph family. Virginia was notorious for its lack of real money. Wealth was measured in land, tobacco, slaves and credit. These the Randolphs had in abundance…
By the end of the seventeenth century, indentured servants had been largely replaced by black slaves brought in from Africa or the West Indies. Randolph took advantage of the headright system. The surviving records indicate that by himself between I674 and 1697 he imported l5l persons, 72 whites and 69 blacks, for which he collected a total of 7,160 acres.
— The Randolphs of Turkey Island: a prosopography of the first three generations, 1650-1806
In 1693, Randolph tried to introduce a set of “servant codes” to protect his human property. Still, it failed, mostly because his colleagues agreed that the former barn builder possessed one unmistakable quality:
He was a terrible lawyer.
After the slave trader was appointed to serve as Virginia’s attorney general, an emissary of King Charles II described Randolph as “either ignorant of the law or otherwise unfit.” But the slave owner was rich and powerful, so he passed his privilege on to his 10 children, who became very important enslavers in their own right. His son, William Randolph II, continued his family legacy when he was elected to the colonial legislature. As Virginia’s clerk of court, William II invited his father to the ceremonial signing of the 1705 law that fulfilled his father’s dreams:
And also be in enacted, by the authority aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, That all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country…. shall be accounted and be slaves
and it is hereby enacted, That no negros, mulattos, or Indians, although Christians…shall, at any time, purchase any christian servant, nor any other, except of their own complexion, or such as are declared slaves by this act: And if any negro, mulatto, or Indian, Jew, Moor, Mahometan, or other infidel, or such as are declared slaves by this act, shall, notwithstanding, purchase any christian white servant, the said servant shall, ipso facto, become free.
Not only did the new slave codes help the family business, but declaring that slavery was a race-based institution also helped Virginians embrace the practice. To be fair, the Randolphs weren’t the first American family to own a huge forced labor complex. That title belongs to the 800-acre Shirley Plantation in Virginia. But after the Randolphs legally defined “slave” as “not white people,” the free labor of enslaved people helped the Shirley Plantation become “the largest agricultural operation in the state.”
George Menefie’s 1638 headrights scam that made slavery skyrocket is not history. The old Shirley Plantation is not “something that happened.” If you think slavery is something “Black people need to get over,” you should remember an incredible fact about the theft of Black labor that built this corporation:
Shirley is also the oldest family-owned business in North America dating back to 1638 when Edward Hill I began farming in Charles City along the James River. Construction of the present manor house began circa 1723, when Elizabeth Hill married John Carter …
… the “Great House” is largely in its original state and the 11th and 12th generations of the Hill Carter family are the current stewards of the property.
Who TF are the Hill Carters?
Well, on June 18, 1793, William Randolph’s granddaughter, Mary, married Henry Lee. Mary’s grandson, Virginia Gov. Henry “Lighthorse” Lee, was homeboys with George Washington. After Lee’s second cousin died (who also happened to be his wife), he married a wealthy heiress named Anne Hill Carter, who was born and raised on the Shirley Plantation.
The rich, slave-owning aristocrats were so terrible with money that they lost every penny they had. While Lighthorse served a year in debtor’s prison, Anne and her young children moved back in with their family of slave owners. Anne was broke, and her youngest son, Bobby, wasn’t a great student, so he couldn’t attend Princeton like his father. But the slave-owning community was tight-knit. The Hill Carters used their connections to help little Bobby get five letters of recommendation from U.S. senators. So John Calhoun, one of the most racist politicians in American history, admitted Bobby to the U.S. Military Academy on the condition that he sit out the first year and study. If Bobby hadn’t been staying at that slave labor camp, the blueblood son of privilege would’ve been lost to history.
That’s how a white-owned slave empire helped Robert E. Lee win the first DEI scholarship.
But the Confederate general who led America’s first race war isn’t even in the top 5 most famous members of the concentration camp-owning clan. Lee doesn’t outrank his cousin John Marshall, who was “one of the most influential Supreme Court Justices in history.” Edmund Randolph created America’s judicial system and invented the “recess appointment” as the first attorney general — the idea that his best friend, George Washington, could appoint a judge if the Senate wasn’t in session. The family’s starting roster also includes five governors, four Founding Fathers, two secretaries of state, and a U.S. president (two, if you count Continental Congress President Peyton Randolph).
Every single one of them was a “prominent slave owner.”
That was not just a designation for assets in the Randolphs’ real estate portfolio. Back then, “slave owner” was a corporate title like “Queen Bey” or “CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records.” For instance, William Randolph’s next-door neighbor, Peter, was known as a “tobacco planter, slave owner, surveyor, and mapmaker.” Even though Peter could barely read, didn’t plant stuff and “relied on the forced labor of at least sixty individuals to support his family’s needs and lifestyle,” he impressed his neighbor William:
Peter’s nearest neighbors along the James River included young William Randolph… and William’s [son], Isham Randolph of Dungeness….In the early 1730s, Peter expanded his landholdings by acquiring property on the Rivanna River in the Piedmont region of Virginia. A thousand acres of land was patented by 1735. William Randolph exchanged an additional 200 acres.
On October 3, 1739, Peter married William’s granddaughter, Jane Randolph. In 1756, after he received a land grant for 400 acres in Albemarle County, Va., Peter and Jane moved there with their 10 children. When Peter died, his will divided his wealth between his male children, but left the bulk of his estate to his eldest son:
I give and bequeath all my Slaves not herein otherwise disposed of to be equally divided between my two Sons…
I give and devise unto my Son Thomas either my Lands on the Rivanna River and it’s Branches, or my Lands on the Fluvanna in Albemarle County.
That’s how William Randolph’s great-grandson Tommy inherited the labor and the property that propelled him to wealth and prominence. After the first slave headquarters on site mysteriously burned down, he designed a larger, more grandiose labor camp. He named it after the “little mountain” on the property that became one of the most prominent slave labor camps in American history.
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
OK, let’s keep count up the corporate headquarters:
Shirley Plantation: the oldest business in America.
Turkey Island, which would be older if it still existed
Tuckahoe, the quintessential plantation next door
The Peyton Randolph House, where a founding father enslaved 27 people
Stratford Hall, where the Lees imprisoned an estimated 200 forced laborers
The Brandon Plantation, home to 187 enslaved people
Curle’s Neck; the Randolphs got these 5,513 acres for a steal after the original owner was found guilty of treason for leading Bacon’s Rebellion.
Imagine what you could do if you had all that privilege, property and generational wealth built on the back of enslaved people?
Actually, there’s no need to imagine.
In 1772, John Marshall met James, an 11-year-old student who inherited dozens of slaves after both his parents died. The Randolphs embraced him as a family member, teaching him the ways of slavery. Thomas Jefferson got James into William and Mary — the school founded by the family patriarch William Randolph — and even taught James the law. In a few years, the Randolph connection helped James become the head of Virginia’s militia.
In 1799, James Monroe was elected governor of Virginia thanks to his adopted family.
In the 1800 presidential election, Monroe helped break a tie in the Electoral College by appointing electors who would vote for Jefferson. In exchange, Jefferson made his playcousin an envoy to France, where Monroe negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.
Here’s where it all comes together.
In 1819, while Congress was on summer break, James Monroe used Edmund Randolph’s intention to make a recess appointment:
Henry Randolph, a direct descendant of William I of Turkey Island, had six son…Colonel Peter Randolph (third son of the above Henry), born about 1750, came to Mississippi in 1819 … After his migration to Mississippi with his family and all his slaves, he settled near Woodville.
When Mississippi was admitted into the Union in 1819, the distinct state courts were created and with them the United States courts, with judges appointed to preside over them. In Wilkinson County, such a federal court was established, and a circuit judge was appointed … Judge Randolph was given a temporary commission on June 25, 1823 and a permanent one on December 9, 1823.
John Hampden Randolph was 6 years old when he came to Mississippi, but he eventually inherited his father’s land and slaves when his father passed away in 1832. On May 9, 1841, he paid $30,000 for 498.71 acres across the river in Iberville, Louisiana, which was populated by 2,523 whites, 85 “free colored” and 5,887 enslaved people.
Where did he get the equivalent of $1.1 million in today’s dollars?
Payment as followes: $863 to be paid in cash to the vendor. The purchaser assumed the payment of a mortgage on the land in favor of the Union Bank of Louisiana for the sum of $5,000 secured by listed negroes.
For the remainder of the cost, the purchaser signed four promissory notes…Robert also agreed to substitute other slaves in place of twenty-four negroes belonging to the vendor which were not mortgage.
Using enslaved people as collateral was not unusual. It’s how Jefferson borrowed money. Edmund Randolph did it. All the Randolphs did. And it’s how John Hampden Randolph got the lump sum to expand the slave camp that would become Nottaway:
These mortgages assumed by J.H. Randolph…
A mortgage existed on slaves sold, amounting to $15,000…Vendor mortgages property to J.H. Randolph as security that mortgages on slaves will be taken up.
In 1857, the “planter" who didn’t plant and the “prominent slave owner” who didn’t actually own the people he enslaved forced his human property to build what would become the largest plantation in the country 167 years later. He did not build Nottaway. He didn’t have the skills or the money.
He just owned Black people.
It was built by privilege and theft and blood and the labor of the unkillable skilled workers who survived the bloodiest, most violent state-sanctioned, government-funded institution ever created.
There is not a single plantation from sea to shining sea that was built by a white man.
But they will never look at the house they live in.
.
Every one of them should be burned to the ground. God damn, what a poisonous legacy we have.
Thank you for the factual history!