Richard K.[enner] Cralle. Autograph Letter Signed. Lynchburg, Virginia, Jan. 14, 1850. 3pp.+stampless address leaf. To Judge F.[leming] Saunders, Flat Creek, Va.
Writes of a young slave working at a factory in Lynchburg who might be “seduced” by slave-traders “from the allegiance due his master.…of all the places in the Union…this is the very worst for negroes. The intimacy, the apparent equality between them and the masses of the whites; especially the free intercourse kept up in the Factories, must necessarily tend to the destruction of any thing like subordination; and, in the end, lead to evil consequences of more magnitude. It is next to impossible to keep servants in order, even in the best regulated private families. The general relaxation of discipline, observable every where, has assumed here its very worst form; and I am sure it cannot last much longer without the gravest mischiefs…a fellow belonging to M.W. Claiborne, attempted twice to kill a white man, and very nearly succeeded in both instances. A fortunate blow with a pocket knife alone saved the life of the white, by killing instantly the negro, who was upon him. There is scarcely a week passes here without some outrage, and if this wretched system of half slavery and half freedom be allowed to pass unrestrained, I know not what to expect… a young girl I had brought down from the Mountains had declared that she meant to have a white man for her husband. This, after many instances of insolence, finally terminated in her positive refusal to do what her mistress ordered, and the bold declaration that she would not live with us, but desired to be sold to a Trader. I ought to have given her a hundred lashes, and sent her off…designing if she showed any repentance to take her back. In a week or two, however, she appeared in a rich figured silk dress and boasted she had succeeded, and was a white man’s wife. To such a state of things have come! And these things are now too common to attempt correction. Two more of our house servants have since expressed the same wish to be sold, but I am determined to give them the lash…From all I hear from Washington, the Union is in imminent danger. The Abolitionists say they will not [cease?], and this eternal agitation of the subject must inevitably lead to the most serious consequences. Our negroes have been fully aware of what is going on, and if some stop is not put to it, we shall surely be involved in a servile war at no distant day…If I could, I would seize the present favourable opportunity to get rid of every one I own, except a few in the House…” Cralle was a relative of John Calhoun’s who served as the rabidly pro-slavery Senator’s confidant and private secretary. When Calhoun, after his failed bid for the Presidency, became Secretary of State before the Mexican-American War, Cralle was his chief aide and Acting Secretary in his absence. After Calhoun’s death, the year this letter was written, Cralle became his literary executor, editing a six-volume set of his writings and speeches. A dedicated adherent of the mystical Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, Cralle built a “military Gothic” residence on a hill in Lynchburg, called “Cralle’s Folly” because it was so “unusually large and pretentious”. Small wonder that he was so often “astounded” by the independence and insubordination of Black slaves.