Eyre, John, 1768-1855

John Eyre was the fourth and longest-serving steward of Eyre Hall in Northampton County, Virginia. Born in 1768, Eyre inherited Eyre Hall at the age of 21, became the most prosperous man and one of the largest enslavers in Northampton County. His devotion to his extended family ensured the survival of Eyre Hall through the chaotic changes of antebellum America until his death in 1855.^[1]

John Eyre’s father, Severn Eyre, died in 1773 at the age of thirty-seven when John was just five years old. The patriarch left behind a thirty-three-year-old wife, Margaret, four sons, and two daughters – each under the age of twelve. John’s father devised Eyre Hall to his eldest son, the twelve-year-old Littleton. However, Littleton could not take possession of the property until he reached the age of 21 in 1782. In the meantime, Severn Eyre’s widow, Margaret, stewarded the property with the help of Severn’s three other male executors.^[2]

In addition to leaving behind a full young family, Seven Eyre also died as one of the largest enslavers in Northampton County holding more than 160 people in bondage. The labors of those the Eyres enslaved ensured a comfortable upbringing for John Eyre. Under his mother Margaret’s temporary stewardship, the Eyre children grew up in a comfortably furnished home, benefitted from formal education, learned the refined ways of genteel life, and indulged in music and dancing.^[3]

Perhaps John Eyre never expected to inherit Eyre Hall and become the owner of one of the largest estates on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. On the surface, the odds seemed rather astronomical. In the case of the death of John’s eldest brother Littleton, the second-eldest son, Severn, would inherit Eyre Hall. Only in the eventof the deaths of both Littleton and Severn, would the property fall to the third son in this line, John Eyre. However, early death was the prevailing trend among male heirs to Eyre Hall up to the late 18th century. In fact, after Eyre Hall’s initial construction in 1759, the first three stewards of Eyre Hall led the property for only a combined thirty years. John Eyre’s older brother Severn, the son second-in-line to inherit Eyre Hall, died in 1786 at the age of twenty-two. Three years later, John Eyre’s eldest brother, Littleton, died unmarried at the age of twenty-eight in 1789 – the same year John Eyre turned twenty-one.^[4]

As part of the genteel Virginia realm in which the Eyres operated after the American Revolution, John Eyre’s marriage to Ann Upshur constituted a logical match. Ann Upshur came from a distinguished Eastern Shore family not far from the Eyre’s residence. This is not to say, however, that their marriage was not founded on love. The two met at the home Ann Upshur’s maternal aunt, Susanna Gore Kendall, not far from Eyre Hall where Ann recovered from a broken leg in the summer of 1798. John took an active interest in Ann’s convalescence and showered her with books and gifts to ward off boredom. A year and a half after their initial meeting, John Eyre and Ann Upshur were wed in 1800. Three months later, Ann’s sister Elizabeth married Littleton Dennis Teackle, the builder of Teackle Mansion in Somerset County, Maryland. The two properties and their proprietors would be socially and financially linked for decades. In fact, the improvements Ann and John made to Eyre Hall after their marriage were likely spurred on by Littleton Dennis Teackle’s lavish installments at Teackle Mansion.^[5]

The Politics of John Eyre

As was common among wealthy planters across the South, and the Eyre family tradition, John Eyre’s politics leaned toward the conservative Federalist party after the American Revolution. Like his brother, Littleton, John Eyre favored a strong central government which had been enhanced by the recent ratification of the Constitution of the United States. In 1794, at the age of 26, John was elected to theSenate of Virginia representing the Eastern Shore counties of Northampton and Accomack as a Federalist. The writer of his 1855 obituary noted that Eyre’s early service in the Senate involved “little part in debate” although Eyre, “like Washington, exercised the influence due to his sound judgement and weight of character.” Federalist influence in Virginia state politics began to fade around the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite being elected to the state Senate for five consecutive terms, John Eyre stepped down from his state-wide elected post after the 1801 session.^[6]

However, Eyre did not retire completely from politics. Instead, he participated at the community level until the 1810s where he took an active role in improving the infrastructure of Northampton County. He also served on a committee of magistrates which led the construction of a poor house in the community. In fact, his 1855 obituary praised Eyre’s philanthropic deeds at great lengths. “His beneficence was habitual and perennial…The widow, the orphan, the destitute of every description shared in his bounty,” the obituary noted. “He was in the habit of putting aside a portion of his annual crop for the exclusive use of the poor; which those who [would] not accept charity were permitted to buy at a moderate price…His charities, too, were as wisely regulated as they were benevolent. They were not indiscriminate…but they were always in season, always appropriate, never made in ostentation, and they never wounded the feelings of those on whom they were bestowed.”^[7]

Eyre’s financial benevolence extended from the community to his own family. Never having any children of his own, John Eyre routinely considered the welfare of his nieces and nephews. John and Ann Upshur Eyre became the guardians of Margaret Alice Lyon (11) and William Eyre Lyon (10) after the death of their father, Dr. John Lyon (d. 1811) and his wife – John’s sister – Sally (d. 1813) and John’s mother, Margaret Taylor Eyre (d. 1812). The couple also became the guardians of the three surviving children of John Eyre’s younger brother, William L. Eyre of Eyreville, after his death in 1808 and his wife’s death one year later. From the commencement of their guardianship until his death in 1855, John Eyre frequently adjusted his business practices to shore up his nieces and nephews’ inheritances.^[8] Eyre also liberally provided for them in his will. In the same document, Eyre left the Upshur ancestral home of Warwick to his widowed niece, Elizabeth Ann Upshur Teackle Quinby, where she and her son lived after Eyre’s death.^[9]

At a Fourth of July celebration in Accomack County, Virginia, a group of Federalist leaders that did not include Eyre himself contemplated who to nominate to challenge the Democratic-Republican incumbent in 1808. The group unanimously agreed on John Eyre. However, when the results were returned in the spring of 1809, John Eyre lost overwhelmingly. This was less a sign of John Eyre’s unpopularity as it was a signal of the Federalists waning influence on Virginia politics. Eyre would unsuccessfully run for the same seat again in 1811, 1815, and 1817, with various margins of defeat in each election. After his 1817 defeat, John Eyre retired from public life.^[10]

The Enslaving of John Eyre

The Eyre family held Black people in bondage since at least Thomas Eyre II’s time in Virginia during the late 17th and early 18th centuries when he enslaved two individuals: James and Daniel. The number of Blacks enslaved by the Eyres steadily increased across the centuries, peaking during the life of Severn Eyre I who enslaved 163 humans at the time of his death in 1773. In fact, the property tax lists of 1782 record Margaret Eyre, Severn Eyre I’s widow, as enslaving 178 people – the largest holdings in the family’s history and by far the largest enslaver in Northampton County. Margaret and Severn’s sons – including John Eyre – reaped the wealth sown by those they enslaved to solidify their place amongst the Virginia landed gentry.^[11]

At the height of his slaveholding, John Eyre enslaved 90 people across his properties in Northampton and Accomack County.^[12] The expansion of his slaveholdings corresponded with calculated adjustments to his business practices. Virginia planters finally exhausted much of Virginia’s soil – particularly on the Eastern Shore – around the turn of the 19th century. John Eyre and his peers in the enslaving planter class reoriented their agricultural practice to the less labor-intensive regime of grain production. However, with this switch came a shift in slaveholding in the region. A less labor-intensive agricultural system meant less demand for the enslaved laborers who were previously forced to cultivate the tobacco of the preceding centuries. Some of John Eyre’s peers likely sought fresh lands west of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains hoping new soil offered new possibilities for social mobility. Others turned their commercial eye turned towards the Lower South where the federal government waged a campaign to expel and deport as many Native Americans as possible from their homelands in the Southeast to newly-formed reservations west of the Mississippi River to make available land for the production of cotton. Eyre, however, sold and willed his enslaved amongst family and friends from his residence at Eyre Hall.^[13]

Unfortunately, bondspeople’s day-to-day resistance to John Eyre’s enslavement does not readily appear in the historical record. However, larger attempts at resistance do survive.

Escape from Eyre Hall during the War of 1812

During the War of 1812, British forces entered the Chesapeake Bay in February 1813 where they maintained a military presence for two years. As the British began their quest to march on Washington, D.C., and seize Baltimore, American citizens like John Eyre and those they enslaved were ensnared in the war’s destruction. For white enslavers and the landed gentry like Eyre, the British presence in the Chesapeake spelled possible disaster. Notorious for burning and plundering the property of hawkish Americans, the land, crops, buildings, and the enslaved of Eyre and his neighbors were at risk. (Eyre Hall escaped the War of 1812 unharmed possibly due to Eyre’s identification as a Federalist – a party traditionally aligned with the British empire.)^[14]

For those John Eyre enslaved, the British presence in the Chesapeake brought freedom closer than it had ever been since the American Revolution decades earlier. Suddenly, what meant possible destitution for Eyre and his peers meant possible freedom for the enslaved. Thousands of freedom-seeking enslaved people fled towards marching British soldiers, floating British barges, and anchored British ships of war. Eight of John Eyre’s enslaved succeeded in such a flight. Billy, Jonathan, Jim, John, Mingo, Nim Carter, Bill, and Esau escaped John Eyre’s enslavement in 1814 and fled to British vessels in the Chesapeake. After the war, John Eyre filed a claim of indemnity requesting that the value of his self-liberated formerly enslaved property be paid to him by the British government. His claim was approved and the adjudicating committee compensated Eyre $280 for each self-liberated person amounting to $2,240 in total reparations for his “loss.”^[15]

Escape from Eyre Hall by Whaleboat, 1832

In August 1831, just across the Chesapeake Bay from Northampton County, one of the largest uprisings of enslaved people in U.S. history rocked the fears of Virginia enslavers – John Eyre included. There, in Southampton County, Virginia, a group of enslaved men, led by Nat Turner, embarked on a vengeful campaign of violent resistance to their enslavement. The band of enslaved men killed over fifty white Virginians before being apprehended by white militiamen. Nat Turner, however, evaded capture for two months until October 30, 1831. On November 5, ten Southampton County magistrates convicted Nat Turner and sentenced him to death. Turner was hanged on November 11, 1831.^[16]

The same day Southampton County officials executed Nat Turner, a petition to the Virginia legislature was published in the Richmond Enquirer:

“The Petition of the undersigned, Citizens of the County of Northampton, respectfully represent…The scenes which have recently passed around us contain a melancholy and impressive lesson…From the number of our free negroes, and from the idle and vicious habits of most of them, we have stronger reason than exists in most of our counties, to suspect dangerous intrigues with our slaves…Deeply impressed with these considerations we have met together in our respective neighborhoods, in order to consult on the most expedient mode of getting rid of our free negroes, whom we regard as a most prolific source of evil in our community…That the free negroes of our county ought, if practicable, to be sent to Liberia, in Africa.”^[17]

Four of the fifty-four men who volunteer to “effect” Northampton County’s free Black population’s “removal” included Abel Parker Upshur, Severn E. Parker, Littleton Upshur, and John Eyre. Eyre and his fellow enslavers transparently articulated their fears and aims in the petition. Northampton County’s free Black population was “annually increasing,” which, according to the petitioners, constituted a “source of well founded [sic] uneasiness.” “The free persons of colour in Virginia,” the petitioners wrote, “form an anomalous population, standing in a relation to our society, which naturally exposes them to distrust and suspicion.”

To Eyre, his peers, and white enslaving families in Northampton County, these demographic trends potentially signaled another Nat Turner. Free Blacks, the petitioners admitted, were denied nearly every civil liberty “which the humblest white man enjoys, and denied all participation in the government.” “[I]t would be wholly absurd,” the petitioners wrote, “to expect from them any attachment to our laws and institutions, or any sympathy with our people.” Thus, Eyre and the petitioners articulated their fear that free Blacks, unabashedly denied full freedom by white society, might join with their enslaved kin and relations whereupon “the worst evils might justly be apprehended.” Free Blacks and the enslaved in Northampton County, the petitioners argued, might discover a “confidence in their physical power” while potentially expanding “their means of information, facilitate their intercommunications, and thus add to their capabilities of mischief,” as the events in Southampton County had recently shown.^[18]

Eyre’s co-authored petition to the Virginia legislature in the wake of Nat Turner’s Revolt in 1831 exposes another side of his enslaving. Statistics of those Eyre enslaved and the labor he and his overseers forced upon them illuminate his brutal approach to wealth accumulation. These economic records of enslavement help us define why Eyre Hall – as a mansion and a property – thrived while others died during the antebellum era. Through these same sources, the names of those Eyre enslaved and the stories of their escape appear, too, such as the escape of Billy, Jonathan, Jim, John, Mingo, Nim Carter, Bill, and Esau during the War of 1812.

But Eyre’s 1831 petition is a public declaration of his fears as an enslaver during a time of domestic chaos, resistance, and rebellion within the antebellum slave system. The document shows the lengths to which Eyre and his peers were willing to go – that is, advocating for the use of state and federal funds to relocate of an entire demographic of free people to another continent – in order to secure their position in society and the wealth they held in human beings. The petition illustrates John Eyre’s position of authority within his community of enslavers in Northampton County (each time the petitioners are listed, Eyre’s name is the first enslaver mentioned). And it clearly articulates Eyre’s racist beliefs about not only enslaved people, but free Black people – beliefs that were likely shared among his family, peers, and the larger enslaving class in Virginia and beyond.

Despite the anxieties voiced in the Northampton Petition of 1831, John Eyre’s enslaving did not escape resistance. Seventeen enslaved people and one free Black man escaped enslavement in Northampton County upon a stolen whaleboat rigged with sails stolen from Eyre Hall. The pilots of the boat, attuned with Virginia’s waterways and maritime culture, steered the boat southward into the Chesapeake Bay, coastwise along the Atlantic shore, and into harbor in New York City.^[19]

The scale of the daring escape from Northampton County prompted John Eyre and others to hire two slave catchers to retrieve the fugitives from the free state of New York. One of the individuals who escaped from Northampton and reached New York City, Jack Cartwright, brought “an action de homine replegiando” against one the hired slave catchers, William S. Floyd, in November 1833. According to a summary of the case that appeared in the New York Spectator the Thursday following the case’s adjudication, Cartwright argued that he was illegally imprisoned shortly after his arrival in New York City in 1832. Cartwright insisted that he was, in fact, not a slave of John Eyre but rather that he was born of a free mother and a free father in Virginia. His father, Cartwright argued, was a free Black mariner who had drowned at sea while his mother had previously lived freely at her own house near Eastville, Northampton County, Virginia before she relocated to New York City where she passed away.^[20]

Floyd, on the other hand, argued that Jack Cartwright was enslaved by John Eyre before the former escaped in 1832. Floyd called upon Edward A. Waddey, the other hired slave catcher, who corroborated Floyd’s claims during his testimony. The New York State Circuit Court decided for the defendant and slave catcher, William S. Floyd. Cartwright was “taken from the prison in this city, placed on board a brig, and returned to the plantation of Mr. Eyre, where he was turned out to work with the slaves.”

Despite the resistance of New York City’s free Black community and of the fugitives themselves, the two slave catchers apprehended and returned to Virginia fourteen of the eighteen who fled.

John Eyre, a Defense of Slavery, and a Threat of Secession

John Eyre and his peers believed that the Constitution of the United States included their right to hold property in human beings. In August 1835, Eyre led a meeting of over 100 Northampton County residents at the county courthouse in Eastville to discuss the ongoing activities of Northern anti-slavery societies. As chairman, Eyre selected a committee of nine prominent individuals to serve on a committee that would brainstorm ways to insulate Northampton County from abolitionist threats to the county’s slave system. Among those Eyre selected were Severn E. Parker and Abel Parker Upshur. Circulated among Virginia newspapers, the committee clearly dictated their beliefs, arguments, and resolutions in a lengthy 1835 article.^[21]

“We will not condescend to discuss the institution of domestic slavery,” the committee proclaimed, “[i]t is enough for us that slavery is recognized by the Constitution of the United States; that by the provision of that instrument our slaves are our property, and we demand for them as such, the protection of the constituted authorities of the country.” The Constitution is notably vague around the topic of slavery. The word “slave” does not appear at all in the document; nor do any of the word’s variations. This ambiguity – likely done on purpose by the Constitution’s framers – left the document open to interpretation in the antebellum era as it related to slavery. Abolitionists argued that all men, including Black men, were entitled to many of the same privileges outlined in the Constitution as white men.^[22] Enslavers, on the other hand, extrapolated the Constitution’s protections for individual property to include property held in human beings and, by default, slavery.

Although Eyre’s committee made clear that usually “the proper corrective of most political abuses, is to be found at the electoral polls,” the committee declared that they were also willing to defend their perceived right to hold property in human beings by more violent measures. “The question of right we leave to be settled by the Constitution,” the committee declared, “for the security of that right, we fearlessly rely on the strength of our own arms.” Distinguishing between Northerners and Southerners even more blatantly, the committee described Northern abolitionists as “aliens to our [i.e. Southerners’] blood, strangers to our institutions, and wholly ignorant of the true relation between master and slave.”^[23] Recent national crises – namely, the Missouri Controversy of 1820-21 – illustrated that antebellum political issues were increasingly falling along sectional lines rather than the political lines that previously organized American political opinion. The Northampton County committee’s declaration exhibited that, by 1835, sectional divisions in the United States were starkly apparent.

As the committee outlined their grievances, they painted a grim hypothetical scene of the United States and, more importantly to them, the American South should the aims of abolitionists succeed. They accused abolitionists presses of “gross misrepresentations of the real condition of the slave…foul slanders against the master” and of purposefully creating “discontent and dissatisfaction in the slave, and to excite him to open insurrection or secret assassination.” To carry on a classic trope among pro-slavery advocates, the committee pedaled the image of abolitionists and Northerners as false friends to the enslaved. Instead, Eyre’s committee argued, the “masters” were the enslaved’s true friends.^[24]

Nearing their resolutions, the committee turned familiar Revolutionary rhetoric to signal the possibility of disunion should the enslavers’ demands not be met. “We hold that the designs which [the abolitionists] entertain against us and the measures they have adopted in execution of them, would, if sanctioned by the Governments under which they live, be just cause of war, as between separate and independent nations.” The committee warned its Northern readers that although they professed “a due attachment to our Federal Union, and a firm and determined purpose to sustain the Constitution of the United States, so long as it shall be administered in good faith. But the Union of these States, much as we cherish it, is not so high in our esteem as the security of our property, and our lives.”^[25]

Finally, after over ten lengthy paragraphs, the committee came to the following resolutions: to defend Virginians’ “rights of life, liberty, and property”; to emphasize comity and urge the respect for each states’ laws; to alert the public that northern anti-slavery societies threaten southern institutions (i.e. slavery) which could result in “the horrors of civil and servile war”; and to call on northern governments to reign in the activities of anti-slavery groups. Ending their resolutions, the committee put forth an ultimatum. Should any of these demands be refused, “it will be necessary for the Southern States to look to other and stronger measures, for the security of their property and their lives…Signed, JOHN EYRE, Chairman.”^[26]

The Will of John Eyre

Some of the “property” inherited by Eyre’s relatives were the humans John Eyre enslaved at the time of his death. In the very first sentence of the very first article of his will, Eyre bequeathed unto Margaret A. Taylor – the daughter of Dr. John Lyon and John Eyre’s sister, Sally – his “man servant named Lewis, and his two children John and William.” Taylor also inherited a clock, some silver bowls, a portrait of John Eyre’s father, and the sum of $50,000. The eleventh article of Eyre’s will directed his Executor, William E. Taylor (husband of Margaret Alice Taylor née Lyon) and Severn Eyre, to sell all those Eyre enslaved in Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Perpetuating the trope of the “benevolent master,” Eyre caveated the clause stipulating that “the said slaves may be allowed to choose homes or purchasers, provided good ones be selected.” To expedite the liquidation of his slave holdings and, to lubricate such brutal transactions, Eyre “authorized” his Executors to propose a “discount of twenty-five per cent” on the appraised value of those he enslaved. Despite offering his enslaved an apparent “choice” in who enslaved them, Eyre still ensured that everyone he enslaved in Accomack County remained enslaved after his death.^[27]

To be sure, Eyre did not liberate any of those he enslaved in his will. In fact, in the will’s twelfth article, Eyre “permitted” two elderly people he enslaved – Nat and Nancy – “to reside in a house on the Eyre Hall Estate.” Nat and Nancy were also “permitted to occupy and cultivate One Acre of ground to be annexed to such house.” Though Nat and Nancy were no longer required to “perform any service,” they remained enslaved. And despite John Eyre’s stipulation that his grand-nephew, Severn Eyre, aid Nat and Nancy if either of them lacked “any of the ordinary comforts of life,” those “comforts” did not include freedom. If Nat and Nancy’s perpetual enslavement was not made clear enough, John Eyre clarified their status in the article’s last sentence. “[S]o long as they said servants Nat and Nancy may live,” Eyre directed, “they shall be considered as attached to and pass on as heir looms of the said Eyre Hall Estate.”^[28]