THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 3, 1997 TAG: 9702030059
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: COLUMN
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 90 lines
There can be no better way to celebrate Black History Month, February, locally than to honor John Hartwell Cocke, an early 19th century Virginia aristocrat with Norfolk connections. Not only did he brand slavery as ``the great cause of all the great evils of our land,'' he further warned his contemporaries, ``We or our prosperity are inevitably destined to be overwhelmed, unless the cause is removed.''
A fifth-generation descendant of Richard Cocke, who came to Virginia in 1628, Cocke was born in Surry County in 1780 and attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. In 1802, he married Ann Blaus Barraud of Norfolk. When she died in 1816, he married Louisa Maxwell Holmes, a Norfolk widow. Cocke served as a brigadier general of Virginia troops during the War of 1812. When peace was declared he moved to ``Bremo,'' a plantation in Fluvanna County. There, he built what Fiske Kimball, the American architectural historian, later described as the most perfect ``of all houses in the Jefferson tradition.''
But Cocke's architectural accomplishments were only the tip of the iceberg as far as his other and more important humanitarian and agricultural interests were concerned. Of major significance was his loathing of human bondage, which he stigmatized in 1831 thus: ``In the name of wonder, how is it that all will not agree to go faithfully and honestly about the work of removing this blot on our national escutcheon; this cancer eating on the vitals of the Commonwealth?''
Sentiments like these, in view of the ingrained complacency at slavery as it then existed throughout the South, could easily have resulted in an unguarded speaker being lynched. But Cocke's high position on the Virginia social scale saved him from that fate, and he continued to plead for a peaceful solution to the problem that finally resulted in the bloodbath of the Civil War. In the meantime, Cocke spearheaded an effort to ward off this ``fire bell in the night,'' as he and Thomas Jefferson regarded the institution of slavery, if it was not speedily abolished.
Being a practical man, Cocke realized that Virginia's blacks could not be freed until they were sufficiently educated to hold their own in a competitive society. To bring this about, he established a school for his own slaves on his Fluvanna County plantation where his and his second wife's efforts were abetted by a New England schoolteacher. Later, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' set the nation's anti-slavery forces ablaze, Cocke visited the author and congratulated her for her efforts to elicit sympathy for the South's black population.
Cocke was also one of the earliest advocates of the founding of Liberia, the new nation to be established in West Africa for freed slaves. He bought a second plantation in Alabama that was used as an ``Emancipation School'' for the instruction of blacks in the skills they would need in the new land.
Needless to add, Cocke's projects caused him to be despised by most of his fellow aristocrats. But the cold shoulders of his peers didn't faze Cocke, for he went on to attack another Virginia sacred cow - the soil-exhausting cultivation of tobacco - then as now a primary foundation of the Old Dominion economy. In 1860, he published a monograph titled ``Tobacco'' to prove his theory that the widespread cultivation of the ``weed'' was ethically and economically ``the bane of Virginia husbandry'' - a prediction that is now increasingly gaining converts throughout the state.
By the time his blast at Virginia's tobacco economy was published, Cocke had also helped Jefferson establish the University of Virginia. At the time of his death in 1866, one year after Lee's surrender at Appomattox had left the Southern cause in shambles, Cocke had the satisfaction of knowing that his idealism, tempered with practicality, had helped (though the progress had been slow) to bring his more thoughtful countrymen to an increasingly rational and humanitarian way of thinking. In summing up his accomplishments, The Dictionary of American Biography says:
``Without being either a prig or a Puritan, he was a zealous reformer; yet even those who impugned his principles admired his sincerity, catholic benevolence, and alertness to civic responsibility. The causes which he supported indicate him to have been one of the most remarkable Virginians of his generation in power of foresight, a pioneer of modern social reform.'' ILLUSTRATION: Virginia Historical Society
Virginian John Hartwell Cocke (1780-1866) had a wide range of
interests, including ``removing this blot'' of slavery.