The ironies (and absurdities) of slavery in the early American republic

I just finished with Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. The "internal enemy" is a term that whites often used to refer to the slaves in their midst since, as Taylor demonstrates, slave insurrections were a nearly constant fear among Virginia's slaveholders. I would highly recommend the book for those of you who are interested; here I just wanted to mention a few tidbits from the book that stuck out for me and, at the same time, highlight the sometimes highly paradoxical viewpoints that Virginia's slaveholders were forced, either intentionally or not, to maintain in order to preserve an economic system that was a large part of their cultural identity:

• The elimination of primogeniture and entail. These refer to the practices of, respectively, the inheritance by the firstborn child of the entirety of a family's estate and the restriction of inheritance to the family heirs only. When practiced, as they were in colonial America, these laws served to concentrate wealth among a small number of families and, within those families, a small number of powerful individuals. After the American Revolution, these laws were struck down in many of the former colonies, including Virginia. While American lawmakers (including most prominently Thomas Jefferson) felt that the elimination of such laws was more consistent with a republican form of government, it was actually devastating for slave families. In essence, primogeniture and entail prevented wealthy plantation owners from scattering their estates after their deaths. For slaves, this significantly reduced the likelihood that family members would be sold off. With the suppression of these laws after the revolution, wealth was more evenly distributed among whites but, at the same time, the breakup of slave families became easier and much more common.
• Blacks' lack of rights. In 1816, George Boxley hatched a plot to lead about 30 or so slaves (some of which were his own) to freedom in the North as revenge for being passed over for a militia promotion and a seat in the state legislature, both of which he blamed on the state's wealthy, slave holding elite. The plan never materialized, however, and Boxley was eventually arrested. Here's the catch, though: all the witnesses to the treasonous plot were black and therefore barred, by Virginia law, from testifying against a white man! I'll let Taylor (2013: 399) finish the story: "[u]ncertain what to do with Boxley, the authorities kept him in jail until...he escaped after breaking his irons and cutting a passage through the ceiling of his cell...[s]uspicions arose that some powerful local people wanted Boxley gone rather than risk an embarrassing trial that would acquit for lack of evidence." How's that for irony?

References:

Taylor, A (2013). The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. W.W. Norton, New York.