In January 1806, the Virginia House of Delegates convened at the capitol in Richmond to consider a bill outlawing the emancipation of slaves “by [last] Will and testament, and … prevent[ing] emancipations” that would “take effect at a distant day.” One delegate who debated this antimanumission bill asked his fellow legislators to consider, when deciding how to vote, the “preponderance of the blacks in numbers, over the whites, in the eastern parts of the state” and the threat of insurrection that such a situation entailed. He thought the simple majority of Blacks east of the Appalachians distressing, but he argued that the situation was really much worse than the raw numbers indicated. “To ascertain the force” of each race, he claimed, one should “deduct from the number of whites the females, who would be a weight on them destructive to their energy.” Black women, on the other hand, “would be as ferocious and formidable as the males.” Virginia had a “peculiar necessity” for precaution, because east of the Blue Ridge Mountains the true “force of the blacks” was “to the whites as 2 to 1.” The legislator believed that gender distinctions among Blacks would mean little in a slave rebellion.

In many ways this argument was eminently logical. Enslaved women shared the heavy fieldwork of Virginia plantations with their enslaved male kin, and Black women frequently proved themselves impressively “ferocious and formidable” in their relations with their owners and employers. Just four months after the legislative debate, an incident illustrating this occurred across the James River from Richmond.