Post by Wayne Hall on Mar 30, 2024 22:36:47 GMT -5
The Peculiar Institution, pt. 8
The next installment of our series about the history of slavery and the leadup to the US Civil War
DARRYL COOPER
MAR 30, 2024
A decade after the Virginia colony was founded, its investors had every reason to suspect they’d sunk their money into a lost cause. Martial law and work gangs got the colony through the difficult early years when bare survival was the paramount concern, but such conditions were not conducive to developing a flourishing community. By the end of the 1610s, the colony still did not grow enough food to feed itself, relations with the local Indians were touch-and-go, and the almost-all male population gave Jamestown the flavor of a military base or Old West mining camp. Reforms were desperately needed, though the investors disagreed on exactly which ones.
The investors fell roughly into three camps, each with a different idea of what they wanted and needed from the colony. The first group was composed of very wealthy merchants for whom Virginia was just one asset in a diversified portfolio. These men had been the dominant group through the company’s first decade, and their wealth allowed them to be patient with a project that had thus far failed to produce a return. The second group was also willing to be patient, but were less interested in developing Virginia as a community than with using it as a base for their privately-funded pirating campaign against Spanish shipping. Finally, there were the smaller investors, men who had sunk a significant amount of their wealth into the Virginia colony, and needed to see something back soon or else face ruin. Their leader was Sir Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and one of the most respected men in England. By 1618, he had acquired sufficient support within the company to get all parties to agree to a reorganization. In 1619, he was named Treasurer and effectively took control of the reform campaign.
Sandys and his supporters envisioned a Virginia community modeled on those found in England, and directed toward the same industrious purposes. It would not do to have men coming and going with each passing ship, and many of the reforms were intended to give more colonists a greater and more lasting stake in the success of the colony. To that end, the draconian Laws, Moral and Martial, were thrown out, and replaced with a new constitution based on English common law. The governor and council, appointed by the Company to represent its interests and implement its policies, remained in place as the principal governing officers, but their powers would henceforth be limited, and exercised in coordination with an assembly elected by the colonists.1 The assembly had the authority to make laws, subject to approval by the Company - a veto which seems to have been exercised rarely, if at all - and the Company pledged to submit its own policies for approval by the assembly. Thus was born the first representative assembly in English America.
Next on Sandys’s agenda was land reform. The Virginia Company was short on hard cash, but it had more land than it knew what to do with… literally. Beginning in 1619, it began to put that resource to work, doling out parcels as private property. Any resident of Virginia who’d arrived before 1616 was to get 100 acres once his term of service was over, and those who arrived after 1616 got 50 acres. Land owned by the Company would now be cultivated by sharecropping tenants instead of indentured servants, although the Company continued to send large numbers of servants to be sold to private landowners. Company officers were given large tracts of land, along with tenants assigned to work it. The governor, for example, got 3,000 acres and 100 tenants, while the local treasurer got 1,500 acres and 50 tenants. Ministers got 100 acres and six tenants. Tenants were to hand over half their crop to the Company, or the officer to which they were assigned, for seven years, after which they would be given 50 acres, free and clear.
Sandys recognized that land title alone was not sufficient to tie a man to a spot for good. Eventually he would want a family, and the first step toward getting one meant finding a woman. Unfortunately, there were precious few of them in Virginia, and those who were around were invariably already spoken for. So in 1619, the first of several batches of single women were sent to Virginia and sold as wives to any man who could afford to buy one. A crude matchmaking mechanism, perhaps, but families did begin to emerge, slowly but surely. The women were brought in to domesticate and civilize the men, and soon set about their work as best they knew how.
When Powhatan, the Indian ruler of the tribes surrounding Jamestown, died that same year, colonial authorities used the opportunity to try to renew relations with his successor, Opechancanough. The colonists and the Indians had been at each other’s throats throughout the 1610s, so there was a large gap of trust that had to be filled. Sandys raised £550 to establish schools to board Indian children and teach them English skills, but he’d neglected to consult the Indians and was disappointed when they proved unwilling to give up their kids. Back in England, a beggar would have been grateful to find a berth for her children in a school that would raise them well and teach them a working skill. The English viewed the Indian way of life similarly to how they viewed that of beggars and fringe-dwellers back home - destitute, homeless, in need of help and guidance, not a lifestyle anyone would choose if only they knew a better way. Instead of the boarding school plan, Virginia’s governor agreed with Opechancanough that whole Indian families would come to live in the English settlements, in houses built by the colonists. Then the Company endowed a college for adolescent and young adult Indians, and sent George Thorpe, a respected former member of Parliament, to manage it. Thorpe was a strong supporter of the Company’s original goal of creating a harmonious biracial settlement in Virginia, and as the colony’s unofficial ambassador to the Indians, relations between the two sides seemed to thaw.
Finally, 1619 was the year Virginia began exporting tobacco to England. The great thing about tobacco was that it could be grown on pretty much any piece of land in Virginia, and profit was limited only by how much land, and how many workers to cultivate it, a man could lay his hands on. The prices fetched by Virginia tobacco did not match the product coming from Cuba and other Spanish colonies, but it was lucrative enough that even a small landowner could expect to reap a tidy profit. Virginians became more proficient growers as they gained experience with the crop, but even in the early days there are records indicating that a single hard-working man, with the help of a son or two, could generate 1,000 pounds of tobacco in a season. At three shillings a pound, that man’s crop might sell for 150 pounds sterling - an amount which would take an average day-wage laborer in England nearly a decade to earn. Other records show that a man with three adult servants grew 2,800 pounds in a year, and another with six servants managed to grow 4,000 pounds. More and more trading ships made it a point to stop in Virginia to offload people and supplies in exchange for tobacco to be sold back in Europe. Colonists grew as much of it as they could, and the flow of goods through Virginia made it a more attractive prospect for others thinking about making it their home. In the first three years after taking over as Treasurer, Edwin Sandys managed to send about 3,500 new colonists to Virginia. Among them were more women, as well as many craftsmen and artisans, but the majority were bonded tenants and indentured servants.
Taken together, these developments would seem to indicate that Virginia was finally getting its balance, which is why we are surprised to discover an apparent contradiction in the colony. In the five years after Sandys took over (1619-24), a flood of requests for more servants and tenants, as many as could possibly be rounded up, flowed back to the Company, alongside a separate flood of complaints that the colony never had enough supplies and provisions to meet its needs. How could it be that the colony consistently demanded more men when there never seemed to be enough to go around for the ones already there?
To begin with, the tobacco boom turned the Virginia colony into a cash crop monoculture. Everyone grew tobacco, and they neglected other pursuits to do it. Just imagine if, today, a new crop that anyone could easily grow was selling for prices that allowed anyone with a backyard to make ten times his normal income in a year. And imagine it’s legal, and that you don’t even have to market it because traders just come through the neighborhood to buy it from you. That would be pretty great… for a while. So many people would quit their jobs to grow free money that it would be impossible to get someone to fix your toilet, pour a foundation, or work air traffic control.
Rolling in that tobacco dough
Tobacco cultivation didn’t require significant capital outlays or maintenance costs. Again: how much one could profit was quite simply a function of how much land, and how many servants to work it, one could lay his hands on. Land suitable for growing tobacco was so plentiful as to seem almost infinite to the colonists, and the Company gave it away cheaply to anyone with the means to cultivate it. Paying for the transportation of a servant from England to the New World automatically entitled a colonist to 50 more acres of arable land, courtesy of the Virginia Company. Servants were bound from 5-7 years to work without wages even though, during the boom years, a servant put to work on a tobacco plantation paid back his cost of passage in just a year or two. Servants were so cheap relative to the profit they generated that it hardly mattered that most of them died within a year. Ship captains got paid regardless of the condition of their passengers when they arrived, so they packed in as many as they could, provided them the bare minimum of provisions, and dumped them off, exhausted, diseased, and scurvy-ridden on the Chesapeake. Since the 50 acres was awarded even if the servant died on the way, the landowner stood to profit even if disaster struck. Ships typically arrived in early summer, when malaria and various fevers ran rampant in the colony, and new arrivals were usually so weakened by the voyage that only a minority made it through the first season, and even fewer survived their term of service to finally taste freedom. In other words, indentured servitude during these years usually meant remaining in bondage for the rest of one’s life, which, in practical terms, is as good a definition of slavery as any other. True, some indentured servants made it through the gauntlet, but some slaves were manumitted or allowed to hire themselves out and buy their freedom, too. The vast majority of both indentured servants in the first half of the 17th century, and the slaves who would later replace them died in captivity, the main difference being that slaves lived longer.
Despite the boom, the Virginia Company had still never turned a profit. More and more shareholders were losing patience, and voices in opposition to Sandys’s leadership grew louder. Sandys was able to hold his ground until the colony suffered a catastrophe that exposed the rot beneath the surface. In 1622, Virginians learned the hard way that the Indian tribes led by Opechancanough did not share their enthusiasm for detente. The apparent easing of relations had encouraged settlers to spread out ever further, leaving them isolated and vulnerable in the event that the Indians’ attitude changed. Alarmed by the colony’s expansion and anticipating inevitable conflict, Opechancanough struck first on March 22, 1622, with a surprise attack meant to kill every white person they found and wipe out the Virginia colony. Although an Indian who had converted to Christianity warned of the plan at the last moment, word could not be spread in time to save many colonists, and 347 men, women, and children were massacred, including George Thorpe.
I don’t need to tell you what came next. The only question up for debate was whether the Indians should be enslaved or exterminated. The Secretary of the Virginia Company said that, although the Company had hoped for another outcome, the Indians could “now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply… that labor, whereby even the meanest of the (Virginians) may employ themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are more generous, whilst Savages perform the inferior works of digging in mines, and the like.”2 The colonists set upon the Indians with ferocious abandon. Although the Company issued orders to carry out the campaign without losing sight of the laws of justice, the governor and council replied that “we hold nothing unjust that may tend to their ruin.”3
The Indians, being superior woodsmen and more familiar with the terrain, were very difficult to track down, and the Virginians’ attempts to force them into pitched battles were frustrated. Instead, they resorted to deception, luring the Indians into a false sense of security and striking when the opportunity was ripe. Settlers pulled back from outlying homesteads, suspended military patrols in the area, even made treaties with all ceremony, and then, when the Indians dared to settle down and plant their corn, the Virginians would wait until just before harvest and attack, killing as many as possible and burning the corn to deprive the rest of winter sustenance. At the conclusion of one treaty negotiation, the English negotiator broke out a barrel of poisoned wine and convinced his Indian hosts to hoist a drink in celebration. An estimated 150 Indians were felled by the poison, and another 50 were slaughtered by more direct methods. The hope of a peaceful coexistence between the
Virginia colony and its native neighbors was always an illusion, given the natural conflict between their goals and ways of life, but the attack of 1622 and its aftermath dispelled even the illusion.
The attack came as a shock to the Company’s shareholders and was a scandal in London. Sandys’s leadership had always had doubters, and by 1622 he had succeeded in alienating the other two shareholder factions. Now, after three years’ of reports about improving relations with the Indians were proven to be catastrophically misguided, his enemies pounced. They prevailed upon the King to order an official investigation, and what they found was worse than anyone expected. Historian Edmund
Morgan writes:
After the massacre… (it was) discovered that the company was virtually bankrupt and that its colony, long before the Indians raised their hands, had become a charnel house. The story is succinctly told in some notes made by Samuel Wrote, a disgruntled and disillusioned investor. After finding that the company records showed 3,570 persons sent to the colony in three years under the Sandys program and that 700 had already been there, for a total of 4,270, he discovered that only 1,240 were alive at the time of the massacre. “It consequently follows,” he noted, “that we had then lost 3,000 persons within those three years.”4 The Indians had killed 347, but something else had killed 3,000, the great majority of the persons sent… The death rate may have been even worse than Wrote supposed, and it continued at least as high after the massacre as before. The only question was how it could have happened.
The royal commission found the Virginia Company to be in an advanced state of decay. Sandys had been able to round up and send a lot of indentured servants and apprentices to Virginia, since the Company was not responsible for the cost of their transportation. The provisions and supplies needed to get them through the first season were another matter, however, and, since the Company had yet to turn a profit, these were almost always lacking. The commission read stacks of letters complaining that new colonists arrived half-starved and scurvy-ridden, with inadequate supplies, so that most died before making it through their first winter. Left with little choice, in 1624 the king ordered the Virginia Company dissolved, and took the colony under control of the Crown, an act which was widely misinterpreted and propagandized in court histories for many years.
Morgan writes:
Because the Stuart kings became symbols of arbitrary government and because Sir Edwin Sandys was a champion of Parliamentary power and was even accused at the time of being a republican, historians for long interpreted the dissolution of the Virginia Company as a blow dealt to democracy by tyranny. Modern scholarship has altered the verdict and shown that any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths.
The commission had been puzzled by another apparent contradiction. They had letters documenting, month after month and year after year, colonists’ complaints of inadequate food and supplies, and yet they had also established that, except in the immediate aftermath of the 1622 attack, the colony never lacked for supplies in absolute terms. Merchant ships made frequent stops in the Chesapeake, buying tobacco in exchange for needed provisions. The increased commerce also provided the colony with beads, blankets, and other goods that could be traded for Indian corn (even during hostilities with their immediate neighbors, Virginians were able to sail down the coast to trade with other natives). Ships from Canada and Newfoundland arrived regularly with stocks of fish, and more fish were delivered by passenger vessels that made shuttle trips to the Grand Banks after dropping off their colonists. From 1619-1621, local officials reported that, thanks to bumper crops and shipments of cattle and grain from England, the colony was well-supplied. Yet, during the same period a ship captain who stayed in the colony after delivering his cargo and passengers, wrote that the common people under his charge lived “very barely for the most part, having no other food but bread and water and such manner of fare as they make of the maize, which I wish to God I could say they had in any reasonable quantity.”5 During the fall and winter of 1621-22, the period immediately leading up to the Indian attack, there were similarly confusing reports of overall plenty, and individual scarcity. Things got tough the year of the massacre, but already a year later, in 1623 and continuing into 1624, the colony is once again found to be well-supplied.
In theory, there should have been enough for everyone. Unfortunately, as Morgan writes, it was not a question of whether adequate supplies existed, but “of who had them and of who could pay for them.” Case in point: In 1619, a ship pulled in with 100 passengers who’d agreed to work for the Company as tenant sharecroppers. When they arrived, however, the Company lacked the provisions to sustain them, and so rather than work for the Company they were parceled out to private landowners with sufficient means. As it turned out, private plantation owners and Company officers were doing just fine; it was the Company itself, and the servants and tenants who depended on it, that were suffering. When ships bearing supplies and provisions came through the Chesapeake, agents of the colony’s wealthiest men were given first crack, and frequently bought up the ship’s entire stock to provide for their own workers. Whatever was left over was hoarded, or sold at monopoly prices to the less fortunate. During the season of starvation following the massacre, those who owned boats lobbied the governor for a commission to go up the coast to trade for, and, if necessary, steal corn from more Indian tribes with whom they had no quarrel. The hundreds of bushels they brought back might have relieved the colony’s desperation through that difficult year, but instead the owners kept it for themselves, charging exorbitant prices to starving people during what amounted to a famine. After the attack, many small landowners were forced to abandon their farms and retreat to the safety of forts and villages. Others were drafted into militias to wage war against the Indians. Yet others were simply forbidden from planting corn, since a corn field provided cover for potential Indian raiders. All this was to the benefit of the big men who could afford to weather the storm and take advantage of those who could not. It was not lost on many of the colonists that the disaster of 1622 proved to be a bonanza for the opportunistic and unscrupulous, and many complained that the colony’s wealthy leaders purposely prolonged the state of emergency in order to keep the gravy train going.
No hardship exemption was given to the unfortunates affected most. As the crisis dragged out, many of these small holders who’d been prevented from planting were unable to meet their debt obligations or pay their workers. To pay off their debts, many were forced to turn over the contracts of their servants. Others were forced to turn over title to their land, and be reduced from independent farmers to sharecroppers, or even indentured servants, for one of the colony’s big men. One more passage from Morgan:
(The) difference between a tenant and a servant in boom-time Virginia was not easy to discern. The company’s generosity to its officers combined with the high death rate to lay open every surviving tenant sent by the company to exploitation by any officer who claimed him as part of his quota of tenants. Whether a man came as a servant, as an apprentice, as a tenant, or on his own he was vulnerable. If death disposed of the master who could rightly claim his labor, an heir, real or fraudulent, would quickly lay hold of him. Or if, having paid his own transportation, he arrived in Virginia without a master, but also without enough provisions, he was easy prey for anyone who could feed and shelter him. Even if he came with enough to set himself up independently, a bad harvest, insurmountable debts, or Indian depredations might force him into the service of a bigger operator. This was particularly true after the massacre, when it was reported that ordinary men who had made a start on their own were obliged, for fear of the Indians, “to forsake their houses (which were very far scattered) and to join themselves to some great man’s plantation.”
Some found other ways to profit from the Indian war. Colonists who were captured in Indian raids could usually be ransomed for a pittance, but consigned the person to a period of indentured service to their liberator. For a few handfuls of glass beads, a used metal knife, or a small stack of blankets, big landowners and their agents were often able to purchase servants at bargain prices from the Indians. In one infamous case, Ralph Dickenson, a tenant of a private landowner was killed by Indian raiders, and his wife, Jane, was carried off as a spoil. The Company doctor ransomed her for some glass beads6 and took her as a servant. After about a year, she complained to the governor and council that her service under the doctor was intolerable, and that it “differeth not from her slavery with the Indians.” The doctor claimed not only the full period of service she owed him, but also the remaining time that her dead husband would have owed their previous landlord.
In the Company’s archives were complaints that “old Planters and others did allure and beguile diverse young persons (ignorant and unskilled in such matters) to serve them upon intolerable and un-Christianlike conditions, (promising) rewards and recompense they had neither the ability nor the intention to deliver.”7 As even the cruelest master had to account for the risks that came with abusing a grown man beyond his limits, child apprentices and female servants (usually widows) often had it the worst. Sexual abuse, although punishable by law, was rarely inhibited since the testimony of a servant or apprentice was insufficient to convict a free landowner or his agent. As would later be the case under slavery, the worst abuses against female servants were often perpetrated by a master’s jealous and insecure wife. In one case brought before the council about 20 years after our current period, witnesses testified:
Deborah Fernehaugh… did beat her maidservant in the quartering house before the dresser, more like a dog than a Christian, and that, at a certain time, I felt her head, which was beaten as soft as a sponge in one place… She complained that her backbone was broken, and I saw the maid’s arm naked, which as full of black and blue bruises and pinches, and her neck likewise. Afterward, I told my Mistress (the perpetrator of the beating) about it, and said that two or three blows could not have put the maid in such a state. After this, she chastised the maid showing her wounds to me, and thus, very often afterwards, the maid tried to show me how she had been beaten, but I refused to look, saying it concerns me not.
Company officers were often the most corrupt abusers. Far from te supervision of shareholders in London, they took liberties to make themselves rich, even as the colony they were supposed to be managing veered toward bankruptcy. When a shipment of tenants arrived, officers and private landowners picked the sturdiest and healthiest among them for their own service, leaving the Company lands to be worked by the sick and lame. One Company memo complained that “although it is pretended that placing them with old planters is for their health, they are so unmercifully used that it is the greatest cause of our tenants’ discontent.” As a result, while private planters grew rich, company lands went “uncleared, unfenced, and unplanted.” The Company, as we said, was always cash-strapped and chronically unable to provide for its own tenants, and this was often the excuse for hiring them out to private owners. With fewer workers to feed, we might at least expect that those who remained with the Company would have more to eat, but instead the provisions intended for the men hired out to private planters were usually appropriated by Company officers for their own use, or to sell for their own profit. In fact, Company officers seized almost all of the provisions sent from England for the use of its own tenants, who were fed on only corn and water for however long they managed to live. When tenants or servants brought complaints about these abuses, they had to plead their case before councils made up of the big men profiting from the arrangement - very often including the very men against whom they were bringing suit.
Colony officials and big landowners implemented totalitarian measures to crush any attempt by the hoi polloi to challenge their authority. In May 1624, a man named Richard Barnes was convicted of denouncing the governor, and the council ordered that he “be disarmed, and have his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl. He shall pass through a guard of 40 man, and shall be butted by every one of them… then kicked down and sent out of the fort. He shall be banished out of Jamestown and the land, he shall not enjoy any privilege of freedom in the country.”8 Another man was reprimanded by a Captain in the colony for going aboard ship to trade without permission. The man was overheard to complain that the Captain “would be the death of me, as he was of Robert Leyster,” and the council sentenced him to sixty lashes of the whip, to grovel and beg the Captain for forgiveness, to pay the him 100 pounds of tobacco, and to be imprisoned until all this was accomplished. Yet another man, far away on a voyage to Canada, happened to meet the brother of a man who’d been executed in Jamestown, which the man told the brother had been unjust. Word got back of his “slander” against the council, and upon his return to Virginia he was seized and sentenced to “stand on the pillory in the marketplace, with a paper on his head showing the cause of his offense, and to lose both his ears, and to be a bonded servant of the colony for a year, and to be forever incapable of becoming a free man in the country.”9 Just a month after this punishment was inflicted, a young apprentice was heard agreeing that the executed man had been put to death unjustly. The boy’s seven-year term of service was almost up, but for this “crime” he was sentenced to restart his seven-year term from the beginning, and to be “whipped from the fort to the gallows, and then whipped back again, and be set upon the pillory and to lose one of his ears.”10 One observer wrote that “neither the governor nor the council could or would do any poor man right, but they showed favor to great men, and wrong the poor.”
Back in England, labor contracts were typically for one year of service, giving employers an incentive to treat their workers reasonably well so that they’d choose to renew the contract. In early 17th-century Virginia, where contracts were for 5-7 years, a term which few servants and tenants survived anyway, a master was incentivized to squeeze as much work as humanly possibly from a servant for as long as he stayed alive, and then to bring in a cheap replacement when he died. Thus, work discipline and employer abuse was much more severe and brazen than anything that would have been tolerated in England.
Morgan writes:
The most extreme example is the case of John and Alice Proctor and their servants Elizabeth Abbott and Elias Hinton, both of whom died after a series of beatings inflicted by the Proctors and by other servants acting under orders from the Proctors. Thomas Gates testified that he counted five hundred lashes inflicted on the girl at one time and warned Proctor that he might as well kill her and be done with it. Alice Bennett, who examined her, “found she had been severely beaten, and that her body was covered with sores and holes which were very dangerously rankled and putrefied, both above her waist and upon her hips and thighs.” Other witnesses testified that Proctor beat Hinton with a rake. Yet there is no indication the Proctors were punished.
In England, by contrast, courts during this period punished proven abuses by masters, and often forbade masters from inflicting punishments themselves, instead taking it upon the court to correct the behavior of an unruly servant. Servants in Englands had various rights, such as receiving three months notice before the end of his contract if his contract was not to be renewed. They sold their services in a primitive open labor market, avoiding employers with bad reputations or with whom they had a poor relationship. In Virginia, it was the masters who sold their workers, not the workers who sold their services. A servant or tenant who made a contract with one master frequently found himself sold to another, often several times, without his consent. Thomas Best, a servant in Virginia, wrote in 1623 that “My master Atkins hath sold me for £150 sterling like a damned slave,” although, according to John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas, and the man who first brought tobacco to Virginia), “the buying and selling of men and boys was held in England to be most intolerable.” And the famous Captain John Smith denounced the rulers of the Virginia colony for their “pride, covetousness, extortion, and oppression, (even selling) men, women, and children to whoever will give the most.” It would be better, said Smith, for the big men to be “made such merchandise themselves, than be allowed any longer to engage in such trade.” Masters were even known to gamble their servants, passing them around over a game of cards or dice. It got to the point that there were examples of ship captains refusing to transport servants to Virginia, because “servants were sold here up and down like horses, and therefore he held it not lawful to carry any.”
Obviously, this was not a situation that could last forever. The tobacco boom ended after the 1620s (although it took Virginians another decade to admit it to themselves), and prices never again reached the levels planters had enjoyed during those years. By the 1640s, as the death rate slowed and more servants and tenants were surviving to become free men with a stake in the community, the health and physical condition of much of the population improved. Yet the rigid class structure established in the chaotic early years set the tone for the future, and it was only a matter of time before the people at the bottom stood up for themselves. That’s what happened in the second half of the 17th century, and the experience would teach Virginia planters the history-shaping lesson that they needed a new, more manageable labor force that was not poisoned with expectations of an Englishman’s rights.
But we’ll talk about that next time. Thanks for reading.
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The next installment of our series about the history of slavery and the leadup to the US Civil War
DARRYL COOPER
MAR 30, 2024
A decade after the Virginia colony was founded, its investors had every reason to suspect they’d sunk their money into a lost cause. Martial law and work gangs got the colony through the difficult early years when bare survival was the paramount concern, but such conditions were not conducive to developing a flourishing community. By the end of the 1610s, the colony still did not grow enough food to feed itself, relations with the local Indians were touch-and-go, and the almost-all male population gave Jamestown the flavor of a military base or Old West mining camp. Reforms were desperately needed, though the investors disagreed on exactly which ones.
The investors fell roughly into three camps, each with a different idea of what they wanted and needed from the colony. The first group was composed of very wealthy merchants for whom Virginia was just one asset in a diversified portfolio. These men had been the dominant group through the company’s first decade, and their wealth allowed them to be patient with a project that had thus far failed to produce a return. The second group was also willing to be patient, but were less interested in developing Virginia as a community than with using it as a base for their privately-funded pirating campaign against Spanish shipping. Finally, there were the smaller investors, men who had sunk a significant amount of their wealth into the Virginia colony, and needed to see something back soon or else face ruin. Their leader was Sir Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and one of the most respected men in England. By 1618, he had acquired sufficient support within the company to get all parties to agree to a reorganization. In 1619, he was named Treasurer and effectively took control of the reform campaign.
Sandys and his supporters envisioned a Virginia community modeled on those found in England, and directed toward the same industrious purposes. It would not do to have men coming and going with each passing ship, and many of the reforms were intended to give more colonists a greater and more lasting stake in the success of the colony. To that end, the draconian Laws, Moral and Martial, were thrown out, and replaced with a new constitution based on English common law. The governor and council, appointed by the Company to represent its interests and implement its policies, remained in place as the principal governing officers, but their powers would henceforth be limited, and exercised in coordination with an assembly elected by the colonists.1 The assembly had the authority to make laws, subject to approval by the Company - a veto which seems to have been exercised rarely, if at all - and the Company pledged to submit its own policies for approval by the assembly. Thus was born the first representative assembly in English America.
Next on Sandys’s agenda was land reform. The Virginia Company was short on hard cash, but it had more land than it knew what to do with… literally. Beginning in 1619, it began to put that resource to work, doling out parcels as private property. Any resident of Virginia who’d arrived before 1616 was to get 100 acres once his term of service was over, and those who arrived after 1616 got 50 acres. Land owned by the Company would now be cultivated by sharecropping tenants instead of indentured servants, although the Company continued to send large numbers of servants to be sold to private landowners. Company officers were given large tracts of land, along with tenants assigned to work it. The governor, for example, got 3,000 acres and 100 tenants, while the local treasurer got 1,500 acres and 50 tenants. Ministers got 100 acres and six tenants. Tenants were to hand over half their crop to the Company, or the officer to which they were assigned, for seven years, after which they would be given 50 acres, free and clear.
Sandys recognized that land title alone was not sufficient to tie a man to a spot for good. Eventually he would want a family, and the first step toward getting one meant finding a woman. Unfortunately, there were precious few of them in Virginia, and those who were around were invariably already spoken for. So in 1619, the first of several batches of single women were sent to Virginia and sold as wives to any man who could afford to buy one. A crude matchmaking mechanism, perhaps, but families did begin to emerge, slowly but surely. The women were brought in to domesticate and civilize the men, and soon set about their work as best they knew how.
When Powhatan, the Indian ruler of the tribes surrounding Jamestown, died that same year, colonial authorities used the opportunity to try to renew relations with his successor, Opechancanough. The colonists and the Indians had been at each other’s throats throughout the 1610s, so there was a large gap of trust that had to be filled. Sandys raised £550 to establish schools to board Indian children and teach them English skills, but he’d neglected to consult the Indians and was disappointed when they proved unwilling to give up their kids. Back in England, a beggar would have been grateful to find a berth for her children in a school that would raise them well and teach them a working skill. The English viewed the Indian way of life similarly to how they viewed that of beggars and fringe-dwellers back home - destitute, homeless, in need of help and guidance, not a lifestyle anyone would choose if only they knew a better way. Instead of the boarding school plan, Virginia’s governor agreed with Opechancanough that whole Indian families would come to live in the English settlements, in houses built by the colonists. Then the Company endowed a college for adolescent and young adult Indians, and sent George Thorpe, a respected former member of Parliament, to manage it. Thorpe was a strong supporter of the Company’s original goal of creating a harmonious biracial settlement in Virginia, and as the colony’s unofficial ambassador to the Indians, relations between the two sides seemed to thaw.
Finally, 1619 was the year Virginia began exporting tobacco to England. The great thing about tobacco was that it could be grown on pretty much any piece of land in Virginia, and profit was limited only by how much land, and how many workers to cultivate it, a man could lay his hands on. The prices fetched by Virginia tobacco did not match the product coming from Cuba and other Spanish colonies, but it was lucrative enough that even a small landowner could expect to reap a tidy profit. Virginians became more proficient growers as they gained experience with the crop, but even in the early days there are records indicating that a single hard-working man, with the help of a son or two, could generate 1,000 pounds of tobacco in a season. At three shillings a pound, that man’s crop might sell for 150 pounds sterling - an amount which would take an average day-wage laborer in England nearly a decade to earn. Other records show that a man with three adult servants grew 2,800 pounds in a year, and another with six servants managed to grow 4,000 pounds. More and more trading ships made it a point to stop in Virginia to offload people and supplies in exchange for tobacco to be sold back in Europe. Colonists grew as much of it as they could, and the flow of goods through Virginia made it a more attractive prospect for others thinking about making it their home. In the first three years after taking over as Treasurer, Edwin Sandys managed to send about 3,500 new colonists to Virginia. Among them were more women, as well as many craftsmen and artisans, but the majority were bonded tenants and indentured servants.
Taken together, these developments would seem to indicate that Virginia was finally getting its balance, which is why we are surprised to discover an apparent contradiction in the colony. In the five years after Sandys took over (1619-24), a flood of requests for more servants and tenants, as many as could possibly be rounded up, flowed back to the Company, alongside a separate flood of complaints that the colony never had enough supplies and provisions to meet its needs. How could it be that the colony consistently demanded more men when there never seemed to be enough to go around for the ones already there?
To begin with, the tobacco boom turned the Virginia colony into a cash crop monoculture. Everyone grew tobacco, and they neglected other pursuits to do it. Just imagine if, today, a new crop that anyone could easily grow was selling for prices that allowed anyone with a backyard to make ten times his normal income in a year. And imagine it’s legal, and that you don’t even have to market it because traders just come through the neighborhood to buy it from you. That would be pretty great… for a while. So many people would quit their jobs to grow free money that it would be impossible to get someone to fix your toilet, pour a foundation, or work air traffic control.
Rolling in that tobacco dough
Tobacco cultivation didn’t require significant capital outlays or maintenance costs. Again: how much one could profit was quite simply a function of how much land, and how many servants to work it, one could lay his hands on. Land suitable for growing tobacco was so plentiful as to seem almost infinite to the colonists, and the Company gave it away cheaply to anyone with the means to cultivate it. Paying for the transportation of a servant from England to the New World automatically entitled a colonist to 50 more acres of arable land, courtesy of the Virginia Company. Servants were bound from 5-7 years to work without wages even though, during the boom years, a servant put to work on a tobacco plantation paid back his cost of passage in just a year or two. Servants were so cheap relative to the profit they generated that it hardly mattered that most of them died within a year. Ship captains got paid regardless of the condition of their passengers when they arrived, so they packed in as many as they could, provided them the bare minimum of provisions, and dumped them off, exhausted, diseased, and scurvy-ridden on the Chesapeake. Since the 50 acres was awarded even if the servant died on the way, the landowner stood to profit even if disaster struck. Ships typically arrived in early summer, when malaria and various fevers ran rampant in the colony, and new arrivals were usually so weakened by the voyage that only a minority made it through the first season, and even fewer survived their term of service to finally taste freedom. In other words, indentured servitude during these years usually meant remaining in bondage for the rest of one’s life, which, in practical terms, is as good a definition of slavery as any other. True, some indentured servants made it through the gauntlet, but some slaves were manumitted or allowed to hire themselves out and buy their freedom, too. The vast majority of both indentured servants in the first half of the 17th century, and the slaves who would later replace them died in captivity, the main difference being that slaves lived longer.
Despite the boom, the Virginia Company had still never turned a profit. More and more shareholders were losing patience, and voices in opposition to Sandys’s leadership grew louder. Sandys was able to hold his ground until the colony suffered a catastrophe that exposed the rot beneath the surface. In 1622, Virginians learned the hard way that the Indian tribes led by Opechancanough did not share their enthusiasm for detente. The apparent easing of relations had encouraged settlers to spread out ever further, leaving them isolated and vulnerable in the event that the Indians’ attitude changed. Alarmed by the colony’s expansion and anticipating inevitable conflict, Opechancanough struck first on March 22, 1622, with a surprise attack meant to kill every white person they found and wipe out the Virginia colony. Although an Indian who had converted to Christianity warned of the plan at the last moment, word could not be spread in time to save many colonists, and 347 men, women, and children were massacred, including George Thorpe.
I don’t need to tell you what came next. The only question up for debate was whether the Indians should be enslaved or exterminated. The Secretary of the Virginia Company said that, although the Company had hoped for another outcome, the Indians could “now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply… that labor, whereby even the meanest of the (Virginians) may employ themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are more generous, whilst Savages perform the inferior works of digging in mines, and the like.”2 The colonists set upon the Indians with ferocious abandon. Although the Company issued orders to carry out the campaign without losing sight of the laws of justice, the governor and council replied that “we hold nothing unjust that may tend to their ruin.”3
The Indians, being superior woodsmen and more familiar with the terrain, were very difficult to track down, and the Virginians’ attempts to force them into pitched battles were frustrated. Instead, they resorted to deception, luring the Indians into a false sense of security and striking when the opportunity was ripe. Settlers pulled back from outlying homesteads, suspended military patrols in the area, even made treaties with all ceremony, and then, when the Indians dared to settle down and plant their corn, the Virginians would wait until just before harvest and attack, killing as many as possible and burning the corn to deprive the rest of winter sustenance. At the conclusion of one treaty negotiation, the English negotiator broke out a barrel of poisoned wine and convinced his Indian hosts to hoist a drink in celebration. An estimated 150 Indians were felled by the poison, and another 50 were slaughtered by more direct methods. The hope of a peaceful coexistence between the
Virginia colony and its native neighbors was always an illusion, given the natural conflict between their goals and ways of life, but the attack of 1622 and its aftermath dispelled even the illusion.
The attack came as a shock to the Company’s shareholders and was a scandal in London. Sandys’s leadership had always had doubters, and by 1622 he had succeeded in alienating the other two shareholder factions. Now, after three years’ of reports about improving relations with the Indians were proven to be catastrophically misguided, his enemies pounced. They prevailed upon the King to order an official investigation, and what they found was worse than anyone expected. Historian Edmund
Morgan writes:
After the massacre… (it was) discovered that the company was virtually bankrupt and that its colony, long before the Indians raised their hands, had become a charnel house. The story is succinctly told in some notes made by Samuel Wrote, a disgruntled and disillusioned investor. After finding that the company records showed 3,570 persons sent to the colony in three years under the Sandys program and that 700 had already been there, for a total of 4,270, he discovered that only 1,240 were alive at the time of the massacre. “It consequently follows,” he noted, “that we had then lost 3,000 persons within those three years.”4 The Indians had killed 347, but something else had killed 3,000, the great majority of the persons sent… The death rate may have been even worse than Wrote supposed, and it continued at least as high after the massacre as before. The only question was how it could have happened.
The royal commission found the Virginia Company to be in an advanced state of decay. Sandys had been able to round up and send a lot of indentured servants and apprentices to Virginia, since the Company was not responsible for the cost of their transportation. The provisions and supplies needed to get them through the first season were another matter, however, and, since the Company had yet to turn a profit, these were almost always lacking. The commission read stacks of letters complaining that new colonists arrived half-starved and scurvy-ridden, with inadequate supplies, so that most died before making it through their first winter. Left with little choice, in 1624 the king ordered the Virginia Company dissolved, and took the colony under control of the Crown, an act which was widely misinterpreted and propagandized in court histories for many years.
Morgan writes:
Because the Stuart kings became symbols of arbitrary government and because Sir Edwin Sandys was a champion of Parliamentary power and was even accused at the time of being a republican, historians for long interpreted the dissolution of the Virginia Company as a blow dealt to democracy by tyranny. Modern scholarship has altered the verdict and shown that any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths.
The commission had been puzzled by another apparent contradiction. They had letters documenting, month after month and year after year, colonists’ complaints of inadequate food and supplies, and yet they had also established that, except in the immediate aftermath of the 1622 attack, the colony never lacked for supplies in absolute terms. Merchant ships made frequent stops in the Chesapeake, buying tobacco in exchange for needed provisions. The increased commerce also provided the colony with beads, blankets, and other goods that could be traded for Indian corn (even during hostilities with their immediate neighbors, Virginians were able to sail down the coast to trade with other natives). Ships from Canada and Newfoundland arrived regularly with stocks of fish, and more fish were delivered by passenger vessels that made shuttle trips to the Grand Banks after dropping off their colonists. From 1619-1621, local officials reported that, thanks to bumper crops and shipments of cattle and grain from England, the colony was well-supplied. Yet, during the same period a ship captain who stayed in the colony after delivering his cargo and passengers, wrote that the common people under his charge lived “very barely for the most part, having no other food but bread and water and such manner of fare as they make of the maize, which I wish to God I could say they had in any reasonable quantity.”5 During the fall and winter of 1621-22, the period immediately leading up to the Indian attack, there were similarly confusing reports of overall plenty, and individual scarcity. Things got tough the year of the massacre, but already a year later, in 1623 and continuing into 1624, the colony is once again found to be well-supplied.
In theory, there should have been enough for everyone. Unfortunately, as Morgan writes, it was not a question of whether adequate supplies existed, but “of who had them and of who could pay for them.” Case in point: In 1619, a ship pulled in with 100 passengers who’d agreed to work for the Company as tenant sharecroppers. When they arrived, however, the Company lacked the provisions to sustain them, and so rather than work for the Company they were parceled out to private landowners with sufficient means. As it turned out, private plantation owners and Company officers were doing just fine; it was the Company itself, and the servants and tenants who depended on it, that were suffering. When ships bearing supplies and provisions came through the Chesapeake, agents of the colony’s wealthiest men were given first crack, and frequently bought up the ship’s entire stock to provide for their own workers. Whatever was left over was hoarded, or sold at monopoly prices to the less fortunate. During the season of starvation following the massacre, those who owned boats lobbied the governor for a commission to go up the coast to trade for, and, if necessary, steal corn from more Indian tribes with whom they had no quarrel. The hundreds of bushels they brought back might have relieved the colony’s desperation through that difficult year, but instead the owners kept it for themselves, charging exorbitant prices to starving people during what amounted to a famine. After the attack, many small landowners were forced to abandon their farms and retreat to the safety of forts and villages. Others were drafted into militias to wage war against the Indians. Yet others were simply forbidden from planting corn, since a corn field provided cover for potential Indian raiders. All this was to the benefit of the big men who could afford to weather the storm and take advantage of those who could not. It was not lost on many of the colonists that the disaster of 1622 proved to be a bonanza for the opportunistic and unscrupulous, and many complained that the colony’s wealthy leaders purposely prolonged the state of emergency in order to keep the gravy train going.
No hardship exemption was given to the unfortunates affected most. As the crisis dragged out, many of these small holders who’d been prevented from planting were unable to meet their debt obligations or pay their workers. To pay off their debts, many were forced to turn over the contracts of their servants. Others were forced to turn over title to their land, and be reduced from independent farmers to sharecroppers, or even indentured servants, for one of the colony’s big men. One more passage from Morgan:
(The) difference between a tenant and a servant in boom-time Virginia was not easy to discern. The company’s generosity to its officers combined with the high death rate to lay open every surviving tenant sent by the company to exploitation by any officer who claimed him as part of his quota of tenants. Whether a man came as a servant, as an apprentice, as a tenant, or on his own he was vulnerable. If death disposed of the master who could rightly claim his labor, an heir, real or fraudulent, would quickly lay hold of him. Or if, having paid his own transportation, he arrived in Virginia without a master, but also without enough provisions, he was easy prey for anyone who could feed and shelter him. Even if he came with enough to set himself up independently, a bad harvest, insurmountable debts, or Indian depredations might force him into the service of a bigger operator. This was particularly true after the massacre, when it was reported that ordinary men who had made a start on their own were obliged, for fear of the Indians, “to forsake their houses (which were very far scattered) and to join themselves to some great man’s plantation.”
Some found other ways to profit from the Indian war. Colonists who were captured in Indian raids could usually be ransomed for a pittance, but consigned the person to a period of indentured service to their liberator. For a few handfuls of glass beads, a used metal knife, or a small stack of blankets, big landowners and their agents were often able to purchase servants at bargain prices from the Indians. In one infamous case, Ralph Dickenson, a tenant of a private landowner was killed by Indian raiders, and his wife, Jane, was carried off as a spoil. The Company doctor ransomed her for some glass beads6 and took her as a servant. After about a year, she complained to the governor and council that her service under the doctor was intolerable, and that it “differeth not from her slavery with the Indians.” The doctor claimed not only the full period of service she owed him, but also the remaining time that her dead husband would have owed their previous landlord.
In the Company’s archives were complaints that “old Planters and others did allure and beguile diverse young persons (ignorant and unskilled in such matters) to serve them upon intolerable and un-Christianlike conditions, (promising) rewards and recompense they had neither the ability nor the intention to deliver.”7 As even the cruelest master had to account for the risks that came with abusing a grown man beyond his limits, child apprentices and female servants (usually widows) often had it the worst. Sexual abuse, although punishable by law, was rarely inhibited since the testimony of a servant or apprentice was insufficient to convict a free landowner or his agent. As would later be the case under slavery, the worst abuses against female servants were often perpetrated by a master’s jealous and insecure wife. In one case brought before the council about 20 years after our current period, witnesses testified:
Deborah Fernehaugh… did beat her maidservant in the quartering house before the dresser, more like a dog than a Christian, and that, at a certain time, I felt her head, which was beaten as soft as a sponge in one place… She complained that her backbone was broken, and I saw the maid’s arm naked, which as full of black and blue bruises and pinches, and her neck likewise. Afterward, I told my Mistress (the perpetrator of the beating) about it, and said that two or three blows could not have put the maid in such a state. After this, she chastised the maid showing her wounds to me, and thus, very often afterwards, the maid tried to show me how she had been beaten, but I refused to look, saying it concerns me not.
Company officers were often the most corrupt abusers. Far from te supervision of shareholders in London, they took liberties to make themselves rich, even as the colony they were supposed to be managing veered toward bankruptcy. When a shipment of tenants arrived, officers and private landowners picked the sturdiest and healthiest among them for their own service, leaving the Company lands to be worked by the sick and lame. One Company memo complained that “although it is pretended that placing them with old planters is for their health, they are so unmercifully used that it is the greatest cause of our tenants’ discontent.” As a result, while private planters grew rich, company lands went “uncleared, unfenced, and unplanted.” The Company, as we said, was always cash-strapped and chronically unable to provide for its own tenants, and this was often the excuse for hiring them out to private owners. With fewer workers to feed, we might at least expect that those who remained with the Company would have more to eat, but instead the provisions intended for the men hired out to private planters were usually appropriated by Company officers for their own use, or to sell for their own profit. In fact, Company officers seized almost all of the provisions sent from England for the use of its own tenants, who were fed on only corn and water for however long they managed to live. When tenants or servants brought complaints about these abuses, they had to plead their case before councils made up of the big men profiting from the arrangement - very often including the very men against whom they were bringing suit.
Colony officials and big landowners implemented totalitarian measures to crush any attempt by the hoi polloi to challenge their authority. In May 1624, a man named Richard Barnes was convicted of denouncing the governor, and the council ordered that he “be disarmed, and have his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl. He shall pass through a guard of 40 man, and shall be butted by every one of them… then kicked down and sent out of the fort. He shall be banished out of Jamestown and the land, he shall not enjoy any privilege of freedom in the country.”8 Another man was reprimanded by a Captain in the colony for going aboard ship to trade without permission. The man was overheard to complain that the Captain “would be the death of me, as he was of Robert Leyster,” and the council sentenced him to sixty lashes of the whip, to grovel and beg the Captain for forgiveness, to pay the him 100 pounds of tobacco, and to be imprisoned until all this was accomplished. Yet another man, far away on a voyage to Canada, happened to meet the brother of a man who’d been executed in Jamestown, which the man told the brother had been unjust. Word got back of his “slander” against the council, and upon his return to Virginia he was seized and sentenced to “stand on the pillory in the marketplace, with a paper on his head showing the cause of his offense, and to lose both his ears, and to be a bonded servant of the colony for a year, and to be forever incapable of becoming a free man in the country.”9 Just a month after this punishment was inflicted, a young apprentice was heard agreeing that the executed man had been put to death unjustly. The boy’s seven-year term of service was almost up, but for this “crime” he was sentenced to restart his seven-year term from the beginning, and to be “whipped from the fort to the gallows, and then whipped back again, and be set upon the pillory and to lose one of his ears.”10 One observer wrote that “neither the governor nor the council could or would do any poor man right, but they showed favor to great men, and wrong the poor.”
Back in England, labor contracts were typically for one year of service, giving employers an incentive to treat their workers reasonably well so that they’d choose to renew the contract. In early 17th-century Virginia, where contracts were for 5-7 years, a term which few servants and tenants survived anyway, a master was incentivized to squeeze as much work as humanly possibly from a servant for as long as he stayed alive, and then to bring in a cheap replacement when he died. Thus, work discipline and employer abuse was much more severe and brazen than anything that would have been tolerated in England.
Morgan writes:
The most extreme example is the case of John and Alice Proctor and their servants Elizabeth Abbott and Elias Hinton, both of whom died after a series of beatings inflicted by the Proctors and by other servants acting under orders from the Proctors. Thomas Gates testified that he counted five hundred lashes inflicted on the girl at one time and warned Proctor that he might as well kill her and be done with it. Alice Bennett, who examined her, “found she had been severely beaten, and that her body was covered with sores and holes which were very dangerously rankled and putrefied, both above her waist and upon her hips and thighs.” Other witnesses testified that Proctor beat Hinton with a rake. Yet there is no indication the Proctors were punished.
In England, by contrast, courts during this period punished proven abuses by masters, and often forbade masters from inflicting punishments themselves, instead taking it upon the court to correct the behavior of an unruly servant. Servants in Englands had various rights, such as receiving three months notice before the end of his contract if his contract was not to be renewed. They sold their services in a primitive open labor market, avoiding employers with bad reputations or with whom they had a poor relationship. In Virginia, it was the masters who sold their workers, not the workers who sold their services. A servant or tenant who made a contract with one master frequently found himself sold to another, often several times, without his consent. Thomas Best, a servant in Virginia, wrote in 1623 that “My master Atkins hath sold me for £150 sterling like a damned slave,” although, according to John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas, and the man who first brought tobacco to Virginia), “the buying and selling of men and boys was held in England to be most intolerable.” And the famous Captain John Smith denounced the rulers of the Virginia colony for their “pride, covetousness, extortion, and oppression, (even selling) men, women, and children to whoever will give the most.” It would be better, said Smith, for the big men to be “made such merchandise themselves, than be allowed any longer to engage in such trade.” Masters were even known to gamble their servants, passing them around over a game of cards or dice. It got to the point that there were examples of ship captains refusing to transport servants to Virginia, because “servants were sold here up and down like horses, and therefore he held it not lawful to carry any.”
Obviously, this was not a situation that could last forever. The tobacco boom ended after the 1620s (although it took Virginians another decade to admit it to themselves), and prices never again reached the levels planters had enjoyed during those years. By the 1640s, as the death rate slowed and more servants and tenants were surviving to become free men with a stake in the community, the health and physical condition of much of the population improved. Yet the rigid class structure established in the chaotic early years set the tone for the future, and it was only a matter of time before the people at the bottom stood up for themselves. That’s what happened in the second half of the 17th century, and the experience would teach Virginia planters the history-shaping lesson that they needed a new, more manageable labor force that was not poisoned with expectations of an Englishman’s rights.
But we’ll talk about that next time. Thanks for reading.
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