FROM what little can be discovered about the value of a man’s labor in Virginia in the 1620s, it is not hard to see why the demand for servants was high, even in the face of a food scarcity. At the time when Sandys took over the company and began pouring men into the colony, Virginia had just begun to ship tobacco in quantity to the English market. The prices it brought were considerably lower than those for Spanish tobacco, but high enough to excite the cupidity of every settler. In the colony in 1619 the best grade sold for export at three shillings a pound.1 In 1623 what reached England was worth no more than half that, and in bartering within the colony (where it had already become the principal medium of exchange) it was said to be valued at less than a shilling a pound.2 In a lawsuit recorded in 1624 it was reckoned at two shillings a pound, and in 1625 at three shillings again.3 The boom lasted until 1629 or 1630, when the price tumbled to a penny a pound.4 Though it recovered somewhat in ensuing years, it never again reached the dizzy heights of the 1620s. During that decade the profits from tobacco were enough to keep all the colonists growing as much of it as they could, in spite of every effort to turn them to other products.
By order of the company Virginians were forbidden to raise more than 100 pounds of tobacco apiece, but they paid scant attention to the prohibition and less attention still to producing the silk and potash and other staples that the company had demanded. None of Virginia’s prospective commodities stood a chance in competition with the sure thing that the settlers knew tobacco to be. Under its spell Englishmen found that they could work much harder than they had been accustomed to doing and that they could make their servants work even harder. They still would not grow enough corn to feed themselves, but they grew tobacco as though their lives depended on that. As a result, all of Sandys’ projects faded away, even when the men sent to conduct them managed to stay alive. Before the massacre put an end to the ironworks, the men sent to run them had already “turned good honest Tobaccoe mongers.”5 The tenants on both the public lands and the particular plantations scorned the various projects assigned them, so that by 1623 it was reported that “nothinge is done in anie one of them but all is vanished into smoke (that is to say into Tobaccoe).”6
Without regard to the limitation imposed by the company (which apparently no one did regard), the amount of tobacco one man could produce in a year by his own labor varied from place to place, from year to year, and from man to man. In 1619 John Rolfe, who introduced tobacco cultivation in Virginia, estimated that a man could tend four acres of corn and 1,000 plants of tobacco.7 Four years later William Capps, an “old planter,” said that a man could tend 2,000 plants and that this would make 500 “weight” (presumably 500 pounds) of tobacco. He also maintained that in 1623 three of his boys, whom he calculated as equal to a man and a half, had produced 3,000 weight of tobacco and 110 barrels (550 bushels) of corn.8 Richard Brewster working with three men was said to have grown 2,800 weight of tobacco and 100 bushels of corn.9 In 1626 William Spencer testified in court that in 1620 he had overseen the labor of six or seven men who had produced 3,000 or 4,000 weight.10 The figures differ, perhaps because some of the authors were boasting, because some men worked harder than others, and because tobacco harvests varied sharply from year to year for reasons beyond human control.11 The amounts are actually much lower than would be normal a few years later, when more experience with the crop had raised Virginians’ expectations of the number of plants a man could tend. But by any calculation the financial returns from labor invested in growing tobacco were high. John Pory, after the exceptionally good harvest of 1619, said that one man had cleared £200 sterling by his own labor and another with six servants had cleared £1,000 sterling. These, he admitted, were “rare examples, yet possible to be done by others.”12
Because of the chances for such profits Virginia in the last years of the company, while a charnel house, was also the first American boom country. There was no gold or silver. A man could not make a fortune by himself. But if he could stay alive and somehow get control of a few servants and keep them alive, he could make more in a year than he was likely to make in several in England. And if he could get a large number of servants, he might indeed make a fortune.
In boom country not everyone strikes it rich; and even those who come in from the hills with a pocketful of gold generally give it up in a hurry—for drink, for women, even for food and clothing at bonanza prices. Life is cheap, but nothing else is. Those who have what gold will buy get the gold a good deal easier and faster than the miners who dig it. And the pleasures and comforts of normal human relationships, the things that gold will not buy, are not to be had at all. Men have come there not to settle down but to make their pile and move on. But the easy-come, easy-go miner generally carries away as little as he carries in.
So it was in Virginia, where tobacco took the place of gold. Virginia’s counterpart of the easy-come, easy-go miner was the small planter who squandered his small crop on the liquor and luxuries that show up in boom towns. “Our Cowe-keeper here of James Citty,” wrote John Pory in 1618, “on Sundayes goes acowterd all in fresh flaming silkes and a wife of one that in England had professed the black arte not of a scholler but of a collier of Croydon, weares her rough bever hatt with a faire perle hattband, and a silken suite therto correspondent.”13 The first legislative assembly in Virginia in 1619 felt obliged to pass acts against excess in apparel and also against drunkenness.14 For it was drink more than clothes that the planters craved. The thirst of Virginians became notorious in England, and the ships that sailed up the James River were heavily freighted with sack and strong waters, even if they neglected to bring more solid fare.15
Virginians needed drink, if for nothing else, to solace them for losing the comforts of a settled life. Few were able, like the collier from Croydon, to enjoy the company of a wife. Women were scarcer than corn or liquor in Virginia and fetched a higher price. Seeking to overcome the shortage, the company dispatched shiploads of maids (for whom prospective husbands were expected to pay), but the numbers were not large enough to alter the atmosphere of transience that pervaded the boom country.16 The lonely men who pressed aboard every ship in the James to drown their cares in drink looked on Virginia “not as a place of Habitacion but onely of a short sojourninge.”17 They would marry and settle down later, somewhere else.
The whole appearance of the settlements, a mere collection of ramshackle hovels, argued that this was only a stopping place. It was a time when Englishmen of all classes were putting up larger and more substantial buildings throughout their own country;18 and an Englishman’s idea of a house was something solid, preferably of brick or stone. If it had to be made of wood, the walls at least should be plastered. Visitors to Virginia rightly judged the intentions of the settlers from the way they were content to live: “Their houses standes scattered one from another, and are onlie made of wood, few or none of them beeing framed houses but punches [posts] sett into the Ground And covered with Boardes so as a firebrand is sufficient to consume them all.”19 In fact, it did not even take a firebrand. Virginia “houses” could be kept standing only with difficulty. At Charles City, where the settlers had considered themselves fortunate to be released earlier than others from the company’s service, they went on building “such houses as before and in them lived with continual repairs, and buildinge new where the old failed.”20 There was no point in putting up more than a temporary shelter if you did not intend to stay; and as late as 1626 the governing council admitted that what people looked for in Virginia was only “a present Cropp, and their hastie retourne.”21
The present crop stood in the way of everything else. Although the government required everyone to plant a certain amount of corn, men would risk both prosecution and hunger in order to put their time into tobacco. Even self-preservation came second. After the massacre, when the government adopted a policy of continuous attack against the Indians, it was difficult to get men to leave their crops in order to carry on the war for a few days. When the governor commanded them to go, they would “Crye out of the loss of Tyme,” and when a campaign lasted as long as two weeks, they would demand “that they might have leave to retourne, lest it should prove theire utter undoinge.”22 When William Capps, who had had some experience in Indian fighting, volunteered to lead an expedition of forty men, he found that even the governing council was unwilling to spare them. Capps, whose speech comes through vividly in his letters, had his own explanation of the reasons for the council’s refusal: “take away one of my men,” he pictures them saying to themselves, “there’s 2000 Plantes gone, thates 500 waight of Tobacco, yea and what shall this man doe, runne after the Indians? soft, I have perhaps 10, perhaps 15, perhaps 20 men and am able to secure my owne Plantation; how will they doe that are fewer? let them first be Crusht alitle, and then perhaps they will themselves make up the Nomber for their owne safetie. Theis I doubt are the Cogitacions of some of our worthier men.”23
As in other booms, a large share of the winnings was carried away by those who supplied the flaming silks and strong waters, by men who had even less intention of settling down than the planters. The ships that anchored in Virginia’s great rivers every summer were, as one settler observed, moving taverns,24 whose masters, usually private traders, got the greater part of the tobacco that should have been enriching the colonists and the shareholders of the company. Since the company had never been able to satisfy the needs of the colonists, it was helpless to prevent them from trading with outsiders, and by 1620 it gave up trying to.25 Thereafter, the most it could do was to invest its dwindling funds in the magazines, through which still hopeful members tried to recoup some of their losses.
A magazine was supposed to turn a profit by exchanging supplies for tobacco or other commodities, but it became the practice in Virginia to sell for the promise of tobacco when the next crop was in; and somehow the promises were not kept. The floating taverns got the tobacco before it could reach the cape merchant in charge of the magazine, and all magazines seem to have ended with a loss to the investors in England.26 There were sometimes as many as seventeen sail of ships to be seen at one time in the James River, and the Virginians crowded aboard and drank away their promises and their profits. Anything that smelled of alcohol would sell, and the governor and council complained bitterly of the “rates which unconscionable marchantes and maryners doe impose uppon our necessities … especyally of rotten Wynes which destroy our bodies and empty our purses.”27 One trader even “boasted that the only sale of fower buttes of wyne would be Sufficyent to clere the whole Vioage.”28
The private traders from abroad were not the only ones who seized the commercial opportunities of the boom. Complaints reached England against Virginians who got to the ships first and engrossed the commodities most in demand, to sell at monopoly prices.29 And after the massacre, when corn was at its scarcest, those who had boats and could get a commission from the governor were able to bring back hundreds of bushels from the Chesapeake region, some of it bought, some of it stolen, some of it taken by force from the Indians there. At the price of corn then prevailing in Jamestown, these voyages to the Chesapeake must have been highly profitable, and there were charges that the chief men of the colony were only too willing to prolong the scarcity by discouraging or forbidding the planting of corn. As long as the shortage lasted, “they onely haveing the means in these extremities to Trade for Corne with the Natives doe hereby engrosse all into their hands and soe sell itt abroad att their owne prizes….”30
In the winter of 1622–23 English meal was selling at thirty shillings the bushel and Indian corn at ten to fifteen shillings. By April even Indian corn was at twenty to thirty shillings “and non to bee had but with great men.”31 The officers of the colony claimed that corn actually sold at only ten pounds of tobacco a bushel.32 But even at that rate a man who accumulated a thousand bushels of corn on a short trip to the Chesapeake region would be able to trade it for 10,000 pounds of tobacco, worth from £500 to £1,000 sterling.
Although Sir Edwin Sandys had been bent on profit for the company’s investors, profiteering, whether by residents or transients, had been no part of his plans for Virginia. He had hoped to build a community without want and without oppression. Ironically, his concentration on getting men across the water played into the hands of local profiteers who engrossed not only goods but men. Virginia differed from later American boom areas in that success depended not on acquiring the right piece of land, but on acquiring men. Land that would grow tobacco was everywhere, so abundant that people frequently did not bother at first to secure patents for the amounts they were entitled to.33 Instead, men rushed to stake out claims to men, stole them, lured them, fought over them—and bought and sold them, bidding up the prices to four, five, and six times the initial cost.34 The company’s program obligingly poured men into Virginia for the scramble.
Since the number of older, seasoned servants was limited not only by the high death rate but also by completion of their terms of servitude, it was mainly the newcomers under the Sandys program whose labor enriched the aggressive and enterprising traders and planters. At first sight it might seem that the death rate among the new arrivals (even higher than among men who had survived their first year in the country) was so great as to nullify any advantages to those who sought to exploit them. But the records show that enough of them survived to make up almost the whole labor force and also the vast majority of the population of Virginia by 1625. The muster of inhabitants taken in January and February of that year gives the date of arrival in the colony for 740 of the 1,210 living persons listed.35 Of the 740, only 110 had come to Virginia before 1618.36 The muster list also reveals that among the fifteen planters who held ten or more servants, or “men,” in 1625, only two servants out of 199 whose arrival dates are known had come before 1618.37
The bondage of the men sent under the Sandys program was of several kinds. Seemingly the most advantageous status was that of tenant. Although tenants were under the supervision of agents sent by the company or by the association that founded a particular plantation, they were entitled to returns on half of what they earned. Ordinary bond servants, on the other hand, belonged completely to their master: he got everything they earned and had only to supply them with food, clothing, and shelter during their term of service. The least attractive form of servitude was apprenticeship. Apprentices, often known as “Duty Boys” from the name of the ship (the Duty) on which some of them were transported, were bound as servants for seven years under any planters who would pay ten pounds apiece for them. After their seven years’ service, they were to be tenants for another seven years. If, however, a Duty Boy committed a crime at any time during the first seven years, his term as a servant was to begin again for another seven years.38
Probably the majority of men sent under the Sandys program were tenants. The particular plantations were supposed to be manned by tenants, as were the company lands. And the men sent to support the various offices of government were also tenants. But 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. And if an officer did not commandeer him, someone else would. 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 farre scattered) and to joyne themselves to some great mans plantation.”39
Some planters were not above ransoming captives from the Indians in order to claim their labor. Jane Dickenson and her husband, Ralph, were tenants of Nicholas Hide, when Ralph was killed in the massacre of 1622 and Jane carried into captivity. After some time Dr. John Pott, the physician who had been sent to Virginia at company expense, ransomed Jane for two pounds of glass beads. Ten months after her deliverance she complained to the governor and council that she was held in a servitude that “differeth not from her slavery with the Indians,” Dr. Pott alleging that she was “linked to his servitude with a towefold Chaine the one for her late husbands obligation [to Hide] and thother for her ransome, of both which shee hopeth that in Conscience shee ought to be discharged, of the first by her widdowhood, of the second by the law of nations, Considering shee hath already served teen months, tow much for two pound of beades.”40 Other complaints reached London that “divers old Planters and others did allure and beguile divers younge persons and others (ignorant and unskillfull in such matters) to serve them upon intollerable and unchristianlike conditions upon promises of such rewardes and recompence, as they were no wayes able to performe nor ever meant.”41
Among the worst offenders were the company’s own officials in the colony. In Sandys’ shipments of men bound to the company, they had perceived an opportunity for exploiting not only the tenants but the company itself. The fact that the men arrived without adequate provisions furnished an excuse for treating tenants as servants.42 Instead of being seated on company lands where they were supposed to clear, fence, plant, and build, the tenants were hired out to private planters, like the fifty men who arrived “lusty and well” on the Bona Nova.43 Although the officers reported that they hired out the sickly rather than the able-bodied, the company got word that it was the other way round: the strongest men, who might have benefited the company most, were put to work on private plantations. And “where it is pretended this placinge them with old planters is for theire health, they are so unmercifully used that it is the greatest cause of our Tenntes discontent….”44 Thus while company men labored on the lands of private planters, company land went uncleared, unfenced, and unplanted. It would be difficult to believe that the company officials perceived no personal advantage in this situation.
The hiring out of some tenants should have meant more food for those who remained in the company’s care. Apparently, however, the hired men’s share of provisions was converted to private uses;45 and the men who continued as company tenants were deprived even of the supplies intended for them. Whatever the company sent the officers appropriated, and gave the tenants only Indian corn and water,46 a diet not calculated to speed the recovery of men weakened by a long voyage. But malnutrition and the diseases consequent upon it were not the only reasons for the low productivity of the company men. According to one dissatisfied London investor, the reason the company tenants accomplished so little was that “the officers Tenantes were cheifely reguarded and the generall Companies Tenantes the more neglected,”47 by which he probably meant that the officers made it their business to get a day’s work out of their own assigned tenants but not out of the rest. Moreover, John Pory reported to the company in 1624, the officers were seating the men assigned to their offices “on their private Lands, not upon that [that] belongeth to their office,” so that the crop produced on these private lands of the officers “alwaies exceeds yours"; and since the land set aside for officers lay “unmanured48 to any purpose” it would yield little profit to the succeeding officers. The existing ones, Pory added, used the company’s tenants “to row them up and downe, whereby both you and they lose more then halfe.”49
It is only fair to add that what the company wanted for Virginia probably could not have been achieved by even the most faithful and assiduous of officers. The company wanted a stable, diversified society, where men would make reasonable profits and live ordinary, reasonable lives. It was Virginia’s misfortune in the last years of the company to offer opportunities for profit that were much more than reasonable.
The men who seized the opportunities and captured the labor of Virginia’s perishing immigrants are not difficult to identify. In January and February, 1625, a muster of the inhabitants indicated the names and numbers of every man’s “men,” or servants, including both tenants and genuine servants.50 The fifteen who had ten or more may be taken as the winners in the servant sweepstakes:
|
Ralph Hamor |
10 |
||
|
John Pott |
12 |
||
|
Edward Bennett |
12 |
||
|
William Epps |
13 |
||
|
Roger Smith |
14 |
||
|
William Barry |
15 |
||
|
Edward Blaney |
17 |
||
|
William Peirce |
17 |
||
|
Francis Wyatt |
17 |
||
|
William Tucker |
17 |
||
|
Daniel Gookin |
20 |
||
|
Samuel Mathews |
23 |
||
|
George Sandys |
37 |
||
|
George Yeardley |
39 |
||
|
Abraham Peirsey |
39 |
Some of these men may have won fair and square; about several of them we know very little.51 But the careers of the others make it a question whether we should call them labor barons or robber barons. It would be tedious to pile up the evidence about each of them, but a few simple facts may be suggestive.
The front-runner, Abraham Peirsey, with thirty-nine servants, though probably from a high-ranking English family, had been “a verie poore man” when he came to Virginia in 1616 as the cape merchant in charge of the company’s magazine. Although he sold goods at two or three times the prices set by the investors, the magazine, under his direction, showed a loss, and in 1626 he had not yet paid the investors for the goods sold. But when he died two years later, he “left the best Estate that was ever yett knowen in Virginia.”52 Edward Blaney succeeded Peirsey as cape merchant in 1620. At his death in 1626 he too had not paid for the goods he sold, but he had acquired seventeen servants. He had also succeeded in embezzling a fair amount by marrying a widow and successfully claiming an estate left by a man with the same surname as his wife’s first husband, a trick played by a number of quick-witted Virginians at the death of a stranger who happened to bear the same surname.53 George Sandys, treasurer of the colony, having failed to receive the full quota of tenants assigned to his office, simply appropriated sixteen company tenants as his servants. Although for some time before his departure for England in 1625 he refused to execute his office (the commission having expired), he continued to hold the tenants in bondage. One of them, listed in the muster as a freeman, wrote to a friend, “he maketh us serve him whether wee will or noe and how to helpe yt we doe not knowe for hee beareth all the sway.”54
William Tucker, who may originally have been a ship captain, probably came to Virginia between 1617 and 1619.55 Sometime before 1622 he was entrusted by John Ferrar and associates with £900 worth of goods to sell in Virginia, for which, like other Virginia factors, he failed to deliver either cash or accounts.56 He was one of the men commissioned to trade with the Indians for corn in 1622–23 and was also empowered to negotiate peace with the Pamunkeys of the Potomac River area. His methods of dealing we have already noted in his poisoning of two hundred Pamunkeys with wine brought for that purpose, which he gave them to drink in celebration of the peace treaty he pretended to conclude with them.57 By 1632 the assembly was finding his attitude toward his fellow Virginians unsatisfactory and objected to the Privy Council about merchants “who have by needlesse and unprofitable Commodities … ingaged the inhabitants in debts of Tobacco, to the value almost of theire ensuinge croppe … amonge whome we have good cause to complayne of Captayne Tucker, who hath farr exceeded all other marchaunts in the prizes of theire goods …”58
Ralph Hamor, though he wrote one of the most effective pamphlets in praise of Virginia, got off to a slow start or else lost heavily in the massacre. In 1623, when other men were already getting rich, George Sandys observed that “Captain Hamor is miserablie poore and necessitie will inforce him to shiftes.”59 The shifts to which he resorted included trading with the Indians and selling English goods at prices that brought accusations of extortion.60 By 1625, with ten men growing tobacco for him, he was far from poor.
Dr. John Pott seems to have been more assiduous in pursuit of cattle and servants than of his duties as physican. In 1623 George Sandys dismissed him as a mere cipher,61 but by 1628 he was acting governor. According to his successor, Governor Harvey, he took advantage of the position to advance his private interest “by foule and coveteous ways,” in particular “by curing out the markes of other mens neate cattell and markinge them for himselfe with his owne handes, whereby he hath gotten into a greate stock of cattell.” Harvey pardoned him because of the colony’s need for his services as a physician and because Harvey found his delinquencies to have been in imitation of “the example of a former governor who passed unquestioned for many notable oppressions.”62
The former governor to whom Harvey referred was probably George Yeardley, who had found Virginia a rewarding environment from the beginning. According to John Pory, when Yeardley arrived there in 1610, he carried with him nothing more valuable than a sword.63 But when he visited London in 1617, after his first term as governor of Virginia, he was able “out of his meer gettings here” to spend “very near three thousand poundes.” Before returning to the colony he got himself knighted, and Londoners observed that “he flaunts yt up and downe the streets in extraordinarie braverie, with fowreteen or fifteen fayre liveries after him.”64
Yeardley, when appointed governor in 1618, was assigned 3,000 acres of land and 100 tenants plus 30 more in 1620 to make up for deaths among the first group.65 When Yeardley gave up the governorship in 1621, he turned over only 46 tenants. The governor’s council, which now included Yeardley, wrote to the company in London that “as for the rest of the Tenantes Sir George yardley denieth to make them good, And sayeth that havinge made noe strong Agrement with you at any tyme he holdeth nott him selfe tyed unto yt, And therfore should take it for a matter of great Injustice to bee Compelled therunto.”66 Yeardley, whom William Capps characterized as a “right worthie Statesman, for his owne profit,”67 did not give up his tenants, and the records contain accusations against him of appropriating servants belonging to other planters and of keeping as a servant a young man whose relatives had paid his way.68 He remained nevertheless a member of the council and was again serving as governor when he died in 1627. He was one of those commissioned to trade for corn after the massacre of 1622 and was accused by one settler of discouraging the planting of corn, the word being “that Sir G. Yardlie should provide them Corne if they would provide Tobacco.”69 He did, in fact, provide the corn, 1,000 bushels in January, 1623, alone.70 At his death Yeardley’s estate was apparently valued at only about £10,000.71 But it is not unlikely that he had already transferred much of what he owned to his wife and children in order to circumvent the litigation that a substantial will often produced.72
It seems evident that while the Virginia Company was failing in London, a number of its officers in the colony were growing rich. In order to do so, they not only rendered less than faithful service to their employers; they also reduced other Virginians to a condition which, while short of slavery, was also some distance from the freedom that Englishmen liked to consider as their birthright. The company in 1618 had inaugurated a popularly elected representative assembly, but the effective power remained in the governor and his council.73 By no coincidence, the council consisted almost entirely of the men holding large numbers of servants. Between 1619 and 1627 Hamor, Pott, Peirsey, Sandys, Tucker, Mathews, and Yeardley sat on it, while Wyatt and Yeardley took turns in the governor’s chair. These men, with a more than average interest in controlling the labor force, were thus enabled to maintain their personal ascendancy not only over their servants but over all lesser men. Whether operating under the company or, after 1625, under the king, they met every challenge to their authority with a rigor not exceeded by what we know of the earlier absolute government of John Smith or Thomas Dale.
In May, 1624, when they discovered that Richard Barnes had uttered “base and detracting” speeches against the governor, they ordered that he “be disarmed, and have his armes broken and his tongue bored through with a awl. shall pass through a guard of 40 men and shalbe butted by every one of them, and att the head of the troope kicked downe and footed out of the fort: that he shalbe banished out of James Cittye and the Iland, that he shall not be capable of any priviledge of freedome of the countrey, and that (before he goe out of the Iland) he shall put in suretyes of £200 bond for the good behaviour.” 74 When John Heny was reprimanded by Captain Tucker for going aboard a ship contrary to the governor’s command, Heny made the mistake of saying, after Tucker had left, that Tucker “would be the death of him as he was of Robert leyster.” For these words, reported to the council, Heny got sixty stripes and had to beg forgiveness of Tucker, pay him 100 pounds of tobacco, and be imprisoned until he could give bond for good behaviour.75
Heny’s offense came at a time when the council had also heard of murmurs against their execution of Richard Cornish, a shipmaster, for sodomy. There is no record of the execution, but some of the testimony in the case was recorded, and there can be no doubt that the execution took place.76 Afterwards, on a voyage to Canada, one Edward Nevell met up with Cornish’s brother, and upon the latter’s inquiry as to how the execution came about, Nevell replied, “he was put to death through a scurvie boys meanes, and no other came against him.” For this statement, made aboard ship off Canada where the governing council of Virginia could scarcely claim jurisdiction, Nevell upon his return to Virginia was required to “stand one the pillory with a paper one his head shewinge the cause of his offence in the markett place, and to loose both his Ears and to serve the Colony for A yeere, And forever to be incapable to be A ffreeman of the Countrey.”77 A month later Thomas Hatch was heard to say in a private house in James City “that in his consyence he thought the said Cornishe was put to death wrongfully.” Hatch had the misfortune to be a Duty Boy, and his seven-year period of service was nearly up. The court therefore ordered “that Thomas Hatch for his offence shalbe whipt from the forte to the gallows and from thence be whipt back againe, and be sett uppon the Pillory and there to loose one of his eares, And that his service to Sir George Yardley for seaven years Shalbegain [again] from the present dye.”78
The councillors not only guarded their authority jealously, and perhaps unconstitutionally, but not infrequently they wielded it on their own behalf, participating in decisions that favored their interests. Sandys sat at a meeting in which Luke Eden was seeking payment of twenty bushels of corn due him from Sandys. Whether Eden got the corn is not recorded, but he did get himself fined 200 pounds of tobacco and laid neck and heels “for his lewd behavior and unreverent speche” toward Sandys in the council chamber.79 Wyatt participated in a judgment that awarded him a Negro servant “notwithstanding, any sale by Capt. Jonnes to Capt. Bass, or any other chaleng by the ships company” (Captain Jones had brought a privateer into the James for provisions and apparently considered the servant part of the ship’s booty).80 Abraham Peirsey sat at a meeting that had Richard Crocker put in the pillory with his ears nailed for saying that Peirsey and Hamor were not fit to sit on the council because “they deale uppon nothing but extortion.”81 Yeardley sat at a meeting that ordered the execution of a man for killing a calf of Yeardley’s and at another meeting that awarded him as tenants all the Duty Boys who had finished their terms as servants.82 He also participated in sentencing John Radish to lie neck and heels, because Radish “Caryed over Sir George Yardley his servants to his house at unsesonable tyme of the night and there gave them Entertainment and made them drunke.”83
It was apparently not without reason that ordinary men grumbled at the government. In the words of William Tyler, “nether the Governor nor Counsell could or would doe any poore men right, but that they would shew favor to great men and wronge the poore.”84
It may be contended that severe discipline was necessary in a colony consisting predominantly of lusty young men who had just shaken loose the fetters of home and country. And it must be acknowledged that the men entrusted with government did protect some of the rights of servants. When a master failed to teach an indentured apprentice his trade or when he sought to hold a servant beyond the term of his indenture, the council might interfere. Dr. Pott was ordered by a meeting at which he was himself present either to teach his apprentice the art of an apothecary (which he was neglecting to do) or else pay him wages.85
Nevertheless, serious differences made servitude in Virginia more onerous than servitude in England. The ordinary term of service that a man agreed to work in Virginia was not a year but several years; and the wages to which he was entitled had been paid in advance in the form of transportation across the ocean. Almost all servants were therefore in a condition resembling that of the least privileged type of English servant, the parish apprentice, a child who (to relieve the community of supporting him) was bound to service by court order, until he was twenty-one or twenty-four, with no obligation on his appointed master’s part to teach him a trade or pay him. In Virginia a master had little reason to treat his servant well in order to obtain a renewal of his services at the expiration of his term; and a servant had little reason to work hard in order to assure being rehired, because men would not bind themselves out for a second long term when they could make more by working for themselves. There was accordingly the more reason for a master to assert his authority in order to get what he considered a full quota of work from his servants. Not surprisingly, it was reported in England that Virginians “abuse their servantes there with intollerable oppression and hard usage.”86
Hard usage for a servant in Virginia doubtless included working harder and more continuously than Englishmen were used to working. Although later generations of servants would be made to tend five or six times the number of tobacco plants that the servants of the 1620s tended, the work seemed more onerous and more unrelenting than the intermittent labor of the English farmer; and masters bent on profit “corrected” their laggard, hungry, and diseased servants with barbarous punishments.
The records are not sufficiently complete to show how extensive the abuse may have been, but the council in Virginia (until 1634 the only court) supported masters in severities that would not have been allowed in England. 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.87 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, “fownd she had been sore beaten and her body full of sores and holes very dangerously raunckled and putrified both above her wast and uppon her hips and thighes.” Other witnesses testified that Proctor beat Hinton with a rake. Yet there is no indication that the Proctors were punished. Even the compassionate witnesses who testified against them indicated that when the maid came to them for shelter they had instead returned her to her master and mistress in her half-dead condition, with entreaties that they pardon her! By contrast, we find English courts undertaking the work of correcting unruly servants themselves (as the statutes required) and even on occasion forbidding masters to do it.88
Whether physically abused or not, Englishmen found servitude in Virginia more degrading than servitude in England. In England the hiring of workers was dignified by laws and customs that gave a servant some control over his own life. He had to give his master three months’ notice if he intended to leave at the end of his term; and in order to move from one place to another he must have a testimonial that his term of service was finished. But by the same token, a master could not turn away a servant before his term was up and must give him three months’ advance notice that his contract would not be renewed.89 Once a year, in the petty sessions held by the constables, servants could renew their contracts or make new ones, with the constables recording the transaction. These sessions, usually held in a churchyard, came to be known as hiring fairs and constituted a kind of open labor market, where workmen sold their annual services.90 But in Virginia it was the masters who sold the workmen, and there was no annual hiring fair. Masters bought and sold servants at any time for any period of years covered by their transportation contracts; and during that period a servant might find himself sold without his own consent from one master to another. In 1633 a Dutch, sea captain found the planters gambling at cards with their servants as stakes.91 Virginians dealt in servants the way Englishmen dealt in land or chattels.
This development was a simple outgrowth of the extreme demand for labor in combination with the long terms of service that were exacted for transportation to Virginia. In England itself, after labor became more valuable, the demand produced a certain amount of buying and selling of industrial apprentices. When a man had more apprentices than he needed, he might with the permission of his guild sell an apprentice to another master of the guild.92 But industrial apprentices were a special case, and the idea of a large-scale market in men, or at least in English men, was shocking to Englishmen. “My Master Atkins,” wrote Thomas Best from Virginia in 1623, “hath sold me for a £150 sterling like a damnd slave.”93 This “buying and selling men and boies” had already become a scandal by 1619, when John Rolfe noted that it “was held in England a thing most intolerable.”94 Captain John Smith denounced the “pride, covetousnesse, extortion, and oppression” of men who sold “even men, women and children for who will give most.” It would be better, he said, that these profiteers be “made such merchandize themselves, then suffered any longer to use that trade.”95 And in 1625 Thomas Weston refused to carry servants in his ship from Canada to Virginia, because “servants were sold heere upp and downe like horses, and therfore he held it not lawfull to carie any.”96
Other shipmasters were not so scrupulous, and the dissolution of the Virginia Company brought no end to the market in men or to their importation. So much did the planters count on continued importations that the council during the 1620s awarded as yet unarmed, unknown, and unnamed servants to the victors in lawsuits.97 A servant, by going to Virginia, became for a number of years a thing, a commodity with a price. Although the government might protect him against continuation in this status beyond the time agreed upon, it was not likely to shorten his term or give him his freedom, even if his master’s crimes against him were serious enough to warrant the death penalty. The servant who was the victim of Richard Cornish’s homosexual attack did not win his freedom by his master’s execution. Even though no other man had a legal claim to his service, the court decreed that he must choose another master, who in return was to compensate the government for the costs of prosecuting Cornish.98 A servant in Virginia, as long as his term had not expired, was a machine to make tobacco for somebody else.
In boom-time Virginia, then, we can see not only the fleeting ugliness of private enterprise operating temporarily without check, not only greed magnified by opportunity, producing fortunes for a few and misery for many. We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things. In order to make the most out of the high price of tobacco it was necessary to get hard work out of Englishmen who were not used to giving it. The boom produced, and in some measure depended upon, a tightening of labor discipline beyond what had been known in England and probably beyond what had been formerly known in Virginia.
That the masters of Virginia could maintain such power over the colony’s work force was due not only to their magisterial backing but to the difficulty of escape from the colony. The nearest European settlements were those of the Dutch hundreds of miles to the north at New Amsterdam and of the Spanish hundreds of miles to the south in Florida. After 1620 there was a small English colony in New England and after 1630 a larger one, but these lay even more perilous miles away. When Maryland was founded in 1633 at a less terrifying distance for a small stolen boat, it did become a refuge of sorts for discontented Virginians. But in the 1620s a servant’s choice was work or flight to a wilderness populated by savages. After the abrogation of the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall in 1618, a man no longer invited the death penalty by going native. And doubtless some did just that. But the growth of a special feeling about Indians gave men pause and made this avenue of escape less feasible and less and less attractive.
It is difficult to identify the first stirrings of racial hatred in Virginia. Englishmen had always had their share of xenophobia, and national consciousness shades easily into racial consciousness. But something more than nationalism or xenophobia seems to have affected English relations with the Indians from the beginning. When Englishmen at Roanoke react to the alleged theft of a silver cup by burning a village, we suspect that more than meets the eye is involved. And when Englishmen at Jamestown throw Indian children in the water and shoot out their brains, we suspect that they might not have done the same with French or Spanish children. George Thorpe was disturbed by the scorn in which his fellow white Virginians held the Indians, a scorn that also sounds like racism. After the massacre of 1622 the government’s policy of extermination and the continuing guerrilla warfare between natives and settlers combined to encourage race hatred in both.
Hatred of the Indians, fed on fear, probably affected all white Virginians; and the more it grew the less likely it became that servants would wish to leave their servitude, however severe, for freedom among the Indians. Moreover, the policy of extermination made life among the Indians far more arduous and more dangerous than formerly. Some servants still thought it worth the risk, but most were caught in Virginia’s tightening labor discipline, to be bought and sold as their masters pleased and to hoe tobacco as long as they were likely to live.
“Like a damnd slave,” said Thomas Best. To buy and sell servants for a period of years was not the same as buying and selling men and women for life and their unborn children with them. And the servitude of Thomas Best and his contemporaries was not a function of their race or nationality. Nevertheless, in the treatment of labor in boom-time Virginia and in the rising hatred of Indians, we can begin to discern some of the forces that would later link slavery to freedom.
1 RVC, III, 162. The figure 3d. given here is an obvious misprint for 35.
2 RVC, IV, 264; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619–1658/59 (Richmond, 1915), 24.
3 Minutes of Council, 33, 43.
4 Evidence about the exact time of the collapse is scanty, but see VMHB, VII (1899–1900), 382; C.O. 1/8, ff.17–18; C.O. 1/9, ff.248–49; C.O. 1/10, ff.14–17; Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas, I, 479.
5 RVC, IV, 141.
6 RVC, IV, 145.
7 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 541.
8 RVC, II, 524; IV, 38.
9 Ibid.
10 Minutes of Council, 99; RVC, I, 256, 268.
11 If we may judge from the English customs records of tobacco imported from Virginia, Bermuda, and Maryland, a good year often produced twice the amount of a poor year and sometimes almost three times the amount. See figures in Neville Williams, “England’s Tobacco Trade in the Reign of Charles I,” VMHB, LXV (1957), 403–49; Stanley Gray and V. J. Wyckoff, “The International Tobacco Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Southern Economic Journal, VII (1940), 16–25; American Historical Review, XXVII (1921–22), 526; and Elizabeth B. Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford, 1960), 52–55.
12 RVC, III, 221. By the 1640s it was expected that one man’s crop might amount to 1,500 or 2,000 pounds, which at 1619 prices would have brought from £225 to £300 per man. See chap. 7, note 40.
13 RVC, III, 221.
14 RVC, III, 165.
15 RVC, III, 658, 666; IV, 11, 14, 23, 271–73; WMQ, 2nd ser., VII (1927), 247.
16 RVC, I, 256, 269, 566; III, 493; IV, 231. By 1624 the total female population by count, including children, was 244 out of 1,292. In 1625 it was 276 out of 1,210. There are 58 living persons of indeterminable sex in the 1624 list and 14 in the 1625 list. Most of these are children, but some are persons with names like Francis. See Appendix.
17 RVC, I, 566.
18 W. G. Hoskins, “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past and Present, No. 4 (1953), 44–59.
19 RVC, IV, 259.
20 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 33. Planters who had built houses at Kecoughtan on land later claimed by the company were paid from 70 to 100 pounds of tobacco for them in 1625. At the maximum valuation of 3s. a pound this would make the best house worth £15 (Minutes of Council, 41). In spite of the high wages of carpenters in Virginia, this was probably no more than half what an English husbandman’s house might be worth. As late as 1642 Governor Berkeley was ordered by the Privy Council to require everyone with 500 acres to build a brick house “and also not suffer men to build slight cottages as heretofore hath been there used. And to remove from place to place, only to plant Tobacco.” VMHB, II (1894–95), 284, 287.
21 RVC, IV, 572.
22 RVC, IV, 451.
23 RVC, IV, 38.
24 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 103–4.
25 RVC, I, 303; III, 362.
26 RVC, II, 51, 218–19; III, 502–5; IV, 14, 23.
27 RVC, IV, 453.
28 Ibid.; cf. Ill, 528, 658–59; IV, 11.
29 RVC, III, 504, 703–4; IV, 261.
30 RVC, II, 375; IV, 186, 234.
31 RVC, IV, 89, 231, 234.
32 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 24.
33 This is evident from any comparison of the dates of patents with the dates of transportation of persons for which headrights were claimed. When Abraham Peirsey made his will in March, 1626/7, he had not yet taken up land for the servants he had transported since 1620. Neill, Virginia Carolorum, 404.
34 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 618; RVC, IV, 235.
35 A convenient breakdown of the information in the muster about numbers of cattle and supplies listed for each household is in VMHB, VII (1899–1900), 364–67, but this does not analyze dates of arrival or ages, and some of the figures are incorrect. A more detailed analysis is Irene W. D. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic History,” WMQ, 3rd ser., XXX (1973), 65–92. My own analysis, which was made before this appeared, differs slightly from hers. See Appendix, note 3. The muster was evidently taken by various people who did not all put down the same kinds of information. The dates of arrival are complete for some plantations; others show no dates at all; and still others show dates for some names but not for others. It seems safe to assume that the 740 are roughly typical of the remaining 470, who include, however, a number of children born in the colony.
36 The rest had come as follows: 1618, 59; 1619, 78; 1620, 124; 1621, 114; 1622, 95; 1623, 117; 1624, 43.
37 I have not counted the few children of servants, but I have included the few wives, and I have assumed that “men,” presumably tenants, were under the control of the person under whose name they are listed.
38 RVC, I, 270–71, 293, 304–7, 411–12, 424, 520; III, 259; Minutes of Council, 117.
39 VMHB, LXXI (1963), 410.
40 RVC, IV, 473.
41 RVC, II, 113; cf. II, 442.
42 The officers also cited the lack of housing. But the company had repeatedly ordered the construction of guesthouses to quarter newcomers until they could build houses of their own. The officers in the colony regularly found excuses to evade the orders. RVC, III, 489, 493, 532.
43 RVC, III, 479, 489. The same hiring out of tenants by those to whom they were entrusted apparently also occurred in Bermuda. Lefroy, Memorials, I, 165.
44 RVC, III, 489.
45 Ibid.
46 RVC, IV, 175.
47 RVC, 1, 456–57.
48 I.e., uncultivated.
49 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 571; cf. RVC, III, 479.
50 See note 35 and Appendix. The number of persons employing ten or more servants in Virginia, with a living population of a little over 1, 200 in 1625, was almost as large as in the English county of Gloucestershire in 1608, where the total population was probably more than 50,000 (men aged 20 to 60 amounted to 19,402). See A. J. and R. H. Tawney, “An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review, V (1934–35), 25–64.
51 Wyatt, who served as governor, 1621–26, and Peirce seem to have made their way without eliciting complaints. Bennett, a Puritan merchant of London and Amsterdam, came to Virginia only after the dissolution of the company and did not remain. His estate was built up through the efforts of his brother Robert, who sold provisions at prices that drew protests (J. B. Boddie, Seventeenth-Century Isle of Wight County [Chicago, 1938], 34–53; RVC, IV, 453). Gookin too was in Virginia only briefly, though his sons and overseers seem to have done very well for him (F. W. Gookin, Daniel Gookin, 1612–1687 [Chicago, 1912], 38–48). Barry and Smith were agents of the company, and most of the men listed under their names were probably company tenants and not appropriated to private profit (RVC, I, 433; Minutes of Council, 78, 90). Samuel Mathews was to play a prominent role in the colony in the 1630s and 1640s. He married Peirsey’s widow and by 1638 boasted the best estate in the country (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th ser., IX [1871], 136n; VMHB, I [1893–94], 187–88; XI [1903–4], 170–82). Epps, described both as “a mad ranting fellow” and as “a proper yong man,” killed another man in a drunken brawl in 1619 and was charged with adultery in 1627. He became a leading figure on the Eastern Shore, but by 1633 he had moved to St. Christopher (VMHB, LXV [1957], 313–27; RVC, III, 121, 242; Minutes of Council, 48, 50, 91, 140, 148; Northampton I, 9, 21, 67, 116, 163–64).
52 Minutes of Council, 118; RVC, I, 333; II, 219; VMHB, I (1893–94), 187; XI (1903–4), 175–82; C.O. 1/8, ff.15–18. In spite of his initial poverty, Peirsey was evidently well connected, perhaps with the Earl of Northumberland, whose brother, George Percy, has already figured in these pages. It was probably through this connection that Abraham Peirsey got the job as cape merchant. His social standing is suggested by the fact that he was able to marry in 1625 the widow of Captain Nathaniel West, brother of Lord De la Warr (who married a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth). The Virginia estate left by Peirsey was appraised at only 60,000 pounds of tobacco, but it is likely that his widow’s jointure was not included in this.
53 RVC, III, 449, 503–4, 526; IV, 106–7, III, 263–65; Minutes of Council, 93, 121. Blaney evidently married the widow of William Powell. The widow brought with her an estate of which her husband had taken possession on the basis of his name, after the owner, Captain Nathaniel Powell, died in the massacre of 1622. Captain Nathaniel Powell was actually no relation to William Powell, and Nathaniel Powell’s surviving brother, Thomas Powell, was trying to recover the estate from Blaney at the time of the latter’s death (VMHB, XVI [1907–8], 30–31; C.O. 1/4, f.36).
54 Lefroy, Memorials, I, 264; VMHB, VII (1899–1900), 259; C.O. 1/4, f. III. See in general R. B. Davis, George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer (New York, 1955).
55 He invested in the company in 1617, and in 1619 he represented Kecoughtan in the House of Burgesses, RVC, III, 58, 154, 535.
56 RVC, II, 104.
57 RVC, IV, 221–22; WMQ, 2nd ser., VII (1927), 206–7.
58 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 55–56. See also Governor Harvey’s complaints against him, VMHB, VIII (1900–1901), 149–50. Tucker was not slow to perceive the danger of Dutch competition to his high profits. He did his best to secure from the government in England a prohibition of Dutch trading in Virginia (ibid., 154; C.O. 1/6, ff.135, 207–12).
59 RVC, IV, 110–11.
60 WMQ, 2nd ser., VII (1927), 204–5, 212, 254; Minutes of Council, 48, 132, 135.
61 RVC, IV, 110.
62 Hening, I, 145–46; C.O. 1/6, ff.36–43; VMHB, VII (1899–1900), 378, 381, 382–85; VIII (1900–1901), 33–35; Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th ser., IX (1871), 143n–144n.
63 RVC, III, 221.
64 John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, Nov. 28, 1618. SP 14/103 (Public Record Office); New England Historic Genealogical Register, XXXVIII (1884), 70.
65 RVC, I, 268, 332; III, 471.
66 RVC, III, 584–85.
67 RVC, IV, 37. Capps’s opinion was shared by the Earl of Dorset, who blamed the ruin of Southampton Hundred to Yeardley’s “being a man wholy adicted to his private.” Dorset to Governor John Harvey, Aug., 1629. Sackville Mss., Library of Congress microfilm (British Manuscripts Project, reel K334).
68 RVC, II, 113, 119; IV, 510–14.
69 RVC, IV, 186.
70 RVC, IV, 9–10.
71 Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, II (1921), 121.
72 His sons Francis and Argall later cut a large figure in Norfolk and Northampton counties.
73 Even the assembly showed itself to be a meeting of masters, when the first session, in 1619, adopted measures to secure every man’s right to his servants. As protection against servants’ fraudulently claiming freedom, it ordered the establishment of a registry of all servants in the colony and of all that should come in the future, with the dates of expiration of their terms. It also decreed that if a servant, before leaving England, contracted to serve one master in Virginia and then contracted to serve another (who perhaps made a more attractive offer), he should serve two full terms, one with each master (RVC, III, 167, 171, 174).
74 Minutes of Council, 14.
75 Ibid., 85.
76 See references to case, ibid., 34, 42, 47, 81, 83, 85.
77 Ibid., 85.
78 Ibid., 93.
79 Ibid., 57.
80 Ibid., 66–68, 73.
81 Ibid., 135–36.
82 Ibid., 4–5, 154.
83 Ibid., 58.
84 Ibid., 19.
85 Ibid., 117.
86 RVC, II, 442.
87 Minutes of Council, 22–24.
88 Sachse, Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, XV, 90.
89 5 Elizabeth I, c. 4, par. 4, 7.
90 M. G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 191, 196–97, 233. There are records of some of these petty sessions in the typescript Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls. A good contemporary description is in Henry Best, Rural Economy in Yorkshire in 1641, Surtees Society, Publications, XXXIII (1857), 134–36.
91 New-York Historical Society, Collections, 2nd ser., III (1857), 36.
92 O. G. Dunlop, English Apprenticeship and Child Labor (London, 1912). 57–58, 127–29.
93 RVC, IV, 235. If the figure is correct and Atkins bore the initial expense of transportation and support, he must have made a profit of several hundred percent on the transaction. The original letter does not survive. The quotation is from a contemporary transcript in the Manchester Papers (P.R.O.), in which it is likely that the scribe erred.
94 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 542.
95 Ibid., 618.
96 Minutes of Council, 82.
97 Ibid., 181.
98 Ibid., 47.