IT could be argued that Virginia had relieved one of England’s social problems by importing it. Virginians of the late seventeenth century seemed to be plagued by the same kind of restless, roistering rogues who had wandered through Elizabethan England. England had kept them down by the workhouse, by the gallows, by whipping them back to the parish they came from, by sending them off on military expeditions—and by shipping them to Virginia. Richard Hakluyt had hoped that the New World would save them from the gallows. It had, and although Virginians were not all happy about it, throughout the century they kept crying for more. They wanted men. They could not get enough of them. The problem was not, as in England, to find work for them but simply to keep them working for their betters.
As we have seen, Virginians had coped with the problem in several ways: by creating an artificial scarcity of land, which drove freemen back into servitude; by extending terms of service; by inflicting severe penalties for killing the hogs that offered easy food without work. They had also through rents and taxes and fees skimmed off as much as they dared of the small man’s small profits for the benefit of burgesses, councillors, and collectors. But the burdens imposed on Virginia’s workers placed the colony continually on the brink of rebellion.
Elsewhere the world was trying less dangerous ways to maximize labor and the returns from labor. One way, which had a large future, grew out of the ideas that we associate with Max Weber’s term, “the Protestant Ethic.” Whether the origin of those ideas lay in any particular religion or not, where they prevailed they excited in employers and employed alike a zeal for work that exceeded anything the world had formerly known. Men imbued with a yearning for salvation found in diligent, systematic work at their jobs a sign of their predestined election to the joys of paradise. In their eagerness thus to demonstrate their sainthood to themselves and to others, they delivered more work than could be obtained by most external forms of compulsion. But the extraordinary capacity for work displayed by men addicted to the Protestant Ethic was the by-product of a special religious zeal. And religious zeal of any kind was not conspicuous among Virginians. It was the specialty of the New Englanders whom Governor Berkeley so despised. There remained, however, another way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor without as great a risk of rebellion as Virginians had been running.
Slavery is a mode of compulsion that has often prevailed where land is abundant,1 and Virginians had been drifting toward it from the time when they first found something profitable to work at. Servitude in Virginia’s tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England. Men served longer, were subjected to more rigorous punishments, were traded about as commodities already in the 1620s.
That Virginia’s labor barons of the 1620s or her land and labor barons of the 1660s and 1670s did not transform their servants into slaves was probably not owing to any moral squeamishness or to any failure to perceive the advantages of doing so. Although slavery did not exist in England, Englishmen were not so unfamiliar with it that they had to be told what it was. They knew that the Spaniards’ gold and silver were dug by slave labor, and they themselves had even toyed with temporary “slavery” as a punishment for crime in the sixteenth century.2 But for Virginians to have pressed their servants or their indigent neighbors into slavery might have been, initially at least, more perilous than exploiting them in the ways that eventuated in the plundering parties of Bacon’s Rebellion. Slavery, once established, offered incomparable advantages in keeping labor docile, but the transformation of free men into slaves would have been a tricky business. It would have had to proceed by stages, each carefully calculated to stop short of provoking rebellion. And if successful it would have reduced, if it did not end, the flow of potential slaves from England and Europe. Moreover, it would have required a conscious, deliberate, public decision. It would have had to be done, even if in stages, by action of the assembly, and the English government would have had to approve it. If it had been possible for the men at the top in Virginia to arrive at such a decision or series of decisions, the home government would almost certainly have vetoed the move, for fear of a rebellion or of an exodus from the colony that would prove costly to the crown’s tobacco revenues.
But to establish slavery in Virginia it was not necessary to enslave anyone. Virginians had only to buy men who were already enslaved, after the initial risks of the transformation had been sustained by others elsewhere. They converted to slavery simply by buying slaves instead of servants. The process seems so simple, the advantages of slave labor so obvious, and their system of production and attitude toward workers so receptive that it seems surprising they did not convert sooner. African slaves were present in Virginia, as we have seen, almost from the beginning (probably the first known Negroes to arrive, in 1619, were slaves). The courts clearly recognized property in men and women and their unborn progeny at least as early as the 1640s,3 and there was no law to prevent any planter from bringing in as many as he wished. Why, then, did Virginians not furnish themselves with slaves as soon as they began to grow tobacco? Why did they wait so long?
The answer lies in the fact that slave labor, in spite of its seeming superiority, was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor during the first half of the century. Because of the high mortality among immigrants to Virginia, there could be no great advantage in owning a man for a lifetime rather than a period of years, especially since a slave cost roughly twice as much as an indentured servant.4 If the chances of a man’s dying during his first five years in Virginia were better than fifty-fifty—and it seems apparent that they were—and if English servants could be made to work as hard as slaves, English servants for a five-year term were the better buy.
If Virginians had been willing to pay the price, it seems likely that they could have obtained Negro slaves in larger numbers than they did. During the first half of the century the Dutch were busy dismantling the Portuguese empire and, in the process, taking over the African slave trade. They promoted the development of English sugar plantations in the West Indies and supplied those plantations with enough slaves to give Barbados (founded twenty years after Virginia) a black population of 5,000 by 1645 and 20,000 by 1660.5 Virginia could scarcely have had a tenth the number at either date. Yet the Dutch were heavily engaged in the purchase of Virginia tobacco. They would surely, in the course of that trade, have supplied Virginians with slaves if the Virginians had been ready to pay.
That Virginia’s tobacco planters would not pay, while Barbados’ sugar planters would, requires explanation, for mortality was evidently as heavy in Barbados as in Virginia.6 If servants for a term were a better buy for Virginians, why not for Barbadians?
Up until the 1640s, when the principal crop in Barbados was, as in Virginia, tobacco, the labor force was mainly composed, as in Virginia, of white servants. But a shift from tobacco to cotton and then to sugar in the early 1640s made the islands less attractive than the mainland for servants who crossed the ocean voluntarily. Sugar production required such strenuous labor that men would not willingly undertake it. Sugar planters, in order to get their crops grown, harvested, and processed had to drive their workers much harder than tobacco planters did. Richard Ligon in the late 1640s was scandalized to see how the Barbados planters beat their servants in order to get the work out of them.7 Moreover, when a servant turned free, he found land much scarcer than in Virginia or Maryland. And even if he could hire a plot, at high rents, sugar production (unlike tobacco) required a larger outlay of capital for equipment than he could likely lay hands on.8 For these reasons, when Barbados servants became free, they frequently headed for Virginia or other mainland colonies. The sugar planters may thus have bought slaves partly because they could not buy servants unless the servants were shanghaied, or “barbadosed” as the word was at the time, or unless they were sent as prisoners, like the captured Scottish and Irish soldiers whom Cromwell shipped over.9 A dwindling supply of willing servants may have forced a switch to slaves.
It is possible that the conversion to slavery in Virginia was helped, as it was in Barbados, by a decline in the number of servants coming to the colony. The conditions that produced Bacon’s Rebellion and the continuing discontent thereafter did not enhance the colony’s reputation. Moreover, by the third quarter of the century there was less pressure on Englishmen to leave home. Complaints of overpopulation in England had ceased, as statesmen and political thinkers sought ways of putting the poor to work. Certainly the number of white immigrants to Virginia does seem to have declined.10 But if this was a factor in the conversion process, another, probably of greater consequence, was the decline of heavy mortality toward midcentury, for as life expectancy rose, the slave became a better buy than the servant.
The point at which it became more advantageous for Virginians to buy slaves was probably reached by 1660. In that year the assembly offered exemption from local duties to Dutch ships bringing Negroes.11 But in the same year Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, interdicting both the export of tobacco from the colonies to the Netherlands and any trade by Dutch ships in the colonies.12 The result was to delay Virginia’s conversion to slavery. The mother country attempted to compensate for the severing of the Dutch slave trade through a royally sponsored English trading company, the Royal Adventurers, which was reorganized and rechartered in 1672 as the Royal African Company. These companies enjoyed a monopoly of supplying all the colonies with African slaves until 1698; but the men who ran them never gained sufficient familiarity with Africa or the slave trade to conduct the business successfully. And even though their monopoly could not be effectively enforced, especially against knowledgeable private traders, both tobacco and sugar planters complained that it prevented them from getting the number of workers they needed.13 Virginia thus began to change to slave labor at a time when she had to compete with the sugar planters for a smaller supply of slaves than would have been available had the freer conditions of trade still existed under which Barbados had made the conversion.
In the competition for slaves after 1660 the sugar planters still enjoyed some advantages. Although sugar and tobacco were both “enumerated” commodities that must be shipped only to England or to another English colony, England did not collect nearly so heavy an import tax on sugar as on tobacco.14 Consequently, a larger percentage of the price paid by the consumer went to the grower. Moreover, the price of slaves in the West Indies was less than in Virginia, because the islands were closer to Africa, so that costs of transportation and risk of loss on the “Middle Passage” were therefore less.15 The figures for slave imports into Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands in the last quarter of the century are all far above those for Virginia.16 That Virginia was able to get any at all was owing to the fact that while slaves had become a profitable investment for tobacco growers, the profitability of growing sugar had declined.
It is impossible to reconstruct from surviving data the returns that could be expected on capital invested in growing tobacco in Virginia in comparison with the same amount invested in growing sugar in the West Indies at different periods in the seventeenth century.17 It is clear, however, that by the end of the seventeenth century and probably by the third quarter of it the tobacco growers had one strong advantage in the longevity of their laborers. A smaller proportion of their profits had to go into labor replacement and was available to meet the higher initial cost of a slave. Life expectancy in Barbados, especially for the black population, continued to be low throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century. The slaves on Barbados plantations had to be replaced at the rate of about 6 percent a year.18 It is estimated that between 1640 and 1700 264,000 slaves were imported into the British West Indies. The total black population in 1700 was about 100,000.19 In the next century, between 1712 and 1762 the importation of 150,000 slaves increased the Barbados black population by only 28,000.20 By contrast, while Virginia imported roughly 45,000 slaves between 1700 and 1750 (figures from the seventeenth century are sporadic), the black population increased from perhaps 8,000 or 10,000 to over 100,000.21 In Virginia not only had the rate of mortality from disease gone down, but the less strenuous work of cultivating tobacco, as opposed to sugar, enabled slaves to retain their health and multiply. To make a profit, sugar planters worked their slaves to death; tobacco planters did not have to.22 A slave consequently had a longer period of usefulness in Virginia than in the West Indies. The return on the investment might be less in the short run, but more in the long run.
The gap between the ability of Virginia and West Indies planters to pay for slaves was also narrowed in the course of the century by changes in the market price of their respective crops. The selling price of muscovado sugar in the islands during the 1640s, when the planters were converting to slavery, was perhaps 60 shillings the hundredweight (it brought 80 shillings at wholesale in London). In the 1650s and 1660s it dropped to about 30 shillings, in the 1670s to about 15, and in the 1680s to as low as 10, with some recovery in the 1690s.23 Tobacco reached 10 shillings the hundredweight in the 1660s and 1670s and stayed there with occasional ups and downs for half a century.24
What these prices meant in profits for the planters depended in large measure on the comparative productivity of sugar and tobacco workers; and, in the absence of actual records of production, that is less easy to determine. No significant innovations in technology occurred in the growth or processing of either crop before the nineteenth century, and by 1660 both sugar and tobacco planters were thoroughly familiar with their respective crops and with ways of maximizing production. Contemporary estimates of productivity per hand on sugar plantations vary widely, but a fair medium might be 1,500 pounds a year. Because of Virginia’s fickle weather the tobacco harvest probably varied more from year to year than the sugar harvest, and a man might grow a smaller but better and higher-priced crop by reducing the number of leaves left on each plant. Any estimates of productivity are therefore even more tenuous than those for sugar. It is likely, however, that by the 1660s a man would make less than 1,000 pounds of tobacco in a lean year, but more than 2,000, perhaps much more, in a good year. In the long run a man’s labor for a year would probably make about the same weight of tobacco in Virginia as of sugar in the islands. But the tobacco worker could at the same time grow enough corn to sustain himself. And in the most favorable locations, especially on the York and, to a lesser degree, the Rappahannock, he could grow a variety of tobacco (known as sweet-scented) which brought a higher price and weighed more in relation to bulk (reducing freight costs) than the ordinary Orinoco.25
In addition, tobacco continued to enjoy the advantage, which it had always had, of requiring a smaller outlay of capital for production equipment. And land, if scarcer than it had been, was still much cheaper in Virginia than in the islands. The far greater number of slaves delivered to the sugar islanders indicates that sugar remained the more attractive risk to English capital investment. Nevertheless, tobacco was so close a competitor that before the 1680s slaves were being shipped from Barbados for sale in Virginia.26
In financing the extra cost of slaves, Virginians were not wholly dependent on upswings in the tobacco market. They could draw on capital accumulated during the first half century. Their earnings from tobacco (apart from any they returned to England) had been invested, as we saw earlier, in cattle and hogs and servants. When they wanted to buy slaves in Barbados, they could send cattle and hogs in exchange. Land in the West Indies was too valuable to be devoted to food products, and sugar planters were eager to buy live cattle as well as barreled beef and pork. They needed live cattle not only to turn their mills but also to dung their land as the canes exhausted it. Virginia joined with New England in supplying the need; and though no figures exist to show the volume of the trade, there is a good deal of evidence in county court records of contact between Virginia and Barbados in the seventeenth century.27 But the extra capital to buy slaves came not only from livestock. In spite of the low profits of tobacco growing after 1660, there were the entrepreneurial profits of the merchant planters and the substantial amounts accumulated by the judicious use of government office.
More important perhaps than the capital generated locally was that attracted from England by the new competitive position of tobacco. Substantial men who might earlier have headed for Barbados now came to Virginia, supplied with funds to purchase or rent land and labor. And men with small amounts of capital, insufficient for the initial outlay of a sugar plantation, could make a good start in Virginia. Though the colony had ceased to be, if it ever was, a land of opportunity for the servant who came with nothing, it offered much to the man with £300 or £400 sterling. With half of it put into buying a well-located plantation, he would have enough left over for eight or ten slaves, and “a handsom, gentile and sure subsistence,” as William Fitzhugh said, who had done it. Ten slaves might make 20,000 pounds of tobacco in a good year, which at the time Fitzhugh wrote would be worth from £100 to £200 sterling. The cost of feeding them would be nothing and of clothing them little. The return on the investment would be accordingly a good deal more than could be expected from any agricultural enterprise in England.28
Englishmen with spare cash came to Virginia also because the prestige and power that a man with any capital could expect in Virginia was comparatively much greater than he was likely to attain in England, where men of landed wealth and gentle birth abounded. Well-to-do immigrants and their sons, who came to Virginia after midcentury, dominated the colony’s politics, probably in default of male survivors of earlier successful immigrants.29 But the fortunes gathered by those early immigrants during the deadly first half century were not necessarily lost or dispersed. Capital still accumulated in the hands of widows and joined in profitable wedlock the sums that well-heeled immigrants brought with them. The Ludwells, Byrds, Carters, Spencers, Wormeleys, Corbins, and a host of others not only shared the spoils of office among themselves, but also by well-planned marriages shared the savings gathered by their predecessors. In Lancaster County, of the twelve persons who were listed for more than twenty tithables between 1653 and 1679, one was a widow and nine of the remaining eleven married widows.30
These were the men who brought slavery to Virginia, simply by buying slaves instead of servants. Since a slave cost more than a servant, the man with only a small sum to invest was likely to buy a servant. In 1699 the House of Burgesses noted that the servants who worked for “the poorer sort” of planters were still “for the most part Christian.”31 But the man who could afford to operate on a larger scale, looking to the long run, bought slaves as they became more profitable and as they became available.
How rapidly they became available and how rapidly, therefore, Virginia made the switch to slave labor is difficult to determine, partly because the Royal African Company monopoly made it necessary to conceal purchases from illicit traders. During the period of the monopoly (1663–98), slaves could presumably still be purchased legally from Barbados, but few records of trade between the two colonies have survived.32 Nevertheless, from stray bits of evidence we do know that Virginians were getting slaves from other sources than the company and what prices they were willing to pay for them. The ship Society, of Bristol, carried about 100 slaves to Virginia in 1687. She was an interloper and was seized by William Cole, the collector for the lower James River, who later accounted for the sale of the cargo. The prices he obtained varied according to the age, sex, and condition of the slaves. For “5 Sick Negroes not able to goe or Stand” he got £20 sterling, for a man £23, a youth £20, another £21, another £22, and so on. All told, for 90 Negroes, including 13 sick (two “almost dead”) and a number of small children who were probably under twelve (but not counting seven slaves who died on his hands), he got £1,501.13.6, an average of £16.6.0.33 William Fitzhugh in 1683 apparently thought he could get better prices than these, for he offered to buy slaves worth up to 50,000 pounds of tobacco from a New Englander, at prices ranging from 3,000 pounds (for children aged seven to eleven) to 5,000 pounds (for men and women aged fifteen to twenty-four). Tobacco at this time was generally valued at 10 shillings per hundred pounds, so Fitzhugh’s top price was equal to £25.34
There is no way of telling how many slaves were brought to Virginia by interlopers and how many came legally from Barbados. Edmund Jennings, inquiring into the subject in 1708, was told by “some ancient Inhabitants conversant in that Trade … that before the year 1680 what negros were brought to Virginia were imported generally from Barbados.”35 It may be that many continued to come by that route. Although the Royal African Company had promised at its founding in 1672 to supply Virginia and Maryland as well as the islands, it sent only a few shiploads before the end of the century. During the 1670s somewhat more than 1,000 may have been landed, and in the 1680s perhaps another 1,000 or 1,500—if the seven or eight captains instructed to go to Virginia actually went there. In the 1690s, however, a list of fifty-four ships sent out between October 25, 1693, and February 15, 1698/9, shows only one consigned to Virginia.36
The company’s figures for slaves sent to Virginia do not comport with hints in the colony records of the rate of importation. Up until 1699 slaves, like other immigrants, carried a headright worth fifty acres of land, and a count of slaves mentioned in patents for land shows fewer for the 1670s (421) and 1680s (629) than the numbers presumably carried by the company alone, but the number for the 1690s, when the company probably delivered few, if any, was 1,847.37 It is impossible to say whether the discrepancies mean that the company records are unreliable or that many Virginians waited until the 1690s to claim land with the headrights of slaves they had imported in the 1670s and 1680s.
The extent to which slaves were replacing servants during the last decades of the century can be estimated with more assurance from the lists of tithables for Surry, the only county where the names of all the tithables survive (rather than the mere number of tithables per household). Of Surry tithables who belonged to another man’s household, slaves amounted to 20 percent in 1674, 33 percent in 1686, 48 percent in 1694, and 48 percent in 1703.38 Surry, as we have seen, was one of the poorer regions of Virginia. In the rich counties on the York the proportion must have been larger. To achieve such a large slave labor force by the end of the seventeenth century Virginians must have been buying at least as many slaves from interlopers and from Barbados as they got from the Royal African Company. And with the end of the company monopoly in 1698, private traders immediately began to bring many more.
If half the labor force was already enslaved by the end of the seventeenth century, much more than half must have been in that position by 1708, for official records show that in the preceding ten years 5,928 slaves were brought by private traders and 679 by the company.39 And the company’s papers testify to a great demand for slaves that raised the Virginia price far enough above the West Indies price to outweigh the costs of the longer voyage. The company’s letters to captains in 1701 began advising them to head for Virginia rather than Jamaica, if they could get there in May, June, or July when the demand was greatest.40 In 1704 they noted that Virginians were paying £30 to £35 a head as against £23 to £27 in Jamaica.41
But the planters in Virginia, as in the West Indies, were more eager to buy slaves than to pay for them. During the first five years of the new century, they overextended their credit, and the company was faced with a multitude of protested bills of exchange.42 By 1705 the Virginia assembly was so disturbed by the rising indebtedness that it tried to slow down the traffic, dropping an import duty on servants while retaining one on slaves.43 But by then the conversion to slave labor had already been made. According to Edmund Jennings, writing in 1708, virtually no white servants had been imported in the preceding six years.44 This was not the end of white servitude in Virginia, but henceforth white servants were as much the exception in the tobacco fields as slaves had been earlier. Between 1708 and 1750 Virginia recorded the entry of 38,418 slaves into the colony.45
Virginia had developed her plantation system without slaves, and slavery introduced no novelties to methods of production. Though no seventeenth-century plantation had a work force as large as that owned by some eighteenth-century planters, the mode of operation was the same. The seventeenth-century plantation already had its separate quartering house or houses for the servants. Their labor was already supervised in groups of eight or ten by an overseer. They were already subject to “correction” by the whip. They were already often underfed and underclothed. Their masters already lived in fear of their rebelling. But no servant rebellion in Virginia ever got off the ground.
The plantation system operated by servants worked. It made many Virginians rich and England’s merchants and kings richer. But it had one insuperable disadvantage. Every year it poured a host of new freemen into a society where the opportunities for advancement were limited. The freedmen were Virginia’s dangerous men. They erupted in 1676 in the largest rebellion known in any American colony before the Revolution, and in 1682 they carried even the plant-cutting rebellion further than any servant rebellion had ever gone. The substitution of slaves for servants gradually eased and eventually ended the threat that the freedmen posed: as the annual number of imported servants dropped, so did the number of men turning free.
The planters who bought slaves instead of servants did not do so with any apparent consciousness of the social stability to be gained thereby. Indeed, insofar as Virginians expressed themselves on the subject of slavery, they feared that it would magnify the danger of insurrection in the colony. They often blamed and pitied themselves for taking into their families men and women who had every reason to hate them. William Byrd told the Earl of Egmont in July, 1736, that “in case there shoud arise a Man of desperate courage amongst us, exasperated by a desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline kindle a Servile War,” and make Virginia’s broad rivers run with blood.46 But the danger never materialized. From time to time the planters were alarmed by the discovery of a conspiracy among the slaves; but, as had happened earlier when servants plotted rebellion, some conspirator always leaked the plan in time to spoil it. No white person was killed in a slave rebellion in colonial Virginia.47 Slaves proved, in fact, less dangerous than free or semi-free laborers. They had none of the rising expectations that have so often prompted rebellion in human history. They were not armed and did not have to be armed. They were without hope and did not have to be given hope. William Byrd himself probably did not take the danger from them seriously. Only seven months before his letter to Egmont, he assured Peter Beckford of Jamaica that “our negroes are not so numerous or so enterprizeing as to give us any apprehention or uneasiness.”48
With slavery Virginians could exceed all their previous efforts to maximize productivity. In the first half of the century, as they sought to bring stability to their volatile society, they had identified work as wealth, time as money, but there were limits to the amount of both work and time that could be extracted from a servant. There was no limit to the work or time that a master could command from his slaves, beyond his need to allow them enough for eating and sleeping to enable them to keep working. Even on that he might skimp. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, accounted a humane man, made it a policy to give his slaves less food than they needed and required them to fill out their diet by keeping chickens and by working Sundays in small gardens attached to their cabins. Their cabins, too, he made them build and repair on Sundays.49 Carter’s uncle, Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, made his slaves buy part of their own clothes out of the proceeds of what they grew in their gardens.50
Demographically, too, the conversion to slavery enhanced Virginia’s capacity for maximum productivity. Earlier the heavy concentration in the population of men of working age had been achieved by the small number of women and children among the immigrants and by the heavy mortality. But with women outliving men, the segment of women and their children grew; and as mortality declined the segment of men beyond working age grew. There was, in other words, an increase in the non-productive proportion of the population. Slavery made possible the restoration and maintenance of a highly productive population. Masters had no hesitation about putting slave women to work in the tobacco fields, although servant women were not normally so employed. And they probably made slave children start work earlier than free children did.51 There was no need to keep them from work for purposes of education. Nor was it necessary to divert productive energy to the support of ministers for spiritual guidance to them and their parents. The slave population could thus be more productive than a free population with the same age and sex structure would have been. It could also be more reproductive than a free population that grew mainly from the importation of servants, because slave traders generally carried about two women for every three men,52 a larger proportion of women by far than had been the case with servants. Slave women while employed in tobacco could still raise children and thus contribute to the growth of the productive proportion of the population. Moreover, the children became the property of the master. Thus slaves offered the planter a way of disposing his profits that combined the advantages of cattle and of servants, and these had always been the most attractive investments in Virginia.
The only obvious disadvantage that slavery presented to Virginia masters was a simple one: slaves had no incentive to work. The difference, however, between the incentive of a slave and that of a servant bound for a term of years was not great. The servant had already received his reward in the form of the ocean passage which he, unlike the slave, had been so eager to make that he was willing to bind his labor for a term of years for it. Having received his payment in advance, he could not be compelled by threats of withholding it. Virginia masters had accordingly been obliged to make freer use of the lash than had been common in England. Before they obtained slaves, they had already had practice in extracting work from the unwilling. Yet there was a difference. If a servant failed to perform consistently or ran away, if he damaged his master’s property either by omission or commission, the master could get the courts to extend the term of his servitude. That recourse was not open to the slaveowner. If the servant had received his reward in advance, the slave had received the ultimate punishment in advance: his term had already been extended.
Masters therefore needed some substitute for the extended term, some sanction to protect themselves against the stubbornness of those whom conventional “correction” did not reach. Their first attempt in this direction was an act, passed in 1661, that is sometimes cited as the first official recognition of slavery in Virginia. In it the assembly tried to handle the most common form of servile intractability, by making a servant who ran away with a slave responsible for the loss incurred to the master by the absence of the slave. The law read, “That in case any English servant shall run away in company with any negroes who are incapable of makeing satisfaction by addition of time, Bee it enacted that the English so running away in company with them shall serve for the time of the said negroes absence as they are to do for their owne by a former act [the act requiring extra service for double the length of the absence].”53
Though this measure tells us something about the relationship between servants and slaves in these early years, it was a deterrent more to servants than to slaves. And it did nothing for the master who could not get what he considered an adequate amount of work out of his slave by the methods that had sufficed for servants. One way might have been to offer rewards, to hold out the carrot rather than the stick. A few masters tried this in the early years, as we have seen, offering slaves freedom in return for working hard for a few years, or assigning them plots of land and allowing them time to grow tobacco or corn crops for themselves.54 But to offer rewards of this kind was to lose the whole advantage of slavery. In the end, Virginians had to face the fact that masters of slaves must inflict pain at a higher level than masters of servants. Slaves could not be made to work for fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to fear for their lives. Not that any master wanted to lose his slave by killing him, but in order to get an equal or greater amount of work, it was necessary to beat slaves harder than servants, so hard, in fact, that there was a much larger chance of killing them than had been the case with servants. Unless a master could correct his slaves in this way without running afoul of the law if he misjudged the weight of his blows, slaveowning would be legally hazardous. So in 1669 the assembly faced the facts and passed an act that dealt with them forthrightly:
An act about the casuall killing of slaves.
Whereas the only law in force for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master, mistris or overseer cannot be inflicted upon negroes [because the punishment was extension of time], nor the obstinacy of many of them by other than violent meanes supprest, Be it enacted and declared by this grand assembly, if any slave resist his master (or other by his masters order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accompted Felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to punish him) be acquit from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that prepensed malice (which alone makes murther Felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate.55
With this act already on the books in 1669, Virginia was prepared to make the most of slavery when slaves began to arrive in quantity. Later legislation only extended the principles here recognized, that correction of slaves might legally be carried to the point of killing them. The most important extensions had to do with runaways. As the numbers of slaves increased and the plantation quarters were placed farther from the house of the master, runaway slaves would frequently hide out in the woods, visiting the quarters by night, where their friends or families would shelter and share food with them. To eliminate this problem, the assembly provided that the names of such outlying slaves should be proclaimed at the door of every church in the county, after divine worship, and then if the runaways did not turn themselves in, it would “be lawful for any person or persons whatsoever, to kill and destroy such slaves by such ways and means as he, she, or they shall think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same.”56 The public would compensate the master for the loss of slaves thus killed. If one was captured alive, the owner might apply to the county court “to order such punishment to the said slave, either by dismembring, or any other way, not touching his life, as they in their discretion shall think fit, for the reclaiming any such incorrigible slave, and terrifying others from the like practices.”57
This was no idle threat. Though the words of the law—“reclaiming,” “dismembering,” “discretion”—seem to soften the shock, the law authorizes not merely an open season on outlying slaves, but also the deliberate maiming of captured slaves, by judicial order. One gets a glimpse of the law in action in the records of the Lancaster County court for March 10, 1707/8:
Robert Carter Esq. Complaining to this Court against two Incorrigible negroes of his named Bambarra Harry and Dinah and praying the order of this Court for punishing the said Negroes by dismembring them It is therefore ordered That for the better reclaiming the said negroes and deterring others from ill practices That the said Robert Carter Esq. have full power according to Law to dismember the said negroes or Either of them by cutting of[f] their toes.”58
Such was the price of slavery, and Virginia masters were prepared to pay it. In order to get work out of men and women who had nothing to gain but absence of pain, you had to be willing to beat, maim, and kill. And society had to be ready to back you even to the point of footing the bill for the property you killed.
It has been possible thus far to describe Virginia’s conversion to slavery without mentioning race. It has required a little restraint to do so, but only a little, because the actions that produced slavery in Virginia, the individual purchase of slaves instead of servants, and the public protection of masters in their coercion of unwilling labor, had no necessary connection with race. Virginians did not enslave the persons brought there by the Royal African Company or by the private traders. The only decision that Virginians had to make was to keep them as slaves. Keeping them as slaves did require some decisions about what masters could legally do to make them work. But such decisions did not necessarily relate to race.
Or did they? As one reads the record of the Lancaster court authorizing Robert Carter to chop off the toes of his slaves, one begins to wonder. Would the court, could the court, could the general assembly have authorized such a punishment for an incorrigible English servant? It seems unlikely that the English government would have allowed it. But Virginians could be confident that England would condone their slave laws, even though those laws were contrary to the laws of England.
The English government had considered the problem in 1679, when presented with the laws of Barbados, in which masters were similarly authorized to inflict punishment that would not have been allowed by English law. A legal adviser, upon reviewing the laws for the Lords of Trade, found that he could approve them, because, he said “although Negros in that Island are punishable in a different and more severe manner than other Subjects are for Offences of the like nature; yet I humbly conceive that the Laws there concerning Negros are reasonable Laws, for by reason of their numbers they become dangerous, and being a brutish sort of People and reckoned as goods and chattels in that Island, it is of necessity or at least convenient to have Laws for the Government of them different from the Laws of England, to prevent the great mischief that otherwise may happen to the Planters and Inhabitants in that Island.”59
It was not necessary to extend the rights of Englishmen to Africans, because Africans were “a brutish sort of people.” And because they were “brutish” it was necessary “or at least convenient” to kill or maim them in order to make them work.
The killing and maiming of slaves was not common in Virginia. Incidents like Robert Carter’s application to dismember his two slaves are rare in the records. But it is hard to read in diaries and letters of the everyday beating of slaves without feeling that the casual, matter-of-fact acceptance of it is related to a feeling on the part of masters that they were dealing with “a brutish sort of people.” Thomas Jones, of Williamsburg, was almost affectionate about it in writing his wife, away on a visit, about her household slaves. Daphne and Nancy were doing well, “But Juliet is the same still, tho I do assure you she has not wanted correction very often. I chear’d her with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again and today I hear she’s sick.”60
Possibly a master could have written thus about a white maidservant. Certainly there are many instances of servants being severely beaten, even to death. But whether or not race was a necessary ingredient of slavery, it was an ingredient. If slavery might have come to Virginia without racism, it did not. The only slaves in Virginia belonged to alien races from the English. And the new social order that Virginians created after they changed to slave labor was determined as much by race as by slavery.
1 Evsey D. Domar, “Causes of Slavery or Serfdom,” 18–32; Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 265.
2 C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and the Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIX (1966), 532–49.
3 See chap. 7, note 69.
4 A newly arrived English servant with five years or more to serve cost 1,000 pounds of tobacco, more or less, in the 1640s and early 1650s. The earliest surviving contract for importation of Negroes, in 1649, called for their sale on arrival at 2,000 pounds apiece, but whether they actually sold for that price is unknown (Northampton III, 104a). A seasoned Negro man or woman then cost between 2,000 and 3,000. Values for both slaves and servants in inventories rose in the late 1650s, with servants fetching as much as 3,000 and slaves 4,000. See also chap. 8, notes 68 and 69.
5 Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 33, 55–60, 63–68, 82–84; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 312.
6 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 327–34.
7 Ligon, True and Exact History, 43–55; Harlow, Barbados, 302–3; Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 102–17.
8 Ligon, True and Exact History, 109–17; Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 85, 287; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 91, but cf. 197.
9 Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 18, 219; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 69.
10 Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 309; C.O. 5/1316, f.53.
11 Hening, I, 540.
12 The acts excluded all foreign shipping and required tobacco to be taken only to England or another English colony, but it was the Dutch who were principally aimed at.
13 K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957), 131, 133, 145, 149. 300–315.
14 In 1668–69 tobacco imports in England valued at £50,000 paid customs duties of £75,000, while sugar imports valued at £180,000 paid customs duties of £18,000. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 206–7.
15 The Royal African Company’s proposed prices in 1672 were £15 in Barbados and £18 in Virginia. C.O. 1/62, f.133.
16 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 363; Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 256; Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969), 53, 55, 62.
17 Various contemporary calculations survive of the possible return on investment in sugar; for example, Ligon, True and Exact History, 109–17, and C.O. 1/58, ff. 155–60. But they do not rest on actual records of production. Since they were made in support of arguments that the planters were doing well or that they were doing poorly, they are either much too optimistic or much too pessimistic.
18 The sex ratio among Barbados slaves was about even. Although more men were imported than women, they died faster, and total deaths outnumbered births. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 251, 309, 314–17, 323; Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 354–55. Cf. Richard Pares, A West India Fortune (London, 1950), 122–25.
19 Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 59, 119.
20 David Lowenthal, “The Population of Barbados,” Social and Economic Studies, VI (1957), 445–501.
21 Appendix, p. 423, and Historical Statistics of the United States, 769.
22 It is possible also that diseases in the West Indies contributed to the higher death rate there. Mortality from disease may have continued to be as high there as it was in Virginia in the early part of the century.
23 Harlow, Barbados, 170, 188, 259–60; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 196, 205, 211; C. S. S. Higham, The Development of the Leeward Islands under the Restoration, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1921), 158, 191–92, 194. These prices are crude, but more precise ones for London show a similar though not so steep decline. Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar (London, 1950), II, 528; Davies, Royal African Company, 365–66. In Virginia in the 1650s a pound of sugar was valued at from 3 to 7 pounds of tobacco. Northampton IV, 203a; V, 132a, 139a; Norfolk II, 180; IV, 114.
24 Chap. 7, note 7; chap. 10, notes 10 and 29.
25 On sugar production see Ward Barrett, “Caribbean Sugar-Production Standards in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in John Parker, ed., Merchants and Scholars: Essays in the History of Exploration and Trade. Collected in Memory of James Ford Bell (Minneapolis, 1965), 147–70. On tobacco see chap. 7, note 33.
26 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, D.C., 1930–35), IV, 89.
27 See chap. 7, note 26.
28 Davis, Fitzhugh, 279–80.
29 Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure”; Quitt, “Virginia House of Burgesses.”
30 The twelve (derived from Lancaster I, III, and IV) were Robert Beckingham (married widow of Raleigh Travers), John Carter I (married widow of William Brocas), John Carter II (did not marry a widow), Sir Henry Chichely (married widow of Ralph Wormely), Henry Corbyn (married widow of Roland Burnham), Anthony Ellyott (married widow of Justinian Aylmer), David Fox (married widow of Richard Wright), Robert Griggs (wife unknown), Lady Lunsford (widow of Sir Thomas Lunsford), Richard Parrott (married widow of Nicholas Dale), Robert Smith (married Lady Lunsford), and Thomas Wilkes (married widow of Robert Beckingham).
31 H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1695 … 1702 (Richmond, 1913), 175.
32 See chap. 7, note 26.
33 C.O. 5/1308, No. 9.
34 Davis, Fitzhugh, 127.
35 Donnan, Documents, IV, 89.
36 C.O. 1/31, f.32; C.O. 1/34, f.109; Donnan, Documents, IV, 55; T. 70/61, pp. 3–4, 6, 30, 57, 83, 165–70.
37 Craven, White, Red, and Black, 86. It is possible that part of the slaves brought by the company in the 1670s and 1680s wound up in Maryland.
38 Surry II, 62–64; Surry III, 67–69; Surry V, 21–23, 287–90. Since some of the tithables listed in other men’s households were boarders, these percentages can be considered low.
39 Donnan, Documents, 172–73.
40 T. 70/58, Public Record Office.
41 To Charles Chaplin et al., Dec. 7, 1704. Ibid.
42 To Gavin Corbin (the company’s agent in Virginia), April 26, May 15, 1705; Feb. 20, 1705/6; March 27, May 27, Sept. 30, Nov. 18, 1707; Feb. 24, April 9, June 4, 1709; March 23, April 18, 1710; Aug. 23, 1711. T. 70/58. With their letters the company returned the protested bills of exchange, numbering 274.
43 Hening, III, 235. The import duty may also have been aimed at the old goal of reducing tobacco production (and raising prices) by reducing the growth of the labor force. And some planters who had bought large numbers of slaves may have favored it in order to increase the value of the slaves they had acquired. See Jones, Present State of Virginia, 132; Donnan, Documents, IV, 145, 151–52. The history of import duties on slaves in eighteenth-century Virginia is complex. See especially Thad W. Tate, Jr., The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Charlottesville, 1965), 29–33; John M. Hemphill, “Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1689–1733” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1964), 34–35, 65–66, 88–91; and Darold D. Wax, “Negro Import Duties in Colonial Virginia,” VMHB, LXXIX (1971), 29–44.
44 C.O. 5/1316, f.53.
45 Historical Statistics of the United States, 769; Donnan, Documents IV, 175–220.
46 Ibid., 131–32.
47 Tate, Negro in Williamsburg, 200–208. For examples of conspiracies see WMQ, 1st ser., X (1901–2), 178; Executive Journals, I, 86–87, 510–11; III, 234–36. Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972), analyzes the forms of resistance offered by slaves and concludes that it was the most “acculturated” slaves who proved most rebellious. One might say, in other words, that the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freemen whom they displaced, the more dangerous they became.
48 VMHB, XXXVI (1928), 122.
49 Hunter D. Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian (Williamsburg, 1957; Charlottesville, 1968), 38, 96, 202–3.
50 Landon Carter, Diary, Jack P. Greene, ed., (Charlottesville, 1965), I,
51 From 1680 to 1705 imported Negro children were tithable at the age of twelve and imported “Christian servants” at the age of fourteen. In 1705 the age was changed to sixteen for both. Hening, II, 479–80; III, 258–59.
52 Davies, Royal African Company, 299.
53 Hening, II, 26.
54 See above, chap. 7, pp. 154–57.
55 Hening, II, 270.
56 Hening, III, 460 (1705). This superseded a law passed in 1680 empowering “persons that shall by lawful authority be imployed to aprehend” an outlying Negro to kill him if he resisted. Hening, II, 482.
57 Hening, III, 460–61. In 1723 the law was expanded to allow the dismemberment of any slave “notoriously guilty of going abroad in the night, or running away and lying out, and cannot be reclaimed from such disorderly courses.” At the same time it was specified that no one was to be prosecuted for the death of a slave occurring as a result of dismemberment or correction. Hening, IV, 132–33.
58 Lancaster VIII, 185. This Robert Carter was the grandfather of Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, mentioned above.
59 C.O. 1/45, f. 138.
60 Oct. 22, 1736. VMHB, XXVI (1918), 285.