The years 1607–24 are known as “the Company period” of Virginia history, when the affairs of the colony were conducted under the aegis of the Virginia Company of London, chartered by James I in 1606, successively re-chartered in 1609 and 1612, and reformed in 1618 under Sir Edwin Sandys. Historians have long noted that the development of the Virginia colony during the Company period falls naturally into three time phases.1 (1) 1607 to 1610: Virginia as an experimental colony, 24 May 1607 to the granting of a new charter in May 1609 through the “starving time” in the winter of 1609–10. (2) 1610 to 1618: the expansion of the royal territorial grant to the Virginia Company; the establishment of a special royal council for the Virginia Company; the beginning of tobacco cultivation and export, with the widening of the Company’s charter in 1612 to cover the Bermuda (Somers) Islands, and authorization of a local Colony Council to function as a legislative body. (3) 1619 to 1624: the installation of George Yeardley as Governor of Virginia under the Sandys instructions (which the colony elite called the “Great Charter”), authorizing the establishment of an elected General Assembly “for the happy guiding and governing of the people there inhabiting;”2 the growth of independent, non-Company, plantations; the bankruptcy of the Virginia Company; the devastating Indian attack on the colony in March 1622; the revocation of its charter, and the reversion of custody of Virginia affairs to a royal commission in June 1624.3
Most historians treat the Company period primarily in terms of the rise of the Virginia Company, its internal and external struggles, and its eventual dissolution, rather than in terms of the counter-revolution in labor relations that it brought. Some among them see in those events a confirmation of their particular strain of the “germ” theory of American history. This theory is summarized by Alexander Brown in his First Republic as follows:4
[T]his nation was not brought forth in a day.… The evolution had been going on ever since the free air of America inspired the first petitions against a royal form of government in 1608, to the present day [1898]. The germ is still unfolding and so long as it remains true to the seed it will continue to put forth to the glory of the nation and for the betterment of mankind.… The seedling, after being fostered in England under the advanced statesmen of that transition period, continued to grow in the political system of the new nation …
Works of this genre interpret the history of the 1606–24 period in Virginia as an aspect of the struggle of the English bourgeoisie in general against the absolutist tendencies of the bourgeois monarchy, which culminated in the English Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century. This, for example, is the approach taken to consideration of the successive Virginia Company charters of 1609 and 1612; to the instructions to the newly designated colony governor, Francis Yeardley, in 1618, the so-called “Great Charter”; and to the internal factional disputes of the Virginia Company.
Since such scholars find no differences between the contending policy-setting English parties with respect to the status to be imposed on the laboring people, they find it unnecessary to inquire into the anomalous character of labor relations that evolved in the Company period. Nor do they perceive the causal link between that transformation and the later institution of lifetime chattel bond-servitude as the basis of the continental plantation colonies’ economy, which the final victory of the Parliamentary bourgeoisie at home “brought forth.”5
For the present work on the origin of racial slavery as a particular form of racial oppression of African-Americans, the Company period of Virginia history is of crucial significance, even though only a very small number of Africans or African-Americans were then living in Virginia. The findings of historians of seventeenth-century economic development in Virginia, the plantation system, and racial slavery offer a firm foundation for this approach. A century ago, Philip A. Bruce concluded thus:
But for the introduction of the indented servant into the Colony upon the threshold of settlement.… [t]he unique social conditions established at a later period would never have existed, or, indeed, if such had been the case, only in a modified form.6
James C. Ballagh made the point more explicitly:
Servitude not only preceded slavery in the logical development of the principle of subjection, standing midway between freedom and absolute subjection, but it was the historic base upon which slavery, by the expansion and addition of incidents, was constructed.7
Eric Williams, though centering his attention on Caribbean history, included colonial Virginia in the generalization that “[w]hite servitude was the historic base upon which slavery was constructed.”8 Lerone Bennett Jr, looking at colonial Virginia, found:
[W]hite servitude was the proving ground.… The plantation pass system, the slave trade, the sexual exploitation of servant women, the whipping-post and slave chain and branding iron, the overseer, the house servant, the Uncle Tom: all these mechanisms were tried out and perfected on white men and women.… [I]t is plain that nothing substantial can be said about the mechanisms of black bondage in America except against the background and within the perspective of white bondage in America.9
Of English “Liberties, Franchises and Immunities”
As profound as the implication of this general premise is, it has never been confuted, although it has been ignored and implicitly rejected by many,10 and expressly challenged by two.11
But when it is accepted, attention is immediately drawn to a basic constitutional principle that informed all of these charters and instructions as first stated in the 1606 charter and reaffirmed in the 1609 charter, establishing the Royal intent that all colonists
shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises and immunities of free denizens and natural subjects, … to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this our Realm of England, or any other of our said Domains.12
Before the social demotion of the laboring people to chattel bond-servitude could form the basis for the subsequent lifetime hereditary chattel bondage of African-Americans, those “liberties, franchises and immunities” established in England had to be overthrown insofar as they concerned the relations between employer and employee established in the Statute of Artificers of 1563. The parity of colonists’ rights with those prevailing in England was stated again in the 1612 charter that established a Virginia Colony Council, with authority to legislate for the colony, provided that the law and ordinances “be not contrary to the laws and statutes of this our realm of England.”13 So how then was it that the plantation bourgeoisie was able to overthrow basic English constitutional principles and reduce the laboring-class in colonial Virginia to a general condition of chattel bond-servitude? Following the lead of Edmund S. Morgan, I will examine this question by emphasizing the transformation of the relations of production, the relations between laborer and employer.
The 1607–1610 Years
The conditions of life were unimaginably difficult for the English colonists during much of the 1607–1610 period. One statistic will suffice: nine out of ten of the emigrants who came in that period died, an annual death rate of almost 50 percent.14 The winter of 1609–10, the “starving time,” reduced the population of the colony “from 500 to about sixty as a result of disease, sickness, Indian arrows, and malnutrition.”15 In June 1610, Governor Thomas Gates ordered the abandonment of the premises by a demoralized remnant of colonists, and on 17 June the entire company embarked for England. Much to the dismay of the abandoners, they were intercepted by newcomers under the command of Governor de la Warre, at whose order the old settlers returned to Jamestown.16
The records of the sufferings of these earliest of Virginia colonists have been extensively reprinted and discussed in the sources noted. I wish, however, to direct special attention to two aspects of the story that are of special relevance for the thesis I am presenting.
First, however appalling the situation was in other regards, the labor, whatever it was, conformed to the traditional English system; none of the laboring people was a chattel bond-servant. In 1607, the Virginia Colony Council complained of English sailors diverting colony laborers from their proper work to pursue a sideline in the sassafras trade. Referring to these men, the council said, “they be all our waged men.”17 It has been questioned whether this use of the term “waged men” should be understood in the modern sense.18 But the Colony Council was composed of persons who were familiar with the wages system of labor, and who had no experience at all with chattel bond-servitude of English workers. Furthermore, in later years, when the chattel-labor relation of production was established for English workers in Virginia, those workers were never referred to as “waged” workers. Finally, in 1624 when his advice was sought, the famous Captain John Smith, who was a member of the Colony council from 1608 to 1610 and its president for most of that time, firmly believed English workers in Virginia should be “hyred good labourers and mechanical men.” He explicitly denounced the buying and selling of workers as an un-English practice.19
Second, the sex ratio in this first period was extremely high. The total number of women in the colony was raised to two on the arrival of the second supply ship on about 1 October 1608. Some one hundred women were among the four or five hundred passengers who arrived in Virginia in the nine ships of the so-called Great Supply in 1609. But the death toll of the following winter’s “starving time” canceled the sex ratio as a meaningful statistic. English women continued to arrive; still, in the middle of the 1610–1618 period, women and children together constituted less than a one-fifth of the 351-member colony.20 Whether the scarcity of women contributed to the demoralizing death toll that led to the aborted decision to abandon the colony is speculative. Some of the men were veterans of European armies, accustomed to the ready services of women camp followers. Perhaps even then complaints were heard like one made a decade later, that men were dying for the lack of women to tend them in their sickness.21 This attention to the sex ratio could perhaps be omitted, if it were not for the fact that it was not a transitory phenomenon soon to be eroded as a result of the normal process of natural reproduction. (See this page–this page, below.)
The middle period, 1610–1618, began under the new charter of 1609.22 It was the interlude between the fade-out of the “gold fever” and the beginning of the “tobacco fever”; between the factional president-and-council conduct of the colony’s affairs and the establishment of the Virginia Assembly under the “Great Charter” of 1618. It was a period of military dictatorship in the colony headed by a succession of veteran officers of the wars in Ireland and the Netherlands;23 it saw the creation of the privately organized, separate plantations and the beginning of increasing difficulties for the Company. It ended with the frustration of the social control efforts of the military regime, whose attempts to enforce the progam for balanced economic development wilted in the heat of the “tobacco fever.”24
The author of the standard study of the Virginia Company regards this 1610–1618 period as primarily an ebb tide in the life of the colony.25 Nevertheless, it was a time of great significance with regard to the development of the status of labor. The English had, as noted, realized that the Indians were not going to labor for them; therefore,
[a]fter 1609 the chief attention of all concerned was concentrated on the task of sending a sufficient labor supply to produce in Virginia the commodities that would find a ready and profitable market at home.26
Under the new administration, production relations were to be those of a producer’s cooperative type of enterprise. The projected arrangement was outlined in the pamphlet Nova Britannia, published in 1609:
All charges [expenses] of settling and maintaining the plantation, and of making supplies shall be borne in a joint stock of the adventurers [stockholders], for seven yeares after the date of our new enlargement [1609]: during which time there shall be no adventure, nor goods returned in private from thence, neyther by Master [ship’s captain], Marriner, Planter, nor Passenger, they shall be restrained by bond and search, that as we supplie from hence to the Planters at our own charge all necessaries for food and apparel, for fortifying and building of houses in a joynt stock, so they are to returne from thence the encrease and fruits of their labours, for the use and advancement of the same joynt stocke, till the end of seven years.27
The joint stock was made up of shares purchased by investors, the minimum cost of one share being £12 10d. A distinction was made between those who invested money but stayed in England, and those who went to Virginia as colonists. The former were called “Adventurers,” the latter were called “Planters.” Among the colonists, the power-structure personnel, “the extraordinarie men [as distinguished from the ‘ordinary man or woman’], Divines, Governors, Ministers of State and Justice, Knights, Gentlemen, Physitions, and such as be men of worth for special services,” were not required to labor, but were still counted as Planters and were “to be maintained out of the common store.” At the end of seven years a dividend was to be declared which, it was anticipated, would amount to “five hundred acres, at least,” for each stockholder. These Adventurers and Planters would then be free and independent Virginia landowners.
In a further quest for settlers, the Company turned its attention to the destitute proletarians of London, charitably described as “a swarme of unnecessary inmates … a continual cause of dearth and famine, and the very originall cause of all the Plagues that happen in this Kingdome.” In 1609, the Virginia Company, in a letter to the bourgeoisie corporate of London, “The Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Companies,” sought to stress the value of ridding “the city and suburbs” of the surplus poor by shipping them to Virginia.28 The Company proposed that the London bourgeoisie, individually or in organized forms, should purchase shares of Virginia Company stock. For every share thus purchased, the Company would offer to transport one poor London “inmate” to Virginia. Since it was a fundamental right of English men and women that, except by explicit order of the Crown, they might not be sent out of the kingdom without their own consent, the Company suggested persuasive arguments whereby the city fathers might get that consent:
And if the inmate called before you and enjoined to remove shall alleadge that he hath not place to remove unto, but must lye in the streets; and being offered to go this Journey, shall demaund what may be theire present mayntenance, what maye be their future hopes? it may please you to let them Knowe that for the present they shall have meate, drinke and clothing, and with an howse, orchard and garden, for the meanest [poorest] family, and a possession of lands to them and their posterity, one hundred acres for every man’s person that hath a trade, or a body able to endure day labour, as much for his wife, as much for his child, that are of yeres to do service to the Colony, with further particular reward according to theire particular meritts and industry.
The exact terms on which these people were to “have possession” of the allotted land was not stated; as tenants, apparently,29 with future prospects of becoming independent landowners. They certainly were not to be chattel proletarians.
In 1614, Acting Governor Thomas Dale sought to rouse the labor force of the colony to a more consistent effort. Among the measures he instituted was the allotment of three acres each to a large number of the colonists. These persons were referred to as “farmers,” that is, tenants. Their relation to production was described at the time as follows:
They are not called into any service or labor belonging to the Colony, more than one month in the year, which shall neither be in seed time, or in harvest, for which, doing no other duty to the Colony, they are yearly to pay into the store two barrels and a half of corn.30
The rest of the workforce were to be Company laborers. It is not known how the selection of tenants was made, but it is a reasonable conjecture that the expatriated proletarians were found more frequently among the Colony laborers than among tenants. These workers were required to labor eleven months a year for the Company in exchange for supplies and were additionally allowed to work one month’s time for their own private accounts. Among this number some were also given a day a week, from May to harvest time, to tend their own crops.31 The laborers were, like other colonists, subject to the severities of “Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall.” Offenses against the code could bring down on a worker the harsh cruelty of the military camp, such as pillorying, cutting off of ears, boring through of the tongue, whipping of offenders through the town tied to a cart, banishment from the colony to the wilderness, and inducement of the premature birth and death of an infant by the whipping of a pregnant woman, for offenses such as speaking ill of a master or official, stealing food from a master’s store, and failure to complete a work task.32
By way of summary of the production relationships as they existed in the period July 1614 to March 1616, we have John Rolfe’s account:
The general mayne body of the planters are divided into … Officers; Laborers, and Farmors
(1) the officers [soldiers, guards, etc.] have the charge and care as well over the farmors as laborers generallie – that they watch and ward for their preservation, etc.
(2) The Laborers are of two sorts – 1st those employed only in the generall works, who are fed and clothed out of the store. 2nd others, specially artificers, as smiths, carpenters, shoemakers, taylors, tanners, etc. do work in their professions for the colony, and maintayne themselves with food and apparrell, having time permitted them to till and manure their ground.
(3) The Farmors live at most ease – yet by their good endeavors bring yearlie much plentie to the plantation. They are bound by covenant, both for themselves and servants, to maintaine your Majestie’s right and title in that Kingdom, against all foreign and domestic enemies. To watch and ward in the townes where they are resident. To do thirty one days service for the colony, when they shall be called thereunto – yet not at all times, but when their own business can best spare them. To maintayne themselves and families with food and rayment – and every farmor to pay yearlie into the magazine, for himself and every man servant, wheat [corn], which amounteth to twelve bushells and a halfe of English measure.33
There is not one laboring person in this catalogue whose status is that of chattel bond-servant.34 Even the least favored member of this labor force was working under a bilateral, mutually binding contract which could not legally be dissolved except by common consent of the laborer and the employer. The laborer was not a chattel; the employer, whether it were the Virginia Company or an independent farmer, could not dispose of the laborer as he could of property. Furthermore, these laborers were assured at least a degree of propertied status at the completion of the terms of their contracts.
A prominent English colonist and member of the Virginia Company returned in 1610 from a trip to the colony and published his “Newes from Virginia,” enthusiastically setting forth the prospects of the new land. He described the relations of production in verse:
To such as to Virginia
Do purpose to repaire;
And when that they shall hither come
Each man shall have his share,
Day wages for the laborer,
And for his more content,
A house and garden plot shall have.35
In March of 1616 there were, by Colony Secretary John Rolfe’s account, 81 tenants and some 140 laborers working for the Company in Virginia, out of a total population of 351.36 Later that same spring, the servants belonging to the group favored with extra time for tending their own private crops were granted complete freedom from servant status; this was in accordance with the agreement made between them and the Company three years before in England, prior to their signing on for service in Virginia.37 They now became tenants like those previously mentioned or, possibly, they joined others in the classification of artisans, or they became agricultural laborers for farmers. A year later, in 1617, at the time of Captain Samuel Argall’s assumption of his duties as Governor in Virginia, the number of laborers employed by the Company was reduced to only fifty-four.38 Perhaps 20 percent of the total population of the colony (after making allowance for the death rate) was thus shifted in one year from the status of contract wage-laborer for the Company – not to chattel bond-servitude but upward to a status preferable and more profitable for them.39
It was during the latter part of this middle period that the English first cultivated tobacco in Virginia.40 The discovery of tobacco was “by far the most momentous fact in the history of Virginia in the seventeenth century,” writes Bruce, declaring that it shaped the fate of the people of Virginia absolutely.41 The high profits that the crop soon began to yield drew the labor of the colony like a magnet. The Company and colony authorities offered special inducements and prescribed penalties to stem the tendency, but to no avail. By the spring of 1618, the former food surplus had become a scarcity:
The lack of corn became so great in consequence of the exclusive attention paid to the culture of tobacco, that there would have been ground for anticipating a severe famine if two hundred quarters of meal had not been imported into the magazine.42
Governor Argall at first attempted to enforce limitations on tobacco planting, and to encourage needed attention to food production.43 But he had come just at the time when separate private plantations outside the Company were beginning to operate, making the task of enforcing controls on production practically impossible by the efforts of colony officials alone. In 1616, the operation of the supply magazine was farmed out to a separate company of merchants.44 In that same year, the Virginia Company, having no other means of paying the seven-year dividend that was due to its stockholders, awarded land titles to the original investors.45
The initial effort at imposing minimum corn cultivation while limiting the planting of tobacco was soon allowed to lapse.46 In June 1617, the newly arrived Governor. Samuel Argall, proclaimed a fixed price of three shillings per pound of tobacco. In order to secure compliance with this regulation, he decreed a scale of penalties which serve to throw light on the question of production relations. Violators of the price decree were subject to a “penalty [of] 3 years slavery to the colony.”47 To protect the colonists against profiteering by the newly privatized magazine, the same penalty was to be exacted on those who bought tobacco at less than three shillings. Though Argall’s interest in controlling tobacco planting diminished sharply, his belief in slavery as punishment for malefactors remained constant. The following year, desiring to encourage piety among the colonists, Argall ordered that persons failing to attend church on Sundays and holidays should suffer corporal punishment, “and be a slave the week following – 2nd offense a month – 3rd, a year and a day.”48
What did Argall mean here by “slavery”? And what does it tell us of the nature of the production relationships at that time prevailing? Since this slavery was intended as a punishment, it could not have been the normal condition of labor as it then existed in the colony. The culprit under punishment would be unpaid, but would receive maintenance. It can be inferred, therefore, that workers were normally entitled to recompense other than mere maintenance. This penalty-servitude was imposed without regard to the will or consent of the person subject to it. On the other hand, the laborer under this sentence was not a chattel, subject to purchase and sale. It appears that what Argall meant by “slavery” in this instance was a status between that of the “waged man,” the colony laborer working for pay under contract, and that of limited-term unpaid servitude.
Further evidence that the typical laborer at this time was a hired wage worker, and not one employed for “meat and drink only,” is to be seen in the following two items. In June 1618, Argall complained that he had personally had to pay “sundry debts of the Company,”49 including “wages … payde” for Company laborers.50 The Company denied knowledge of any such debts, but did not deny the possibility of them. Furthermore, Article XIV of the Virginia Charter of 1612 was specifically aimed at checking the practice of workers who, “having received wages etc. [in England] from the company, and agreed to serve the colony, have afterwards refused to go thither,” or who, having gone to Virginia, returned before their contracts expired.51
Argall occupied a dual position; he was the Governor of the colony, appointed to serve by and for the Company, and he was also the holder of a 400-acre land patent,52 being therefore a private planter. As time went on, it was said, he showed an increasing tendency to resolve any conflict of interest in favor of his private-planter side rather than his Company-official side. In August 1618, the Company in London addressed a letter to Argall charging him with peculation and other violations of trust, and notifying him that he was to stand trial before the Company Court in England upon his return to that country. Argall, it was alleged, had used the Company’s ships and crews for trading for his own private profit; he had forbidden any other person from trading with the Indians for furs, in order that he, Argall, might have the monopoly of that profitable commerce; he had appropriated Company-owned corn for his own private plantation use; and he had disposed of the Company’s livestock to private planters, including himself, in violation of explicit orders from the Company.53 One of the Company’s accusations is particularly relevant to the question of the status of the laboring classes in the colony:
that you take the ancient Planters which ought to be free and likewise those [colony servants] from the common garden to sett them upon your corne to feed your own men as if the Plantacon were onely intended to serve your turne.54
Here is the first alleged instance of a worker being treated like a chattel, in that the worker is transferred without his prior consent from one employer (in this instance, the Company) to another (Argall, the private planter). Lastly, and equally significant, these alleged acts were officially condemned as violations of the rights of the laborers under the Virginia charter, for which the violator would have to render account before English authorities.
In the end, Argall was able to avoid trial. His guilt or innocence is of no particular importance today, except for historical scholars.55 What is of lasting significance is that these charges against Argall anticipated in detail the known course of self-aggrandizement followed by colony governors, and by other strategically advantaged officers, who succeeded Argall, conduct that was to have historical consequences.
Finally, in this listing of innovations in property and production relations in the 1610–1618 period, we come to the establishment of what would in time come to be called the “headright” principle. As has been mentioned, the investors of 1609 were given their dividend in 1616 in the form of land titles, this being the only form in which the financially embarrassed Virginia Company could meet its obligations. Having struck on this device, the Company decided to use it for raising capital.56
This new procedure was distinguished from the old in the provisions it contained for facilitating the free flow of capital. These features betokened not only the difficulties facing the Company in securing capital, but also the impending break-up of the Company’s monopoly of colonial enterprise. Under the new Company policy, the investor, or group of investors jointly, though remaining in England, could receive immediate title and possession of Virginia land, at the rate of fifty acres for every £12½ sterling paid to the Company; this clearly was a more attractive arrangement than the previous one of having to leave the investment in the parlous environment of the Company treasury for seven years, with dubious prospects of profitable returns, before getting any land title. Or, alternatively, these private investors could get land by means of the headright,57 which allowed the investors the same portion of fifty acres for each person whose emigration expenses were paid by the investors. No less significant for our present focus, it was specified that this new opening to capitalist investment in Virginia land was to be used for “sending families to manure [work] it for yearely rent, or for halfe the clear profits as many others doe.”58 These enterprises were called “particular plantations.” The perspective here being put forward was that of a capitalist agriculture of the English style, with landlord, tenants and wage laborers, distinguished only by the fact that the landlord was an absentee.59
Under this provision, by 1618 six such separate companies had been granted patents for land in Virginia,60 some of really vast extent, including one for 200,000 acres and another for 80,000 acres.61 These independent capitalists were given, along with the land, beginning in February 1619, legal jurisdiction over the control of their tenants and laborers; in the words of the Company’s order: “to make Orders, Ordinances and Constitutions for the better ordering and dyrectinge of their servants.” Yet, significantly, they added the stipulation, “provided they be not repugnant to the Lawes of England.”62
The new departure represented by the issuance of the Virginia charter of 1609 reflected a change in perspective for the colony; the gold fever was abated, and attention was directed toward the establishment and development of agriculture and of extractive enterprises of sea and stream, of forest and mine, as well as to the trade with the Indians for beaver skins. Virginia, under the new direction, was expected to become a supplier of a wide variety of products, supporting and supplementing the profit-making processes of the home country. The author of “Newes from Virginia” had rhapsodized on the prospects foreshadowed in his mind by two ships he had recently seen coming into England from the colony:
Well fraught, and in the Same
Two ships, are these commodities
Furres, sturgeon, caviare,
Black-walnut-tree, and some deal boards
With such they laden are;
Some pearl, some wainscot and clap boards,
With some sasafras wood,
And iron promis’t for ’tis true
Their mynes are very good.63
As our account has indicated, these hopes were not, in the main, to be realized. On the other hand, the colony’s success in achieving self-sufficiency in food production and in developing commerce with the Indians no doubt explains in large part the lowering of the annual death rate in the 1610–1618 period to less than 9 percent, compared with the rate of just under 50 percent in the 1607–1610 period.64 In 1616, John Rolfe, his term as Secretary of the Colony having ended, returned temporarily to England with his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas, and their infant son;65 there he wrote an account of the colony, now at peace with its neighbors. He said:
The great blessings of God have followed this peace, and it next under him, hath bredd our plentie – every man sitting under his fig tree in safety, gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.66
But now, at the close of the 1610–1618 period, the system of allocation of land by head-right, and the opportunity for a freer flow of and quicker turnover of capital had cast a shadow over the peace, the land and the laborer. It was to be a capitalist farming system in Virginia.67 But what kind of capitalist farming – the English type, or some peculiar system? That was the question to which the next and final phase of the Company period would give an answer.
The Final Phase, 1619–24: The Tobacco Price Problem
The 1619–24 period begins with the installation of Sir Edwin Sandys as Treasurer and chief executive of the Virginia Company, and the entrance of George Yeardley upon his duty as the Company’s governor in Virginia, in the spring of 1619. Basic lines of policy, however, had been worked out in the latter part of 1618, in discussions that sought to draw lessons from the experiences of the past, and of the Argall regime in particular.68
The program that emerged was fashioned along three main lines: (1) the reclamation of Company lands and stock, and the revitalization and extension of various Company enterprises, all to be financed initially by the sale of patents for separate plantations to be organized by individual and group capitalists outside the Company; (2) the promotion of a generalized economy, and avoidance of reliance upon tobacco as the mainstay; (3) the definition and systemization of land tenure in the colony, and the encouragement of emigration of laboring hands to the colony.69 Integrally and separately, from the beginning the three points of this program bore within themselves latent contradictions which quickly matured.
As a capitalist operation, the Virginia Company was a failure in 1619. For twelve years of effort and the outlay of £75,000 sterling of investors’ money and credit, the Company had nothing in Virginia to show for it but – six goats!:
[The] wholl State of the publique [Company property in the Colony] was gone and consumed, there beinge not lefte att that time to the Company either the land … or any Tennant, Servant, Rent or trybute corne [from the Indians], cowe or salte-worke and but six Goates onely.70
Paradoxically, however, the colony was beginning to throb under the first stimulus of “America’s first Boom,” as Professor Morgan has called it.71 It was the tobacco boom, of course, and it drew into itself an increasing share of the colony’s labor. The shipment of tobacco from Virginia to England in 1615 amounted to less than one-third of a pound for every person in the colony. By 1619, the figure was twenty pounds per person, and by 1622 it had reached forty-eight pounds.72 The number of separate non-Company plantations showed a parallel growth. Between 1616 and 1619, six patents were issued to separate capitalist plantation groups. Between 1619 and 1623, forty-four such patents were granted by the Company.73
Conceived as a means of financing the development of a generalized economy under Company leadership in the colony, the policy of selling land for separate plantations produced the opposite effect. The directors of these new enterprises emerged increasingly as the vital force in the direction of the economic and political affairs of the colony, and in the ever-increasing reliance upon tobacco cultivation.74 Although they made some gestures toward developing non-tobacco enterprises, they were not interested in risking very far along a path that had proved so costly to the Company. Their eyes were fixed on tobacco, with its quick turnover and profits. From 1619 on, writes Craven, “the chief interest of the Virginia planter was devoted to his tobacco crop.”75
A competition developed between the Company and the separate plantations for the supplies of labor and capital. In 1619 and 1620, separate planters were already accounting for the transport of 30 percent of the emigrants; after that, the majority were supplied by the separate planters.76 This competition took its most dramatic and sharpest form in the Argall-like practice of colony officers diverting Company tenants from Company service to these officers’ own private exploitation. In its instructions to the new Governor Yeardley, the Company had endowed the colony officers with lands to be cultivated for their support by tenants supplied by the Company. Leading the list was an allotment of 3,000 acres to be attached to the office of the governor. In addition to this substantial perquisite of office, Yeardley was granted outright a personal plantation of 2,200 acres.77 Yeardley was an especially arrant offender among the colony officers who appropriated tenants for “their own private Lands, not upon land belongeth to their office,” and wasted the time of many others by requiring personal services of them.78 When he surrendered his office at the end of his three-year term, Yeardley kept for himself all but forty-six of his Company complement of one hundred tenants.79 The Company officers also betrayed their trust and advantaged themselves by hiring out Company-supplied tenants to private non-Company employers.80
In the competition for investment capital, the Virginia Company was also being outdone. In 1620 and 1621, the Company was forced on this account to rely mainly on its public lottery as its capital funds source.81 By the summer of 1621, the par £12½ sterling Virginia Company shares were selling in London at from £2 to £2½.82
The definition and systemization of land tenure was elaborated in the instructions for Yeardley, adopted by the Company Court in London in November 1618, prior to Yeardley’s coming to Virginia.83 These instructions represented a further development of the trend to large-capitalist agriculture and a freer flow of capital, both of which were established principles informing the 1616 policy.84 The tenants who had been brought to Virginia prior to mid-1616 were, upon completion of their term of service, to receive one hundred acres “to be held by them, their Heirs and assigns for ever,” paying only two shillings annual rent. But persons transported at Company expense since mid-1616 had a less attractive option. They could remain as tenants for the Company at the completion of their seven-year term, or be “free to move where they will,” but with no land guarantee.85
Obviously the prospective creation of a permanent class of tenants would be designed to encourage capital investment, as would the reduction of the growth in numbers of self-employed freehold farmers, through the accretion of landless ex-tenants. On the other hand, this was a policy that would increase class differentiations by reducing social mobility from tenant to landowner, and sharpen class contradictions. The same effects were to be expected from the expansion of the headright principle to provide a grant of fifty acres to any investor who would pay for the transportation of “persons … which shall go into Virginia with intent there to inhabit, if they continue there three years or dye after they are shipped.”86
Under Sandys’s leadership the Company launched a number of projects – iron mining, processing wood for potash and pitch, timbering, fishing, glass making and fur trading – designed to promote a generalization of the Virginia economy, as a market for and a supplier to England, and in the interest of the strength and stability of the colony itself. Lacking capital of its own, the Company farmed out a number of these efforts to subsidiary joint-stock companies. Although one of these projects – shipping women to be sold for wives among the more prosperous men – was profitable, most of the other endeavors were less remunerative for the investors.87 By the summer of 1621, writes Craven: “The company was for all practical purposes bankrupt.”88
Crisis of overproduction of tobacco
Most disastrous, however, was the outbreak of a characteristic capitalist crisis of overproduction:
[T]he Company had not reckoned with the effect of the rapidly expanded supply of Virginia tobacco, nor with the increasing competition from the new British settlements in Barbados and St Christopher. Consequently, during 1620 and 1621, the adventurers who had underwritten the purchase of the product had been compelled to sell much of it at less than they had paid in Virginia.89
In the hope of riding out the storm, the Sandys administration joined, indeed put itself at the head of, the tobacco party.90 Succumbing to what one of Sandys’s opponents called the “straunge dream”91 of salvation through tobacco, the Company decided to stake all on an application for a royal grant of the monopoly of the English tobacco import trade. They got the contract, but the terms dictated by King James were so onerous that it was guaranteed to fail so far as the Company’s interests were concerned.92 Although the insupportable conditions of the contract led the Company to surrender it within a year, it was of momentous historic significance. It expressed the choice of the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie as a whole to base the development of Virginia Colony on a monocultural, rather than on a diversified economy. From the time of the forlornly ambitious projects for non-tobacco products plotted by the Virginia Company, the records of seventeenth-century Virginia are filled with instructions, advice, appeals, exhortations and injunctions aimed at diversifying the economy and avoiding dependence upon tobacco.93 With even greater consistency the colony was fashioned at every turn in the opposite image. In the end it was a victory of blind instinct over articulate wisdom. But not instinct in general: Indian society had mastered the uses of tobacco without letting tobacco master Indian society. It was, rather, the victory of the specifically bourgeois class instinct for their annual rate of profit and quick turnover of capital.
The “Adventurers” Seek Ways to Support the Tobacco Addiction
The drop in tobacco prices fell upon the just and the unjust, the “publique” and the separate private plantation owners, alike. The Virginia Company passed into history in 1624, but the price of tobacco continued a general course of decline; by 1630 it was less than a penny a pound in Virginia.94 By the middle of the seventeenth century, Barbados and St Christopher had been transformed into sugar plantation colonies in the interest of a higher rate of profit, but the price of Virginia tobacco never again rose to even one-third of what it had been in the day of the “straunge dream.” If the losses sustained on other enterprises had dried up the source of capital flowing into the Virginia Company, the decline in the price of tobacco implied a similar effect, if it were not somehow to be averted, upon the flow of English capital into Virginia tobacco cultivation, whether that cultivation were conducted by a royally chartered company or by separate entrepreneurs operating on their own account.
The capitalists would have to find a way to counteract the market-driven tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As we have noted, the Company and the Virginia Assembly in 1619 had indicated their idea of a fair profit, stipulating a limit of 25 percent mark-up on English goods brought for sale in Virginia. Faced with falling tobacco prices in England, the merchants accordingly discounted the tobacco with which the Virginia people paid for English goods. From a contentious exchange of letters between the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Colony Council in Jamestown in 1623, we learn that a bushel of meal delivered in Virginia and worth thirteen shillings was exchanged for nine or ten pounds of tobacco, officially rated at three shillings the pound, a discount of 55 percent.95
Conceivably this deterioration of the Virginia tobacco-seller’s position could have been countered by administrative measures. This was not a practical possibility, however, as more than a century of subsequent efforts at “stinting” tobacco, pegging prices, destroying surplus stocks, etcetera, would prove.96
Almost the entire cost of production in Virginia was in payment for labor power, and since these payments were made in tobacco, the capitalists’ cost of production declined proportionately to the decline in the price of tobacco.97 Therefore, although the capitalists’ profit was being reduced, the decline was not caused by a rise in the absolute or relative wages of the laboring people, but by the fall of tobacco prices. This built-in elasticity of laborer and tenant costs served to reduce the impact of the lowered price of tobacco upon the interests of the capitalists, in Virginia or in England or in both places. However, it did not protect the capitalists against a reduction of their equity or profit rate in terms of their pound-sterling investment. If the adventurer or planter invested one hundred pounds sterling in Virginia tobacco and the price of tobacco declined by half, the rate of profit on the investment would be cut in half. The plantation bourgeoisie accordingly sought ways to raise its share of the net product by an attack on “entitlements,” as they would be called by today’s “Conservatives,” namely the tenants’ “moiety” and the laborers’ free-market wage levels.
Intermediate Bond-Servitude Forms: Convicts, Apprentices and “Maids-for-wives”
For some time before 1622, the adventurers and planters had taken measures to secure supplies of non-tenant laborers on conditions more favorable than those provided under the Virginia wage scale. For this purpose they turned their attention to those segments of the English population most vulnerable to such superexploitation, namely prisoners, impoverished youth, and women of the laboring classes.
In the spring of 1617, the Privy Council issued a warrant for the transport of a number of “malefactors” then being held in custody; the king specified that they be sent to Virginia and nowhere else.98 In October 1619, the king supplied the Company with another one hundred “divers dissolute persons,” who were to be transported as “servants” to Virginia. The exact terms on which they were to serve in the colony were not specified, but it was anticipated that the conditions would not be agreeable to the prisoners. This feeling was, it has been said, all the stronger on account of the fact that the group of prisoners included a number of Irish persons captured in their own country in the course of the brutal English plantation of Ulster.99 Their disaffection caused some delay in the execution of the order for their transportation, as Edwin Sandys explained in speaking of the intended shipment of the first fifty of these persons:
[T]hey could not goe in lesse than fower Shipps, for feare they beinge many together may drawe more unto them and so muteny and carry away the Ship, which would stand [cost] the Company fowre thousand pounds.100
The records of the Privy Council proceedings are sprinkled with orders for the surrender of imprisoned convicts to Company authorities for transportation to Virginia as “servants,” on the condition that “they retourne not again into England,” on pain of death.101 For instance:
• 13 July 1617: Chris Potley, Roger Powell, Sapcott Molineux and Thomas Chrouchley, prisoners at Oxford jail; and George Harrison, convicted of stealing a horse, prisoner at Hartford jail.
• March and November 1618: William Lambe and James Stringer, respectively, prisoners at Newgate prison.
• May 1622: Daniell Frank,102 William Beare and John Ireland, prisoners at White Lion jail in Southwark.
• Also in 1622: James Wharton, convicted of picking pockets, in Norfolk; and John Carter of London, convicted of horse-stealing, but for whom injustice was tempered with mercy since it was doubtful “whether the horse was stolen or not.”
Still, as Sandys had warned in 1619, there was a critical mass where further congregation of such deportees meant mutiny. Therefore, whilst they might supplement the labor supply, they were not to be the main source of it, and thus were not the means of achieving a general reduction of labor costs in the colony.
The “Duty boys”
In the 1618–22 period, considerable effort was made to recruit “vagrant” children – mainly, but not exclusively, in London – to work in Virginia. In autumn 1618, the London Common Council and the Virginia Company agreed upon the “taking up” of one hundred homeless boys and girls, aged eight to sixteen, for shipment to Virginia.103 A year later the Company congratulated itself and the city fathers on the successful delivery of the full one hundred, minus “such as dyed on the waie.”104 The Company then proposed a renewal of the collaboration, with the object of sending another one hundred youths, but this time they were to be “twelve years old and upward.”105
The program encountered opposition on the part of the youth who were its objects. Two months after the second plan was proposed, it was discovered “that among that number there are divers unwilling to be carryed thither [to Virginia].” Special care was taken that the “troublemakers” who sought to obstruct the program were included among those selected for transport, but they were to be taken to jail for punishment before their departure.106
Fifty such young persons were delivered in Virginia in May of 1620 on board the ship Duty; thereafter, apprentices brought on the same sort of program were called “Duty boys.”107
From the standpoint of labor costs, the apprentice role for which these “Duty boys” were destined had obvious advantages for the plantation bourgeoisie. Apprentices were bound to serve seven years, the common apprentice term in England. The cost of getting them to Virginia was “Three pounds a peece for the Transportation and forty shillings a peece for their apparrell.”108 In addition to this outlay, the expenditure for their equipment and food for the first year of the term was not likely to amount to more than another £5 sterling, since their own labor provided their own food and most of their other necessities, except clothing, bedding, metal products and other manufactured goods supplied from England. The cost of maintaining the apprentice declined to practically nothing in subsequent years of the term.109 The apprentice received no wages except his board and keep; thus the cost of the apprentice’s labor, assuming the worker survived for the full term, came to less than thirty shillings per year.
The annual output of the apprentice in the period 1619–23 averaged 712 pounds of tobacco,110 which would yield £44 10s., at 15d.,111 in Virginia and £106 16s., at 36d.,112 in London. The Virginia “planter” would thus get for his tobacco in one year thirty times its annualized labor cost. The use of apprentice youth as a labor supply, however, involved certain negative features. The planters expressed a preference for men “such as have been brought up to labor & those between 20 & 30 yeres of age”113 rather than inexperienced and less muscular teenagers such as the apprentices mostly were.114
Yet each of these drawbacks carried its own partial offset. If the youthful apprentice was not so strong as a mature adult, he was perhaps more tractable for that reason. If the apprentice died before the end of his term, then at least he would not be around to raise the cost of labor by becoming first a tenant-at-halves and then a free farm owner.
There remained one unmitigated handicap in the apprentice arrangement, so far as the needs of the capitalist plantation development in Virginia was concerned. Under English custom and law, even the parish or country apprentice was bound to one particular employer in a one-to-one relationship. It was a relationship equally binding on each party and the apprentice could not be sold to or bought from another employer.115
A new opportunity for venture capital: “maids-for-wives”
A third direct and indirect source of labor power that was unpaid was sought by the importation of women. As early as 1618, enterprising men were specializing in this labor supply service. This was revealed in two arrests made in the fall of that year. One man, Owen Evans,116 who was a messenger for the king, ranged over three counties of southeastern England “pressing maidens” for “His Majesty’s service for the Bermudas and Virginia.” Paying four shillings to one man, five to another, twelve pence to third, and threatening them with hanging for refusal to comply (so they testified), Evans ordered women to be taken up in the king’s name and delivered to him at Sherborne in Dorset. He bore a badge of authority from the King’s Chamber which, it was later said, was validly his, but which he used illegally in this business. As many as forty women were said to have fled the one parish of Ottery in Devon to escape this frightful form of class and sex oppression. They must have had to flee to points far distant, because young women from adjoining parishes were also taking flight in terror. Jacob Crystie of Ottery sold his daughter to Evans for twelve pence. A member of the local establishment paid Evans ten shillings to dissuade him from further oppression of the Ottery parish. Evans was finally arrested and sent back to London, being treated in due course with the deference reserved for personal agents of the king. What if anything in the way of punishment was given to Evans for this crime, our historians do not tell us.
Another man, named Robinson, forged a commission for himself and used it “to take up rich Yeomen’s daughters to serve his majesty for breeders in Virginia” unless they were ransomed by their parents and friends. He was apprehended, tried, hanged, drawn and quartered for counterfeiting the Great Seal.117
Subsequently, bourgeois gentlemen and aristocrats made the trade respectable and profitable: respectable, on the ground of “making of the men feel at home in Virginia”;118 and profitable, by operating it as a Virginia Company monopoly. Of 650 persons sent by the Company to Virginia between August 1619 and April 1620 (see Table 4.1), ninety were “Young maids to make wives for so many of the former tenants.”119 This item is included in a “Noate of Shipping, Men and Provisions Sent to Virginia”; women, it seems, were counted as “provisions.” The Company in June 1620 projected a plan for sending one hundred more “maids-for-wives,” in a total of eight hundred emigrants.120 On 20 December 1621, the Warwick arrived in Virginia with a cargo that the Company’s accompanying letter advertized as “an extraordinary choice lot of thirty-eight maids for wives.”121 Investors were apparently encouraged by this bright aspect of an otherwise not very promising general business outlook. In November 1621, a subsidiary joint stock for trading in “maids-for-wives” to Virginia was established in the amount of £800 sterling. Virginia Company leaders Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton patriotically headed the list of investors with subscriptions of £200 each.122
The shipment of “one widow and eleven maids for wives” on board the George in the late summer of 1621 was accompanied by a Company letter to the Colony Council regarding the disposal of the cargo.123 That letter, when considered together with other records of the time, helps to outline the economic aspects of this branch of business, as well as to suggest inferences regarding the life of the women traded. The George women were to be sold at “120 lb waight of the best leafe Tobacco.” The price of the Warwick women who arrived in Virginia a month later was increased to 150 pounds of tobacco, partially on the grounds of the declining price of tobacco in England.124 It was provided that the total payment on the George’s twelve would have to be equal to 12 times 120 pounds of tobacco, and that, therefore, “if any of them dye (before sale was made) that proportion must be advanced to make it uppon those that survive.”125 Some of the business had to be done on credit, judging by an order of the Virginia General Court of 2 May 1625 requiring “Debtors for Maids” to pay up or face punitive action by the Court.126
Such problems arose despite the effort made to limit the purchasing rights to men of substance. While allowing love its dominion, the Company authorities directed that it operate within the limits of sound business practice. Accordingly, the Company kept one eye on the improvement of prospects; it promised the women that they would not be married off to poor men, “for we would have their condition so much better as multitudes will be allured thereby to come unto you.”127 Therefore, a line was drawn on eligible men for wiving: the Company would “not have those maides deterred and married to servants but only to such freemen or tenants as have meanes to maintain them.”128
There is evidence of resentment on the part of poor men on account of the deprivation they had to endure because of this pounds-shillings-and-pence approach to the woman question. Thomas Niccolls expressed indignation at this discrimination in a letter he sent to England.129 Women were so “well sold,” he said, that a poor man could never get possession of one. Poor tenants, he wrote, desperately needed wives, for “they depart this world in their own dung for want of help in their sickness.” Furthermore, Niccolls could not see why women should not
be bound to serve the Company for a certain number of years whether they married or not, [since] all the multitude of women [do is] nothing but to devour the food of the land without doing any day’s deed whereby any benefit [may] arise wither to the company or the Country.
To speed the turnover of their capital, the stockholders offered a special inducement to prospective customers: “you may assure such men as marry those women that the first servants sent over by the Company shall be consigned to them.”130
Niccolls’s comment and Company promises to the contrary notwithstanding, these women were not absolutely insured against becoming “servants.” In its instructions, the Company said that they might “be servants … in case of extremetie.” Extremity of what exact sort is left to our own inferences. Several years later, a case came before the Virginia General Court concerning a woman who had been brought over to the colony to serve as a wife. But the marriage plan had aborted “because of some dislike between them,” and “it was agreed” that the woman was to be a servant to her former fiancé for two years.131 The Virginia census of 1624–25 showed that of the 222 English women in the colony, forty-six were propertyless workers. How many of this unmarried group had originally come to be sold as wives, and how many came as girl apprentices, or by some other particular arrangement, is not known.132
The same census showed that there were 107 Virginia-born English children in Virginia. This statistic points up the special contribution to be had from the importation of women in connection with the reduction of labor costs, but Virginia births were not to furnish the quick solution sought by the tobacco plantation bourgeoisie. In fact, there was a contradiction between the woman’s role as child-bearer and as laborer. Her pregnancy, child-bearing and childcare responsibilities entailed an uncompensated expense and loss of labor time for the employer. The child would not reach working age during the mother’s term of service, and in any case the child was born free and not under any contractual obligation to the mother’s employer. For that reason, severe penalties were imposed upon servant women who became pregnant, or who risked becoming pregnant, and upon men (except the particular employer) who were thus involved with servant women.133 On the other hand, if a landholder wanted to establish an ongoing estate, male heirs must be produced of undoubted paternity. In those cases, one particular woman in the capacity of wife and mother was indispensable, in spite of the added expense at a time of rising labor costs, it being understood that this particular woman would not be available for common labor as a general rule.
A man could buy a wife, but he could not sell her. Once the investment was made, it dropped forever out of the sphere of circulation of capital, by the law of coverture. The investment could not be restored to its original money form by a return to the market; nor could it be used to settle outstanding debts or as collateral to meet needs for credit. This form of “property,” whatever the benefits to its possessor, clearly inhibited the free flow of capital. For these several reasons, therefore, the importation of women was not a means for reducing the general cost of labor to any degree commensurate with the fall in tobacco prices, which by 1622 was already a critical problem.
Sex Ratio and Economic Base: Virginia and New England
The maids-for-wives program may have contributed to a reduction of the sex ratio, but in the colony census of 1624–25 the sex ratio among adults was still nearly four men to one woman.134 Although it is not surprising to learn that the ratio of men to women in the earliest colonial settlements was high, the ratio in Virginia was significantly higher than it was in New England. In the four-year period 1620 to 1623, 212 persons left England for New England. Among the 203 identified by sex, the sex ratio was just over two to one.135 Among the adults on the first of these ships, the Mayflower, there were 56 men, 26 women, and 19 children.136
The contrast would prove to be more than momentary. In the years 1634 and 1635, among passengers embarking for Virginia, males outnumbered females by more than six to one. A similarly derived index for English emigrants going to New England in the years 1620 to 1638 indicated a rough ratio of 150, 60 men to 40 women.137 A tabulation by Russell R. Menard of eleven selected quantifying items, yields a weighted sex ratio of 338 for European immigrants to Maryland and Virginia for the period 1634 to 1707.138
This contrast with New England was a function of the differing relations of production in the two regions. Of the 5,190 bond-laborers shipped for continental Anglo-America from the port of Bristol between 1654 and 1686, New England took only 165, while Virginia took 4,924. The relatively insignificant proportion of bond-labor in New England reflected the fact that there the relations of production originally developed in the matrix of the family kinship group.139 In Virginia, where bond-servitude was the status of the great majority of European immigrants, family formation was inhibited because the laborers, being chattels, were legally barred from marrying. The retarding effect on family formation due to the bond-labor system is seen in the fact that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake the average age of female European immigrants, who were mainly bond-laborers, was 24.9 years at the time of the first marriage; the corresponding figure for native-born European-American women was 16.8 years.140
Tenantry, Wage Labor and Captain Nuce’s Plan
The laboring people in Virginia in the beginning of 1622 were predominately tenants, not convicts, wives, or apprentice youth. This is a fact of obvious importance in any effort to investigate the beginnings of the system of chattel bond-servitude as the basic form of labor in the Anglo-American plantation colonies. Since it deserves greater attention than most historians of the period have given to it, the matter merits some documentation here.141
Prior to 1622, most emigrants to Virginia were transported by the Virginia Company.142 The proportion of tenants among those sent by the Virginia Company in the 1619–21 period, and for whom we have a categorization in the records, was about 60 percent, that is, 860 out of 1,450 (see Table 4.1). If the 190 “maids for wives” are left out of the account, or if they are counted in the category into which they were inducted by marriage, the tenant proportion among these Company emigrants would amount to around 70 percent.
There is much evidence in the records to indicate that in this period the proportion of tenants was as high, or possibly higher, among emigrants dispatched from England by separate, non-Company, enterprisers. The best and most complete, if not the only, substantial record of a non-Company plantation which has come down from that time is that of Berkeley Hundred, in the form of the papers of John Smyth of Nibley, one of the four incorporators of that enterprise.143 These documents present a picture of the employment relation of those engaged for service in Berkeley Hundred. The terms of employment are written, specific for each individual (or family), and they are formalized before the emigrant leaves England. The contracted arrangement is mutually binding on both parties; the person employed is bound to service to this employer only; his or her contract is not “assignable” to another employer.
The list includes thirty-four men sent to Berkeley Hundred in September 1619 to serve under plantation manager John Woodleefe, apparently as tenants, excepting two men sent apparently to serve only in their trade of joiner.144 Beside each tenant’s name is the term to be served, in years. The shortest term is three years; all of the “assistants” to Woodleefe are in that category, and that term is most common (nine cases) among the other twenty-eight tenants. There was one serving the longest term, of eight years. Four of Woodleefe’s five assistants were assigned 50 acres each; the fifth, one of the two non-tenants, was a skilled artisan (one of the two joiners), who was to receive a percentage of the business. Of the twenty-eight rank-and-file tenants, eighteen were assigned 30 acres each, two were assigned 40 acres each, and the single smallest allotment was 15 acres. Five of these persons were put on a supplemental wage (in some cases paid in whole or part in advance, in England), apparently in consideration of special expected services in trades such as sawyer, cooper, gunsmith, etcetera. Thirteen of these men, including five who were tradesmen, were paid individual earnest money and promised family maintenance money before leaving England. They were engaged as tenants for from three to seven years, and were assigned land, most commonly 30 acres.145
Table 4.1 Shipments of persons to Virginia by the Virginia Company and by separate planters, 1619–21
| Total | Tenants | Servantsa | Apprentices | Maids | |
| Sent by Company | l,450b | ||||
| for own use | 1,060 | 860 | 100 | - | 100 |
| for former tenants | 390 | - | 100 | 200 | 90 |
| for separate plantations | 221c | ||||
| Sent by separate planters (estimate) | 750d |
Source: Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols. edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury [Washington, DC, 1906–35]), 3: 313.
a. The Company records distinguish between tenants and servants among those shipped by the Company, but not in the case of those shipped for the separate plantations.
b. The Company figures include some persons who were to have gone, but did not; and others who died en route. Yet a comparison with Alexander Brown’s figures (The First Republic in America [Boston and New York, 1898], this page, this page, this page, this page) shows the proportion sent by the Company and by the separate planters to have been as presented in this table.
c. In the 1619–20 period, of the 611 sent to private plantations 221 were transported by the Company.
d. The ratio of privately shipped to Company-shipped persons remained constant at about 45 per cent during this period. (See Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company [New York, 1932], this page.) For the 800 shipped by the Company in 1620–21, 360 thus would have been shipped for private planters. This number plus the 390 sent by separate planters in 1619–20 equals 750.
A year later, in September 1620, seven persons entered into a contract to go to Berkeley Hundred as tenants.146 This agreement is remarkable in that there is no time set for the expiration of the agreement; indeed, reference is made to a continued arrangement of the “heires” on both sides. Still, two things are clear: (1) these tenants are to have two-thirds of the corn and wheat they raise, and half of everything else they produce; and (2) there is no provision for a “setting over,” “assigning,” or “selling” of the tenants to another employer.
These papers show the employers as paying the cost of the transportation of the employees; the laboring emigrants are not obligated to “pay back” this expenditure by servitude or otherwise. The contract agreed to by Robert Coopy, a smith, carpenter and turner, in September 1619 is seen by A. E. Smith as the “first genuine servant’s indenture.”147 But Coopy’s arrangement was obviously quite different from that of the “indentured servant” that was to be. Although the only recompense appears to have been “to maintayne him with convenient [appropriate] diet and apparell meet for such a servant,” it is equally provided that, at the end of his three-year term, he is to be given 30 acres of land, and is “to enjoy all the freedomes and privileges of a free man”; that is to say, within three years Coopy would be a self-employed owner of a 30-acre farm.148 More fundamental, Coopy was not a chattel, alienable to any person to whom his employer might “assign” him; and his right to a land grant was written into the contract.149
The significant aspect of the Robert Coopy document is that it is the earliest evidence in the record that rationalizes transferring the burden of a transatlantic transportation costs from the employer to the laborer. It is perhaps also worth noting that Robert Coopy did not actually come to Virginia, but stayed in England.150 Whether or not he reneged on the arrangement on account of the obnoxious uniqueness of its wageless feature is not revealed in the record.
While the documentation presented here is not exhaustive, there is nothing in the record, or in the argumentation based on it, to negate its clear implication. The typical form of labor in Virginia at the beginning of 1622 was that of the tenant, “the planters being,” as Alderman Johnson said in reviewing the period 1619–22, “most of them Tenants at halves.”151
A new proposal for getting “hands at Cheaper rates”
The relationship of tenant-at-halves interposed limits to the recoupment of profits by the reduction of labor costs. The tenant relationship also involved a relatively important and less reducible cost of the initial installation in Virginia. Tenants transported by the Virginia Company, for instance, were to be provided with “Apparell, Victuall, Armes, Tooles and Household Implements,” the cost of which, delivered with the tenants in Virginia, came to a total of £20 sterling, of which only £6 sterling represented the cost of the transportation of the person, the remainder being for the purchase and freight of the equipment and supplies.152
A wage worker, on the other hand, was provided only with transportation, a cost amounting, as in the case of the person of the tenant, to £6 sterling.153 But once in Virginia, the wage worker was entitled to wages set by the Colony Council several times as great as those of England (see Table 4.2). Even as the Colony Council was establishing that schedule of wages, in January 1621/2, it was telling London that the advancement of the work was hindered by a lack of “hands at so Cheape a rate as cannot yett possibly bee.”154 Although Captain Thomas Nuce was one of the council members who signed their names to the proclamation of wages that January, four months later he was moving for a reconsideration.155 He had been sent to the colony to superintend the revival of the Company’s enterprises, but he found the prevailing wage rates an obstacle. With patriotic discretion, Nuce chose for illustrative contrast not the wage scale of the Mother Country, but that of Catholic lands. Virginia, he said, where “wee pay iii s [three shillings] a day for the labor of a man who hath no other waie but to digg and dealve,” must not be confused with “Italie, Spain, or ffraunce: countries plentiful and prosperous: where are thousands of women and children and such ydle people to be hyred for i d [a penny] or ii d [two pence] a day.”
Table 4.2 Comparative day wages in Virginia, January 1622, and in Rutland County, England, in 1610–1634
| with meals | without meals | ||||
| Virginia | Englanda | Virginia | England | ||
| Master carpenter | 3s.b | 8d. | 4s. | 14d. | |
| Helperc | 2s. 3dd | 4d. | 3s. | 6d. | |
| Master bricklayer | 3s. | 5d. | 4s. | 9d. | |
| Helper | 2s. 3d. | 3d. | 3s. | 7d. | |
| Master sawyer | 3s. | 6d. | 4s. | 12d. | |
| Helper | 2s. 3d. | - | 3s. | - | |
| Master mason | 3s. | 8d. | 4s. | 12d. | |
| Helper | 2s. 3d. | - | 3s. | - | |
| Master joiner | 4s. | 6d. | 5s. | 12d. | |
| Helper | 3s. | 4d. | 3s. 9d. | 8d. | |
| Master tailor | 2s. | 4d. | 3s. | 8d. | |
| Helper | 1s. 6d. | - | 2s. 9d. | - | |
| Farm laborer | 2s. | [40s./year] | 3s. | 8d. | |
a. English wages are for spring and summer; fall and winter wages were one-fourth to one-third less.
b. 1s. equals 12d.
c. “Helper” is intended here as a generic for “apprentice” (England) and “labourer in husbandry” (Virginia).
d. The Virginia helper’s wage was set at one-fourth less than that of the respective master tradesman.
Sources: For England: James E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 7 vols. in 8 (London, 1886–1902), 6:691–3. For Virginia: Virginia Colony Council, Settlement of the Wages of Tradesmen in Virginia, 14 January, 1621/22, (Records of the Virginia Company of London [4 vols. edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury, Washington, DC, 1906–35], 3: 589–90). See also wages of farm laborers paid by the year, in G. E. Russell, ed., Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, 1610–1620, Camden Society Publications, 3rd ser., vol. 53 (London, 1936), pp. xxviii-xxix.
Two things were obvious: first, the decisive element in the cost of labor in the colony at that time was the tenant. Second, given the irrevocability of the bourgeois commitment to the tobacco plantation monoculture in the situation of everlastingly low tobacco prices, wage labor was not to be the alternative to the tenant.
In the course of discussions within the Virginia Assembly on the problem of how “yett” to get “hands at so Cheape a rate” as would satisfy the employers, Captain Thomas Nuce, having these two above-mentioned imperatives in mind, advanced a plan that received enthusiastic endorsement. In January, 1622, the Governor and Council forwarded that proposal to London:
Wee have heerin closed sent you a project of Capt newces which if you shalbe pleased to take likinge of, it is thought here will yeelde you, a more certain proffitt then [than] your Tenantes to halfes, which beinge proposed to the generall Assemblie, was by them well approved of.156
In reply the Company promised to give careful consideration to the “project of Capt Newce concerning the altering of the Condicons with our Tenants,” especially because it was recommended by the Virginia Assembly.157 A few months later the Company returned to the subject, and assured the colony officials that the Company was more than prepared to send Virginia employers “servants instead of tenants” and to do so “in a manner very advantageable to you.”158 A year after the Virginia Governor and Council had initiated the proposal in the interest of “a more certain profitt,” the Virginia Council urged the question again:159
Wee conceave that if you would be pleased to Chaunge the Conditione of Tenants into servants for future Supplies, … your revenues might be greatly improved.
In the spring of 1623 Alderman Johnson declared that the Colony officers had all desired to reduce their tenants to servants.160