English historical experience had shown that the reduction of non-proletarian laboring people to proletarians, and the creation of a large surplus of labor were the conditions necessary for bringing about a general lowering of labor costs. The essence of the matter was shown to be the placing of the laborers in a position of great and growing dependency upon capitalist employment under conditions in which many workers compete for relatively few jobs. The English bourgeoisie had accomplished both these steps in one operation, the enclosures, during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Virginia in the 1620s the starting point was to be the destruction of tenancy. But whereas the enclosures involved the replacement of one hundred peasant tillers of the soil with one shepherd, the mere transformation of tenants into non-tenants did not involve any increase in labor productivity. Therefore, the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie, unable to create a labor surplus above labor demand, sought by other means to achieve a condition of extreme dependency of the laboring people.
The first requisite for the successful completion of the general offensive against the rights of the laboring classes that reduced them to chattels in Virginia was the maintenance of social control. The Anglo-American bourgeoisie did not need to be told that they were dealing with people who were not to be taken for granted in such a matter. The rebellious resistance of the English freehold and copyhold tenants in the sixteenth century had produced a large peasant revolt in the Midlands in the very year Jamestown was founded. Fresher in the minds of the rulers was the meltdown of the regime of Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall in the face of colonists determined to defy attempts to restrict the planting of tobacco.1
Open military dictatorship was over; the colony was now governed by the newly created General Assembly, the Colony Council and General Court. Reliance would still be placed on English mercenary veterans of wars in Ireland and the Netherlands, not only to command in warfare against the native population but also for the maintenance of social control in the interest of the tobacco bourgeoisie. The fulfillment of this social control function was favored by four special conditions prevailing in the colony at this time.
First of these was the appalling death rate. The record is filled with testimony of the dying, the doomed and the fearful, about the insufficiency of food, clothing and housing; and about the perils of the period of “seasoning,” the first year of acclimatization. Half of the six hundred colonists living in Virginia at the beginning of 1619 were still living in March 1625. But only one out of every six of the new immigrants who came during that period was alive at the end of it. An influx of nearly five thousand persons increased the population by less than five hundred (see Table 5.1). By modern standards, the death rate in England in these years was very high, being about 2.7 percent per year;2 but it was not such as to interfere with the continuity of the social pattern, as happened at the time of the great plague of the fourteenth century. In the Virginia colony, however, the death rate in this period was seven times that of England. In such a small, far-distant colony, the sheer physical annihilation of property owners implicit in these figures inevitably overwhelmed the orderly procedures of property transfers and afforded exceptional opportunities for illegal expropriations, including the “expropriation” of laboring people.3 From the standpoint of social control, mere survival in these circumstances became the overriding concern for many of the working people, and the question of rebellion or social rights came to be of lesser concern for the moment.
The second special condition affecting the bourgeoisie’s ability to maintain social control was the external contradiction represented by the Indians’ resistance to massive, rapid and aggressive English encroachment upon the land. On the one hand, this contradiction made ruling-class social control more difficult, since it presented the laboring people of the colony with a means of frustrating the bourgeois pressure on their living standards and social rights, by abandoning the colony and joining one or the other of the nearby Indian communities. This was more than an abstract possibility. Instances of English colonists fleeing to the Indians are found throughout the records of the early colonial period. They went despite the fact that recapture could mean death “by hanginge, shootinge and breakinge uppon the wheele.”4 The death penalty was not always imposed, however, as the following entries in the record for 20 October 1617 seem to show:
Table 5.1 Approximate number of English emigrants to Virginia and the death rate among them in the Company period (omitting May 1618 to November 1619)
| 1607-10a | 1610-18b | 1619-24c | |
| Shipped from England | 640 | 1,125 | 5,009 |
| Survivors in Virginia | 65 | 900 | |
| Total in Virginia, start of period | 1,191 | 5,909 | |
| Alive at end of period | 65 | 600 | 1,218 |
| Dead en route or in Virginia | 575 | 591 | 4,691 |
| Death toll | 90% | 45% | 80% |
| Annual death rate | 49.5% | 8.2% | 26.4% |
| Death rate in England | 2.5% | 2.6% | 2.1% |
Sources: Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York, 1898). pp. 129, 285, 612; Charles E. Hatch, The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607–1624 (Williamsburg, 1957), pp. 3, 7, 5; Irene W. D. Hecht, ‘The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic History,’ William and Mary Quarterly 30:65–92 (1973), p. 70; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871, (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p.532. Cf. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), pp. 134–6.
a. December 1606 to prior to May 23, 1610, 3.42 years.
b. May 1610 to May 1618, 8 years.
c. November 1619 to February 1624/25, 5.17 years.
Geo White pardoned [by Governor Argall] for running away to the Indians with his arms & ammunition which facts deserve death according to the express articles & laws of this colony in that case provided and established and for which offenses he stands liable to censure of a marchalls Court.5
Henry Potter for Stealing a Calf & running to Indians death [blank space in manuscript].
On the other hand, the increase of immigration worked to the advantage of the plantation bourgeoisie in dealing with the flight of laborers. Expansion of the colony permitted the development of an English institutional superstructure as an inhibitor to self-banishment in a strange country. A second factor was more immediate. While the Indians had been able to absorb a score or so of English left at Roanoke in 1587, the level of development of the productive forces among the Indians, and the need to avoid the strange epidemic diseases of the English, set rather close limits on the numbers of English defectors who could be absorbed into the Indian settlements. English national consciousness aside, the great inpouring of colonists made impossible a general resort to escape from bourgeois oppression by going to the Indians.
Third among these special conditions facilitating the attack by the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie against the social status of the laboring people in the colony was the intensified economic pressure on the laboring people in England that occurred just at this time, and that might be assumed to predispose more workers to consider emigration than would have been the case at other times. As I have previously noted,6 in England real wages had pursued a generally downward course since the close of the fifteenth century. The situation became particularlay acute with the onset of the severe depression in England’s chief industry, cloth making, in the period 1620–25. In 1624 there were still twelve thousand cloth workers out of work in England.7
Finally, there was the fact of the complete and utter dependence of the colony upon England for supplies, especially of clothing and metal products but also, to a considerable extent, of food and beverages. Not a nail, let alone a plow or a saw, but had to be brought a long sea voyage from England. Not a requested ball of yarn, let alone a coat, a shirt, or a bit of bedding, not a hoe, axe or pail, but must be waited for for six months at least to come from England. This was a major factor in the maintenance of social control, even when the greatest provocation to revolt was being brought to bear on the working people. If they were to succeed, the situation would not be as in England, where there were means of production to be taken over in the form of manufacturing facilities. This dependence upon English supplies enhanced the power of the bourgeoisie, the governor and Colony Council members, the plantation owners, the Cape Merchant in charge of the Company’s “magazine,” and free-trading ship captains relative to the “dependent classes.”
The Emergent Colony Elite
The basis for the rise of an elite of rich Virginia planters was laid at the very outset of the Edwin Sandys regime, in 1619; it is seen outlined in the famous “Instructions” issued to George Yeardley upon his appointment as Governor of Virginia that April.8 For every £12½ share of Virginia stock, “separate planter” capitalists were granted free title to one hundred acres of land, and when that land was “sufficiently peopled,” an additional amount was to be given to the stockholder equal to the original amount. The term “sufficiently peopled” is not defined. The four incorporators of Berkeley Hundred, for example, jointly purchased forty-five shares and were given a patent for 4,500 acres of Virginia land, the price being equivalent to 2½ shillings per acre.9 Furthermore, the separate planters were to benefit from the “headright” principle under which they were to be compensated for transporting laboring people to Virginia at the rate of fifty acres per “head.” Later, when the next sections of land were surveyed, the planters were to receive an equal additional amount, provided they had sufficiently peopled the first grant. The capitalist was entitled to the headright land even if the person whose passage he had paid died before the ship ever reached Virginia, or starved or died of disease in Virginia, as most of them did before their three-year term was completed. Such a provision would seem designed to exacerbate the shortage of food and other supplies in the colony. Six pounds sterling invested in supplies and the freight for them to be used by laborers in Virginia could yield a return only if the laborers lived and produced commodities for the capitalist, which were then sold at a profit. But the same amount invested in getting a laborer on board a ship bound for Virginia brought the capitalist a patent on fifty acres of Virginia land. Of course, land needed laborers, and laborers needed provisions, and there was a point beyond which a stinting of supplies would prove counterproductive. But the “headright” privilege tended to push the contradiction to the limit in terms of maximum profit for the capitalist and minimum provisions for the laboring people.
The new governor, Yeardley, who had served as Acting Governor in 1616–17 and was already, before his appointment, the owner of two hundred acres by virtue of his two Company shares, was granted two thousand more acres in appreciation of his “long and faithful service.” Those lands were to be held by him, his heirs and assigns forever. Three thousand acres, to be called “the Governor’s Land,” were set aside “in the best and most convenient place,” and one-fourth of the produce of them was to belong to the Governor in his official capacity. A similar one-fourth share of the output on twelve thousand acres, called “Company lands,” was to be apportioned among four or five other colony officers,10 such as the Treasurer, the Secretary, and the Vice-Admiral, and for payments to lesser functionaries. One-twentieth of the total product of the Company lands was to be provided for the services of overseers of the Company tenants and other laboring people, and for compensating those who were responsible for dividing the product according to the proper shares.
While concentration of land ownership at this time was less than it would become by the end of the seventeenth century,11 it was still significant. The land patent rolls for the year 1626 in Virginia show that 20 percent of the patents, comprising those of two hundred acres and more, accounted for 50 percent of the patented acreage. More than half the patents were for one hundred acres or less, but they accounted for only one-fourth of the total acreage.
This phenomenon was by no means merely the working out of the natural processes of capitalist competition whereby the advantage generally accrues to those who are operating with the largest resources of capital, or who benefit from the development of new techniques or instruments of labor. Those favorably placed in the colony government used their legal authority to secure special advantages for themselves.12 They were able to succeed each other in various high offices, including that of Governor; acting as the Colony Council, they determined the local laws and controlled the public stores of food, arms and gunpowder. They also commanded the special bodies of armed men who enforced “order,” and they controlled the colony’s relations with the mother country and with the Indians. Acting as the Virginia General Court, Colony Council members dispensed judgments as harsh as they pleased.13 In these ways, the special difficulties of colonial life, coupled with the crass partiality of the Colony Council and the Virginia General Court, placed the tenants at an extreme disadvantage in contending with the bourgeois attack upon their rights and status.
“Renting Out” of Tenants
The operative principle for using the shortage of supplies, whether absolute or relative, to undermine the position of the tenants is perfectly exemplified by the cases of the one hundred tenants sent at the Company’s expense on the Bona Nova, who arrived in Virginia on 4 November 1619 to work “under the Comand” of Captain Weldon and Lieutenant Whitaker. The terms under which these men had been engaged to come to Virginia as tenants were explicitly and emphatically published by the King’s Council for Virginia:
Every man transported into Virginia, with intent there to inhabit, as Tenants to the Common land of the Company, or to the publike land, shall be freely landed there at the charge of the Company: And shall be furnished with provisions of victual for one whole year next after his arrival, as also of Cattle: And with apparell, weapons, tooles and implements, both of house and labour, for his necessary use. He shall enjoy the ratable moytie [half] of all the profits that shall be raised of the land on which he shall be Planted, as well Corne and Cattle, as other commodities whatsoever: the other halfe being due to the Owners of the land.14
But a week after their arrival in Virginia, the Governor and Colony Council wrote the authorities in London of a different arrangement that had been made:
It was thought expedient by the governor and Counsell to advise the said two gentlemen [Weldon and Whitaker] to rent out the greatest part of their people to some honest and sufficient men of the Colonie till Christmas Come twelve month for iij [three] barrels of Indian Corne and 55 [pounds] waight of tobacco a man.15
This manner of proceeding occasioned, as Weldon reported, “no small discontent among my whole Company [of tenants].16 Not only did it involve the chattel-like transfer of tenants from one employer to another without the consent of the persons transferred, it also carried with it a drastic reduction of their prospective income from that which they had been promised as tenants-at-halves. According to contemporary authorities,17 these tenants might normally be expected to produce by the end of that year of service from twelve to thirty-two barrels of corn and 250 to 1,000 pounds of tobacco, of which they would be entitled to a half-share. To be required to labor the full year for three barrels of corn and 55 pounds of tobacco was clearly oppressive.
As to who the lucky “sufficient men” were who were to have the services of these tenants assigned to them, there is no doubt that colony officials were prime beneficiaries of the policy, and of similar appropriations of tenants subsequently. John Rolfe, writing to England,18 called attention to the
many complaints against the Governors, Captaines and Officers in Virginia: for buying and selling or to be set over from one to another for yearly rent, was held in England a thing most intolerable, or that tenants or servants should be put from their places, or abridged their Covenants, was so odious that the very report thereof brought a great scandall to the generall action.
The colony authorities justified the “renting out” of the tenants on the ground that they had come ill-provisioned, having only meal for food, and of that only enough for five and a half months, possibly less.19 Captain Weldon defended his compliance with the arrangement on the same grounds, inadequate food supplies, and added that instead of the promised three suits of apparel for each of his tenants, there were only two, of which one was unserviceable for winter wear.20 Furthermore, he said, there were only “5 iron pots & 1 small kettle for 50 men.” Of “butter Cheese rice oatmeale or any other English victuall” there was none at all.
Yet, the record shows that there was no shortage of food in Virginia in that year. Colony Secretary John Pory wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton in September 1619 that Virginia was enjoying “a marvelous plenty, suche as hath not bene since our first coming into the land.”21 The ground was so fertile, he said, that with less cultivation than was required in Europe, “we shall produce miracles out of this earth.” Cattle, hogs and goats, he said, grew larger in Virginia than in England, and they multiplied rapidly. He spoke of the general prosperity based on tobacco, noting that Governor Yeardley was the most prosperous person of all. The labor of the tenants, Pory said, was the most valuable asset of the colony, but he noted that the employer had to pay for the tenants’ “armes, apparell, & bedding; and for their transportation, and casuall both at sea & for their first year comonly at lande also.”
In an exchange of charge and countercharge with Captain Weldon two years later, the Virginia Company in London condemned the captain for his “renting out” of the tenants, and said that contrary to the claims of Weldon and the colony authorities, the Bona Nova invoices showed that the tenants had been supplied with one pound of meat a day for the first year.22
John Rolfe, who had preceded Pory as Colony Secretary, remained an active correspondent with persons in England specially interested in Virginia affairs. In January 1620 he reported to Edwin Sandys that toward the end of the previous August, Yeardley had exchanged victuals for “20 and odd” African laborers, men and women, who had been brought to Virginia in a “Dutch man of Warr.”23 The readiness to trade victuals for these workers, as Professor Morgan first pointed out, cannot be squared with the plea of a food shortage being advanced by the Governor and Colony Council, but it would be consistent with a policy of reducing labor costs by inducing an oversupply of laborers relative to the amount of food that would be available to them.24
Great significance attaches to the reaction of the Company to this “renting out” of its tenants, the violation of their contract rights, and their consequent impoverishment and deprivation of status. In order to appreciate that significance, it is helpful to contrast the Company’s reaction in 1618 when Governor Argall expropriated Company tenants to his own private use, and committed other abuses of authority. The very violations of public trust for private gain that the company charged against Argall were practiced on a greatly expanded scale by the governors and Council of Virginia in the 1619–24 period. They included appropriating “the Indian trade to yourselfe”;25 using the Company boats and sailors to conduct private affairs; taking tenants from Company service, and using them for private plantations of colony officials.26
The message sent to Argall regarding his alleged peculations ended with the stern promise that he would be called to account: “either you must think highly of yourselfe or very meanely of us … to do what you list [wish] … without being called to account.”27 They then acted; they dispatched a special set of instructions to the Governor designate, Lord Delaware, then en route to Virginia, to “cause him [Argall] to be shipped home in this ship … to satisfy the Adventurers by answering everything as shall be layde to his chardge.” Furthermore, to secure their interest in these proceedings, the Company instructed Delaware to “ceaze upon his [Argall’s] goods, as Tobacko and Furrs, whereof it is reported he hath gotten together great stoare to the Colonies prejudice, and so sendinge them to us to be in deposite till all matters be satisfyed.”28
The Company had the same authority to recall Governor Yeardley or his successor, Francis Wyatt, or any of the other “Captaines and Officers” denounced by Rolfe for violating tenants’ contracts. The grounds for such action were certainly present. Captain Weldon, however, was merely reprimanded for his complicity in the matter. He continued his Virginia career, being granted a large land patent there in 1622.29 Yeardley and the members of the Colony Council who had forced the transfer of the tenants were the recipients of no more rebuke than might be gleaned from the following paragraph in a letter from the Company to the Governor and Council, dated 25 July 1621:30
We cannot conceale from youe, that it is heare reported that contrary to the public faith given, not the sicke but the ablest men are lett out to hire and theire provisions converted to private uses. And where it is pretended this planting them with old planters is for theire health, they are so unmercifully used that it is the greatest cause of our tennant’s discontent; and though we hope this is not in all parts true, yet we cannot conceive such unwillingness to proceed in this worke should they not have some other grounds than is alledged: lett it therefore be your worke at the first general session of the Counsell to effect this business, and it shall be our care to provide for the well orderinge and furnishinge of them.
As that letter was being delivered to the Virginia colony, George Yeardley’s term in office was coming to an end. As Governor, Yeardley had had one hundred tenants assigned to him. When his successor, Wyatt, counted the tenants turned over to him, he could find only forty-six. The Colony Council inquired about the other fifty-four. Yeardley coolly declined to supply the missing number.31 To have done so would have required him either to return those he had taken or else to pay for the installation of a new supply from England. Seizure of Argall’s property had been ordered in a similar situation, but now things were different. In reporting on the Yeardley matter in January 1622, the Colony Council showed no disposition to press the issue. “Sir George Yeardley denieth to make them good,” it wrote to London, “[and] we have foreborne to Compell him thereunto, until we Receave your further directiones therein.”32 Apparently, these were not forthcoming. Yeardley remained a member of the Colony Council, restored no tenants to the Company, and continued to thrive in fortune and honors. Having come to the colony in 1610 with nothing but his sword, he lived sumptuously, and died in the second year of his second term as governor, possessed of a very large fortune.33
In the contrasting treatment of Argall and Yeardley, we can see measured the progress of the Company’s conversion to the cause of tobacco monoculture, to the liquidation of its own productive enterprises in the colony, and to its own transmutation into merely a monopolist of English tobacco imports. It further reveals the essential concord that had been reached by the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie for the overthrow of the tenantry.
Another way of bringing pressure on the Company tenant was found in the restriction of tobacco planting. Although official policy was generally ineffective and pursued with steadily diminished vigor,34 it none the less presented the employing class with opportunities for increasing the tenants’ dependency and making tenants more vulnerable to degradation of their status.
When Captain Weldon informed his tenants, those remaining to him after the “renting out” of half their original number, that their tobacco planting was to be restricted, they denounced the policy. They well understood that, completely dependent upon supplies from England as they were, a lack of the medium of exchange, tobacco, would render them destitute. In a report to London, Captain Weldon described the angry mood of these tenants:
[T]hey will with no patience endure to heare of it bitterly Complayninge that they have no other meanes to furnish themselves with aparell for the insuinge yeare but are likely as they say (and for ought I Cann see) to be starved if they be debarred of it.35
As a result of the tenants’ strong resistance, the Governor consented to an easing of the restriction, although not to its outright and formal revocation.
When Yeardley was succeeded by Francis Wyatt as governor in 1621, the policy of restricting tobacco planting was officially continued, with output to be limited to 112 pounds per year per laboring hand.36 To the extent that such a policy was effective, the burden fell with much greater impact upon the laboring tenants than upon the land-owning employer of a number of tenants; the tenant had only one half-share, but the employer would receive as many half-shares as he had tenants. The employer had an additional advantage since he, not the tenant, had the dividing of the product into the employer’s and the tenant’s shares.37
An altercation, involving corn not tobacco, occurred between tenant William Moch (variously spelled) and John Harvey, later to be governor, who was sent by the king and Privy Council to conduct an inquiry into Virginia affairs in 1624–25. Harvey summoned Moch and demanded to see his covenant papers, that is, the agreement under which Moch had been engaged as a tenant. The court minutes continue:
To which he [Moch] replyed, first lett me see my Corne[.] Capt. Harvey told him he scorned to keep back his Corne, Mutch replyed againe he would have his corne before he should see them. Then Capt. Harvey told him he was an idle knave, and that he could find in his heart to Cudgell his Coate. To which Mutch answered scornefully, alas Sir it is not in you.38
Although according to testimony Harvey then struck Moch a blow across the head with a truncheon, Moch continued to “give other provoking speeches” to the king’s appointed commissioner. Tenant Moch appears to have been a man of courage, and the record shows that he could have drawn strength from knowing that his stand represented the basic sentiments of the tenants generally.
The majority of the colonists were tenants, and, although they too were as hooked on tobacco as anyone else, they were determined to have their “moiety” of the crop, whatever the particular crop happened to be, and not to be “set over” from one landlord to another without their consent, nor to have their tenant status degraded to one of servitude. Like Captain Weldon’s tenants they would “with no patience endure to hear of it.” The tradition of Tyler and Ket was bred in their bones, and they had a deep sense of chartered “liberties, rights, and immunities” as their English birthright. Like tenant Moch in his retort to Commissioner Harvey, they could not believe that the landowners had the power to “cudgel the Coates” of the tenantry in a land where labor was destined to be in short supply for a long time to come.
Making One Crisis Serve Another
It was the external contradiction that precipitated the consummating crisis.39 On 22 March 1622, the Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy mounted what was to be in relative terms the strongest effort ever made after the founding of Virginia to halt the Anglo-American occupation of Indian lands, with the possible exception of the Yamassee War of 1715 in South Carolina. Powhatan had died in 1618, on the eve of the period of accelerated English colonization.40 His kinsman and successor Opechancanough watched the inpouring of immigrants – more in the next four years than had come during the four decades of Powhatan’s time. Yet the Indian guests who had accompanied the ill-fated Pocahontas to England had found the natives too numerous to count.41 Opechancanough saw them come and die like fish out of water; yet in greater numbers than ever they came, in ships carried by the winds. Tobacco had made them mad. They had guns and they took the land.
We cannot, of course, know the terms in which the discussion was carried on that united thirty-two tribes,42 but clearly there was much discussion of
[T]he dayly feare that posseste them that in time (the English) by … growing continually upon them, would dispossess them of this Country, as they had been formerly of the West Indies by the Spaniards.43
As Powhatan had succeeded in doing at Roanoke forty years before, and as O’Donnell and O’Neill had tried to do in the Tyrone War (1594–1603), Opechancanough and the Powhatan allies would strike to root out the English plantation.
The strategy against this enemy armed with guns and with cannon-bearing ships was to be that of the single massive blow and subsequent attrition. The English would later congratulate themselves on the partiality of their Divine Providence which, they said, stayed the hands of the Indian attackers;44 but limited success may simply have been the most that Opechancanough or any other general could have achieved in the circumstances. Even his enemies’ historians would concede that the attack was “planned by a master mind.”45 To hold together the alliance of thirty-two tribes for a long war against English firepower and the barrage of cheap commodities46 was an improbable prospect. On the other hand, the obvious ineptitude of the English colonists gave reasonable grounds to expect that from the single catastrophe they might be moved to abandon the colony47 and merge with the people of the country, as those of Roanoke had done, and a number of frequent defectors had done since the founding of the colony.48
The blow would be aimed at the colony’s most vulnerable point, its food supply. It was the time for planting corn, not harvesting it. Even when they had planted corn, the colonists had begrudged each acre and day taken from “their darling tobacco.”49 Close observers perhaps saw the corn shortage as a particular, rather than a general, one, with the haves exploiting the have-nots by virtue of the haves’ access to corn among the Indians.50 If so, the situation presented an opportunity to take advantage of class divisions within the colony. Finally, the day chosen for the attack was, as English preachers and defectors had informed them, the most solemn moment of the Christian calendar, when perhaps their mountainous guilts would sit most heavily on their English souls – the day they called Good Friday.
Viewed from history’s elevated ground, the strategy seems to have been foredoomed as far as the achievement of its maximum objective was concerned, even had the English not (as they claimed) received a last-minute warning from a Christianized Indian.51 The difference in the level of development of productive forces would give the English the ultimate, fundamental advantage. It seems probable, too, that Opechancanough underestimated the persistence of the English promoters of colonization, who scrupled not at a 25 percent death rate if a 25 percent profit could be made in the process.52 Whatever may have been the possibilities of strategic victory, the attack dealt the death blow to the Virginia Company, although the Company’s charter was not formally revoked until 1624. More important was the fact that the attack struck to the very foundation of the life of the colony. It intensified to an extreme degree the uncertainties of existence that resulted from economic dislocation, epidemic disease, the heavy assignments of watching and warding, the dependence upon trans-ocean supplies, and the vulnerability of property and production relations.53
Four hundred English colonists died on that day, one-third of the total population.54 All but a few of the settlements were abandoned, a major portion of the livestock was lost, and there was little prospect of growing corn in the colony during the remainder of the year. Only one-third of the survivors were men fit for work, and a large part of that potential labor was diverted to “watching and warding.” The colony authorities forbade the planting of corn near dwellings on the grounds that it provided a lurking place for hostile Indians. They added that, even if corn were planted, it was liable to be cut down or harvested by Indians.55 A similar problem was cited as a reason for forbidding individual colonists to hunt wild game in the woods; the hunter, it was claimed, would risk death or capture by Indians.56 However, the colony officials were equally concerned with preventing hungry and overworked English laborers from fleeing the colony to join the Indians. In March 1623, George Sandys reported on a group of eleven Company tenants for whom the Company had no provisions. Seven were sold or relocated. Of the disposition of the other four, Sandys wrote: “two of these … ran away (I am afraide to the Indians) and no doubt the other two would have consorted with their companions if sickness had not fettered them.”57 Without food supplies from the outside, the colony would famish.58 Widespread undernourishment rendered many colonists especially susceptible to the diseases brought from England by the eight hundred immigrants who came to Virginia in the year following the attack of 22 March 1622. According to the Company, six hundred of the emigrants themselves died in Virginia before the year was out.59
The dependence upon English supplies was made even more critical under these deprived circumstances. The record is filled with urgent, even anguished, appeals, public and private, for food to be sent from the Mother country. In their first letter to England after the Indian attack, the Virginia Governor and Colony Council asked for enough grain to sustain the colony for a year.60 Lady Wyatt, wife of the Governor, despite her favored position was not above writing to her sister in England requesting a bit of butter, bacon, cheese and malt, explaining that “since we & the Indians fell out we dare not send a hunting but with so many men as it is not worth their labour.”61
We may assume that the means and opportunity for writing letters to England describing the sufferings of the colonists, and appealing for assistance, were inversely proportional to the actual privations of the individual letter writers, and directly proportional to their prospects for special assistance from England. Letters by members of the laboring population of the colony are much more rare in the record than those written by members of the owning classes. The great majority of the laboring people could not write; and even if they could have written and had the means and opportunity to do so, they had no friends of substance in England to whom they might have appealed. Laboring people whose letters have been preserved seem to have been persons of “respectable” backgrounds, with significant connections in the middle class of the home country. Yet it is to these latter that we are indebted for what we have of an “inside” picture of the conditions of life as they pressed down on the laboring people of the colony. Frequent citations from these letters have given their authors a sort of immortality, which they doubtless would have traded for a little cheese had the choice been offered.
If the frequency of these letters in the record is indicative, the spring of 1623 was especially hard for the working people of the colony. Richard Frethorne was one of a group of men who arrived as laborers in Virginia about Christmas 1622.62 Young Frethorne had been sent under an arrangement concluded between his father and Robert Bateman, London merchant, member of Parliament, and prominent member of the Virginia Company.63
What Richard Frethorne wished for more than anything else was just about what Opechancanough wanted for him – a swift return to England. Even an utterly incapacitated person, begging from door to door, was better off in England, said Frethorne, than a plantation laborer in Virginia. And this, he wrote, was the feeling of all his fellow workers. What with the Indians’ hostility, the pervasive despondency, the scurvy and the “bloody fluxe,” the population of Martin’s Hundred, he said, had been reduced from 140 to only 22 in the past year. The surviving laborers were subsisting on one-third of a pint of meal per day.64 It was only ten weeks after his arrival in Virginia, and he was writing to Bateman asking to “be freed out of this Egypt.” Frethorne seemed to sense that his “right worshipfull” merchant sponsor might be unable to find it in his purse simply to pay for his immediate release from Virginia service and return passage to England. He sought, therefore, to appeal to Bateman’s business instincts. In lieu of immediate deliverance, Frethorne would be satisfied, he said, if Bateman could send him some beef, cheese, butter or other victuals, which Frethorne could sell for a profit. Frethorne would send all the profit back to Bateman to cover the costs of termination of his contract and his return home. Frethorne suggested further that the people of his parish in England might be willing to contribute toward the cost.65
In his letter to Bateman, the young plantation worker discreetly refrained from complaints about the oppressive conditions of labor. But to his mother and father he spoke more freely. He had eaten more in a day in England than he had in Virginia in a week, he said. There were wild fowl in the woods, he wrote, but “We are not allowed to goe and get it, but must Worke hard both earlie and late for a messe of water gruell, and a mouthfull of bread and biefe.” A part of his time was spent in hauling the employer’s goods from ships anchored at Jamestown, ten miles from Martin’s Hundred. On those occasions, he had to work until midnight, loading, rowing and unloading. He had had to sleep in an open boat, even on rainy nights, when on this duty, until a gunsmith named Jackson befriended him and built a cabin in which Richard could shelter when in Jamestown at night. There was only three weeks’ supply of meal remaining on their plantation. Frethorne speculated with dread on the approaching day when: “My Master … is not able to keepe us all, then wee shalbe turned up to the land and eat barkes of trees, or mouldes of the Ground.” Richard Frethorne’s last recorded words have become familiar by quotation: “I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth dailie flow from my eyes.”66
Another laboring man, Henry Brigg, wrote to his brother, a merchant at the Customs House in London, in that April of 1623, “to lett you understand how I live it is very miserable, for here we have but a wyne quart of Corne for a day and nothing else but Water, and worke hard from Sun rising to Sun sett at felling of Trees and we have not victuall not past xx [20] dayes.”67 He asked the London brother to send him provisions for a year, and a gun with ammunition “for I goe in danger of my life every day for lack of one.”
Brigg also had a business proposition to make. If his brother would care to invest in a stock of trade goods, Henry would undertake to secure for him a clear profit of 100 percent. The list of items he thought might move well is especially interesting as evidence of the degree of dependence of the colonists upon English manufactured and processed supplies. Understandably, it was made up mainly of food and apparel: oatmeal, peas, butter, cheese, oil, vinegar, aquavita, linen or woolen cloth or apparel for men or women, shoes, stockings, metal-tipped laces, gloves, and garters. Knives and other metal utensils were also recommended.68
Thomas Nicolls wrote to England in March and April, saying that each laborer should be allowed “a pound of butter and a pound of cheese weekly, as there was no food in sickness or health but oatmeal and pease, and bread and water.” Nineteen men had been captured by the Indians, he said, and conflict, disease and starvation had in the last eighteen months reduced the complement of men on one plantation from fifty-six to fourteen, and from ninety-seven to twenty on another.69
Perhaps nothing symbolized more clearly the colony’s extreme dependence upon supplies of English commodities than did the waiting for the Seaflower in the spring and early summer of 1623. A ship of 140 tons,70 the Seaflower left England around 1 January that year, Virginia-bound, with a cargo of meal and other provisions valued at £500 sterling,71 to relieve the famine there, at the usual rate of 25 percent profit for the investors in the voyage.72
Governor Wyatt and chief councillor George Yeardley told the colonists “that except the Seaflower come in,” or they could get corn from the Indians, more than half the colony would starve to death.73 The people watched the sea, and wrote those letters; Colony Treasurer George Sandys, Colony Secretary Christopher Davison, plantation servant Richard Frethorne all prayed with small planter and silk-raiser Peter Arundell for “the speedie arrivall of the Seaflower.”74 Even as they prayed, the Seaflower lay at the bottom of a Bermuda harbor, sunk en route by the explosion of its powder magazine.75 Two ships did come into Jamestown in April, but they lacked even adequate provisions for the people they brought with them.76 It would be five months before the Company’s next supply would arrive on the ninety-ton Bonnie Bess in September.77
The Seaflower sank, and the colonists starved, sickened and died. In self-defense against Company censure, George Sandys begged for understanding in England: “[W]ho is ignorant,” he asked, “how the heavie hand of God hath suppressed us? The lyveying being hardlie able to bury the dead.”78 The annual March census was not sent to England, or, if sent, was concealed from public disclosure.79
Captain Nathaniel Butler had come from Bermuda and made an investigation of the conditions in Virginia in the winter of 1622–23. At the king’s request, Butler wrote a report which came to be known popularly as “The Unmasking of Virginia.”80 The dominion of death was so established in Virginia, he reported, that people “are not onely seen dying under hedges and in the woods, but beinge dead ly some of them for many dayes unregarded and unburied.”81 Not until 1625 would the population of the colony regain the level it had attained in March 1622.82
The difference in the suffering of the owning and the laboring classes apparent in Virginia at this time was, to a degree, normal for a society based on class exploitation. The same phenomenon was observable in England. But the special conditions of colony life presented unusual opportunities for profiteering by the merchant and planter bourgeoisie.
As I have noted, the Virginia Company of London expected investors to make a 25 percent profit on the food that was sent to the starving colony. Because of the continuing decline in the price of the overproduced tobacco,83 this profit margin was a constant point of contention between the colony buyers and the Company, and in turn between the Company and the king in the tobacco contract negotiations. English colony tobacco, which had sold in England at from 3 to 4½ shillings, and more, the pound in 1619, was selling for 18 to 20 pence in March 1622/3.84 A year later, it had fallen further to 18d. or less per pound.85 In April 1624, a group representing “the poore Planters in Virginia” petitioned for a reduction of the combined 12d. per pound royal impost and import custom on tobacco. The price of tobacco in England was at that time so low, it was said, that such charges left insufficient return to continue production.86 In January 1626, the Virginia Colony authorities reported that their efforts to maintain tobacco at 18d. had failed, and that it was then selling at less than 12d. per pound in the colony.87
Profit-making pressure on the colonists was intensified by the presence of the trading ships that anchored at Jamestown. They were laden with cargoes of delectable English commodities and they conducted their offshore business with colonists able and willing to give tobacco for wines, liquors, cider, salad oil, vinegar, butter, candies, cheese and Canadian fish.88 Trading was so heavy, it was said, that almost the entire 60,000-pound crop of Virginia tobacco produced in 1622 was taken by these private traders.89 Business was brisk despite the increasingly “excessive and unconscionable” rates of profit extorted by the merchants.90
The customers were people who had some tobacco above what they might have needed for purchasing corn. Undoubtedly, they were in the main the poor but free planters, such as constituted something less than half the population of the colony.91 This aspect of profiteering must have impoverished many small planters and reduced some to proletarians. Certainly, after dealing with the trading ships they had little tobacco left for shipment to England for their own accounts. As the Company stated in March 1623:
[C]oncerning the poor Planters … the quantitie of Tobacco brought home in right of their proprietie is for the most part verie smale it beinge expended in the Plantacons amongst the Marchantes trading thither with their several necessarie Commodities.”92
Profiteering, official and otherwise, was coupled with outright expropriation, legal and illegal, on a grand scale, without any color of exchange. Given the special circumstances of colony existence, and given the continuing supply of laborers from England, this profiteering and expropriation were basic factors in the reduction of colony plantation laborers to chattels.
As the remark of Wyatt and Yeardley had indicated, the rulers of the colony had only one active policy for feeding the colony, namely to get corn from the Indians. Two general methods were employed to implement this policy. One was to make war against Opechancanough and his allies. The other was that of peaceful trade with the more distant, friendly Indians on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay.93 But the main method seems to have been the former; when in doubt, or perhaps merely low on English trade goods,94 the English would allege “treachery” against the Indians and attack them, taking corn without payment and destroying the growing corn of the Indians, a method of warfare that some of the English officers in Virginia had practiced under Mountjoy in Ireland.95
As noted above, shortly after the Indian attack of 22 March 1622 the colony authorities ordered drastic restrictions on the planting of corn, as a safeguard against lurking Indian enemies it was said.96 Many colonists considered the “national defense” rationale for this policy to be spurious, and complained bitterly about it. Later they declared that if they had been allowed to plant corn as they wished, they could have provided for their own needs adequately,97 even though little food, or none at all, was coming from England. The restriction on corn planting was also challenged in the meetings of the Court of the Virginia Company of London.98 Nevertheless, the policy was enforced, although the temper of the colonists was so unruly by April 1623 that the governor asked London to institute martial law, as he said to terrorize the people.99 The ban on hunting for food in the forests, and the abandonment of half the plantations and the withdrawal of the colony into a restricted perimeter, compounded the food supply problem.
It was a recipe for famine; but it was also a recipe for capitalist profiteering, by those equipped and opportunely positioned to exploit the situation. Captain Nathaniel Butler was only reporting, and in terms of understatement, what was an open scandal, when in the spring of 1623, regarding the hardship of the corn famines, he said:
howesoever itt lay heavy uppon the shoulders of the Generallytie itt may be suspected not to be unaffected by some of the chiefe; for they onely haveing the means in these extremeties to Trade for Corn w[i]th the Natives doe hereby engrosse all into their hands and soe sell it att their owne prizes [prices].100
The means for trading for corn with the Indians were boats and small ships. Those who possessed or could secure the use of such vessels had a monopoly of the trade, since there was absolutely no other way of bringing corn into the colony from the Indians of the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Having made it practically impossible for the people to trade simply and directly with their immediate Indian neighbors, the Colony Council and the Governor in the winter and spring of 1622–23 issued corn-trading licenses to owners and operators of cargo-carrying capital equipment. Not surprisingly, George Yeardley appears a foremost actor in this group. On 3 January, Governor Wyatt licensed Yeardley to send Captain William Tucker, an experienced officer and trader, on a corn-getting voyage, using “such shipps, pinnaces boates as hee the s[ai]d Sir George shall thinke fitt to appoint unto him & that doe in any way belong or are in service to him the said George.”101
Tucker was authorized, on Yeardley’s behalf, to “trade or take by force of Armes” in order to secure the Indians’ corn. He was instructed to deliver the corn to Yeardley “by him to be disposed as hee in his best discretion shall thinke fitt.”102
Seven corn-getting ventures were made in that same month, by George Sandys, Colony Secretary, and by a number of “Captains.” Four of the six men engaged in these separate voyages in the privileged trade were members of the Colony Council.103 Yeardley was the largest of the operators; of the four thousand bushels of corn brought into the colony by 20 March, Yeardley, in only one voyage, accounted for one-fourth of the total.104 The oft-quoted old planter William Capps called Yeardley “[a] worthie statesman for his owne profit,” who was willing to prolong the colony’s distress in order to gain by it personally.105 It is reasonable to infer, and it was so implied by Nathaniel Rich, that corn profiteering was the motive of the merchants in the Colony Council generally, when they advised the London authorities in January 1623 that they were “Confident there wilbe noe cause to intreat your helpe for supplie of corne or any other provisions,” provided incoming colonists were accompanied by adequate food.106
Under ordinary conditions, the colony at its current size needed at least eleven thousand bushels of corn to get through to the next harvest from planting time.107 The normal price of corn was 2½s. per bushel.108 Under normal conditions, the five largest possessors of corn in the colony held 12 percent of the total supply.109
In March 1623, there were certainly less than four thousand bushels of corn on hand of that brought in during the previous three or four months. Very little corn had been harvested in 1622; the same would be true of 1623. At the same time a group of not more than a dozen of the colony elite held practically the entire corn supply of the colony. The supply was not distributed according to need; rather it was sold for the highest prices that could be extorted. The price of corn had risen to ten, and then fifteen, shillings a bushel in the winter of 1622. By the spring of 1623, the price was octupled, at twenty shillings per bushel.110 And within a month after the Seaflower went down in Bermuda, Edward Hill was writing to his brother in England that the price of corn in Virginia had reached thirty shillings, and that the land faced “the greatest famine that ever was.”111 As the price of corn was rising to eight times its normal level, the price of tobacco was falling due to overproduction. We have already noted that the commodity-trading ships were said to have taken almost the entire sixty-thousand-pound tobacco crop of 1622.112 While that estimate may have been exaggerated somewhat, the fact still contributed to the pressure of indebtedness bearing down on the people as a result of profiteering by the plantation bourgeois elite.
In 1623, the Governor and Colony Council sought to fix the exchange rate of tobacco in Virginia at 18d. per pound in order to discourage trade with the private ship-merchants.113 This was only half the three-shilling rate that had been set before the crisis. If the price of corn rose eight times and the price of tobacco fell by half, then the four thousand pounds of corn secured in the winter of 1622–23 would, even at a price of fifteen shillings the bushel, be equal in exchange-value to forty thousand pounds of tobacco at 18d. per pound. If the total 1622 tobacco crop of sixty thousand pounds had nearly all been spent with the commodity-trading ships (see this page), then the indicated indebtedness to the corn elite must have approached something like forty thousand pounds of tobacco. The crushing weight of such debt was enough to drive the tenants into long-term debt servitude. The same pressure was felt, perhaps only slightly less forcefully, by the freemen, the rank-and-file small landholders.
The uprooting of the inhabitants of many English settlements, combined with the extremely high death rate, simultaneously presented the plantation bourgeoisie with opportunities for direct capitalist expropriation of land and labor power in the furtherance of the alteration of labor relations to that of chattel-servitude.
In the aftermath of the 22 March 1622 attack, the boundaries of the colony were drawn back by deliberate decision to Jamestown and Newport-News and points on the north side of James River, and to a few plantation above and opposite Jamestown. In its report to London at the end of April, the Colony Council revealed that “halfe the people” had been uprooted and “enforced … to unite with” the other half, along with as much of their livestock as could be salvaged, within the confines of an area less than half that occupied by the colony before 22 March.114 Two months later, the Colony Council advised London that “[w]e have been forced to quitt most of our habitations, so that many of our people are unsettled.”115
One-third of the landholders had died in the attack of 22 March. Half of the surviving landholders were those who were displaced from the outlying settlements; and half of that number died within the ensuing year. Chaos in property relations was the result, especially in the common case in which there was no clearly entitled Virginia-dwelling heir-apparent. Three years after the attack, only twenty-eight of the seventy non-corporate landholders were still living of those who had been granted land patents in Charles City prior to 22 March 1622. Most revealing of the chaotic quality of the situation is the fact that sixteen of the seventy are listed as “probably” or “possibly” dead. It was difficult enough to straighten out the lines and portions of inheritance when the patent holder was known to be dead; it was impossible to do so where it was not certain that the original holder was dead. Still, the land “lived,” and would yield tobacco for somebody, if “planted” with laborers. The corporate group that operated under the name Southampton Hundred was the holder of title to 100,000 acres in Charles City. In 1625, this land was still “virtually abandoned.” In Henrico settlement, only nine of the pre-March 1622 patent holders remained alive in 1625; of these, only two were living in Henrico.116
It was a field rich with opportunity for land-grabbing.117 Immediately after the March 1622 attack, the gentlemen of the Colony Council noted that in the straitened circumstances it would be necessary for colonists to be “contented with smale quantities of Land,” and asked London for authority to assign planters “the place and proportions of Land” that the Council in Virginia should think proper.118 Under cover of a reference to the settling of new planters, the Colony Council asked that the patent-granting authority be transferred from the Virginia Company Court in London to the Virginia Governor and Colony Council.
The Company’s reply indicated that, in any case of divergence of interest among claimants, control should be unambiguously located in England. The Company categorically rejected the suggestion of the Virginia Colony council, immediately established a special committee of Londonders to receive claims of Virginia land heirs living in England, and enjoined the Virginia authorities to process these claims as they were forwarded, expeditiously and justly.119 In November 1622, the Company’s committee on Virginia land claims declared as follows:
The Companie knoweth not what land is Due to men and every Day unjust and false claimes are put up especially upon pretences of beinge heires to persons [in Virginia].120
Aside from the individually held lands, around thirty thousand acres of Company lands reverted to the Crown in 1625,121 to be distributed in time on its terms.
In consequence of this double process of death and displacement, one-third, at least,122 of the surviving tenants, laborers and apprentices in the entire colony were left without employers or means of employing themselves. The moment had come to put into execution the proposal of Captain Nuce, which had been so ardently embraced by the Virginia Governor, Colony Council and House of Burgesses in January 1622 – to “turn the tenants into pencons.”123 The optimum conditions were conjoined for realizing the intention of the plantation bourgeoisie to reduce the general condition of the plantation laboring classes to that of unpaid bond-labor, working without wages, for board and lodging only.
As of the spring of 1622, there were five officially recognized social classes in Virginia Colony. Two of them were the owning classes: gentlemen (the bourgeoisie) and the freemen, small independent farmers and self-employed artisans (the petty bourgeoisie). The other three were the dependent laboring classes: the tenants-at-halves, the hired servants, and the apprentices.124
In the long crisis that followed the Indian attack of March 1622, however, the significant distinctions of status among the three laboring-class elements were deeply eroded by pervasive hunger and sickness, by economic dislocation, and by the general precariousness of existence.125
Theoretically, the average tenant could, under normal conditions, raise some five hundred or more pounds of tobacco in a year,126 half of which was his, plus the corn, of which his share would supply him and his family (if he had a family in Virginia) for the year ahead. But the crisis had confronted the tenants with a far different reality. They were forced into debt by the restriction on tobacco planting, coupled with a fixed rate of rent. Forbidden to plant corn, they were compelled to pay extortionate prices for it from the corn-profiteering elite, and to the shipboard hucksters down at the river. Alderman Johnson, a critic of the Sandys administration in the Virginia Company, said in June 1623: “the planters, most of them being Tenants at halves … for twelve moneths bread paye 2 years labor and for cloths and tooles he hath not wherewith to furnish himself.127 Yet friends of the Sandys administration judged the proportion of the tenants’ resources to be even less. In January the Virginia Colony Council had said that tenants could not feed themselves three months out of the year.128 In March, Colony Secretary George Sandys would write that most tenants-at-halves “die of Melancholye, the rest running so farre in debt as keepes them still behind hand,” and many too hungry to continue at their works or to wait for the harvest were hunting wild game to keep from starving.129 And in April, those of Governor Wyatt’s twenty-four tenants who still survived were sinking hopelessly into debt merely for corn to get them through the year, because their families would otherwise starve waiting for the year-end division of the crop. Eight of Wyatt’s tenants were obliged to submit to being “rented out” to private planters, who paid Wyatt one hundred pounds of tobacco and three barrels of corns for each.130
In the case of the hired laborer, what did it matter that, even at the reduced official rate of 18d. per pound, his wage of a pound of tobacco per day was by the numbers equal to three times as much as the wages of a laborer in England? Corn, the basic food, cost four or five times as much in Virginia as grain in England.131 Two-thirds of the possible employers of hired labor had died or been displaced from their lands in the space of a year. The opportunities for being hired were thus cut in half, while the number of hands available for hired labor was doubled by the displacement of half the tenants from their holdings. January letters from Jamestown described the laborer’s situation in such terms as these:
by occasion of the last massacre … every man of meaner sort, who before lived well by their labour upon their owne land, being forced to foresake their houses (which were very farre scattered) & to join themselves to some great mans plantation; where having spent what before they had gotten, they are ready to perish for want of necessaries.132
The tendency to concentration of land ownership has been noted above. But the most significant index of wealth concentration in Virginia at that time was in numbers of laborers; as Secretary Pory had said, ’our principal wealth … consisteth in servants.133 Edmund S. Morgan lists the fifteen “winners” in the servant “sweepstakes,” who by the winter of 1624–25 had accumulated a total of 302 “servants.”134 That was 60 percent of all those categorized as “servants” in the Colony.135 Some significant portion of them had been forced by sheer want “to join … great men’s plantations.” The individual holding of the grandees ranged from ten to thirty-nine “servants.” Morgan emphasizes the extreme degree of concentration of this engrossment of the laborers in the hands of the colony elite by noting that contemporary Gloucestershire in England, with a labor force nearly forty times as great as that of Virginia Colony, had only slightly more employers of ten or more persons than Virginia’s favored fifteen.136 The concentration of “servants” in the colony was guaranteed for the future by the headright system of land acquisition and tenure; and the arrangement of political power based on it was certain to intensify the already apparent degree of concentration of land ownership in Virginia.
Now completely in the labor market were such ex-tenants as John Radish, one of the “rented-out” tenants-at-halves, who found himself so destitute late in 1622 that he was compelled by necessity to work for his master for food and clothing only, or die of starvation.137 Such being the lot of the tenants-at-halves and the wage workers, what but despair would come to the apprentices, lacking a master, land and tools, unskilled in labor, possibly displaced from lodging, and three thousand miles from home? It need only be said that their situation was the most precarious of all, and to note that in April 1622 Edwin Sandys in England had come to the opinion that what Virginia needed most was “multitude of apprentices.”138
A time came, in June 1623, when in labor-scarce Virginia food was proportionately even more scarce than laborers. Writing to his brother Edward in London, Virginia gentleman planter Robert Bennett acknowledged recent receipt of a shipment of “19 buttes of excelent good wyne, 700 jarse of oylle, 16 Barelles of Rysse, tooe halfe hoghedes of Allmonds, 3 half hoghedes of wheate …, 18 hoghedes of Olives and some 5 ferkenes of butter and one Chesse.”139 Concerning general conditions in the colony, he added in a postscript: “Vittiles being scarce in the countrye noe man will tacke servantes.”
Laboring People’s Difficulty, Colony Elite’s Opportunity
The extreme economic pressure on the laboring people created an opportunity for the abuse of their rights that was deliberately exploited by the official policy and actions of the Virginia Colony Council and General Court. Men on wages were sold after their employers died.140 Poor planter William Tyler declared that “neither the Governor nor Counsell could or would doe any poor man right.” Even if he were a man of means, Tyler said, he wouldn’t be a member of the Colony Council, because as such he could not do right as his conscience would dictate, adding that the great men all hold together.141 Laborer Elizabeth Abbot was whipped to death with 500 lashes, and Elyas Hinton was beaten to death with a rake by his employer, Mr Procter.142 In the first recorded instance of the un-English practice of punishing a runaway laborer by adding years to his servitude, John Joyce was sentenced by the General Court to thirty lashes and a total of five and a half years’ extra labor service.143 Henry Carman, who had been shipped to Virginia as one of the “Duty boys” in 1619, was the first laborer sentenced to an added time (seven years) of unpaid labor for a criminal offense (“fornication”).144 Company tenants, who had been promised promotion to landowner upon completion of their contracts, were instead merely to serve again as tenants of the colony authorities for “terme of yeares.” “Duty boys” who in 1626 completed their seven-year terms, were not promoted to tenants-at-halves, but were divided up among the Governor and members of the Colony Council, with whom they were to “make composition,” that is, negotiate terms from their utterly dependent position.145 Bruce’s “explanation” of why the plantation bourgeoisie reneged on the conditions under which these laboring people were originally brought to Virginia seems cold-bloodedly true. If they had been granted land, he says, “the ability of the planters who had been their masters to secure laborers in place of them would have been diminished to a serious extent.”146
For the laboring classes, it was as if Virginia had been visited with a combination of the plague of the fourteenth century – but without the chance to walk away to higher-paying employment – and the enclosures of the sixteenth century – but without a Pilgrimage of Grace of powerful allies, or their native Mousehold Heath to rally on. They could not escape from Virginia. Rebellion was, at that moment, practically impossible, even if the subjective element for revolt had been prepared. They were dependent upon the bourgeoisie for every peck of corn for their starved bellies. They were thus compelled to submit to the condition dictated by the plantation bourgeoisie: the status of unpaid labor, that is, bond-laborers.
Yet the tenants’ desperate situation which had made it possible for the employing class to reduce labor costs to mere “vittles” would certainly end with new corn harvests,147 although the price of tobacco was bound in shallows from which it would never return to its early high levels. How then would it be possible for the plantation bourgeoisie to make this momentary system of unpaid labor permanent, instead of being forced to return to “that absurd condition of tenants at halves,”148 or to paying wages higher than those paid in England?149