Virginia Colony evolved under the direct rule of a tiny elite which, in the fifteen years leading up to Bacon’s Rebellion, included fewer than four hundred men, probably numbering no more than two hundred at any one time, owners of an average of 4,200 acres of land each.1 The lowest-ranking members of this stratum were the county2 commissioners, deliberately limited by Act of Assembly in 1661 to no more than eight per county,3 who acted collectively as the county court, and served individually as magistrates, justices of the peace, in their respective districts. The members of the county courts, among whom the office of sheriff was rotated annually, were appointed from time to time by the Colony Council and Governor, upon the recommendation of the sitting members of the particular county court.4 Next came the members of the Virginia House of Burgesses who were invariably elected from among the members of the county courts. Originally the vote was exercised by all freemen but as the ranks of propertyless former bond-laborers increased, in 1670 the General Assembly deliberately excluded these latter from the right to vote.5 At the top were the Governor (appointed by Charles II, king of England during this period) and the Virginia Colony Council, made up of men appointed by the Governor with the formal approval of the General Assembly, the term used to describe the House of Burgesses and the Colony Council together. The Governor and the Colony Council constituted the General Court.6
County court and magistrate orders were enforced by the county sheriffs and constables, and through pursuit by hue and cry. But hue and cry after runaway bond-laborers was so generally neglected that in 1658 the General Assembly ordered the imposition of fines on householders and constables for such lapses in civic responsibility.7 Two years later the General Assembly again faulted the constables for neglect of their duty to hunt down runaways.8 In 1669, the General Assembly not only noted the plots made by bond-laborers to escape their owners but also charged that “some planters,” instead of arresting the fugitives, “have given them assistance and directions how to escape.”9 The General Assembly then proceeded to provide a reward, not only to encourage constables but to enlist the general public in the capture of runaway bond-laborers, by offering to any person one thousand pounds of tobacco for each runaway recaptured. It was intended that when bond-laborers became aware of “soe many spies upon them,” they would “keep within the bounds of their duty.”10 The general subject of runaways has been treated in Chapter 8; the point here is to emphasize the absence of an effective social control stratum.
Every man between the ages of sixteen and sixty was subject to service in the militia. Its organizational structure derived from the political structure of organization of the colony, the militia of each county being officered by local members of the colony elite. An establishing order issued by Governor Francis Moryson in June 1661 required each county to mobilize three militia companies, to be made up of “freemen and Servants of undoubted fidelity.” Because the population was so widely dispersed that the entire county regiment could not be mobilized for sudden emergencies, a special unit called the “settled trayned band,” was to be formed of one-eighth of the entire regiment and divided into three companies, selected because of the members’ proximity to the plantation of the regiment’s captain.11 The Governor and Colony Council were obliged to confess the incompetence of the militia for sustained service, citing two factors: the impossibility of storing sufficient corn to sustain the militia on extended duty, because of the infestation of the grain by vermin; and the strenuous objections of the men against being diverted from making their tobacco crop.12
In summary, I quote Professor Morgan:
There was no trained constabulary. The county commissioners, who annually chose the constables in each county, usually rotated the job among men of small means, who could not afford the fines for refusing to take it. There was no army except the militia, composed of men who would be as unlikely as the constables to make effective instruments for suppressing the insubordination of their own kind.13
There was, then, in Virginia no intermediate social control stratum based on a secure yeoman class such as had been preserved in England.
The Deference and Reverence Deficit
In well-ordered class societies, ancient traditions of pomp and circumstance play a vital part in instructing the masses in subservience to “their betters.” “[R]everence,” wrote Francis Bacon, “is that wherewith princes are girt from God.”14 But the claim to authority of the seventeenth-century planter elite rested on raw acquisitiveness, expressed first of all in their possession of mainly English bond-laborers, and in their large handholdings based not on ancient titles but on headrights purchased by import of human chattels.15 There were no storied manors in Virginia to which they could say they had been born. Furthermore, the fact that the elite planters were necessarily as involved as the poorest of their neighbors in the cheek-by-jowl competition each for his share in the tobacco market was not calculated to promote a deferential attitude toward the same elite planters as the ruling circle.
Auxiliary institutions, particularly those of established religion, render indispensable service in preserving and protecting the awe in which ruling classes need to be held. But that great pillar of reverence for authority the established Church of England did not travel well to seventeenth-century Virginia, where it enjoyed the status of a mere subdivision of the London bishopric. Whereas in England the parish minister, upon recommendation of some eminent person or of a university, was appointed with life tenure, in Virginia, parish vestries made up of rich local planters had the nomination of the minister who was then formally chosen by the Governor rather than by a clerical authority. The result was that ministers, being no more than hired hands employed from year to year at the pleasure of the vestries, often lapsed into demoralization. In cataloguing the sad conditions prevailing in Virginia in the middle of the seventeenth century, an English clerical critic asserted that the colony’s ministers were “for the most part, not only far short of those qualifications required in Ministers … but men of opposite qualities and tempers … by their loose lives, and un-Gospel becoming conversation.”16 Such a church “could not play its traditional role of fostering obedient habits” among the colonists.17
The Anglican church was enfeebled, and neither was the political climate favorable to Puritans. Quakers were outlawed in the seventeenth century; official hostility towards them did not slacken until early in the eighteenth century.18 In any case, ministers were so few and far between that even if every one of them had been willing and able to play the social buffer role, they would have been an insufficient leaven for the colony’s lump of irreverence. In a colony of forty or fifty thousand widely scattered people, there were only thirty-five Anglican priests in 1680.19
What is one to conclude, then, about the state of ruling-class social control in the decade before Bacon’s Rebellion, when Colony Secretary Thomas Ludwell was fain to confess that Virginia’s small landholders were restrained from rebellion only by “faith in the mercy of God, loyalty to the King, and affection for the Governor”?20
A Society Shaped by Monoculture
The basic cause of the failure of the plantation elite to establish a viable system of social control in the seventeenth century was, of course, the tobacco monocultural economy itself. Rainbolt stated the case most clearly:
A colony where most men pursued the same occupation of tobacco planter seemed ill suited to the emergence of a heirarchical social system. A Province where most men lived in relative isolation on scattered plantations prevented that constant scrutiny of inferiors by their superiors deemed vital to the order of a society.21
After the margin of profit had been stabilized by the institution of the new chattel bond-labor relation of production in the 1620s, the farm price of Chesapeake tobacco averaged about 4d. per pound in the 1630s.22 In the next two decades, however, the average price was reduced by almost half, to 2.2d. It is impossible to fix the year when the falling tendency of tobacco prices reached the critical level in regard to ruling-class social control, but the decline of tobacco to an average of 1.2d. per pound for the entire decade and a half beginning in 1660 was a basic condition for the eruption in 1676 of the social control crisis known to history as Bacon’s Rebellion.23
Tobacco planters were trapped in a vicious spiral: efforts by each planter to make up in volume for the declining price forced all to do as each; as this drove the price even lower, the planters fell ever deeper into debt. In 1664 the planters of Virginia and Maryland went into debt of £50,000 on their shipments to England.24 But the burden did not fall uniformly on the planters; indeed, it tended to enrich the planter elite.
Warren M. Billings has analyzed the year-to-year changes in the level of the indebtedness in six Virginia counties for the period 1660–7525 by tabulating the amounts for which creditors sued for payment.26 The total debt of all planters in cases decided in the courts of those six counties averaged 3,243,000 pounds of tobacco per year. In those counties, with a total population of several thousand,27 the thirty or so members of the plantation elite accounted for 35.6 percent of the total credit, with the debts owed to members of the elite class amounting to twice as much as the amounts owed by them.28 Social dissolution was especially portended by the fact that the indebtedness gap between the elite and the general run of planters tended to increase as time went on, by an average of 375,000 pounds of tobacco every year during the sixteen-year period.29 The records suggest that the deteriorating conditions of the non-elite planters in these six counties were typical of Virginia as a whole.
This discrepancy between the elite and non-elite with respect to the debt burden would seem to be a reflection of a marked tendency toward concentration of land in the hands of the former (see Table 9.1). Morgan finds an extreme degree of land engrossment by headright for other counties: in 1658, thirty persons owned most of the land – 100,000 acres – on the south side of the Potomac; in 1664, 33,750 acres of headright land went to only thirteen persons in Accomack County, and 15,050 acres of Rappahannock land was claimed by only six persons. These nineteen patents accounted for 30 percent of all the headright acres patented in Virginia in that year, and averaged over 2,500 acres each; eight patents in Accomack, Isle of Wight and Rappahannock counties, averaging more than 4,300 acres each, accounted for 23 percent of all headright land patented in Virginia in 1666.30 These figures from various counties appear consistent with and confirm the trend suggested by the comparison of figures for 1626 and 1704 shown in Table 9.1.31
The most significant indicator of increasing concentration of capital, however, is the number of laborers per plantation. Kevin P. Kelly’s study of the records of Surry County, on the south side of the James River, revealed that there, small households dominated throughout the seventeenth century, although “there was a growing divergence between the large planters controlling more than ten laborers, and the small, independent planter.”32 Wertenbaker found that the Surry County ratio of tithables to taxpayers in 1675 and 1685, considered together, was 18 to 10, but by 1704 the comparable ratio, of tithables to freeholders, was 39 to 10.33 Edward Randolph, Royal Inspector of Customs, reported to the Lords of Trade and Plantations in 1696 that the “chief and only reason” for the retarded development of Virginia colony was that “Members of the Council and others … have from time to time procured grants of very large Tracts of Land.” By the use of headrights, he said, many of this elite group held “twenty or thirty thousand acres of land apiece” which were left unplanted yet unavailable to prospective planters.34
Table 9.1 Increase in concentration of landholdings in Virginia, 1626–1704
| Holdings | 1626 | 1704 |
| 100 acres or less | ||
| (a) % of total acres | 24.9% | 4.9% |
| (b) % of all holdings | 54.0% | 24.0% |
| (c) no. of holdings | 126 | 1,316 |
| (d) acres | 8,610 | 112,100 |
| (e) average size | 68 | 85 |
| 101 to 499 acres | ||
| (a) % of total acres | 41.4% | 32.7% |
| (b) % of all holdings | 36.9% | 54.3% |
| (c) no. of holdings | 42 | 2,971 |
| (d) acres | 13,140 | 742,000 |
| (e) average size | 313 | 250 |
| 500 to 999 acres | ||
| (a) % of total acres | 22.5% | 22.3% |
| (b) % of all holdings | 7.7% | 13.5% |
| (c) no. of holdings | 14 | 738 |
| (d) acres | 7,800 | 504,300 |
| (e) average size | 557 | 683 |
| 1,000 acres or more | ||
| (a) % of total acres | 10.2% | 40.1% |
| (b) % of all holdings | 1.6% | 8.4% |
| (c) no. of holdings | 3 | 461 |
| (d) acres | 3,582 | 907,900 |
| (e) average size | 1,284 | 1,969 |
Sources: John C. Hotten, The Original Lists, this page–this page, patented land in Virginia in 1626; 1704 Virginia Rent Rolls, printed in T. J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922).
Reflecting the results of such egregious engrossment of headright land by importation of bond-laborers by the plantation bourgeoisie, 60 to 65 per cent of Virginia landholders, according to Wertenbaker’s estimate, had no bond-laborers at all in the closing two or two and a half decades of the seventeenth century.35 A corresponding pattern of differentiation is apparent in Russell R. Menard’s comparison of estate inventories on the lower western Maryland shore of Chesapeake Bay, in the 1658–70 and 1700–1705 periods.36 The proportion having bond-laborers declined by nearly one-tenth (49.4 to 45.2 percent). The proportion of the total bond-labor force represented by estates having only one or two bond-laborers was reduced by more than one-third (18.3 to 11.0 percent). At the other end of the scale, in 1700–1705 the proportion of estates with 21 or more bond-laborers was nearly six times what it had been in the 1658–70 period (rising from 1.1 percent to 6.2 percent of all estates), and their share of the total number of bond-laborers had increased to almost five times what it was in the earlier period (from 6.5 to 31.6 percent of all bond-laborers).
The Dutch Wars and Doubtful Loyalty
Threats of Dutch seaborne incursions during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, in 1665–67 and 1672–74, served to underscore the weakness of the elite’s social control of the colony. In 1667, a Dutch warship succeeded in entering the James River and capturing the Virginia tobacco fleet of twenty ships. That same year, the Dutch admiral de Ruyter audaciously sailed up the Thames and the Medway, and detroyed or captured some of the finest ships of the English navy. But there was a significant difference in the two situations, so far as the ruling class was concerned. England was in no danger of invasion and occupation by Dutch forces aided by the rank and file of the English people; in Virginia that prospect was perceived as real.
On 11 July 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, another Dutch naval force of nine ships conducted a raid up the James River, defeated the English in a three-hour battle, and captured eleven merchant ships laden with cargo.37 Governor Berkeley and the Colony Council, writing to the King and Privy Council in England, asked that a large fort be constructed to command the entrance to the James and the Chesapeake Bay, or else that the home government provide regularly for a strong convoy for the Virginia tobacco fleet, the expense to be recovered through raised merchant freight charges. They based their appeal on the non-functional state of the Virginia militia.
But the social control question, which is a central concern of this work, is brought most starkly into focus by the following passage of their letter, which describes Virginia as
intersected by Soe many vast Rivers as makes more Miles to Defend, then we have men of trust to Defend them, for by our neerest computacon wee leave at our backs as many Servants (besides Negroes) as there are freemen to defend the Shoare and on all our Frontiers the Indians. Both which gives men fearfull apprehentions of the dainger they Leave their Estates and Families in, Whilst they are drawne from their houses to defend the Borders. Of which number also at least one third are single freemen (whose labor Will hardly maintaine them), or men much in debt, both which Wee may reasonably expect upon any small advantage the Enemy may gaine upon us, would revolt to them in hopes of bettering their Condicon.38
Fourteen such debt-ridden Surry County freemen attempted the following December and January to organize a mutiny against payment of the colony levy. Meeting first at Lawnes Creek Church and next in Devil’s Field, they declared their determination to stand together come what might, “burn one, burn all.” Their effort was thwarted; four were fined 1,000 pounds of tobacco, one 2,000 pounds, and all were put under bond for their future good behavior.39
Although the Lawnes Creek Mutiny was thwarted, it was both a validation of the fears of Berkeley and the Colony Council, and a portent of the general mutiny of 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion. Objective “social and economic conditions” themselves “conspired against an effective control of the citizenry by the provincial leadership.”40
Facing the Problem
Three means were available to the plantation bourgeoisie to combat the economic root of social instability: (1) regulate the production and shipment of tobacco to relieve the ruinous effect of the glut of the market; (2) diversify production in order to escape the desperate dependency on tobacco monoculture; or (3) find a way to lower the cost of labor per unit of output.
It was to be expected that contradictions would develop between English monarchy and mercantilism, on the one hand, and the colonial plantation bourgeoisie, on the other. These clashes of interest, which in time would find fullest expression as part of the American War of Independence, first emerged in the context of the long crisis of tobacco overproduction and low prices that began at the moment of the Stuart Restoration in 1660.
Throughout the seventeenth century, the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie preached the virtues of diversification of the Chesapeake economy, while reproducing decade after decade the economic morass of tobacco monoculture. Warnings were sounded by Virginia officials against basing Virginia’s economy on tobacco alone; they urged that a variety of products be developed to meet a variety of English market demands. The longest-serving and most famous of Virginia colonial governors, Sir William Berkeley, was himself the most articulate denouncer of tobacco monoculture and the most enthusiastic advocate of diversification. “Our Governors,” said Berkeley, in a treatise of the early 1660s, “by the corruption of the times they lived in, laid the Foundation of our wealth and industry on the vices of men … [particularly] this vicious habit of taking Tobacco.”41 But, with encouragement and instruction from the home government, said Berkeley, Virginia within seven years could supply England with all its needs for “Silk, Flax, Hemp, Pitch, Tar, Iron, Masts, Timber and Pot-ashes,” that were then of necessity being imported from other countries at great expense.
Over the years, various suggestions were made for reducing production – by limiting the number of leaves on the plant, or the number of plants, or by limiting the time allowed for transplanting seedlings – and for regulating the time of shipping the crop in order to maximize favorable seasonal factors. Repeated proposals were advanced for co-ordinating with Maryland and North Carolina in limiting tobacco production, but they came to naught. Merchant shipowners opposed this last idea because, as they said in 1662, it would seriously interfere with the shipment of bond-laborers and thus cause a burdensome increase in the number of unemployed in England.42
Other measures aimed at directly shoring up tobacco planters’ profits by exemptions from export duties, by a measure of relief from the provisions of the Navigation Law, and by exempting Virginia-owned ships from export duties on their cargoes.
Topographical factors, involving the heavy costs of clearing away the ubiquitous forest, and the decentralizing influence of geography (Virginia being a series of peninsulas formed by navigable rivers), as well as clashes of various economic interests, hampered programs aimed at both diversification and the limiting of tobacco production.43 With regard to diversification, furthermore, there was a lack of capital in Virginia for ventures into other lines of production, since the Virginia bourgeoisie was chronically in debt to English merchants. The three Dutch wars used up English resources that might theoretically have been available for investment in Virginia; later, the same drain of capital accompanied the first phase (1689–1713) of the Anglo-French wars of colonial rivalry. After the Restoration in 1660, the Crown itself was so desperate for funds that, far from wanting to embark on diversification experiments, it was determined to maximize the tobacco trade, which was its most lucrative source of income; integral with that, there was the interest of the English tax-and-customs “farmers,” who contracted to collect the king’s customs on tobacco imports. In 1671 the king’s share from import customs collections on Virginia tobacco was estimated to be £80,000 per year; in 1682 the royal share of tobacco profits was calculated to be £7 per year for every plantation bond-laborer.44 English merchants, who did have capital they might have invested, were not interested in taking unnecessary risks with it; and they were adamantly opposed to encouraging the rise of a set of competitive industries in Virginia.45
On general principles the English mercantilists were increasingly wary of deviations from the primacy of tobacco production, and especially of those deviations that might lead to the development of competition with goods produced in England and to the consequent economic independence of colonies. In April 1705 the Commissioners of Trade specifically instructed the Governors of Virginia and Maryland to “take care not to suffer the People employed in the making of Tobacco to be Deverted therefrom.”46 In the eyes of English manufacturers, such a development “would be of very ill consequence” to English woolen exports and tobacco shipping and imports, and would jeopardize the relation of dependence in which a colony should be kept.47 In 1707 Governor John Seymour warned the Board of Trade that credit-starved Maryland planters, rendered “almost starke naked” for lack of English-made clothing, were turning to making their own linen and woolen goods. He too worried about the “ill consequence to the Revenue arising on tobacco” if people in that colony generally laid aside tobacco-making in order to manufacture such goods as they customarily purchased from England.48 Governor Gooch was confident that wages were so high in Virginia that Virginia-made linen would cost 20 percent more and woolen cloth 50 percent more than English textiles and therefore would be unable to compete with English-made goods as exports. But since they might reduce the market for British manufactures within the colony, such local industry should be discouraged. Acting on Gooch’s information, the Board of Trade in London resolved to find a way to “divert their [the colonists’] thoughts from Undertakings of this nature.”49
Diversification efforts were not aimed at supplanting the tobacco monoculture, but merely at protecting it. One premise was common to all parties – the Virginia ruling elite, the English Crown, English merchants, and rival provincial governments in Maryland and North Carolina. However much they differed over principles, such as those of the mercantilist Navigation Laws, or details regarding the regulation of production and shipment, or the number and location of centralizing port cities, they all held to one inviolable principle – the priority to be given to the maintenance and enhancement of profit on tobacco.50 Consequently, schemes for limiting directly the supply of tobacco brought to the market were driven aground by the prevailing winds of competitive pressure for the quickest turnover of capital, coupled with the Crown’s determination to resist any diminution of its tobacco revenues, which were based on physical volume rather than selling price.51
But even if, by a sudden rush of enlightened self-interest to the heads of all parties, some more than evanescent scheme for “economic reform” could have been instituted, it would have been foredoomed by the insubstantiality of the requisite buffer social control stratum. Virginia’s “labor- and capital-scarce economy demanded efficient marshaling of effort and resources,” requiring social discipline that could not be imposed by the plantation elite, having “large goals but small capacity to command,” and “lacking strong supporting social and religious institutions.”52
The Third Possibility: Reducing Labor Costs
The English bourgeoisie finally secured direct access to African labor at the end of the Second Dutch War, concluded in the Treaty of Breda in 1667.53 Five years later, with the establishment of the Royal African Company, England embarked on a career that within less than forty years made English merchants the preeminent suppliers of African bond-labor to the Western Hemisphere. A rise in the demand for labor in England, and a corresponding rise in the wage level there (soon to be coupled with the great demand for cannon fodder for the far-flung battle lines of England’s contest with France in Europe and in America), reduced the supply of persons available for bond-labor in the plantation colonies.54
As it had been when the source of supply had been in Europe, the African labor trade was a self-motivating capital interest. Virginia Governor Thomas Lord Culpeper was urged by King Charles II “to give all due encouragement and invitation to Merchants and others … and in particular to the Royal African Company of England.” Culpeper was further instructed to be on guard against any “interlopers” in that trade, which was intended to be a monopoly of the Royal African Company.55 Replying a year later, Culpeper asserted that the king alone made at least £6 per year from the labor of each Negro bond-laborer in Virginia.56
Now, finally, the plantation bourgeoisie was brought within reach of the realization of the vision foreshadowed in a number of laws already enacted, of enrichment through the imposition of lifetime, hereditary bond-servitude of Africans and African-Americans. In seventeenth-century Virginia the buyer paid an average of £14 and £13 respectively for men and women five-year bond-laborers. The investment in “seasoned” hands depreciated, however, and at an increasing rate; at the end of three years its value would be only £7 for males and £4 for females. The buyer of an adult lifetime bond-laborer was making an average investment of £18 to £20, an amount that depreciated over the remaining years of the laborer’s life. Thus the retained value of the investment at the end of three years would run in favor of the option for lifetime bond-labor. If that lifetime lasted ten years, the annual amortization on the investment would have been less than £2, about 30 percent less than on two five-year bond-laborers. There were ancillary benefits of investment in lifetime bond-labor since there was no outlay for freedom dues, and even at birth a child of a lifetime bond-laborer was of some capital value.57 The anticipated reduction in labor costs would have been desirable for the employing class at any time, but as the end of the seventeenth century neared it appeared to offer the bourgeoisie both a way of evading the unresolvable contradictions between monoculture and diversity, and a significant easing of the contention between English and continental branches of the business with respect to profits from low-priced tobacco. Culpeper stressed this latter consideration in urging the Royal African Company to moderate its prices for the sale of lifetime bond-laborers in Virginia. “[I]n regard to the infinite profit that comes to the King by every Black (far beyond any other Plantation) … and that Blacks can make [tobacco] cheaper than Whites, I conceive it is for his Majesty’s Interest full as much as the Countrys, or rather much more, to have Blacks as cheap as possible in Virginia.”58
But if a lack of “capacity to command” had made it impossible for the plantation bourgeoisie to impose the necessary social discipline on free and middle-rank tobacco farmers, what hope could there be for imposing social control on a society when masses of kidnapped Africans were added to the ranks of the disaffected bond-laborers already at the bottom of the heap?
With that question, the narrative portion of this chapter is complete, but a reflective postscript is in order. For the reader’s indulgence, I appeal to the example of Philip Alexander Bruce’s speculation on the possibility of an alternative path of development for the Old Dominion.59
Those historians who intend not only to record and interpret history, but also in so doing to affect its future course are impelled to offer judgments that for them seem to light the path ahead,60 even though sooner or later other historians are sure to find the light misdirected or insufficient in one or more respects. Having studied the record of the travail of the common people of seventeenth-century Virginia, “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” as Professor Morgan has called it, I cannot but ponder if it was possible for history to have followed a different, happier course and, if so, what Virginia by such a course would have become. It is a speculation, but I hope not an idle one.
In 1625 Sir Francis Bacon cited Virginia as an example to be avoided in establishing plantations, arguing that “the base and hasty drawing of profit” from tobacco worked to “the untimely prejudice of the main business.”61 John Smith, son of the English yeomanry, soon warned that to base production on chattel bond-labor was a disastrous course.62
Received historiographical doctrine argues to the contrary as follows. Virginia colony could only survive by exports; tobacco was not only the most profitable prospect for that role, but the only practicable one. Because of the low price of tobacco and the high prevailing wages, chattel bond-servitude was indispensable. The alternative was “slow progress” as “a community of small peasant properitors.” Such a course would (the thesis concludes) have been “utopian”; Virginia, indeed, was by nature designed to be “A commonwealth of tobacco plantations.”63
Who is right? If the question were merely a historiographical one, it would be as well to let it rest with the dead past. But the issue is not dead; it is as vital today as it was those nearly four centuries ago. The equating of economic growth with the most rapid accumulation of capital, which led Virginia to misery just as John Smith predicted, has continued to this day to guide the ruling class of the USA, who subordinate to that principle all other interests, heedless of the misery that it may leave in its wake.
“Two roads diverged … And that made all the difference”
As Virginia was first getting high on tobacco, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock to begin in New England a form of internal economic organization that largely embodied the principles advanced by Francis Bacon in that respect.64 In an appraisal of the condition of Virginia at the close of the seventeenth century, James Blair, the founder of William and Mary College lamented the fact that “No care was taken at the beginning to seat that Country [Virginia] in Townshipps, as in New England.” The result, he continued, was that Virginia was “deprived of the great Company of Citizens and Tradesmen that are in other Countryes.”65
Although both colonies were products of bourgeois England, four sets of contrasting factors would determine their respective patterns of social development:
1. the domination of landholding by large plantations in Virginia versus the predominance of small farms in New England;
2. the Virginia monoculture, with its utter dependence upon export markets, versus the mainly non-market-centered, and definitely non-capitalist, basic New England economy;
3. the chattel bond-labor force of the Virginia Plantation system versus the non-bond-labor of the small New England farms;
4. the Virginia “family,” which included all the persons belonging to one plantation even if most of them were not kin of each other, versus that typical New England family of a mother and father and their children.
The character of seventeenth-century Virginia society in these respects has been adequately described here; however, a brief elaboration of the New England case is in order. The statistics cited by Moller regarding contrasting seventeenth-century sex ratios in Anglo-American continental colonies66 are explained in terms of the contrasting labor bases:
While in the New England immigration males outnumbered females three to two, the ratio was six to one in the Virginia immigration. The Puritans, broadly speaking, arrived by families … The movement to Virginia, on the contrary, consisted predominantly of male workers [i.e., chattel bond-laborers].67
As we have seen, for every person brought into Virginia in the seventeenth century, a patent on fifty acres of land was bestowed on whomever had paid the cost of the immigrant’s transportation. This custom, supplemented by special land grants to favored individuals, was the basis of the high degree of concentration of landownership in that colony. In the very earliest days in New England, the headright form of land grant was observed, but over the colonial period as a whole “by far the greater part of the land disposed of was granted to communities of settlers.”68 Thus was formed in New England the very “township” form of settlement whose absence in Virginia was so much lamented by Commissary Blair. Under the New England system of settlement by families, “Great pains were taken to guard against excessive grants and accumulation of large estates,” writes Egleston. “Land, however abundant, was to be given by the community authorities to those who could use it.”69 New England settlement was in the form of communities initiated by a group of families securing, usually from the colony general court, an allotment of land not occupied by other settlers. These “proprietors” then distributed the land to colonists by plots of ground, proportioned to their payment for expenses of surveying, and other incidentals.70 A tendency toward concentration of land ownership did occur in New England “[t]hrough purchase, marriage, inheritance, [and] proprietary rights … with the result that later distributions of land, particularly those of the eighteenth century, showed more inequality;”71 but it was relatively insignificant as compared to that in plantation Virginia.72
Schemes and hopes of diversification of the Virginia economy were frustrated, as has been noted, by a shortage of capital for investment. Caught as the planters were between a low-ranging elasticity of tobacco prices and the inelasticity of royal customs and shipping charges, they could not escape the discipline of the next year’s indebted crop. Seventeenth-century New England settlers were not faced with that difficulty because “the household mode of production remained the dominant form of existence.”73 By the middle of the eighteenth century, when a degree of market development had occurred,74 the New England farmer might profit from a cash crop, perhaps wheat. But where does a self-employed person, propertyless except for an ax, possibily a plow, two or three animals, and enough grain to get the family through to his first harvest – where, without credit resources, does such a self-employed person get the capital for clearing land, building shelter for the family and the animals, and storage sheds or barns, and cutting new road?
[Such a] farmer may be compared to a business corporation which pursues a conservative dividend policy. Instead of paying out all of current income to stockholders, it puts a large share back into the business, thus increasing the value of his capital … [thus] literally ploughing in his profits.75
Such farmers made up the “communities of peasant proprietors” that Bruce argued were necessarily excluded from the march of “progress” in Virginia. Yet in New England they proved from their seventeenth-century beginnings to be perfectly viable and capable of eventual evolution from natural (subsistence) production to simple commodity production (the commodity beginning as the property of the producer) to capitalist production (wherein the product is never the property of the producer, but of the capitalist employer).76
Colonial Virginia has been assessed as “dynamic” and New England as the “least dynamic” of the continental colonies. By the eighteenth century, when Virginia and New England were about equal in population size, Virginia’s exports and imports were six to ten times as large as New England’s.77 It is obvious that New England’s climate and soil characteristics made the general employment of bond-labor impracticable, even if the land distribution system had formed plantations of a size suitable for profitable capitalist operation, and some staple had been struck upon that would not offend competitors in Old England. But it does not follow that Virginia’s climate and soil could not have been settled on the basis of communities of small farmsteads. For New England it was not a matter of choice; for Virginia it was. So it was that New England, more than anywhere else in North America, re-created rural England, while the Virginia plantation bourgeoisie “cast away restraining ideologies and institutions [and] developed a labor process unknown in England.”78
It was a conscious decision, not an unthinking one. In opting for the “dynamics” of monoculture and chattel bond-labor, the members of the Virginia plantation bourgeoisie knew they were rejecting the counsel of perhaps the most illustrious member of the Virginia Company. “It is true,” Bacon had said, “speedy profit is not to be neglected as far as it may stand with the good of the plantation, but no further.”79 It was simply what preacher Lionel Gatford warned them against in 1657 – the triumph of “Private Interest” over “Publick Good.” Now fifty years after the fateful option was made, having ignored Sir Francis’s precept and New England’s example, the Virginia ruling elite found itself three thousand miles from home with no yeoman buffer between it and a people of whom “six parts of seaven at least, are Poore, Endebted, Discontented and Armed.”80