Abbreviations of Some Frequently Cited Sources
1 The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case
1. See Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), Part I, “Colonial Theories, 1570–1660.”
2. As mentioned in Volume One of The Invention of the White Race (p. 8), in the early 1630s the English planted a colony on Providence Island, some 350 miles north of Panama and 135 miles from the eastern coast of present-day Nicaragua, but they were forced to abandon it in 1641.
3. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. IV, The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1967), p. 304.
4. J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–98 (New York, 1968), pp. 24, 289.
5. Between 1503 and 1660, according to records kept at Seville, Spain received from America 16 million kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of gold, of which the Spanish Crown’s share was 40 percent. (J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York, 1964), pp. 174–75.) This treasure quickly passed from Spain to its creditors, most notably the Fugger family of Augsburg and Antwerp, as payments on imperial debts, however. (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Vol. I, The Modern World-System, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century [New York, 1974], pp. 178–85. See also Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe, From the Invasion to the XVI Century [New York, 1955], pp. 524–6.)
6. Vieira’s O Papel Forte is here cited from Robert Southey, History of Brazil, 3 vols. (London, 1817); 2:225. “(I)t was men of which Portugal was in want,” said Southey, “not extent of territory.” (Ibid., p. 224.)
7. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York, 1969), p. 88.
8. Henry Raup Wagner, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas (Alburquerque, 1967), pp. 22, 38–43. Though Las Casas’s plan for establishing a Spanish peasant colony in the Americas failed, his proposal for using Negro slaves would soon lead to the royal licensing of the wholesale shipment of African bond-laborers to the Americas, which would come to be known as the Asiento. Some thirty-five years later, Las Casas regretted his role in this development. Even though he felt he had made a well-intentioned mistake that was generally approved by his contemporaries, he feared the divine judgment that he had yet to face for his role in bringing such terrible injustice on the Africans. (Bartolomé de Las Casas, História de las Indias, 3 vols, edited by Augustin Millares [Mexico City, 1951]; 3:474 [Capitulo 129].)
9. Charles Edward Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America (New York, 1933), p. 109. Special permission of the king or other qualified official had to be obtained before anyone might go to the Indies.
10. In a comment that anticipated Adam Smith and Edmund Burke (See The Invention of the White Race, Vol. One, pp. 33 and 71), Las Casas decried the social anomaly of “rabble who had been scourged or clipped of their ears in Castile, lording it over the native chiefs.” (Edward Gaylord Bourne, Spain in America, 1450–1580 [New York, 1907], p. 208.)
11. Luis Ivens Ferraz, “The Creole of Sao Tomé,” African Studies, 37:3–68 (1978), p. 16. Most of these survivors married men and women who were brought from the African mainland.
12. John Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change 1598–1700 (Oxford, 1992), p. 8; Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 300–301.
13. Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 300–301. Lynch, p. 8. In 1609, the moriscos constituted perhaps one-third of the population of Valencia, where they were chiefly agricultural laborers. (Elliott, p. 300.)
14. Ernest John Knapton, Europe, 1450–1815 (New York, 1958), pp. 238–9.
15. Chapman, pp. 109–10. In an analogous situation, English governments, whether guided by Puritan or Anglican principles, were untroubled by sectarian scruples. Irish Catholics in significant numbers were sent to Anglo-American plantation colonies in the seventeenth century, where their substantial presence caused the plantation owners some anxiety. (See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 74, and chapter 12 and 13 below.)
16. James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981), p. 81.
17. Jan de Vries, Dutch Rural Economy (New Haven, 1974), pp. 87–8. Rich and Wilson give the proportion as three-fourths (Economy of Expanding Europe, pp. 46–7).
18. De Vries, pp. 120, 184 and 203–34. De Vries concludes this section of his discussion by speculating that the absense of a numerous displaced and unemployed agricultural population retarded Holland’s industrial development.
19. Rawley, p. 80.
20. De Vries, pp. 120, 184 and 203–34.
21. Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800 (New York, 1965), p. 58.
22. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 58.
23. Ibid., p. 218. Although in 1630 the Dutch seized from Portugal the northern region of Brazil and called it New Holland, they were driven out in 1654, in part because “they were never able to induce adequate numbers of Dutchmen to settle in the faraway colony to influence the ethnic makeup of the settlement.” (Johannes M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 [Cambridge, 1990], p. 19.)
24. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Appendix C, p. 207.
25. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 219.
26. Jean Jacquart, “French Agriculture in the Seventeenth Century,” translated by Judy Falkus, in Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 165–84; 165, 177.
27. Ibid., p. 180.
28. The failure of one line of agricultural development is discussed in Sigmund Diamond, “An Experiment in ‘Feudalism’: French-Canada in the Seventeenth Century,” WMQ, series 3, 18:3–34 (1961).
29. W. J. Eccles, France in America (New York, 1972), pp. 76–7. Léon Vignols, “La Mise en Valeur du Canada à l’Époque Française,’ La Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 16:720–95 (1928); p. 736.
30. Eccles, France in America p. 77. In 1680, Robert LaSalle, the noted French explorer, reported that in Canada more trade goods were being converted into beaver pelts than Indians were being converted into Christians. (Vignols, “La Mise en Valeur,” p. 724.)
31. Hispaniola was the name first given by the Spanish to the island that the native people called Haiti. At the end of the seventeenth century, France took over the entire island and called it St Domingue. It reassumed the name Haiti when France lost possession as a result of the Haitian Revolution (1800–1804). Spain finally reasserted its claim to the eastern portion of the island in 1844. Since that time the island has remained divided: Haiti in the west, the Dominican Republic in the east.
32. Eccles, France in America, p. 148.
33. Ibid., p. 149.
34. For a further discussion of the French reasons for turning away from the idea of supplying plantation labor from among the French population, see W. J. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV (Toronto, 1964), especially pp. 52–8.
35. Eccles cites a 1681 finding that only one out of every twelve of the engagé laborers were surviving three years out of service, and another that in the eighteenth century only one out of every three African laborers were surviving as long as three years of labor in the French West Indies. (Eccles, France in America, pp. 149 and 151.)
For a more detailed treatment of the subject of engagé labor, see two articles by Léon Vignols: “Les Antilles Françaises sous l’Ancien Régime – aspects économiques et sociaux: l’institution des engagés, 1626–1774,” La Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 16:12–45 (1928); and “Une Question mal posée: le travail manuel des blancs et des ésclaves aux Antilles (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Revue Historique, 175:308–15 (Jan.–June 1935); pp. 310–11.
36. Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York, 1939), 2:19–20.
37. Eccles, France in America, pp. 76, 148. See also A. J. Sargent, The Economic Policy of Colbert (London, 1899; 1968 reprint), pp. 47–8; and Cole, pp. 21–2.
38. Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 174–5.
39. William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed (Madison, 1992), xxiii–xvi, xxviii (Table 1); Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge, 1981). Both Denevan (p. xxiii) and Cook (p. 2) note the irreconcilable extremes of the estimates of the 1492 population of Hispaniola, which range from sixty thousand to 8 million. Denevan, taking into account newly reported evidence of a devastating epidemic of swine flu in 1493, agrees with studies that fix the population at about 1 million. The 1514 figure is mid-range of a general consensus. (Cook, p. 2.)
40. In 1574 there remained in Hispaniola only two Indian villages, and in Cuba only nine, comprising 270 married Indian men. (Bourne, pp. 197–8.) Certain countervailing factors operated to limit the degree of destruction of the indigenous population of Puerto Rico in this period. (James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development [Princeton, 1986], p. 6; Salvador Brau, Ensayos: Disquicisiones Sociológicas [Rio Piedras, 1972], p. 15.) I am indebted to Bill Vila Andino for directing me to these sources relative to the history of Puerto Rico.
41. Encomienda was the assignment of a given number of Indian laborers to a Spanish employer. Repartimiento was the assignment of Indian laborers by an encomendero to another employer. Indentured servitude was an alternative form to the forced labor of the repartimiento. (See Charles Gibson, Spain in America [New York, 1966], pp. 144–7.)
Repartimiento involved movement to workplaces outside of one’s village; however, it required twenty men to be travelling to and from the mines, to maintain a supply of ten working in the mine. (T. R. Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood, A History of Mexico [New York, 1973], p. 225.) The repartimiento miners were forced to labor at a wage one-fourth that of free laborers. (Lynch, pp. 306–7.)
Ultimately, the Indian agricultural laboring class in Mexico, though nominally free, was reduced to peonage, a form of practical bondage by debt to the owner of the hacienda. (Gibson, pp. 118–19, 147,156).
42. Denevan, ed., Table 1, p. xxvii. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610 (Berkeley, 1960), p. 48. Cf. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 2–3.
The decline of the indigenous population of Mexico ended in the middle or late seventeenth century, but by the end of the eighteenth century their number was still less than it had been in 1492.
43. Markham, who spells the word mitta, identifies the term as a native Peruvian Quichua word meaning “time” or “turn.” (Clement R. Markham, A History of Peru [1892; reprinted New York, 1968], p. 157.)
44. Cook, pp. 113–14, 246. Compare the slightly higher estimate of 11.7 million for the Indian population of the “Central Andes” at the time of the arrival of the Spanish. (Denevan, p. xxviii.)
45. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 88. Basic to the difficulties of the Portuguese in Brazil was the fact that the unstratified, non-sedentary, native social structure there – in contrast to the class-differentiated sedentary societies found by the Spanish in Mexico and Peru – did not present opportunities for co-optation of native social forms for colonialist purposes.
46. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of the Portuguese social control problems in Brazil.
47. The Belgian historian Charles Verlinden, a preeminent authority on slavery in medieval Europe, has contributed a series of studies showing the link between medieval European and Ibero-American colonial slavery, noting both parallels and divergences. He emphasizes the historical continuity that existed between slavery in medieval European societies, including the Portuguese plantation gambits in the Atlantic islands, on the one hand, and the labor supply system in colonial Ibero-America, on the other. See Charles Verlinden, The Beginning of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, translated by Yvonne Feccero (Ithaca, 1970), especially pp. 33–51, Chapter 2, “Medieval Slavery and Colonial Slavery in America.”
48. African bondmen and bondwomen, nearly fifty thousand of whom were brought to Europe in the sixteenth century, worked mainly as domestic servants, artisans and farmers, and enjoyed a considerable degree of social mobility. (Verlinden, p. 47; Rawley, pp. 24–5.)
49. Verlinden, p. 38.
50. Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade, Precolonial History, 1450–1850 (Boston, 1961), pp. 33–4.
51. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery: Changing Portuguese Attitudes, 1440–1770,” Journal of American History, 83:16–42; 27.
52. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 116. See also Russell-Wood, p. 22; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 88–9; Rawley, pp. 24–5.
53. Verlinden, p. 39. It is interesting to note that among these Africans brought to Portugal was the putative great-grandmother of Jesuit priest António Vieira (1608–1697), the famous royal adviser and advocate of sparing the Brazilian Indians of the Maranho region by substituting laborers bought and brought from Angola. (“Não custa a crer tivesse vindo a bisavó de Africa, trazida por escrava a Portugal.”) (Lúcio de Azevedo, História de António Vieira, multi-volume [Lisbon, 1992–], 1:14. See also: the Inquisition documents, ibid., pp. 311–17; Mathias C. Kiemen, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region, 1614–1693 [Washington, DC, 1954], p. 140.)
54. Verlinden, p. 40.
55. Wagner, p. 40. Chapman, p. 119. Rich Wilson, eds. p. 322.
56. Rawley, pp. 26–27. Postma, p. 31. George Scelle, “The Slave Trade in the Spanish Colonies of America: The Asiento,” American Journal of International Law, 4:612–61 (1910), pp. 614, 618, 622.
57. Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760, revised 2nd ed. (Oxford 1962), pp. 265 n. 1, 315.
58. Estimates considered include: W. E. B. Du Bois, 10 or 12 million (Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 1, Selections, 1877–1934 [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press], p. 124) and J. D. Fage, 11,360,000 (A History of West Africa, 3rd. edition [Cambridge, 1969], pp. 82–3, 225). David Brion Davis puts the number at a minimum of 15 million (Slavery in Western Culture [Ithaca, 1966], p. 9). Rawley estimates the number at 11,048,000 (Rawley, pp. 428–9). Philip D. Curtin concludes that more than 8 million and fewer than 10.5 million Africans survived the Middle Passage to arrive as bond-laborers in the Americas. (Curtin, p. 87). Fage bases his estimate on Curtin, adding a percentage for those who lost their lives during the voyage.
Discussing the overall impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa, Davidson writes: “it appears reasonable to suggest that one way or another, before and after embarkation, it cost Africa at least fifty million souls” (Davidson, pp. 80–81). See also Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), pp. 95–8. (This work was originally published in London and Dar es Salaam, 1972.) Compare Rawley, pp. 425–7.
60. Rawley, p. 424. I hope that my remarks are not inconsistent with Rawley’s intention.
61. Curtin, p. 87.
62. The concluding stanza of “We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years,” by “An Unknown Proletarian”, in IWW Songs, Songs of the Workers, 27th edition (Chicago, 1939), p. 64. IWW stands for Industrial Workers of the World.
63. See “The Enslavement Process in the Portuguese Dominions of King Philip III of Spain in the Early Seventeenth Century” (1612), in Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, 1983), pp. 11–15.
English captain Thomas Phillips described the determined resistance of captive Africans being assembled for shipment to Barbados in 1693 in his ship the Hannibal. Though shackled two-by-two “to prevent their mutiny, or swimming ashore,” “… they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up by our boats, which pursued them; they have more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have of hell. (“A Journal of a Voyage in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694 from England to Africa and so Forward to Barbadoes, by Thomas Phillips, Commander of the said Ship,” in John and Awsham Churchill, comp., A Collection of Voyages and Travels [Churchill’s Voyages], 6:171–239; 219.)
Compared with ships in Mediterranean or Baltic commerce, the slave ships required a higher crew-to-tonnage ratio to hold down their rebellious cargoes. (Kenneth L. Davies, The Royal African Company, [London, 1957], pp. 193–4.) In this brutal commerce, writes Basil Davidson, “Every ship’s captain feared revolt on board, and with good reason, for revolts were many.” (Basil Davidson, Africa in History [New York, 1968], p. 187.) It was for fear of revolt that 120 Africans were suffocated below decks, in order that the remaining 380 could be delivered to New Spain (Mexico), on a Portuguese ship in about 1612. (Conrad, p. 15.) See, in the same work, pp. 39–40, Document 1.7, “A Slave Revolt at Sea and Brutal Reprisals [1845]”.
64. See Appendix II-A.
65. “. the Moors, with their women and children were leaving their houses as fast as they could, for they had seen their enemies” (Document 1.1, “The Beginnings of the Portuguese-African Slave Trade in the Fifteenth Century, as Described by Chronicler Gomes Eannes de Azurata,” in Conrad, pp. 5–11; p.6; the name of the chronicler is given as Gomes Eanes de Zurara in. biographical encyclopedias.)
66. In the nineteenth century, the liberation struggle tended to merge into the general abolitionist and anti-colonialist struggles, especially in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil and Uruguay. (In Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York, 1973), see: Jose L. Franco, “Maroons and Slave Rebellions in the Spanish Territories,” p. 48; Miguel Acosta Saignes, “Life in a Venezuelan Cumbe,” p.73; David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico,” p. 99; Roger Bastide, “The Other [than Palmares] Palenques,” p. 171. In Magnus Mörner, ed., Race and Class in Latin America, (New York, 1970), see: Carlos M. Rama, “The Passing of the Afro-Uruguayans From Caste Society into Class Society,” pp. 21, 37–9; Richard Graham, “Action and Ideas in the Abolitionist Movement in Brazil,” pp. 62–6.
The maroon settlements in the mountains in eastern Cuba “lasted till the beginning of the first War of Independence in 1868, when the maroons joined en masse the ranks of the Cuban Liberation Army.” (Franco, p. 47.)
67. See: C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963), p.411; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York, 1988), pp. 245–6.
68. Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London (Albany, NY, 1869), p. 11. Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), pp. 28–9. Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the Material Conditions of the People, based upon original records, 2 vols. (New York, 1895; Peter Smith reprint, 1935), 1:10–19. Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1890), pp. 562–5.
69. Las Casas denounced his Christian fellow countrymen on this account. Spanish encomenderos, given Indians of Hispaniola into their care to teach them the Catholic faith, merely “took care,” said Las Casas, to “send the men into the mines, to make them drain them out gold.” (Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevisima Relación de la Destruicion de las Indias Occindentales, written in 1539; first printed in 1552, excerpted in George Sanderlin, trans. and ed., Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Selection of his Writings (New York, 1971), p. 84.) The Indian cacique Hathuey, who had fled from Hispaniola to Cuba in about 1511, explained to the people what he had learned of the Spanish religion. Pointing to a small chest of gold and jewels, he said: “Behold here the God of the Spaniards.” (Ibid., p. 87.)
Francis Bacon, the famous English essayist and statesman and member of the Virginia Company, generalized as follows: “It cannot be affirmed (if one speak ingenuously) that it was the propagation of the Christian faith that was the adamant of that discovery, entry and plantation [of America]; but gold and silver and temporal profit and glory.” (Bacon, Works, 7:20–21, “An Advertisement Touching An Holy War.”)
70. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present, no. 70, pp. 31–73 (February 1976); p. 69. R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1912), p. 195. George M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (New York, 1942), pp. 206–8.
71. “This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection and the hand of war …/… set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall” (Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1). This sentiment perhaps was even more appropriate to Shakespeare’s time than in the reign of Richard II (1377–99).
72. J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors (Oxford, 1952), p. 450. Tawney, p. 195–6. Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1969), pp. 120–21,126–8,132–3, 201.
73. Mackie, pp. 374–5.
74. See Tawney’s discussion of the stimulating effect of the confiscation and redistribution of monastic lands on the pace of the conversion of arable to pasture land (Tawney pp. 379–84).
75. C. S. L. Davies believes that the turbulence of the following couple of years may have been worsened by the tardiness of their reabsorption into civilian life. (“Slavery and the Protector Somerset: the Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 19:533–49 (1936); p. 538.)
This retreat from France marked the withdrawal from the alliance with Charles V, as whose ally the English had invaded France in September 1544. It was the beginning of the Tudor “island policy,” which relied on the build-up of the Royal Navy rather than on military campaigns in Europe to protect the English position. (Trevelyan, p. 216.)
76. C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Armies, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1966), pp. 14–16. For the number of English soldiers in the Tyrone War (1594–1603), see The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Chapter 5.
77. Demographers’ corrected figures, based on London bills of mortality for seven plague years in the period 1563–1665 (three in the sixteenth century and four in the seventeenth century), totalled 292,598, only one-fifth of them in the sixteenth century. (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction [Cambridge, Mass., 1981], pp. 81–2 [Table 3.9].)
78. Wrigley and Schofield, pp. 531–5 (Table A3.3). The annual rate of natural increase of the English population in the last six decades of the sixteenth century averaged 0.76 percent contrasted with 0.36 and 0.57 percent for the ten decades of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries respectively. (Ibid., p. 183 [Table 6.10].)
79. Lawrence Stone, taking issue with Tawney, asserts that, “It was relentless demographic growth … rather than the enclosing activities of monopolistic landlords which … was responsible for the rise of a landless labourer class, of a semi-employed squatter population eking out a living in cabins in the wastes and heaths, and of a small but conscious body of unemployed vagrants.” (Lawrence Stone, Introduction to the 1967 edition of Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century.)
80. Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), p. 200.
81. Sir John Clapham, A Concise History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (Cambridge, 1949; Princeton, 1963), pp. 251–2.
82. Thirsk and Cooper, eds., p. 1 (House of Commons, 26 February 1621).
83. Journals of the [English] House of Commons, I:711.
84. E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900), p. 266.
85. John Eastcott Manahan, “The Cavalier Remounted: A Study of the Origins of Virginia’s Population, 1607–1700,” PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1946; p. 28.
86. Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1924), 1:64, “Petition of the Virginia Company” (26 April 1624).
87. “A Letter of Advice Written to the Duke of Buckingham” (1616), in Bacon, Works, 13: 13–24, 21. Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse of Western Planting (1584), in Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2nd ser., 2:37 (1877). R. I. (Richard Johnson), Nova Britannia (1609), p. 19. The original sources are given here, but these quotations, along with twice as many more to the same point, are found in Knorr, pp. 42–4.
The opposing minority did not challenge the colony-makers on the fact of the surplus of common labor. Instead, they argued mainly from the following three principles: (1) that a large population was essential to the strength of the realm; (2) that colonies, once established, might become unwelcome competitors in the markets supplied from England; and (3) that emigration might seriously reduce the home supply of skilled workers.
88. “A Consideration of the Cause in Question before the Lords touching Depopulation,” British Museum Mss., Cottonian Mss., Titus F, iv, ff. 322–3 (5 July 1607). Reprinted in Kerridge, pp. 200–203.
89. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 8–11, for my criticism of Winthrop Jordan’s use of the term “unthinking decision” in his psycho-cultural explanation of the origin of racial slavery.
2 English Background, with Anglo-American Variations Noted
1. The religious issue in England, which culminated in the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, and which paralleled the establishment of the racial oppression of Catholics in Ireland, had its echoes in Maryland, which was founded as a proprietary colony of Catholic convert George Calvert (c. 1580–1632). A number of Protestant rebellions, interlinked with class conflict, were launched in the province, with varying degrees of success, against a succession of Lords Baltimore, until 1715 when the third Lord, Charles Calvert, converted with his family to the Protestant religion. The difference between the fate of Catholics in Maryland and of those in Ireland is betokened by the fact that the land holdings of Maryland Catholics remained intact, even in the 1691–1715 period when the Calvert proprietorship of the colony was revoked on religious grounds. In Ireland, as has been discussed in Volume One, the Catholic landowning class was systematically expropriated by Protestants under the Protestant Ascendancy regime of racial oppression. Irish Catholics brought to Maryland as chattel bond-laborers did become the occasion for expressions of ruling-class alarm, principally because of the worry that they would join the African-American bond-laborers in class solidarity.
2. See Part Two below.
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.), Book III, Chapter IV, p. 329.
Karl Marx, Thorold Rodgers, R. H. Tawney and Rodney Hilton present a more sober view. Tawney’s concluding eloquence on this point should not be missed. (R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century [New York, 1912] pp. 406–8.)
Eric Kerridge (Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century [London, 1969], Introduction), however, thinks that Tawney sacrificed scholarship to the social dogma to which Tawney supposedly adhered as a member of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. By portraying capital as relentless and remorseless, as the violator of common-law rights of peasants, and as the perpetrator of giant exploitation of man by man. Tawney – as Kerridge sees it – led “whole generations of history students into grievous error.”
For a sharp counter-criticism of Kerridge, see Lawrence Stone in the Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1970, pp. 1135–6.
4. A paraphrase of Tawney, p. 264.
5. Estimates range from 20 percent mortality (Josiah Cox Russell, “Demographic Patterns in History” Population Studies, no. 1, 1948) to possibly half (J. H. Clapham and Eileen Power, eds., The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages [Cambridge, UK, 1944], Volume I of Cambridge Economic History of Europe, p. 512).
The preamble of the 1349 Statute of Labourers posed the feudal lords’ problem more adequately than the remainder of the law served to assuage it: “Because a great part of the people, and especially workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages.” (23 Edw. Ill, The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year of the reign of King George, the Third, inclusive [London, 1786–1800].)
6. See Appendix II-B, on Wat Tyler’s Rebellion. Historians such as Charles Dobson (The Peasant Revolt of 1381 [London, 1970], p. 30) question the importance of the revolt as a factor in bringing an end to feudalism in England. Yet Dobson concedes that in the following century “tenants did not find it impossible to resist pressure from their landlords.”
Thorold Rogers, on the other hand, declares that, “the gradual emancipation of the serfs [dates] unquestionably from the great Insurrection [of 1381].… The peasant of the fourteenth century struck a blow for freedom … and he won.” (Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History [London, 1889] pp. 31 and 82.) Rodney Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973) presents an equally sympathetic discussion of the revolt, but takes note of fateful shortfalls in its accomplishments.
7. Rogers coined the term (p. 82).
8. W. H. R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land (Oxford, 1920), p. 117.
9. “It is not easy to discover any economic reason why the cheap wool required for the development of the cloth manufacturing industry should not have been supplied by the very peasants in whose cottages it was carded and spun and woven” (Tawney, p. 407).
10. The peasants in Ket’s Rebellion put forward a program which, had they won, would have given a severe check to the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. (See S. T. Bindoff, Ket’s Rebellion, 1549 [London, 1949], Historical Association, General Series G. 12.)
11. Tawney, p. 318.
12. Ibid., p. 333.
13. For the most comprehensive treatment of this event, see Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537 and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge 1915), 2 vols.
14. J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 385.
15. Dodds and Dodds, 1:220 and 2:225–6. Tawney, pp. 334–35.
16. Tawney, p. 11.
17. Gilbert Bernet, History of the Reformation (originally published in 1679–81 and 1714; republished Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865; 3 vols., cited in George L. Craig and Charles Macfarlane, The Pictorial History of England, being a History of the People as well as a History of the Kingdom, 4 vols. (New York, 1843), 2:464. Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisition of Depopulation of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 18 (1904): 195–214; p. 203 n. 2. John Hales, The Discourse of the Common Weal, edited by E. Almond (circa 1549) (London, 1893), p. viii. [Raphael] Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (originally published 1577; London, 1808; AMES Reprint [New York, n.d.]), 3:963–85 (Holinshed’s account of Ket’s Rebellion).
18. Tawney, pp. 335–7. Bindoff, Ket’s Rebellion, p. 9. The quotation is from Bindoff. (Although “privatizing” is my own anachronism, it seems appropriate for this earlier process of “the rich stealing the property of the poor.”)
The government did make a notable concession in response to the demands of the rebels, although it proved to be a time-limited and fundamentally ineffectual one. Two years after Ket’s Rebellion, Parliament enacted a law (5 & 6 Edw. VI 5) requiring that as much land be established in tillage as was in tillage in the first reign of Henry VIII (1509). This law was repealed a decade later by 5 Eliz. 2. (E. M. Leonard, “The Enclosure of Common Fields in the Seventeenth Century,” in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History 3 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:227–56; p. 242 n. 65.)
19. Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulations of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 18:195–244 (1904); pp. 212, 216 n. 3, and 240.
An interesting example of how in formulating a deliberate policy of social control, ruling-class concessions were weighed against the danger of encouraging rising expectations, is to be noted in a House of Lords commentary following the Midlands anti-enclosure revolt of 1607. If indeed “depopulation” was to be adjudged the cause of the revolt, the House of Lords wondered “Whether time may be fit to give remedy, when such encouragement may move the people to seek redress by the like outrage, and therefore in Edward the sixth his time was not pursued until two years after the rebellion of Kett.” (Kerridge, pp. 200–203; p. 200, Document No. 27 [British Museum, Cottonian Manuscripts, Titus F. iv, ff. 322–3, “A Consideration of the Cause in Question before the Lords touching Depopulation,” July 6, 1607].)
20. Curtler, p. 117.
21. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,’ Past and Present, 70(1976):31–73; 63 n. 80.
22. D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” in Carus-Wilson, ed., 2:291–308; 295 (originally published in Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 8(1956), no. 3). Sir John Clapham, A Concise History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (Cambridge, 1949; Princeton, 1963), pp. 212–13. “By no means the least burden of complaint,” writes Kerridge (p. 132), “was that family farmers were deprived of their livings and replaced by wage workers.”
23. E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of Building Wages,” in Carus-Wilson, ed. 2:168–78; pp. 177–8 (originally published in Economica, vol. 22 [1955]). E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates” in Carus-Wilson, ed., 2:178–96; pp. 194–6. (originally published in Economica, vol. 23 [1956]).
24. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), pp. 14–15.
25. Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry Seventh, in Works, 6:124. Laslett, pp. 14–15. Coleman, 2:295.
In 1688, Gregory King estimated that of the total English population of 5,500,000, nearly one-fourth, or 1,300,000, were just such “cottagers and paupers” (Gregory King, “A Scheme of the Income and Expense of the several Families of England calculated for the year 1688,” in Jan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-century Economic Documents [Oxford, 1972], pp. 780–81).
26. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins (“Wage-Rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,” Economica, 24(1957): 289–306) relate this question specifically to the wage earners, but I have taken the liberty of giving it more general reference. The term “upheaval” is not precise, although the peasant revolts of 1536, 1549 and 1607 certainly qualify for that term. But an “upheaval” sufficient to check the ascendance of the bourgeoisie and its heedless and heartless expropriation and impoverishment of the laboring people did not occur. It is in this broader sense that I wish the matter to be understood in the discussion that follows concerning the establishment of bourgeois social control.
Rodney Hilton, a historian who identifies emotionally with the peasant rebels, traces their defeat in the sixteenth century to the fourteenth-century “failure of the rebels [behind John Ball and Wat Tyler in 1381] to end villeinage and to extend the rights of free tenure [as against mere manorial copyhold rights] to all tenants.” Such a thorough sweep, he maintains, “would have meant the end of manorial jurisdiction … [and] it would have involved the removal of all cases about land to the common law courts.… At one stroke the material basis for deference and the respect for the hierarchy which had dogged the English rural masses for centuries would have been removed.” (Hilton, pp. 232 and 224).
The “long” sixteenth century might be taken to mean roughly 1500–1640. For a discussion of this concept, see I. W. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 67–9.
27. These gradations related to the degree of security of the tenant’s claim to the land. See Tawney, Chapter III; Kerridge, Chapter 2; and Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven, 1942), Chapter IV.
28. The term “forty-shilling freeholder” was first defined by Thomas Littleton, in his treatise on Tenures, near the end of the fifteenth century. Strictly interpreted, it would mean a person free of personal labor obligations to any lord, and holding a hereditary lease on lands yielding at least forty shillings’ annual income. While the land-income qualification remained constant, the term came to be not so strictly applied in other respects.
29. See Tawney, pp. 340–44. “It was an essential feature of Tudor policy to foster the prosperity of the yeomanry, from whose ranks were recruited the defenders of the realm” (Ephraim Lipson, The Economic History of England, 3 vols. [London, 1926, 1931, 1931]; 1:141).
30. Francis Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, in Francis Bacon, Works, 6:28–245; pp. 93–5.
31. Ibid., 6:95.
32. Though the producer “intends only his own security … [and] only his own gain, … he is … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV Chapter 2, p. 354). But where does one’s self-interest lie? In this yeoman-preserving policy, the English ruling class was drawing a distinction between the self-interest of the individual exploiter and the overriding self-interest of the exploiting class as a whole.
33. Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, in Works, 6:94.
34. Ibid., p. 219.
35. Campbell. Chapter IX, “For the Common Weal,” is the general basis for this paragraph on the public functions of the yeomen.
36. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Discourse on the Commonwealth of England (1583; 1906, edited by L. N. Alston; reprint New York, 1974), pp. 43–4.
37. Bindoff, p. 216. Joseph Clayton, Robert Kett and the Norfolk Rising (London, 1912), p. 217.
39. The Statute of Artificers, in The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first Year of the Reign of King Goerge, the Third, inclusive (London, 1786–1800).
40. The wage level, whether high or low, operates as an essential mechanism of social stability. The limits of its fluctuation, however, are set by the premises of the bourgeois social order itself. The formulation of this basic principle has not been improved upon since Sir Bernard de Mandeville first set it down in his Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. With an Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools, and A Search into the Nature of Society, 6th edition (London, 1732), pp. 193–4: “[T]hose that get their Living by their daily Labour … have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their Wants, which it is Prudence to relieve but Folly to cure. The only thing then that can render [them] industrious, is a moderate quantity of Money; for as too little will … either dispirit or make [them] Desperate, so too much will make [them] Insolent and Lazy.’
41. 25. Edw. Ill, Stat. 1, c. 1 (1351); 37 Edw. Ill, c. 6 (1363); 12 Richard II, c. 3–9 (1388); 13 Richard II, Stat. 1, c. 8 (1390); 6 Henry VI, c. 3 (1427); 8 Henry VI, c. 8 (1429); 23 Henry VI, c. 12 (1445); and 11 Henry VII, c. 72 (1495). In The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third, inclusive (London, 1786–1800). See also W. E. Minchinton, ed. Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (republished, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972). This collection comprises works by R. H. Tawnet originally published in Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, XI (1914), pp. 307–37 and 533–64; R. Keith Kelsall, “Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers” R. Keith Kensall, and, “A Century of Wage Assessment in Hertfordshire, 1662–1772,” originally published in English Historical Review, vol. 57 (1942):115–19.
42. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, in Carus-Wilson, ed., pp. 171, 177, and 194.
43. Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978), p. 27.
44. 1 Edw. VI, 3. In The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third, inclusive.
45. C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and the Protector Somerset: the Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19:533–49 (1966); 535–6. “The 1547 act,” says Davies, “was aimed at a wider target than those bands of wandering beggars which terrorized the Tudor countryside. The latter were a useful excuse to make palatable a policy of enforced employment, and, by implication at least, to reduce still further the worker’s limited ability to bargain” (p. 536).
46. 1 Edw. VI, 3, Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first Year of the Reign of King George, the Third.
47. 3 & 4 Edw. VI, 16, Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third.
48. Cited in Lipson, 1:149.
49. Cited in ibid.
50. Davies, pp. 547–8.
51. Tawney, p. 11.
52. John Cheke, “The Hurt of Sedition” (1549; republished, 1569), in Holinshed, 3:987–1011.
53. Davies, p. 546.
54. F. W. Russell, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk (1859), p. 48; cited in Tawney, p. 337.
55. Bindoff, while calling it “the only resounding denunciation of villeinage ever heard in Tudor England,” still thinks that it had no reference to the slavery provided by the 1547 law; he considered this rebel programmatic point as merely high-flown symbolic verbiage borrowed from the German peasant uprising of 1512 (Bindoff, pp. 12–13).
Diarmuid MacCullogh rejects Bindoff’s speculation. He believes that the anti-bondage demand was narrowly directed against Thomas Howard, late Duke of Norfolk, who was much disliked for mistreatment of and refusal to manumit bondmen (villeins) on his East Anglia estates (Diarmuid MacCullogh, “Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” Past and Present, 84(1979):36–59; p. 55).
56. Davies, p. 547. The original voice was that of one Fitzherbert, Description of England, which Davies cites from E. R. Cheyney, “The Disappearance of English Serfdom,” Economic History Review, vol. 15:20–37 (1900); 24.
57. Davies, p. 548.
58. Davies is here citing Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States, 2 vols. (New York, 1849), 2:72. Davies’s reference is by way of the citation in Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York, 1956), p. 399. I cannot explain why Stampp’s page reference differs from mine.
59. Davies, p. 544, citing ms. Cecil Papers, 152/96. But a century after the repeal of the 1547 law, it yet provided the model for the first Barbadian slave code. (Rev. George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica, 2 vols. [London, 1827], 1:507. Cited by Lewis Cecil Gray, assisted by Esther Katherine Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. [Washington, DC, 1932], 1:347.)
60. R. H. Tawney, “The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace,” in Minchinton, ed., Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England, pp. 47–53.
61. 5 Eliz. 4, “An Act touching the divers Orders for Artificers, Labourers, Servants of Husbandry and Apprentices.” Good modern discussions of this statute are to be found in Minchinton, ed. and in S. T. Bindoff, “The Making of the Statute of Artificers,” in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams, eds., Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961), pp. 56–94.
62. Bindoff, “Making of the Statute of Artificers,” p. 72.
63. The studies made by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins would indicate that the statute did not affect the trend in nominal or real wages. (See Carus-Wilson, ed., 2:168–96, especially pp. 177–78 and 193–96.) But Tawney’s study of magistrates’ records led him to believe that “it is probable that the practice of assessing wages tended to keep them low by setting up a standard to which the master could appeal, [but, he adds] it is also probable that it was evaded without much difficulty by the exceptionally competent journeyman, or by the master who was in difficulties through a shortage of labor” (Tawney, “Assessment of Wages,” pp. 92–3).
64. 53 Geo. 3, c. 40, Statutes of the United Kingdom, p. 191, “Act to Repeal the Statute of Artificers.” Reprinted in Joel H. Wiener, ed., Great Britain, The Lion at Home, A Documentary History of Domestic Policy, 1689–1973, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers in association with R. R. Bowker Company, 1974), 1:913.
65. The testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, who had himself been a major architect of the Statute of Artificers (see Davies, pp. 542–3), provides a catalog of degrees of servitude and freedom of labor as they had evolved in the sixteenth century: “Thus necessitie and want of bondmen hath made men to use free men as bondmen to all servile services: but yet more liberally and freely, and with more equalitie and moderation, than … slaves and bondemen were wont to be used. This first [apprenticeship] and Latter [wage-labor] fashion of temporall [limited-term] servitude, and upon paction [mutual agreement of employer and employee] is used in all such countryes, as have left off the old accustomed man[n]er of servaunts, slaves, bondemen and bondwomen, which was in use before they received the Christian faith.” (De Republica Anglorum, p. 139 [lib. 3, ch. 9].)
66. For instance Rogers (p. 38); Tawney (“Assessment of Wages,” p. 49), and Marxists such as A. L. Morton (A People’s History of England, 2nd edition [London, 1948], p. 173).
67. Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law, 5 vols., 5th edition (Dublin 1786), p. 359, paragraphs 46–8. The remedy, “when any Man covenants to do a Thing, … and that cannot be, then [he is] to render Damages for not doing of it.”
68. Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1619); edited, with an appendix, by William Nelson, London, 1727), p. 179.
69. Under certain unusual circumstances – such as the death of a master or the removal of his master to another place – the apprentice, if he were willing, might be put with another master, but the apprentice could not be compelled to accept the assignment against his will. (Dalton, pp. 222, 245; John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, second edition, 2 vols. [London, 1782], 2:266–7.)
70. In 1648 a promotional pamphlet for colonizing in Virginia was written by Beauchamp Plantagenet entitled, Description of the Province of New Albion. It was printed in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies of North America from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, 1836–46); vol. 2, no. 7.
71. A number of modern historians, such as Edwin F. Gay, W. H. R. Curtler, and Eric Kerridge, stoutly maintain that the actual extent of the economic dislocation occasioned by the Agrarian Revolution was exaggerated in the original accounts, and subsequently by uncritical historians. To the present writer these objections seem narrowly based. However that may be, the fact remains that real wages declined from decade to decade throughout the sixteenth century and into the first decade of the seventeenth, when they were only 44 percent of what they had been in the first decade of the sixteenth century (Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “… Prices of Consumables,” 2:194–5). It is impossible to believe that such a catastrophic decline in real wages could have occurred without massive unemployment.
72. Tawney, p. 273, citing Historical Manuscripts Commission, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII (November 1597, “Notes for the present Parliament”).
73. These laws included 14 Eliz. 5 (1572) and 39 Eliz. 4, 5 and 17.
74. Preamble to 14 Eliz. 5 (1572), cited in George Nicholls, A history of the Country and Condition of the People, 3 vols. (supplementary volume by Thomas Mackay) (1898; 1904; Augustus M. Kelley reprint, 1967), 1:157.
75. Nicholls, 1:178, citing John Stow, Survey of London and Westminster (1598), book V, chapter 30.
76. Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse of Western Planting (1584), in Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2nd ser., 2:37 (1877).
77. Nicholls, 1:178.
78. Sir Henry Knyvet, The Defense of the Realme (1596; Oxford, 1906), p. 11. Cited in Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), p. 43.
79. Nicholls, 1:188.
80. It was repealed by the National Assistance Act of 1948, Geo. 6, c. 29, Public General Statutes (1948), declaring that “The existing poor law shall cease to exist.” Reprinted in Wiener, ed., 4:3553–9.
81. Nicholls, I:189–92.
82. E. M. Leonard, 255–6, citing State Papers, Domestic, Vol. 185, No. 86.
83. Tawney, pp. 275–6 and 280.
84. I cite but two examples: First, A Virginia law passed in April 1662 provided that “all horses, cattle, and hoggs” belonging to any African-American or other lifetime bond-laborer were, in default of the claim of the bond-laborer’s owner, to be “forfeited to the use of the poore of the parish” through the good offices of the churchwardens. (Hening, 3:103.)
Second, under the provisions of a Maryland law of 1717, any free African-American who married a European-American, or any European-American marrying a free African-American, was to be taken and sold by the county court into a seven-year term of servitude, the proceeds of the sale to be “applied to a [whites only] Public School.” (Thomas Bacon, comp., Laws of Maryland at Large [Annapolis, 1765], Chapter XIII, Section V.)
85. Male domination – the practice and the doctrine – is a social institution of such immemorial origin that both the makers and the recorders of history may have mistaken it for a natural condition, and thus outside the scope of their concerns. Except for those investigators specifically committed to exposing and abolishing the wrongs that women, as women, have been forced to bear, our historians have generally ignored the function of male supremacy as a basic element of ruling-class social control.
86. The unmarried adult woman (“feme sole”) of the propertied classes was a partial exception, she having some limited individual rights with regard to property. But even so, because of the generally subordinate social status of women she would find her position extremely vulnerable if she attempted to capitalize on her property independently.
87. Of the 216 persons executed for treason for participating in the Pilgrimage of Grace, only one, Margaret Cheyne, Lady Bulmer, was burned at the stake. Many women had been involved in the ill-fated rebellion, and some of them more directly and deeply than Cheyne. But Henry VIII preferred to make examples rather than to carry through large-scale executions, and Lady Bulmer was vulnerable. She and her husband were true lovers; some of their children were born before she and John were married; and they remained faithful to each other to the end. According to the Dodds, Henry’s aim was “an object lesson to husbands, which should teach them [women] to dread their husband’s confidence” (Dodds and Dodds, 2:214 and 226).
Anne Boleyn, convicted of treason on charges instigated by her husband, Henry VIII, in 1636, after she had twice miscarried in an attempt to bear him his much-desired male heir, was treated with greater mercy than that shown to Margaret Cheyne a year later. Instead of being burned alive, Anne Boleyn was beheaded. A specially skilled executioner with his special French sword was brought from Calais for the occasion. Anne Boleyn privately insisted on her innocence to the end, but she abstained from doing so publicly for fear of bringing down the wrath of her husband on her daughter, Elizabeth, the future queen. (William Douglas Hamilton, ed., A Chronicle of England During the Reign of the Tudors from AD 1485 to 1559, by Charles Wriothesley [hereafter referred to as Wriothesley’s Chronicle] 2 vols. [London: Camden Society, 1875 and 1877]).
But Henry’s purpose was constant. When Anne Seymour, whom he married the day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, pleaded with him to desist from his expropriation of church abbeys, a course that had brought on the beginnings of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry warned her against meddling in “his” affairs, and cowed her into silence by a direct reference to the fate of her predecessor (Dodds and Dodds, 1:108).
88. Unless otherwise noted, the comments made here on social relationships under feudalism in England are based on the following readings: (1) Paul Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (London, 1927), especially Chapter II, “Rights and Disabilities of the Villain,” and Chapter V, “The Servile Peasantry and Manorial Records”; (2) idem, The Growth of the Manor, 2nd. edition (London, 1911), especially Book III, Chapter III, “Social Classes”; (3) H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (London, 1948), especially pp. 240–44; (4) a legal discussion of the status of the serf vis-à-vis that of the lifetime bond-laborer in continental Anglo-America, set forth in a decision by Judge Daniel Dulany, of the Maryland Provincial Court, 16 December 1767; printed in Thomas Harris and John McHenry, Maryland Reports, being a Series of the Most Important Cases argued and determined in the Provincial Court and the Court of Appeals of the then Province of Maryland from the year 1700 down to the American Revolution (New York, 1809), 1:559–64, especially 560–61.
89. Once, during the days of the final paroxysms of English feudalism, an agent of the Duke of Norfolk (in order to promote a prosecution of interest to the Duke) entreated a certain widow whose testimony was to be required “to be my Lord’s wewe [a form of the Anglo-Saxon word “widewe’ (widow)] by the space of an whole year next following, and thereto he made her to be bound in an obligation.” (“R. L. to John Paston,” 21 October 1471, in John Warrington, ed., The Paston Letters, 2 vols. (London: Everyman, 1956), pp. 118–19. The editor notes that, “The widow of a feudal tenant was called the lord’s widow.”
In Roman times, the Latin term “nativus” was applied to the personally unfree, the born slave. In feudal England, its etymologically evolved form “naif” was reserved for the serf woman, thus emphasizing her doubly servile role, by virtue of class and gender. A man of the laboring classes, whether free or serf, was simply termed “villein.”
90. At one point during the Pilgrimage of Grace, in 1536, non-gentlemen rebels sought to put this sort of upper-class concern to their own purposes, but in a way was equally informed with callous and cruel male supremacism. Having the Earl of Cumberland besieged in Skipton Castle in Yorkshire, these rebels threatened to use the Earl’s two daughters and his daughter-in-law as shields in assaulting the castle; and if they failed in that, they said, they would “violate and enforce them with knaves unto my Lord’s great discomfort” (Dodds and Dodds, 1:210, citing James Gairdner, ed., Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, [London, 1888], vol. XII [1], 1186).
91. Henry VIII justified it as a necessity for the “purity of the succession,” when he had his second and fifth wives charged with “adultery,” and executed. (Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1:xxxviii [Hamilton’s introduction]). This was but a royal example; the same basic principles applied (though not with the same latitude of remedy) wherever women and inheritable property were present in conjunction.
92. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 200–205.
93. 1 Edw. VI, 3, The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third. See also Davies, p. 534.
94. Documents relating to the assessment of wages for the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1593, Lancaster in 1595, and Rutland in 1610. (James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices, 7 vols. in 8 [London, 1886–1902], 6:686–93.
95. Francis Bacon, “The Case of the Post Nati of Scotland” (1608), in Works, 7:641–79; pp. 644–6.
96. In “An Advertisement Touching An Holy War,” an uncompleted dialogue written about 1618, Bacon has one of his characters pose a case which in his view would justify holy war: “Now let me put a feigned case (and yet antiquity makes it doubtful whether it were fiction or history) of a land of Amazons, where the whole government public and private, yea the militia itself, was in the hands of women. I demand, is not such a preposterous government (against the first order of nature, for women to rule over men) in itself void, and to be suppressed?” The speaker then goes on to link such a government with two others whose very existence would justify holy war for their destruction: “… for those cases, of women to govern men, sons the fathers, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree, all being perversions of the laws of nature and nations.” (Works, 7:33).
Bacon understood: “And therefore Lycurgus [the great Spartan state-builder], when one councelled him to dissolve the kingdom, and to establish another form of estate, answered, ‘Sir, begin to do that which you advise first at home in your own house;’ noting, that the chief of a family is as a king; and that those that can least endure kings abroad, can be content to be kings at home” (“Case of the Post Nati of Scotland,” Works, 7:633–4).
97. Dodds and Dodds, 2:216.
98. J. C. Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 4 vols. (London, 1886–92), 1:lii–liii. Wynstone’s social station is inferred from the fact that he is not accorded any distinguishing term of address.
99. I must not commit the error for which I have criticized Jordan and Degler, by making sweeping assertions about the “English mind.” All I mean here is that I have not come across records of any contemporaries of Bacon and Wynstone repudiating male privileges.
100. Virginia laws imposed a year of extra servitude for a male bond-laborer and two years for a woman bond-laborer for marrying without the consent of the owner, and laid a heavy fine on any minister who performed such a marriage. (Hening, 1:252–3 [1643]; 2:114 [1662].)
A Maryland man, together with his wife, was forced by impoverishment to enter into a seven-year term of bond-servitude. One day in 1748 when his wife was bound up to undergo a whipping by her overseer, the husband endeavored to loosen her bonds, avowing that he would untie her “If it cost me my life … for she is my lawfull Wife.” He himself was severely beaten and the whipping proceeded. When he appealed to the county court for redress, his appeal was rejected. (Prince George’s County Court Records, Book HH, 165–8, CR 34717, Maryland Hall of Records.)
101. In a previously mentioned decision (see The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 89, 90) handed down by the Maryland Provincial Court in 1767, Judge Dulany made this point clear in differentiating between the status of the English villein and the lifetime hereditary bond-laborer in Anglo-America. “If a neif married a freeman,” he said, “she became free, it being the necessary consequence of her marriage, which placed her in the power of her husband [even though this] without doubt was an injury to the lord.” But “slaves are incapable of marriage …,” he said, and consequently “we do not consider them as the objects of such laws as relate to the commerce between the sexes. A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed.” (1 Harris and McHenry, Appendix, pp. 560, 561, 563.)
“To debauch a Negro woman they do not think fornication … they still have the feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.” (Statement of Colonel Samuel Thomas, Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands for Mississippi, appended to the Report of Major General Carl Schurz to President Andrew Johnson, 27 July 1865, on “Conditions of the South,” 39th Congress, 1st Session (1865–66), Senate Executive Documents, Vol. 1, p. 81.
As noted in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One (p. 148), a major motive of the Negro Exodus of 1879 was the necessity to escape the gross imposition of the white male privilege against black women in the South. See 46th Congress, 2nd Session (1879–80), Senate Report 693, Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the US Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States; Part II, pp. 177–8; part III, pp. 382–3.
3 Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of Social Control
1. Of sixty-eight mentioned by name, thirty-eight were “Council Members,” and “Gentlemen” (Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, 2 vols., edited by Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley [Edinburgh, 1910], 1:93–4. In subsequent references, this work will be abbreviated Smith, Travels and Works.)
2. “I came to get gold, not to till soil like a peasant!” Cortés replied when it was first suggested that he might receive a large grant of land in Cuba. (William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru [New York: Modern Library, n. d.], p. 130.)
3. “Until 1622 each side [Virginia colonists and Powhatan Indians] tried to gain control over the other one.” (Christian F. Feest, “Virginia Algonquians,” in Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast, Volume 15 of Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturdevant, General Editor, 20 vols. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–), 15:256.)
Waterhouse, Martin and Smith were speaking in the immediate aftermath of the massive attack made by the Powhatan Indians on the English settlement on 22 March 1622. (See Chapter 5.)
4. Edward Waterhouse, “A Declaration of the State of the Colony …” [1622], in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, 1906–35); 3:541–79; 562–3 (hereafter abbreviated RVC). Waterhouse appears to have been right about the decline of Spanish silver and gold. The peak of receipts of bullion at Seville was reached in the early 1590s. (See J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 [New York, 1964], p. 175.)
5. See Gonzalo Aquirre Beltrán, “The Integration of the Negro into the National Society of Mexico,” in Magnus Mörner, ed., Race and Class in Latin America (New York, 1970), p. 18.
6. RVC, 3:558–9.
7. John Martin, “The manner howe to bringe the Indians into subjection without makinge an utter exterpation of them …” [1622], in RVC, 3:704–7; 706.
8. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:579 (1622). A decade before he got to Virginia, Smith had been captured in battle against the Turks in Hungary and served in Turkey as a slave, eventually escaping through Russia. (Ibid., 1:360.)
9. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:955–6.
10. Anthropologist William M. Denevan remarks that he and other scholars in that field “more and more find a causal relationship between size of population and cultural change and evolution.” (William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd edition [New York, 1992], p. 235.) Though I am not an anthropologist, it seems to me that comparisons such as that between Portugal and Hispaniola suggest a more indirect relationship between population density and complexity of social structure; that both increasing population density and class differentiation are functions of the development of the productivity of labor. If the productivity of labor is such as to provide a storable surplus, population density may be higher and, moreover, a possibility of the seizure of power may exist through control of the surplus product by a segment of the society; then, and only then, is a basis for class differentiation present. Without the wheel and domesticated animals, the level of disposable surplus in Portugal would have made it as impossible as it was in contemporary Haiti for a parasitic leisure class to emerge. This is not meant to be the basis for a wider comparison; Noble David Cook points out that intensive agriculture with terracing and irrigation, like that of ancient Peru and in some places in the modern Far East, makes possible a higher level of labor productivity (generally expressed in calories per unit of cultivated area) than that achieved in some other places cultivated with domesticated animals and wheeled equipment.
11. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevisima relación de la Destrución de las Indias (written in 1539; first printed in Spain in 1552), edited by André Saint-Lu (Madrid, 1982), p. 72.
12. Las Casas commented sarcastically, that the Spanish encomenderos, who were supposed to care for the souls of the island natives, merely took “care … to send the men into the mines, to make them drain out golde” (ibid., p. 84).
13. Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York, 1966), pp. 51–2.
14. Las Casas, pp. 81–2.
15. Salvador Brau, La Colonizacion de Puerto Rico, Desde el descumbrimiento de la Isla hasta la reversión a la corona española de los privilegios de Colón, 4th edition (San Juan de Puerto Rico, 1969), pp. 142–63, 259.
16. Salvador Brau, Ensayos: Disquicisiones Sociológicas (Rio Piedras, 1972), p. 15. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico, p. 6. Las Casas reported that the natives of Hispaniola also resisted the Spanish by inter-island flight (Las Casas, p. 83).
17. Comprising the present-day Mexican states of Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Mexico, Hidalgo, Distrito Federal, Michoacán, Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit, plus small portions of Zacatecas, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosi (William T. Sanders, “The Population of the Central Mexican Region, the Basin of Mexico, and the Teotihuacán Valley in the Sixteenth Century,” in Denevan, p. 87.
18. Denevan, p. xxviii, Table 1.
19. “The Central Mexican Symbiotic Region,” as it was termed by demographer William T. Sanders, comprises the present-day Distrito Federal and the states of Mexico and Morelos, plus southern Hidalgo, southwestern Tlaxcala, and the western third of Puebla (Sanders, in Denevan ed., p. 87). For population and population density figures, see ibid., pp. 130–31, Table 4.9. To convert square kilometers to square miles, divide by 2.59.
20. Woodrow Borah and S. F. Cook, The Population of Central Mexico in 1548, p. 7. The Aztec Empire was an alliance of three city states in the Valley of Mexico, composed of Tenochitlan (Mexico City), Tezcoco, and Tlacopan.
21. Borah and Cook, pp. 57, 66–67.
22. Gibson, p. 149. In another work, Gibson’s glossary defines cacique as an Aztec “Indian chief or local ruler.” (Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 [Stanford, California, 1964], p. 600). According to the dictionary, cacique originated as a Haitian word. Clement R. Markham, writing of the caciques of Peru, tends to this view, but he allows the possibility that it derived from the Arabic term for chieftain, sheikh, which the Spanish adapted for Hispaniola. (Clement R. Markham, A History of Peru [1892; reprinted, New York, 1968], p. 156.)
Socially subordinate to the Aztec caciques, but still free, were the commoners, the land-owning but tribute-paying macegual class. The social attributes of this class – their relatively substantial numbers, their wide distribution, and their direct contact with the serf-like mayeques – were characteristics typical of a buffer social control stratum. But I do not know whether they actually functioned as such. (See Borah and Cook, pp. 8, 60.)
23. Gibson, Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, pp. 78–80.
24. Gibson, Spain in America, p. 149.
25. Ibid., p. 149.
26. Ibid., pp. 150–51.
27. Markham, p. 156.
28. See ibid., p. 157; Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change, pp. 330–31.
29. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison, 1968), p. 210.
30. Markham, pp. 145–6, 152. At the ceremonial banquet in Lima, Sayri Tupac fingered the richly fringed table covering, saying, “All this cloth and fringe were mine, and now they give me a thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house.” Returning to his own ancient capital, Cuzco, he languished in melancholy and died not long after. (Ibid., p. 146.)
31. The sheer population decline eventually diminished the importance of these executors of the colonial labor supply system. Between 1650 and 1680, say Borah and Cook, “much of the Indian nobility [in Mexico] … vanished into the general mass of commoners which had become too small for supporting an upper [Indian] stratum.” (The Population of Central Mexico in 1548, p. 65.) I do not intend to pursue the matter of the history of the replacement of this Indian cacique class as the intermediate stratum, beyond referring to the finding of T. R. Fehrenbach that in Mexico this role came to be played by descendants of European fathers and non-European mothers. (T. R. Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico [New York, 1973], pp. 238, 240.)
32. Borah and Cook, pp. 59–60; Lynch, p. 305. One would hope that Fehrenbach intended to allow room for an ironic interpretation of his characterization of the Chichimec resistance as “merely the savage struggles … against advancing civilization.” (Fehrenbach, p. 217.)
33. Markham, pp. 93–6.
34. After the defeat of the rising, the Spanish beheaded the young Tupac Amaru on 4 October 1571, after instructing him in the Christian religion and baptizing him. (Markham, pp. 152–3.)
35. Five years after Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia Governor Thomas Culpeper made that point in his appeal to the English government for the continued maintenance of two companies of soldiers in Virginia to prevent a renewal of rebellion. “There is a vast difference [he wrote] between Virginia and Jamaica, Barbados and all other Island Plantations, by its situation on the Terra Firma. They have little to fear whilst England is Master of the Sea … [In island colonies] there is no shelter or hopes for Rebels to escape long unpunished.” (Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 25 October 1681. In Great Britain Public Record Office, Colonial Papers, CO 5/1355, pp. 407–9; 407.)
36. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (New York, 1969), p. 86.
37. Richard Graham, The Jesuit Antonio Vieira and his Plans for the Economic Rehabilitation of Seventeenth-century Portugal (São Paulo, 1978), p. 29.
38. Mathias C. Kieman, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region, 1614–1693 (Washington, DC, 1954), p. 181.
39. Graham, p. 30. Justification was found for holding still other Indians captured in “just wars” (ibid.).
40. Boxer, p. 88.
41. Kieman, p. 184.
42. See ibid., pp. 181–6.
43. A similar effort was made, but ultimately failed, in Spanish Florida, where, writes Robert L. Gold, “the [Franciscan] mission rather than the encomienda became the institutional structure upon which colonial power rested.” “The indigenous peoples, and territories of Florida,” he continues, “were integrated within a system of missions which offered the Spaniards the typical opportunities of expansion, exploitation and proselytization.” Robert L. Gold, Borderline Empires in Transition: The Triple-Nation Transfer of Florida [Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1969(?)], pp. 6–7.
44. António José Saraiva, História e Utopia, Estudos sobre Vieira (Lisbon, 1992), pp. 56–7.
45. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in North-eastern Brazil,” Journal of American History, 83:43–79 (1978); 45–7. It was a society characterized by “[a] communal or reciprocal attitude toward production and consumption, a domestic mode of production, a society on [in?] which status was not derived from economic ability” (p. 47).
46. In the following argument, I have relied upon the analysis by Helen C. Rountree and the criteria she has adapted from Mary R. Haas defining strong rulership (Helen C. Rountree, Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture [Norman, Oklahoma, 1989], especially Chapter 6, “Social Distinctions”); upon Feest, in Handbook of North American Indians, 15:256–62; and upon Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895; reprinted 1935), 1:149, 157, 168, 175, 178.
47. This thesis is anticipated in The Invention of The White Race, Volume One, pp. 12–13, 23–4, 69–70, and Appendix G. It must be understood that the distinction made here – between societies with and without the intermediate stratum – is different from that between kinship and non-kinship societies. Kinship societies may in some cases be class-stratified, even though the two patterns of social division – kinship and class – are contradictory to each other. (See the discussion of Irish tribal society in Volume One.)
48. Maurice A. Mook, “The Aboriginal Population of Tidewater Virginia,” American Anthropologist, 46:193–208 (1944); pp. 206–7. Mook considers valid John Smith’s estimate that the indigenous population numbered 5,000 within a sixty-mile radius of Jamestown. (Smith, Travels and Works, 1:360.) This was the most densely populated area of the “South Atlantic Slope” region, wherein the total Powhatan Confederacy numbered some 8,000, in an area of 0.89 inhabitants per square mile, compared with 0.43 per square mile for the entire region. Other scholars present somewhat different estimates, on the basis of different population numbers and territorial extent, ranging as high as just over two persons per square mile. (Rountree, p. 143 and Feest, in Handbook of North American Indians, 15:256.) The most important primary sources in this regard are John Smith, Map and Description of Virginia (1612) and William Strachey, Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (c. 1616), in Smith, Travels and Works.
It should be noted that, from the vantage of a consciousness raised by the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, anthropologists and historians have critically reexamined the scholarly European-American estimates of the population north of the Rio Grande prior to the contact with the exotic diseases of the Europeans. They have persuasively argued that the actual numbers were some ten times greater than those given by earlier authorities. For examples of the earlier ethnography see: James Mooney, “The Powhatan Confederacy, Past and Present,” American Anthropologist, 9:128–30; idem, “The Aboriginal Population North of Mexico,” in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, LXXX, No. 7 (1928), edited by J. R. Swanton, pp. 1–40; and A. L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, XXXVIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1939). For examples of recent critical examinations of the subject, see: Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975); Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinctions of the New England Indians,” Human Biology, 45:485–506 (1973); and Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hampshire Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7:395–416 (1966).
49. “It pleased God, after a while to send those people which were our mortall enemies to releeve us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish, and Flesh in great plentie … otherwise wee had all perished. Also wee were frequented by diverse Kings in the Countrie, bringing us store of provision to our great comfort.” (George Percy’s Discourse [1608?], in Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–1609, 2 vols. [Cambridge, 1969], 1:145.)
50. Rountree, p. 143.
51. The possibility of a Mexican-style encomienda and hacienda form of sedentary labor reserve never arose. But if it had, it would surely have proved unsuitable for the constant westward-rolling cycle of clearing and transplanting characteristic of the tobacco monoculture to which the Chesapeake colonies were committed almost from the moment, around 1618, when the bourgeoisie got the first whiff of its profitable possibilities. Of Mexico and Peru, Gibson says: “Native agriculture was little affected by European techniques or crop innovations …” (Spain in America, p. 142.)
52. Though veteran soldiers were important in the Company period of Virginian history which ended in 1624, the colony was by no means primarily a military force. They certainly had no cavalry. When Hernado Cortes sailed from Cuba to invade Mexico, his forces included 110 mariners and 553 soldiers (including 32 crossbowmen and 13 men with firearms) plus 200 Cuban Indian auxiliaries. The force brought 10 heavy guns, four lighter pieces, well furnished with ammunition, and sixteen cavalry horses. (Prescott, pp. 145, 157.)
53. Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), pp. 167–8.
“The argument of technological superiority at that time was a weak one; despite guns and large ships, the Europeans could not wrest a living from a terrain which, by English standards, supported an exceptionally large population.” (Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America, Essays in Colonial History [Chapel Hill, 1959] pp. 33–60; 39.)
54. “The appearance of the English was probably far less alarming [to the Indians] than 350 years of hindsight indicate it ought to have been” (Lurie, p. 36).
55. “There was never any real chance of holding the English back after 1646 …” (Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries [Norman, Oklahoma, 1990], p. 89.)
56. “Treaty of Peace with Necotowance, king of the Indians,” 5 October 1646 (Hening, 1:323–6).
57. See The Invention of The White Race, Volume One, pp. 36–8.
58. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
59. Hening, 2:15–16 (11 October 1660).
60. Hening, 2:346, 404, 440; Hening, 4:10, 102.
61. Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (New York, 1913), pp. 108–9, 123–5.
62. See tabulations of peltry exports from Carolina and Virginia and the prices of various trade goods in the early eighteenth century in Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Durham, North Carolina, 1928), Appendices A and B.
63. “The native tribes were encouraged [by South Carolina traders] to make war on one another and to sell their prisoners to the colonists.” (Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 [Washington, DC, 1932; 1958 reprint]. p. 361.) See also: Lauber, pp. 170–71; 183–4; 184 n. 1; 286; Gary B. Nash, Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974), pp. 116–17; Chapman James Milling, Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill. 1940), p. 87.
64. A section of the Cherokee Indians complained in 1715 that if they complied with English Yamassee War policy by ceasing to make war on the Creek tribe, “they should have no way in getting Slaves to buy ammunition and Clothing” (Crane, p. 182).
65. Nash, p. 152.
66. See note 61.
67. Ibid., pp. 283–9.
68. No separate comment on the second thesis is attempted; it will be briefly noted in the context of the discussion of the third thesis. (See note 122.) Lauber’s fourth thesis seems consistent with the argument I am presenting.
69. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” Journal of American History, 83:43–79 (1978); pp. 76–8.
70. Kiemen, p. 183. See also Graham, pp. 28–31, 34–35; the quoted phrase, used in a letter written by Vieira to Portugal’s King John in May 1653, is at page 28. Charles Edward Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America: A History (New York, 1933), p. 80.
71. Lauber, pp. 173–4.
72. The preamble of the first (1712) South Carolina slave law justifies its enactment on the ground of the “barbarous, wild, savage natures” of Negroes and Indians. Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization of Government under the Federal Constitution, 1497–1789, 3 vols. (New York, 1848), 2:271–2.
Alexander Stephens, who became the Vice-President of the slaveholders’ Confederacy, declared that the Confederacy was founded on “the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.” (Savannah Georgia speech, 21 March 1861, quoted in Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia [Baton Rouge, 1977] p. 125.) See Volume One of The Invention of the White Race, p. 287 n. 15, for other examples.
73. William C. Sturtevant, “Creeks into Seminoles,” in Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie, eds., North American Indians in Historical Perspective (New York, 1971), p. 101. Nash, p. 117.
74. Lauber, p. 171.
75. Ibid., pp. 169, 174.
76. Ibid., pp. 126–7.
77. Bruce, 2:385, 386; Nash, p. 112.
78. Bruce, 1:572–3.
79. Lauber, pp. 108, 187. Governor Berkeley reported that there were 2,000 “black slaves” in Virginia in 1671. (Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, 1676–77, Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepysian Library, document 2582.) He did not offer an estimate of the number of Indian slaves. Lauber does not seem to be justified in implying that Berkeley included Indian slaves in the 2,000 figure. (Lauber, p. 108.)
80. Indeed, Lauber says, “it would seem that the supply was sufficient to nourish the system of Indian slavery indefinitely …”; he adds, however, that the Indian tribes were “generally remote from the English settlements.” (Ibid., p. 283.)
81. Ibid., pp. 124–7.
82. The total population was 9,580, of whom only 41 percent were free persons (1,360 men, 900 women and 1,700 children). In addition to Indians, the bond-labor force included 4,100 Negroes (1,800 men, 1,100 women and 1,200 children), 43 percent of the total population, and 120 “whites”, 60 men and 60 women. (Governor and Council of South Carolina to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 17 September 1709. CSP, Col., 24:466–9.)
83. Lauber, p. 106. Crane, pp. 112–13. I have not sought to check their respective sources to account for the substantial discrepancy between Lauber and Crane regarding the number of African-Americans (Lauber 4,100; Crane: 2,900).
84. Lauber, pp. 124–7.
85. Ibid., p. 106. Lauber in this instance was referring to South Carolina but, as has been noted, the same policy was followed in other colonies.
86. Ibid., pp. 169, 174. Crane, p. 113.
87. Crane, p. 113. Lauber, 245.
88. Nash, p. 155.
89. There is at least one record referring to Carolina chiefs as “cassiques” (Crane, p. 137). The cited sources are (1) CO 5/288, p. 100, Report of the Committee, Appointed to examine into the Proceedings of the People of Georgia [1737], and (2) Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 5:456, n. But in terms of the colonial power social control function, there was a fundamental difference between the Carolina chiefs and the Mexican and Peruvian caciques; the Carolina chiefs were in no position to recruit from their own tribes bond-laborers for the colonizing power.
90. The space advantage could be limited in special circumstances, as in the case of the Apalachees and, later, the Seminoles, on the Florida peninsula; and that of the Wampanoags cut off by the English-allied Mohicans of New York in the 1675–76 Metacom War. See Nash, p. 127; and Sturtevant, p. 75.
91. Milling, p. 86. The Delaware were by then under the hegemony of the Iroquois. (Ibid.) See also Nash, p. 118.
92. The Creeks moved away from the English in 1717. (Sturtevant, p. 101.) The Tuscarora plan to migrate to Pennsylvania failed in 1711 because they were not able to get timely approval from the Quakers there. (Nash, p. 147.)
93. A portion of the Wampanoags merged into the Mohicans after defeat in the Metacom War, 1675–76; and the Delaware tribe was formed by a number of remnants of other tribes. (T. J. C. Brasser, “The Coastal Algonkians,” in Leacock and Lurie, eds., p. 75; The Natchez, after defeat by the French in the Lower Mississippi in 1730, “in small bands sought refuge with other southeastern tribes.” (Nash, p. 109.)
94. The phrase was used by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in contrasting the situations of Indians and Africans vis-à-vis the Anglo-American plantation colonists. (Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South [Boston, 1929], p. 160)
95. Crane, p. 113.
96. William S. Willis, “Divide and Rule: Red, White and Black in the Southeast,” Journal of Negro History, 48:157–76 (1963); p. 162.
97. Ibid., p. 161.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., p. 162.
100. Lauber, pp. 172, 172 n. 1. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes on the Southern Frontier,” Journal of Negro History, 33:53–18 (1948) pp. 59–62. Sturtevant, pp. 100, 101. Crane, pp. 255–6, 274. Willis, p. 159.
101. Crane, pp. 247–8.
102. Porter, pp. 67–8.
103. Crane, pp. 162–5.
104. Willis, p. 158.
105. For a highly informative dissertation on “Indian policy” of the English colonial governors and legislatures of New York and Maryland, and the involvement of Indian tribes in the rivalries of England, France, Holland and Sweden in the seventeenth century, see Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102:5–53 (1968).
106. Crane, pp. 254, 272–3, 275. “[I]t certainly is of the Highest Consequence that they [the Cherokees] should be engaged in Your Majesty’s Interest, for should they once take another party, not only Carolina, but Virginia likewise would be exposed to their invasion” (Commissioners of Trade and Plantations to King George I, 8 September 1721 [CO 324/10, pp. 367–8]).
The thesis that history repeats itself finds expression in the pithy colloquialism “What goes around comes around.” History’s cruel revisit to the Cherokees, the most “English” of all tribes, is briefly noted in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 33–4, 37, and 243 n. 44.
107. CO 324/10, pp. 367–8. (8 September 1621).
108. Bruce, 2:115–16. Porter, pp. 59, 63. Willis, p. 169. Sandford Winston, “Indian Slavery in the Carolina Region,” Journal of Negro History, 19:430–40 (1934); p. 439.
109. Nash, p. 294. He goes on to say, however, that the bounties offered “often evoked little response on the part of the Indians” (ibid.).
110. Willis, p. 163. See also Winston, p. 439.
111. Hening 1:325–6; a similar “agreement” was imposed in South Carolina following the 1711–12 Tuscarora War. (Winston, p. 439.)
An April 1700 treaty between the English colony of Maryland and the Piscataway Indians provided that “[i]n case any servants or slaves run away from their masters to any Indian towne in Oquotomaquah’s territory, the Indians shall be bound to apprehend them and bring them to the next English Plantation; any Indian who assists fugitives shall make their masters such compensation as an Englishman ought to do in the like case.” (CSP, Col, 18:150–52; 9 April 1700 Minutes of the Maryland Colony Council, a treaty between the Governor of Maryland and Oquotomaquah, Emperor of Piscataway.)
112. CSP, Col., 18:150–52.
113. The critical significance of “nearness” informed an order issued by the South Carolina Proprietors in 1680, purposing to prohibit colonists from engaging in the Indian slave trade within 200 miles of Charles Town; two years later the exclusion zone was widened to 400 miles (Crane, pp. 138–9). The settlers on the ground, for whom at that time the Indian slave trade was the principal source of income, were able to evade and nullify such formal restrictions. But their disregard of the “nearness” principle would eventually become a major consideration in the ending of Anglo-American enslavement of Indians.
114. Milling, pp. 86–7.
115. In the extremity of its situation, the South Carolina Provincial government sent emissaries to Virginia to appeal for three hundred “white” volunteers. These recruits were to be paid 22s. 6d. per month. In addition, for each volunteer who came, the South Carolina Provincial government undertook to send one African-American woman to Virginia. (Milling, pp. 144, 146–7, 149.)
South Carolina Governor Charles Craven reported to the English government that he had enlisted about two hundred Afro-American men, “who with a party of white men and Indians are marching toward the enemy,” the Yamassees. (CSP, Col, 28:228 [23 May 1715].) Noting the irony of the situation, Kenneth Porter commented on its uniqueness: “So far as I can discover, in no other part of the British colonies in North America were slaves so employed.” (Porter, p. 55.)
116. Crane, p. 138.
117. CSP, Col., 13: 331–2, Proprietors of Carolina to Governor Colleton, 18 October 1690.
118. Indian employees within the colony played an important part in the surprise Indian attack of Good Friday 1622. At the same time, the English credited an Indian employee with giving the English warning of the attack (RVC, 3:555).
119. “Colonial Papers,” folder 30, item 29 (27 October 1709), Virginia State Archives, Richmond.
120. Hening 4:78. Morgan Poitiaux Robinson, Virginia Counties, Those Arising from Virginia Legislation (Richmond, 1916), p. 95.
121. William Byrd II of Westover to Mr Ochs, ca. 1735. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 9:225–8 (1902); 226. This periodical will hereafter be abbreviated VMHB.
122. Lauber’s second thesis regarding the decline of Indian slavery involves not a reduction in the number of slaves but rather an official ethnic reclassification. Upon the birth of a child of an Indian bond-laborer whose other parent was an African-American, the Indian identity ended. Any such child was classified as a Negro, or “mustee,” a corruption of the Spanish term mestizo. Lauber considers this erasure of the Indian identity simply a matter of the dominance of African genetic traits. (Lauber, p. 287.)
Lauber might better have considered the cases of African-American male bond-laborers who escaped to Indians beyond the boundaries of the colonies, and who “in most cases … seemed to have disappeared into Indian society where they took Indian wives [and] produced children of mixed blood” (Nash p. 296). Two “disappearances,” but in one case the “Indian” identity disappears; in the other, the Negro identity disappears. The disappearance of the Negro identity is by the normal assimilation of the immigrant. But the disappearance of the Indian identity does not involve immigration from one people to another. Rather, the official stripping-away of the Indian identity may be better understood in relation to the following three social control considerations: (1) it was a way of breaking the children from the Indian tribal stems, with the enhanced propensity for running away that such ties entailed; (2) it was a cheap way of formally accommodating the policy of discontinuance of the enslavement of Indians without losing any bond-laborers; and (3) it served to preserve and strengthen the system of white-skin privileges of the European-American colonists, first of all the presumption of liberty.
4 The Fateful Addiction to “Present Profit”
1. The periodicity is noted in Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932) p. 47; Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1910), 2:229; Philip Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York, 1898), Table of contents; and by others.
2. RVC, 3:98–99 (Virginia Company. Instructions to George Yeardley, 18 November 1618, RVC, 3:98–109). The document is also available in Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet, No. 4, The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624, with introduction by Samuel M. Bemiss, pp. 95–109, and in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2:154–65 (July 1894). The title of this journal will hereafter be abbreviated VMHB. See also: Brown, p. 309; Lyman G. Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), “Proceedings of the Virginia Assembly, 1619,” pp. 249–78; Craven pp. 52–54.
3. The well-known facts in this introductory paragraph are conveniently presented in William W. Abbot, A Virginia Chronology, 1585–1783, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 4 (Williamsburg, 1957), pp. 1–11.
4. Brown, pp. 332 and 650. See also 2:633–6.
5. A corollary of the “germ” theory is found in the idea sometimes advanced that the history of the Company period offers a vindication of the “free enterprise” economic system as against the supposed “collectivism” of the efforts made during the first two phases of the Company period, namely up to 1618. A. E. Smith is one who subscribes to this view. In his standard general work in the field of “white servitude,” as it is called, Smith sees the failure of the early efforts of the Virginia Company as due to a “kind of collective farming” approach: “The colony was saved because private individuals took over the activities formerly reserved for the company, and made the profits of the free planters themselves the basis of the settlement’s life”. (Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776, [Chapel Hill, 1947; New York, 1971] p. 14.)
Considering the dearth of material on the origin of chattel bondage during the Company period, however, Smith’s brief discussion of it (pp. 6–16) is still valuable.
6. Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895), 1:586–7.
7. James C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), pp. 31–2.
8. Eric E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 19.
9. Lerone Bennett Jr, The Shaping of Black America (Chicago, 1975), pp. 40–41.
10. For example: Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period in American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1914–1938); Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge, 1949); idem, Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713 (New York, 1967); and idem, White, Red and Black, The Seventeenth-Century Virginian; Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past (New York, 1959 and 1970); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black, American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, (Chapel Hill, 1968); Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1960); Edward D. Neill, Virginia Carolorum (Albany, NY, 1886); Herbert L. Osgood, American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (New York, 1904–1907); Thomas J. Wertenbaker Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (Charlottesville, 1910); idem, Virginia under the Stuarts (Princeton, 1914); and idem, The Planters of Colonial Virginia, (Princeton, 1922).
11. By Russell R. Menard, in his works Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), especially pp. 191–201, 234–5, 268–9, 286, and “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies, 16:355–90 (1977); and by David W. Galenson in his “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America,” Journal of Economic History, 41: 39–47 (1981), in his White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981), and in Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York, 1986).
As historians, Menard and Galenson are economists rather than political economists. The class struggle between laborers and employers does not enter at all into their discussions; indeed Menard spends a lot of time establishing the absence of class struggle, especially between poor and rich, bond-laborer and owner among European-Americans. They seem to presume that all the employer had to do was to decide that a given category of laborers was more advantageous to employers’ interests, and that all else automatically followed. On this basis Menard challenges Edmund S. Morgan’s attempt to suggest that racial oppression of the Negro was a deliberate decision by the ruling class. Menard and Galenson offer their presumption under the rubric of “the divided labor market.” Job discrimination in early colonial times is rationalized by Menard and Galenson as a function of the common language of the English master and servant and the skills that the English workers brought with them to America. This discrimination was undergirded, Menard says, by “cultural barriers and the depth of racial prejudice.” (Economy and Society, p. 270).
Menard and Galenson appear not to be disposed to look at the “white” identity objectively.
12. Cited here from Hening, 1:64; 95. This work will hereafter be cited as “Hening, [vol. no.]: [page no.].” See also: Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet, No. 4, The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624, with an introduction by Samuel M. Bemiss; and Brown.
13. Hening, 1:103.
15. Charles E. Hatch Jr, The First Seventeen Years, Virginia, 1607–1624, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet, No. 6 (Williamsburg, 1957), p. 10.
16. Brown, pp. 126–7.
17. “Coppie of A Letter from Virginia, Dated 22nd of June, 1607. The Councell there to the Councell here in England;” printed in Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890) 1:106–8; 107.
18. Bruce, Economic History, 1:588 n. 1.
19. Answers to a 1624 Royal Commission on “the reformation of Virginia” (Smith, Travels and Works, pp. 615–20; pp. 616, 618).
20. Brown, First Republic (“John Rolfe’s Relation,” [1616]), pp. 135, 144. Evarts B. Greene and V. D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), p. 135.
21. See Thomas Niccolls’s complaint, p. 68.
22. Referring to the 1609 charter, Alexander Brown says: “this charter, it seems, was drafted by Sir Edwin Sandys, possibly assisted by Lord [Francis] Bacon” Genesis, 1:207.
23. Sir Fernando Gorges (1566–1647), an early venturer in American colonization schemes, took note of the predisposition of English mercenaries displaced by the (1603–24) peace with Spain to find employment of their talents in Virginia. The Spanish spy Molina reported from Virginia in 1613 rather disparagingly on the quality of the English soldiers there, while noting “the great assistance they have rendered in Flanders in favor of Holland, where some of them have companies [of soldiers] and castles” (Brown, Genesis, 2:649). From 1607 to 1627, from Captain Edward Maria Wingfield to Sir George Yeardley (second term), every head of the Virginia colony government, except Francis Wyatt (a kinsman by marriage of the Sandys clan), was a veteran of mercenary service in the Netherlands. They were, as was said of Yeardley, “truly bred in that university of Warre, and Lowe countries” (Brown, Genesis, 2:1065). Some also served against the Turks, and others against the Irish in the brutal plantation of Ulster. (See Brown, Genesis vol. 2, “Brief Biographies” of Delaware, Thomas Dale, Thomas Gates, George Percy, John Ratcliffe, John Smith, Winfield and Yeardley.) Gates and Dale each served in Holland, both before and after their terms as governor in Virginia. When Gates went to Virginia, he brought his company from the Netherlands to Virginia (by way of England) under the command of George Yeardley (Brown, Genesis, 2:895). Such references leave no doubt that such men constituted the chief supply source for the “Governors and Captaines for peace and war” which the Company was sending to Virginia in this period. (The quoted phrase is from “Briefe Declaration of the State of Things in Virginia,” by the King’s Council for Virginia [1616] [Brown, Genesis, 2:775–9; 775]. As “governors” they would oversee the laboring people; as “captains” they would organize war against the Indians or against Spanish or other European intruders. It would seem that their role corresponded to that of the “Servitors” in the plantation of Ulster. (See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 118–19.) See especially Darrett B. Rutman, “The Virginia Company and Its Military Regime,” in Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernathy (Charlottesville, 1964), pp. 1–20. Sir Richard Moryson, whose participation in the conquest of Ireland by starvation in the Tyrone War (1594–1603) has been noted in Volume One, urged “using Irish veterans in Virginia.” Indeed three veterans of the Tyrone War (see Volume One) did serve successively as governors of Virginia in the 1610–16 period, namely, Acting Governor Sir Thomas Gates (promulgator of the “Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial,” a draconian set of laws derived from European military codes in which he was well versed), Governor Lord De La Warre (Delaware) and Acting Governor Sir Thomas Dale. (See: A Memorial Volume at Virginia Historical Portraiture, Alexander Willbourne Weddell, ed., [Richmond, 1930], pp. 66, 68, 79, 80; Darrett B. Rutman, “Virginia Company” pp. 6–7; idem, A Militant New World, 1607–1640 [New York, 1970, a reprint of the author’s PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1959], pp. 134–9.)
24. “[T]obacco not militarism was to prove the ‘sovereign remedy’ for Virginia’s ills,” writes Rutman (Militant New World, p. 231).
25. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 33.
26. Ibid., p. 34.
27. “Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruits by Planting in Virginia. Exciting all such as be well affected to further the same,” By R. I. (Robert Johnson probably, London alderman, rich merchant, and Deputy Treasurer of the Virginia Company from 1616 to 1619), London, 1609; printed in Force Tracts, Vol. I, No. 6, p. 23.
28. “A Letter from the Councill and Company of the honourable Plantation in Virginia to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Companies of London,” London, 1609; printed in Brown, Genesis, 1:252–3. The term “inmate,” as used here, simply means “inhabitant.”
In their crusade to “end welfare as we know it,” our modern-day conservatives will doubtless find reassurance in this ancient expression of bourgeois “traditional values”.
29. See Bruce’s comment on the laborers of Charles Hundred: “The probability is that the emancipated laborers of Charles Hundred became tenants” (Economic History 1:220).
30. Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615); cited in Brown, First Republic pp. 205–11; p. 205.
31. Bruce, Economic History 1:213–15, 219–20. Bruce says: “It is impossible to give the proportion between those who received and those who did not receive this privilege” (p. 214 n. 2).
32. Deputy-Governor Sir Thomas Dale promulgated this code in mid-1611. It was published in London in 1612. See William Strachey, comp., For the Colony of Virginian Britannia, Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, edited by David H. Flaherty (Charlottesville, 1969). See Tyler; H. R. McIlwaine, Minutes of the Council and General Court of Virginia pp. 14, 62, 85, 93, 117, 163–64 (hereafter abbreviated MCGC; Rutman, Militant New World, p. 135.
33. John Rolfe, Relation of Virginia (London, 1616), reprinted in part in Brown, First Republic, pp. 226–9; p. 227. The bracketed emendations are Brown’s. The term “familie,” as used here and generally in documents cited in this present work, includes the household of persons, and not merely the blood and marriage kin.
As late as 1622, the official catalogue of social statuses comprised “Gentlemen,” “Freemen,” “Tenants,” “Hired Servants,” and “Apprentices” (RVC, 3:658 [Governor Francis Wyatt’s proclamation against drunkenness, 21 June 1622]). The absence of an “indentured servant” category presumably reflects the fact that the plantation bourgeoisie’s option for chattel-bond servitude was just then being made.
34. Speaking specifically of laborers in this middle period, L. D. Scisco states: “they were really hired employees and were treated as such. [P]rivate property in labor was absent.” (“The Plantation Type of Colony,” American Historical Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2 [January 1903], 260–70; pp. 261.) This periodical will hereafter be abbreviated AHR.
35. “Newes from Virginia,” by Robert Rich (London, 1610), in Brown, Genesis, 1:420–26; pp. 425–6. The author of “Newes from Virginia” was an interested party and an enthusiast, of course; but so was the author of another promotional pamphlet, titled “Leah and Rachel,” published to the glory of Virginia and Maryland half a century later. In the later tract, however, there is no promise of “day wages for the laborer,” but rather the prospect of long-term, unpaid, chattel bond-servitude, at the end of which the worker would find that the right to land was but “an old delusion.” (“Leah and Rachel, or, the Two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia and Maryland: Their Present Condition, Impartially Stated and Related,” by John Hammond [London 1656]; printed in Force Tracts, III, No. 3, esp. pp. 10–11.)
36. Rolfe, p. 229.
37. Bruce, Economic History, 1:220.
38. Edwin Sandys, Report to the June 1620 Court of the Virginia Company of London, in Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London (Albany, NY, 1869), p. 180.
39. Bruce, Economic History, 1:221, 227–8.
40. Native Virginia tobacco could not complete with the product of the Spanish colonies in the world market. John Rolfe induced a friendly ship captain to smuggle Trinidad and Venezuela tobacco seeds into Virginia. When planted in Virginia they produced the “sweet-scented” product that tobacco users found as appealing as the Spanish-American product. The first shipment to England was made in 1615–16. George Arent, “The Seed from which Virginia Grew,” WMQ second series, 19:123–9 [1939], pp. 125–6.
41. Bruce, Economic History 2:566. Here Bruce was assuming the indefeasibility of the capitalist principle of the “bottom line,” as it might be called today. When that assumption was brought into question by social upheaval later in the seventeenth century, class struggle was revealed as an even more fundamental determinant of Virginia’s fate. However, when considered simply in terms of the historical impact of innovations in capitalist production techniques in Anglo-America, the “discovery” of tobacco as a profitable Virginia crop in 1616 can only be compared with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (see The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 160–61).
42. Bruce, Economic History, 1:226.
43. Ibid., 1:222–3.
44. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 33–4.
45. Brown, Genesis, 2:776, 777–9.
46. Bruce, Economic History, 1:225–6. Bruce comments: “Beginning his control of the affairs of Virginia with the strict enforcement of the regulation that every cultivator of the ground should plant four acres in grain, he [Argall] ended with this regulation in entire abeyance.”
47. Brown, First Republic, p. 254. A year later Argall was trying to get the price of tobacco raised vis-à-vis the magazine supplies (ibid., p. 279).
48. Ibid., p. 278.
49. Ibid., p. 279.
50. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 117.
51. Brown, Genesis, 2:550–51.
52. Ibid., 2:939; “William Lovelace” biographical note. Argall came to Virginia the possessor of a new patent for 400 acres as the transporter of eight tenants.
53. “Letter of the Virginia Company to Deputy Governor Argall, 22 August 1618”; in Neill, History of the Virginia Company, pp. 114–19; p. 115. Argall was liable to criminal prosecution for his acts. In a letter to Lord Delaware regarding Argall, the Company said, “the adventurers … are hardly restrayned … [,] the Kings Court in progress[,] from going to the Court to make there complaynte and to procure his Majesty’s command to fetch him [Argall] home” (ibid, p. 119).
54. Ibid., p. 115.
55. Recent historians have seemed more inclined to suspend judgment regarding Argall’s actions. For examples of the earlier condemnatory view, see Brown, First Republic, and Bruce, Economic History; for the revised view, see Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, and Morton.
56. “The Trades Increase,” by R. I. (Robert Johnson) (London, 1615); extract in Brown, Genesis, 2:766. “Briefe Declaration of the present state of things in Virginia, and of a Division now made of some part of those Lands in our Actuall possession, as well to all such as have adventured their moneyes there, as also to those that are Planters there” (London, 1616) (ibid., 2:775–9).
57. My use of “headright” here is anachronistic, since that laconic term was not in vogue until some time later than 1616.
58. Brown, Genesis, 2:779.
59. Events were to show that absentee landlordism was not practicable. Rutman notes that these so-called “ ‘particular plantations’ were soon to disappear altogether from Virginia, their owners having first lost money in their undertakings then lost interest” (Rutman, Militant New World, pp. 307–8).
60. RVC, 2:350 (Virginia Company. A Delcaration of the State of Virginia. 12 April 1623). In the four years 1619 to 1622, the number of “adventurers,” London investors in Virginia plantations, increased by ten times the previous number, and each of the ventures involved at least 100 men (ibid.).
61. Bruce, Economic History, 1:507–9. The patents lapsed, however, for failure to settle the lands with the required numbers of tenants (ibid., 1:505–6).
62. Minutes of the Quarterly meeting of the General Court of the Virginia Company of London, 2 February 1619; reprinted in Neill, History of the Virginia Company, pp. 129–30.
63. “Newes from Virginia,” in Brown, Genesis, 1:420–26; p. 426.
65. Pocahontas’s actual native name was Matoaka. She was christened by the English “Rebecca.” She and Rolfe were married around the middle of April 1614. Their Virginia-born son was named Thomas. (Brown, First Republic, pp. 203, 204, 225).
67. The three southern plantation colonies of the seventeenth century were Virginia, founded in 1607; Maryland, founded in 1634; and South Carolina, founded in 1670. Virginia was first also in the volume of exports. Tobacco was first in time and importance, and it held the leading place throughout the colonial period. The commercial cultivation of rice in South Carolina did not begin until the end of the seventeenth century. (Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. [Washington, DC, 1932] 1:57–8.) As in substance, so in form: Virginia was the pattern-setter for the institution of racial slavery in the southern colonies and in the development of the social and legal structure of white supremacy to reinforce the institution. “The discovery of the great resource for profit in raising tobacco,” writes Ulrich B. Phillips, “gave the spur to Virginia’s large-scale industry and her territorial expansion … [and] brought about the methods of life which controlled the history of Virginia through the following centuries and of the many colonies and states which borrowed her plantation system” (in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese [Baton Rouge, 1968], p. 8). Emphasizing the pattern-setting role of Virginia in legal institutions of white supremacy and racial slavery, Phillips says: “the legislation of Virginia was copied with more or less modification by all the governments from Delaware to Mississippi and Arkansas” (ibid., pp. 26–7).
Maryland was a proprietary colony of the Catholic Calverts, with “manorial” land ownership, where – in contrast to Virginia – the “headright” principle of land acquisition never applied to the importation of African laborers. These circumstances appear to have been the cause of the “large proportion” of limited-term bond-laborers held by small planters there. (Menard, pp. 129, 189.)
South Carolina was different in that the rice plantation economy did not emerge there until after the pattern of racial slavery (including the system of white-skin privileges of European-American workers) had been firmly established in Virginia and Maryland. The general employment of European-American bond-laborers in plantation field labor in South Carolina came late, was relatively less important than it was in the other two early plantation colonies, and was short-lived.
Unless one accepts the “natural racism” theory of the “psycho-cultural” school, these Maryland and South Carolina distinctions vis-à-vis Virginia have no contrary implications for the thesis being developed in the present work, namely that the chattelization of English plantation labor constituted an essential precondition of the emergence of the subsequent lifetime chattel bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers in continental Anglo-America under the system of white supremacy and racial slavery.
68. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 44–6.
69. Ibid., pp. 47–57.
70. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 180.
71. Morgan, “The First American Boom,” WMQ 28:169–98 (1971).
72. For deriving these ratios the following sources were used: export figures from Gray pp. 21–2; population figures from Brown, First Republic, pp. 226, 309, 464.
73. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 59. RVC, 2:350.
74. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company pp. 176–9, 301.
75. Ibid., p. 178. In 1619, the Virginia Assembly was established as the first elected legislative body in Anglo-America. At its first meeting, the Assembly decreed tobacco to be the money of the colony, making it clear in the following order to the Cape Merchant of the Colony: “you are bound to accept the Tobacco of the Colony, either for commodities or upon letters, at three shillings the beste and the second sort at 18d the pund, and this shallbe your sufficient discharge.” Tyler, p. 260.
76. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 190 n. 33, 301. See also Table 4.1.
77. VMHB, 2:154–65 (1894); pp. 155, 159. RVC, 3:99, 104 (“Instructions to Yeardley,” RVC, 98–109 18 November 1618).
78. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:571.
79. RVC, 3:584 (Virginia Colony Council letter to Virginia Company in London, January 1621/22).
80. RVC, 3:479 (Virginia Company of London Instructions to Virginia Colony Governor and Council, 24 July 1621, 3:468–84); 3:489 (Treasurer and Company in London to Virginia Colony Council, 25 July 1621, 3:485–90).
81. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 149–50.
82. Ibid., p. 184.
83. RVC, 3:98–108.
84. “A Briefe Declaration” (by the Virginia Company), Brown, Genesis 2:774–9.
85. Force Tracts, III, no. 5, pp. 14–15. Cf. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 56; Bruce, Economic History, 1:231.
86. “Instructions to Yeardley,” RVC, 3:108.
87. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 100–102, 191.
88. Ibid., p. 189.
89. Gray, 1:259.
90. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp, 230–32. “Sandys had accepted the Company’s dependence on tobacco” (ibid., p. 178).
91. At a meeting of the Virginia Company Court in July 1621, Samuel Wrote, member of the King’s Council for Virginia, called attention to the unreality of the high official price of tobacco in Virginia, and deplored the fact that “It hath not been possible hitherto to awaken out of this straunge dream.” (Virginia Company of London, Court Book I, cited in Gray, 1:260.)
92. The king got one-third of the crop and that transported to England free of charge, plus a duty of half a shilling on the other two-thirds. Furthermore, at a time when the Virginia crop sent to England would reach just 60,000 pounds the Company was required to agree to the English import of not less than 80,000 pounds of Spanish-produced tobacco, an amount approximatley equal to the crops being sent from Virginia at that time. (Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 233–4. Bruce, Economic History, 1:269–70. See Gray, 1:22, for the 1622 Virginia tobacco export figure.)
93. See, for example: King James I, Counter Blast (1610); Gray, 1:25, 180–81, 231. “It was easier to decide upon such limitations [on tobacco-growing] than to make them efffective in Virginia.” (Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 176.)
94. CSP, Col., 1:117, Governor John Harvey’s Report to the Privy Council, 29 May 1630. The price recovered to 6 pence a pound in 1635, but from then to 1660 the price averaged no more than 2¼ pence. A major crisis of overproduction in 1638 brought prices down to extremely low levels, says Gray, and even with recovery prices ranged between 1½ pence per pound until the mid-1660s. (Gray, 1:26.) See also Russell R. Menard’s tabulations of prices paid for tobacco in the Chesapeake (Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 444–50, Tables A-5 and A-6).
In London in 1634, “Virginia tobacco was so low in price that it would no longer bear the old duty of twelve pence a pound; nor even the nine pence to which the duty had been reduced in 1623.” (Aspinwall Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Series 4, IX [Boston, 1871], p. 71.)
95. Brown, First Republic, pp. 562–3. See also Bruce, Economic History, 1:255.
96. Gray, Vol. 1, Chapter XII. See Chapter 9 of this volume for further treatment of the diversification of the Virginia economy.
97. This is another insight to be had from the frequently quoted comment of the Secretary of the Virginia Colony, John Pory, in 1619: “Our principall wealth consisteth of servants” (Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, 30 September 1619 [RVC, 2:219–22; 221]). In 1618 a method was suggested of airing tobacco leaves by hanging them on strings rather than laying them on loose hay. When they could get the needed string from England, the colonists used this method which, by preserving tobacco, raised the productivity of labor. Aside from this innovation, however, there was to be but little technological advance in tobacco raising, and that would come slowly. (Brown, First Republic, p. 260. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 181. See “Pounds of Tobacco Per Laborer, 1619–1699,” Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 462.)
98. Brown, First Republic, pp. 248–9.
99. Ibid., p. 348.
100. Minutes of the meeting of the Virginia Company Court, 17 November 1619 (RVC, 2:271). See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 118, for the shipment into exile of mainly Ulster Irish rebels in 1610. George Hill notes the 1619 proposal of the English Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for shipping away Irish “woodkernes.” (George Hill, An Historical Account of the plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century, 1608–1620 [Belfast 1877], p. iii, n. 2.)
101. They were forbidden to return except by express permission of the Privy Council as provided in a General Order of 24 March 1617. Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, Vol. I, 1618–1638 (London, 1908), pp. 12–13, 19, 22, 52, 55, 56. See also Bruce, Economic History 1:603–4: “At this time, there were three hundred crimes in the calendar from which capital punishment was inflicted. It seemed to be too harsh a punishment to impose deaths for the smallest offense. Transportation was a compromise on the part of the English judges with the more humane feelings of their nature.”
102. This man was put to death in Virginia in 1623 for the theft of a cow worth £3 sterling. The cow was the property of the once and future governor Yeardley who himself had stolen with impunity fifty-four men from the Virginia Company, his employer, two years previously. (MCGC, 4, 5.)
103. Brown, First Republic, pp. 273–4.
104. RVC, 2:270–71 (General Court of the Virginia Company of London meeting, 17 November 1619).
105. RVC, 2:271.
106. Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, 1:28–9 (31 January 1619/20). Prior to 1750, the legal year began on 25 March. Therefore dates falling between 1 January and 24 March inclusive appear in the records in the form shown here. Where one year only is indicated, it is to be understood according to the modern calendar.
107. Brown, First Republic, p. 375.
108. RVC, 2:271.
109. Gray, 1:366. Bruce, Economic History, 1:629–30.
110. This is the average of estimates in the record as made by: John Rolfe, in 1619, 250 pounds (Smith, Travels and Works, 2:541); John Pory, in 1619, two “rare cases” averaging about 1,054 pounds according the 1619 price of 42d. in London (RVC, 3:221); William Spencer, recalling his experience in 1620, which works out to an average of 538 pounds (RVC, 1:256, 268); William Capps, in 1623, 500 pounds (RVC, 4.38); and Richard Brewster, also in 1623, 700 pounds (RVC, 2:524). Russell Menard’s estimate of 712 pounds per worker for the period 1619–29 appears to be based on his figures for this same five-year 1619–23 period. (Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 460, 462.) Although my average figure of 712 per pounds per worker is exactly the same as Menard’s, they were not derived altogether from the same sources.
111. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 444, Table A-5, “Chesapeake Tobacco Prices. 1618–1658.” The average is calculated from fourteen citations (all but two being for 1619 and 1620) mainly from the Records of the Virginia Company; I did not count those tagged as “overstatements.” Averaging by the year, the price paid in Virginia for the 1619–23 period was 20d. (Ibid. p. 448, Table A-6.)
112. Ibid. This is the average of fifteen instances of London wholesale prices.
113. RVC, 3:264 (William Weldon, letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, 6 March 1619/20).
114. Ibid.
115. See discussion and notation in Chapter 6, under the heading “Bond-servitude was not an adaptation of English practice.”
116. Records of Magistrate’s Court, Netherstone, Somerset, England, 19 October and 13 November 1618, Correspondence, Domestic, James I, vol. 103, Nos. 42, 42, I, 87 and 87 I; reprinted in VMHB, vi (1898–99), pp. 228–30.
117. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 121. Brown, First Republic, p. 292.
118. Brown, First Republic, p. 376. The late Professor Richard L. Morton made the erroneous statement that “the women who were sent to be wives” in Virginia were not sold like merchandise, and that the enterprisers did not intend to make a profit on the transaction. (Colonial Virginia, 1:71.)
119. Virginia Company Court, 22 June 1620, RVC, 3:115. See also David Ransome, “Wives for Virginia,” WMQ 48:3–18 (1991).
120. RVC, 3:313.
121. Brown, First Republic, pp. 459, 461. Actually a few of these women arrived in January on the pinnace Tiger.
122. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Colony, pp. 191–2. Of these five subsidiary joint-stocks launched in 1621, only the matrimonial business returned a profit (RVC, 2:15).
123. Virginia Company in London to the Virginia Colony Council in Virginia, 12 April 1621; in Neill, History of the Virginia Company, pp. 233–9; 234–5.
124. Ibid., pp. 241–50.
125. Ibid., p. 235.
126. MCGC, p. 54.
127. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 235.
128. Ibid.
129. Manchester Papers, in Historical Manuscripts Commision, Eighth Report (London, 1881), Part I, Appendix, p. 41 (hereafter referred to as Manchester Papers).
130. Ibid.
131. MCGC, pp. 154–5 (11 October 1627).
132. Brown, First Republic, p. 627.
133. MCGC, pp. 117, 142 (11 October 1626 and 4 April 1627).
134. Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture: Patterns of Colonia America,” WMQ 3d ser., 2:113–53 (1945), p. 114. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC, 1975), Series Z-121–131 (p. 1171).
135. Moller, p. 115, citing J. A. Goodman, The Pilgrim Republic (Boston and New York, 1920), pp. 182–4.
136. Rutman, Militant New World, p. 355.
137. Moller, pp. 116–17. John C. Hotten, The Original Lists of Persons of Quality, Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed and Others Who went from Great Britain to the American plantations, 1600–1700 (London, 1874), pp. 35–138. Hereafter noted as Hotten, Original Lists.
138. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 145.
139. “The Puritans, broadly speaking, arrived by families, although they had a considerable surplus of men. The movement to Virginia, on the other hand, consisted predominantly of male workers” (Moller, p. 118).
140. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 34.
141. Bruce, Economic History, 1:538–89; Morgan, p. 176; A. E. Smith, pp. 14–16.
142. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Colony, p. 311.
143. John Smyth of Nibley Papers, documents in the New York Public Library, calendared in the New York Public Library Bulletin, 1:68–72 (1897), and 3:276–95 (1899).
144. “A Lyste of the men nowe sent for plantacon under Captayne Woodleefe …” (September 1619), RVC, 3:197–8.
145. Ibid. See also “Capt Woodleefes Bill, Setpember, 1619,” New York Public Library Bulletin, 3:221 (1899), p. 221.
146. “Berkeley, Thorpe, Tracy, and Smith. Agreement with Richard Smyth and Wife and Others” (1 September 1620), RVC, 3:393–4.
147. A. E. Smith, p. 14.
148. RVC, 3:210–11 (Indenture between the Four Adventurers of Berkeley Hundred and Robert Coopy of North Nibley, 7 September 1619). Among thirteen other men engaged for Berkeley Hundred in that same month, there were two other Coopys – Thomas and Samuell – but I do not know whether they were kin.
149. RVC, 3:210–11.
150. A. E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage, p. 15.
151. Part of “Drafts of a Statement touching the miserable condition of Virginia [May and June, 1623] by Alderman Robert Johnson” (RVC, 4:174). This was the opening blast of the campaign that was to end in the following year in the revocation of the Virginia Company charter. Johnson was a rich London merchant, who had over the years held positions of great authority in both the East India Company and the Virginia Company. See note 27.
152. Broadside published by the Virginia Company in 1622, prior to the receipt of the news of the Indian attack a of 22 March of that year; in Brown, First Republic, p. 486.
153. Ibid.
154. Virginia Governor and Council to Virginia Company of London (January 1621/22), RVC, 3:585–8; 586.
155. Thomas Nuce to Edwin Sandys, 27 May 1621 (RVC, 3:457).
156. RVC, 3:588. The actual enclosure seems not to have survived in the records, but the essential substance is clear from references to it in documents that have been preserved. It is curious that historians have chosen to ignore Nuce’s proposal, while at the same time noting (Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Colony, p. 173, Morgan, “First American Boom,” p. 172) a letter written seven months earlier in which he states that his tenants are depressed by the prospect of a seven-year term of service, “which course, I am of opinion you should alter” (Nuce to Edwin Sandys, 27 May 1621 [RVC, 3:456–7]). The facts are that the conditions of the tenants were altered – to those of chattel bond-labor; that Nuce specifically recommended that tenants be replaced by “servants”; and that he was unwilling to pay the wages of free wage workers. Therefore, the imputation of benign motives to Nuce should not divert attention from his apparent role in promoting the change in the conditions of labor that took place in the 1620s in Virginia.
157. Virginia Company of London to the Virginia Governor and Council, 10 June 1622; (RVC, 3:646–52; 647).
158. Virginia Company of London to the Virginia Governor and Council, 7 October 1622 (RVC 3:683–90; 684).
159. Idem, 20 January 1622/23 (RVC, 4:9–17; 16).
160. RVC 4:178. The word used in this instance was, “pencons.” This word is nowhere else to be found in the records, but it seems to suggest a servant who lives with the employer, or at least one whose meals are provided by the employer. Indeed, references to this proposed change from tenantry all translate the term as “servant.” Although the term “servant” has various applications in the records of the time, it is not necessary to explore that matter here; it is clear that the purpose was to reduce the cost of labor, and to levels below the wages then current in Virginia.