5 The Massacre of the Tenantry

1. See pp. 56, 61.

2. Back projection of the average annual crude death rate, 1619–1625, inclusive of a 4.16 percent spike for 1625. (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction [Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981], p. 352.) This modern study confirms the reliability of the estimate of 2.5 percent made by Sir William Petty more than three centuries ago in his An Essay concerning the Multiplication of Mankind together with another Essay in Political Arithmetick concerning the Growth of the City of London … (London 1686), reprinted in part in Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-century Economic Documents, (Oxford, 1972), pp. 761–4.

3. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), p. 120. Idem, “First American boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” WMQ, 28: 169–198 (1971), p. 185.

4. “The answere of the Generall Assembly in Virginia to a Declaration of the state of the Colonie in the 12 years of Sir Thomas Smiths Government, exhibited by Alderman Johnson and others” (RVC, 4:458, 20 February 1623/40). Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London (Albany, NY, 1869), pp. 407–11.

5. RVC, 3:74.

6. See Chapter 1, pp. 10–11.

7. [House of] Commons Journals, I, p. 711.

8. “Instructions to Yeardley,” VMHB, 2:154–65.

9. Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), p. 60.

10. Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 427.

11. This conclusion is based on an analysis of the following two documents: the Virginia Muster of 1624/25 in Annie Lash Jester and Martha Woodruff Hiden, eds., Adventurers of Purse and Person: Virginia, 1607–1625 (Princeton, 1956); and “The Virginia Rent Rolls of 1704;” in T. J. Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia. See further in Chapter 9, Table 9.1.

12. See McIlwaine, MCGC, pp. 72–3, 83, 136–7, 154.

13. Neill, p. 408.

14. RVC, 3:307–40; 313–14 (“A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires of Virginia. By his Majesties Counsell for Virginia,” 22 June 1620).

15. RVC, 3:226–7 (Virginia Colony Council, 11 November 1619, “The putting out of the Tenants that came over in the B. N. [Bona Nova], with other orders of the Councell”).

16. Letter of William Weldon to Sir Edwin Sandys, 6 March 1619–20 (RVC, 3:262–5; p. 263).

17. See Smith, Travels and Works, p. 541. RVC, 3:586 and 4:38.

18. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:542.

19. RVC, 3:226 (The Governor and Council in Virginia “The putting out of the Tenantes that came over in the B. N. [Bona Nova] …,” 11 November 1619).

20. RVC, 3:263 (William Weldon. Letter to Edwin Sandys, 6 March 1619/20).

21. RVC, 219–22; 220–21 (Letter of Colony Secretary John Pory in Virginia to Sir Dudley Carleton in England, 30 September 1619).

22. RVC, 1:584–604 (Record of the Meeting of the Virginia Company of London Court, 30 January 1621/22).

23. RVC, 3:241–8; 243 (Letter of John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, January 1619/20). Rolfe does not describe these new arrivals as “Africans” but as “Negroes.” The fact that some of these new workers bore Christian names (Maria and Antonio, for example) and the fact that the ship on which they arrived came to Virginia from the West Indies, suggests that at least some had spent time in the Caribbean, or might even have been born there.

24. Those who read Edmund S. Morgan’s “First American Boom” and Chapter 4 of his American Slavery, American Freedom, may realize how much I am indebted to his insights. Credit must go to Morgan for opening the way to a reexamination of the history of the Company period, particularly the critical years 1619–24, from the standpoint of the consideration of the internal contradictions of the colony, those between the few rich and the common run of the people. After a year-by-year review and analysis of colony’s food supply situation, Morgan concludes: “Yeardley’s complaints, his purchase of the Negroes, and his disposal of the men from the Bona Nova at a time when the colony was reporting an unprecedented abundance, suggest that the problem was not altogether one of whether supplies existed, it was a question of who had them and who could pay for them. In a year of plenty the governor and Council were unable or unwilling to make use of fifty men without supplies when other Virginians were able and willing to do so. The great shortage of supplies, to which we attribute the failure of the Sandys program, was not an absolute shortage in which all Virginians shared and suffered alike. It was a shortage that severely afflicted the Company and its dependants, but it furnished large opportunities for private entrepreneurs and larger ones for Company officials who knew how to turn public distress to private profit.” (“First American Boom,” p. 175).

25. RVC, 2:375; RVC, 4:186; 234. Morgan, “First American Boom,” p. 182.

26. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:571. RVC, 3:581–7; 584 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Company of London, January 1621/22).

27. Virginia Company of London to Deputy Governor Argall, 22 August 1618 (Neill, History to the Virginia Company, pp. 114–17; p. 115).

28. Virginia Company of London to Lord Delaware, 22 August 1618 (Neill, History of the Virginia Company pp. 117–29; p. 119). Delaware died en route to Virginia. Argall returned to England aboard a ship specially sent by his patron, the Earl of Warwick, not waiting for instruction or permission from the London authorities.

29. RVC, 1:601 (13 February 1622). RVC, 1:579 (30 January 1622). The Virginia Company Court granted Weldon a patent for the transportation of one hundred persons which, at the allowance of fifty acres each, implied for him a private plantation of five thousand acres.

30. RVC, 3:485–9; 489. Virginia Company of London to the Governor and Council in Virginia, 25 July 1621 (Neill, History of the Virginia Company, pp. 223–33; p. 230).

31. RVC, 3:584–5 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Company of London, January 1621/22).

32. RVC, 3:219–23; 221 (John Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, 30 September 1619): “the Governor here [Yeardley], who at his first coming, besides a great deale of worth in his person, brought onely his sworde w[i]th him, was at his late being in London, together with his lady, out of his meer gettings here, able to disburse Very near three thousand pounds to furnish himselfe for his [return] voiage.”

33. An incomplete indication of Yeardley’s success at self-enrichment is to be found in his Last Will, dated 12 October 1627 (New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 28: 69 [1884], p. 69). Yeardley’s estate, “consisting of goods debts, servants ‘negars,’ cattle …” and including his thousand-acre plantation on Warwicke River, was valued at six thousand pounds by his uncle in a petition to the Privy Council in 1629.

34. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. pp. 176–8.

35. Weldon to Sandys (RVC, 3:263).

36. RVC, 3:581–8; 586 (Council in Virginia to Virginia Company of London, January 1621/22).

37. In 1622, tenants who had been brought to Bermuda by Captain Nathaniel Butler included in a letter of grievances the charge that they had been “forced to send all their tobacco into England unto their undertakers [employers], undivided,” in spite of the fact that their contracts provided that they were to “divide their yearly tobacco” and “to be accountable for the moiety [half] only” (Manchester Papers, p. 38).

38. MCGC, p. 46 (Last day of January 1624/25).

39. “It was the Powhatan Uprising that both unleashed the company’s self-destructive urges and accelerated Virginia’s evolution” (J. Frederick Fausz, “The Powhatan Uprising of 1622: A Historical Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict,” Ph.D Dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1977, p. 547).

40. Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 2:971.

41. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, pp. 96–105. Philip Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World: A Chronicle of America’s First Settlement in which is Related the Story of the Indians and the Englishmen – Particularly Captain John Smith, Captain Samuel Argall, and Master John Rolfe (Boston, 1970), pp. 169–70.

42. Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1960), 1:74.

43. RVC, 3:556 (“A Declaration of the State of the Colony and … a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre,” after April 1622, 3:541–80).

George Yeardley was accused in England of having provoked the Indian attack of 22 March by treacherously attacking an assembly of the friendly Chickhominy Indians with whom he had asked to parley. Thirty to forty of the Indians were killed. “The perfidious act made them all fly out & seek revenge, they joined with Opichankano” (RVC, 4:118 [Sir Nathaniel Rich’s Draft of Instruction to the commissioners to investigate Virginia affairs, 4:6–8]).

44. RVC, 3:555 (Edward Waterhouse “A Declaration of the state of the Colony and … a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, 1622).

45. Brown, First Republic, p. 467 n.1.

46. See Appendix II-C.

47. RVC 3:613; 4:11–12. In the summer of 1622 the Virginia Governor and Council did contemplate moving out, but to just across the Chesapeake Bay. The Company in London strenuously condemned the notion, and by the following January the Governor and Council were disowning the idea. RVC: 3:613 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Council in London, 3:609–15, 13 April 1622). RVC: 3:366–7 (Treasurer and Council for Virginia to Governor and Colony Council of Virginia, 3:366–73, 1 August 1622). RVC, 4:11–12 (Virginia Colony Council to Council for Virginia, 4:9–17, 20 January 1622/23).

48. The first English colony was established in 1587 on Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast by an expedition organized by Sir Walter Raleigh (a second attempt). When the first relief ship returned to the spot in 1591, there was no trace to be found of the colony, except the eternally mystifying scrawl “Croatan.” It is assumed that the colonists were adopted into an Indian tribe of the region. (See Hamilton MacMillan of Robeson County, North Carolina, “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, with the traditions of an Indian Tribe in North Carolina indicating the fate of the Colony” (1888), cited in Brown, Genesis, 1:189–90. During a military trial in 1864, according to MacMillan, an Indian named John Lowrie asserted he was descended from this merger, and complained that nevertheless “white men have treated us as negroes.”

49. RVC, 3:146 (Treasurer and Council in Virginia to George Yeardley, 3:146–8, 21 June 1619). RVC 3:496 (Virginia Company in London to Virginia Colony Council, 3:492–8, 12 August 1621).

50. See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 172–3, 175.

51. RVC, 3:555.

52. At the end of October 1618, the Company, in order to reduce overcharging for goods at the colony’s supply store (called the “magazine”), forbade any mark-up on goods beyond “the allowance of 25 in the hundred proffitt” (RVC, 3:167).

53. The precariousness of property claims in the conditions of epidemic death prevailing at that time in Virginia, and the danger of fraud in disposition of property of deceased persons there is to be seen in the letter addressed by the Company to the Colony Governor and Council, 7 October 1622, in which they noted “greevances for wrongs by unjust factors and partners in Virginia, and of claymes to lands and foods by the late death of friends” (RVC, 3:689 [Virginia Company to the Governor and Council of Virginia, 3:683–9]).

54. RVC, 3:537 gives the population as 1,240 (Notes from Lists showing Total Number of Emigrants to Virginia [1622]). See also Brown, First Republic, pp. 467, 624.

Regarding the number of lives lost in the colony, Brown writes, “The exact number may not be certainly known … [at first] the company published a list of 347; but it was almost necessary to make the list as small as possible at that time.… The Company afterwards placed the number at ‘about 400,’ and Edward Hill put it at ‘400 and odd.’ ” Hill was a Virginia planter living in Elizabeth City. (Brown, First Republic, 467, 624; and Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. [New York, 1895] 2:71.)

55. RVC, 3:611–15 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Company of London, April (after 20) 1622). RVC, 4:13 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia of London, 4:9–17, 20 January 1622/23).

56. RVC, 4:58 (Richard Frethorne letters, 4:58–62, Spring 1623).

57. RVC, 4:22 (George Sandys to Mr Ferarr).

58. RVC, 3:613.

59. RVC, 4:525 (Virginia Company of London, Discourse … April (?) 1625).

60. RVC, 3:614

61. RVC, 4:233 (Letters arriving in England on the Abigail, 4:228–29, 19 June 1623).

62. RVC, 4:61 (Richard Frethorne letters to his father and mother, 20 March and 2 and 3 April, 1623, RVC, 4:58–63).

63. RVC, 4:41, 59. Brown, Genesis, 2:802–3, 826.

64. RVC, 4:58.

65. RVC, 4:41 (Frethorne to Bateman, 5 March 1622/23).

66. RVC, 4:62.

67. RVC, 4:236.

68. Ibid.

69. RVC, 4:231–2. Great Britain Historical Manuscripts Commission Eighth Report and Appendix (London, 1881), Part I; Appendix (Duke of Manchester Papers), p. 41.

70. RVC, 3:639.

71. RVC, 4:525 (Virginia Company “Discourse of the Old Company,” April 1625, 4:519–61).

72. This is an inference drawn from the rate of profit specified to be secured on the supplies subsequently sent on the relief ships the George, the Hopewell, and the Marmaduke (RVC, 4:263–4).

73. RVC, 4:61–2.

74. RVC, 4:107, 116, 230.

75. RVC, 4:120 (Letter from Captain Kendall in Somers Islands to Sir Edwin Sandys, 14 April 1623).

76. RVC, 4:105 (Sir Francis Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623).

77. Brown, First Republic, p. 559.

78. RVC, 3:639 (28 March 1623).

79. RVC, 4:215–16 (Draft for a Report on the Condition of the Colony, June or July 1623).

80. Butler was a leading opponent of the Edwin Sandys headship of the Virginia Company, and might therefore be expected to be biased. But Alexander Brown, an early and staunch historiographical supporter of Sandys, believes that Butler’s report was on the whole factual (First Republic, p. 506).

81. In seeking to counter this point in Butler’s report, Sandys’s supporters conceded that such public dying might occur in Virginia. But they were confident that it did not take place under hedges, because, they asserted, “there is no hedge in Virginia” (RVC, 2:382). Next case!

82. Brown, First Republic, pp. 444, 506, 627. Professor Morgan revises the total population figures upward from those given by the records for 1623–24 and 1624–25, by 20 percent and 10 percent respectively. He does not suggest any revision of the 1622 figure. (American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 101, 404.)

83. Besides the specific references to the record for the period up to 1626 in this paragraph, see Chapter 4, note 94.

84. RVC, 4:46 (17 March 1622/23).

85. RVC, 2:523. Brown, First Republic, p. 563.

86. RVC, 2:519–20 (Virginia Company of London Court, 21 April 1624).

87. RVC, 4:453 (30 January 1623/24); 4:570 (4 January 1625/26).

88. RVC, 4:271–2. (“A proclamation touching the rates of Comodities,” 31 August 1623.)

89. RVC, 4:14.

90. RVC, 4:271.

91. The census of Virginia Colony for 1624–25 (March 1625) showed 432 male adults who were free in a total population of 1,227. Of the non-free adults, 298 were in the service of an elite bourgeois group of fifteen employers. (Hotten, Original Lists, pp. 261–5.) See also Morgan’s analysis and tabulation in “First American Boom,” pp. 188–9.

92. RVC, 2:339 (Virginia Company of London Court, 24 March 1622/23).

93. RVC, 3:614. Brown, First Republic, pp. 474–5.

94. It seems not unlikely that there was a shortage of English trade goods, since the production of glass beads had been halted at this time in the colony for lack of suitable sand (RVC, 4:108).

95. RVC, 4:9–10 (Virginia Colony Council to the Virginia Company of London, 20 January 1622/23). For references to Mountjoy’s strategy of starvation in the Tyrone War, see Volume One of The Invention of the White Race.

96. RVC, 3:614.

97. RVC, 4:186 (“Rough Notes in Support of the Preceding Charges of Mismanagement of the Virginia Company, May [after May 9] or June, 1623,” 4:183–7); 4:234 (letter of Edward Hill to his brother Mr Jo. Will, 14 April 1623).

98. RVC, 4:186.

99. RVC, 4:105. Brown, First Republic, p. 513.

100. RVC, 2:375 (“The Unmasked face of our Colony in Virginia as it was in the Winter of the yeare 1622,” 2:374–6).

101. RVC, 4:6–7.

102. Ibid.

103. RVC, 4:9–10. These Colony Council members were Yeardley, Tucker, George Sandys and Hamor.

104. Ibid.

105. RVC, 4:37 (Letter of William Capps to Dr John Wynston, March or April, 1623).

106. RVC, 4:14.

107. Brown (First Republic, p. 627) says that 11,185 bushels was regarded as a minimum supply in March 1625.

108. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:615.

109. Brown, First Republic, pp. 625–6, 627.

110. RVC, 4:89, 92, 231.

111. RVC, 4:234.

112. RVC, 4:14.

113. RVC, 4:453.

114. RVC, 3:612 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Company of London, April [after 20 April] 1622, 3:611–15).

115. RVC, 3:656 (Sir Francis Wyatt, A commission to Sir George Yeardley, 6 June 1622).

116. Brown, First Republic, pp. 617–20.

117. See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 189.2.

118. RVC, 3:613.

119. RVC, 2:94–5 (Virginia Company of London Court, 17 July 1622). RVC, 3:689 (Virginia Company of London to Governor and Council in Virginia, 3:683–90, 7 October 1622).

120. RVC, 2:124 (Virginia Company of London Preparative Court, 18 November 1622, 2:124–31).

121. Brown, First Republic, pp. 617, 618, 620, 623, 627. Brown adds, however, that he does not know the particulars of the disposition of the large corporate holdings such as Southampton Hundred. John C. Rainbolt argues that English heirs of Virginia Company land claims “parlayed [these holdings] into estates of several thousand acres” in the third quarter of the century. (“An Alteration in the Relationship between Leadership and Constitutents in Virginia, 1660–1720,” WMQ, 27:411–34 [1970]; 413). Bernard Bailyn, in his essay on the evolution of the Virginia social structure, provides the details, showing that mid-seventeenth century claims on Company period inheritances constituted “the most important, of a variety of forms of capital” that provided the fortunes on which were based the oligarchy of slaveholding families of Virginia of the eighteenth century (Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure,” in James Morton Smith, Seventeenth-century America, Essays in Colonial History [Chapel Hill, 1959], p. 99).

122. I have assumed that the death rate was at least as high among workers as among employers.

123. RVC, 4:185 (May or June [after 9 May] 1623).

124. RVC, 3:658 (Proclamation of Governor Sir Francis Wyatt for the suppression of drunkenness, 21 June 1622). The quintuplex of social classes set forth in this Virginia order perfectly mirrored the categories as established in England at that time: noblemen, freemen, yeomen, artisans, and farm laborers. See Sir Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, Publications of the Camden Society, 3rd ser., Vol. 52, Camden Miscellany, Vol. 16 edited by F. J. Fisher (London, 1936), p. 17.

125. See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 171–75. The use by Professor Morgan of the “mining camp”, boom-town metaphor seems somewhat questionable on the grounds of one-sidedness. Lewis C. Gray used the same argument (see Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, in the History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 [Washington, DC, 1932; reprinted 1958], 1:256). I am no student of that aspect of social history, but was it characteristic of the gold and oil boom towns in the American West and in Alaska, for example, to have two-thirds of the people die of starvation and starvation-related disease in a one- or two-year period? In a boom town, do not wages rise, even though the lucky, grasping few may fare better? In Virginia in the 1620s, the position of the laboring people deteriorated not only relatively but absolutely.

126. RVC, 4:37–8 (William Capps, Letter to Doctor Thomas Wynston. March or April 1623). But that same April, Governor Wyatt said that on the best ground a pair of tenants could make 2,500 pounds, and that because of guard duty his sixteen tenants produced only 1,000 pounds per capita. (RVC, 4:104–6 [Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623].)

127. RVC, 4:175 (“Alderman Johnson(?), Parts of Drafts of a Statement Touching the Miserable Condition of Virginia,” 4:174–87, May or June [after 9 May] 1623).

128. RVC, 4:13 (Virginia Colony Council to the Virginia Company of London, 4:9–17).

129. RVC, 4:74 (George Sandys to Sir Samuel Sandys, 30 March 1623, 3:73–5).

130. RVC 3:105 (Sir Francis Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623, 4:104–6).

131. “From 1606 to 1624, the average value of wheat in England was only five shillings a bushel” (Bruce, 1:256). As noted above (page 91), the price of corn in Virginia was twenty shillings per bushel in 1623.

132. VMHB, 71:410 (1963), citing Harleian Ms. 389, f. 309, unsigned letter to Joseph Mead, 4 April 1623.

133. RVC, 3:221 (John Pory to Sir Dudley Carlton and Edwin Sandys, 30 September 1619).

134. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 119.

135. See Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1975), series Z-125–128.

136. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 119 n. 50. Morgan refers to A. J. and R. H. Tawney, “An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review, 5:25–64 (1934–35). Although Morgan omits page references, his comment seems to be supported by the Gloucestershire figures showing 19,402 men between the ages of twelve and sixty (p. 31), and, in agricultural and domestic occupation, only sixteen employers with ten or more employees (tables VI and VII, pp. 52 and 53).

137. VMHB, 71:409 (1963). See also RVC, 4:104.

138. RVC, 3:618 (Edwin Sandys Letter to John Ferrar, 30 April, 1622 [before news of the 22 March Indian attack had arrived in England]). Historians (Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 152–3, and Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 171 and 183, for example) have considered it a “blunder” on Edwin Sandys’s part to have persisted in the policy of sending thousands of ill-provisioned emigrants to Virginia. If so, it was a blunder that flowed from flawless bourgeois logic: an oversupply of dependent and ill-supplied laborers was an objective necessity for securing a general reduction of labor costs and thus keeping tobacco profitable enough to attract capital investment.

139. RVC, 4:220–22 (9 June 1623).

140. Colony Secretary George Sandys was one of the purchasers (Manchester Papers, p. 39 Letter from “G. S.” [George Sandys?] to “Mr Ferrer” [Ferrar]).

141. MCGC, pp. 19–20 (16 August 1623). Tyler’s opinions are from testimony against him in the General Court.

142. MCGC, pp. 22–4 (10 October 1624).

143. MCGC, p. 105 (7 and 8 August 1626).

144. MCGC, p. 117 (11 October 1626). For her part, servant Alice Chambers was ordered to receive unspecified “worthy punishement.”

145. MCGC, pp. 135–7 (13 January 1626/7). “The Order by which the [thirty-six] Tenants of the Company are distributed to the Governor & [8 other members of the] Councill” shows eighteen assigned to Governor George Yeardley, and three to most of the others. The Colony Council order regarding the “Duty boys” was issued on 10 October 1627 (p. 154).

146. Bruce, 2:43.

147. By the end of 1624, the Virginia Colony Council was reporting to the Virginia Company that there was much corn in the colony, but that they were short of laborers (RVC, 4:507–8, 2 December 1624).

148. So characterized by George Sandys in a letter to his brother Samuel in England, 30 March 1623 (Manchester Papers, p. 39).

149. RVC, 4:106 (George Sandys to John Ferrar in England, 8 April 1623). See also Bruce, 1:47–8.

6 Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No Intermediate Stratum

1. See Oliver Ellsworth’s comment cited in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 286 n. 3.

2. Labor might also have been recruited from among the native population if terms were made sufficiently attractive, or as a result of the destruction of the original native population’s economy of the area by the bombardment of cheap commodities, or by the expropriation of the lands and resources. But this alternative and reasons for its ineffectiveness were discussed in Chapter 3.

3. RVC, 3:592–8 (Virginia Company, The Form of a Patent, 30 January 1621/22); 3:629–34 (Virginia Company, The Form of a Patent for a Planter Only, 22 May 1622).

4. This principle of granting land patents at the rate of fifty acres for each person brought into Virginia would later be known as the “headright” system. See Chapter 4, pp. 58–9.

5. See p. 72.

6. RVC, 3:507.

7. RVC, 3:586; 4:558.

8. RVC, 2:105, 3:699, 4:14 (7 October and 2 November 1622; 20 January 1622/23).

9. RVC, 4:22 (March 1622/23).

10. See p. 86.

11. RVC, 4:235 (12 April 1623).

12. RVC, 4:466–7. MCGC, p. 12 (9 March 1623).

13. RVC, 4:467 (9 March 1622/23).

14. MCGC, p. 40 (3 January 1624/25).

15. MCGC, p. 109 (28 August 1626). Hotten, Original Lists, p. 237.

16. MCGC, p. 90 (20 January 1625/26).

17. MCGC, pp. 131–2 (20 January 1626/27).

18. RVC, 4:5–6 (between January and April 1622/23).

19. MCGC, p. 83 (19 December 1625).

20. MCGC, pp. 136–7 (13 January 1626/27).

21. Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America, (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 627.

22. New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 38:69 (January 1884).

23. See Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967).

24. “The liberties of Englishmen – the privileges and immunities of the free-born English subject … [include] personal liberty … signifying the freedom to dispose of one’s person and powers of body and mind, without control by others who are not representatives of the ultimate supreme authority.” (John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States, 2 vols. [Boston, 1858; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1968] 1:140.)

25. RVC, 3:683–4 (“Virginia Company. A Letter to the Governor and the Council in Virginia, October 7, 1622,” RVC, 3:683–90).

26. In the Gloucestershire occupational census of 1606, the only such existing record for seventeenth-century England, tabulations of employers and their servants in agriculture or domestic employment show that servants constituted 27 percent of the total; 4 percent were of the leisure classes, 11 percent were yeomen, and 58 percent were husbandmen (A. J. Tawney and R. H. Tawney, “An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review, 5:25–64 [1934–35]; see Tables VI and VII, pp. 52 and 53). In Virginia in the era that followed the economic massacre of the tenantry, the great majority of the laboring population were to be not even husbandmen, but chattel bond-laborers.

27. The reader is referred particularly to my Introduction to The Invention of the White Race, in Volume One.

28. With the honorable exception of Edmund S. Morgan, those historians who have concerned themselves with the origin of chattel bond-labor of European-Americans have repeated this rationale as an article of faith.

See, for example, Marcus W. Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America (New York, 1931), p. 46; Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, DC, 1932; reprinted 1958), 1:342; Philip A. 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; reprinted 1935), 1:587. Winthrop D. Jordan is content to say “it was indentured servitude that best met the requirements for settling in America” (White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 [Chapel Hill, 1968], p. 52].).

29. Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947; New York, 1971), pp. 8–9. Bruce, Economic History, 1:262.

30. It is also analogous to the argument advanced by coalmine owners in the twentieth century, with the support of even United Mine Workers officials in McDowell County, West Virginia in 1940–41. Resolutions passed by several United Mine Workers locals demanding portal-to-portal pay were dismissed as utopian. “What!” opponents cried. “Do you think the coal operators are going to pay you for just sitting in the man-trip?” But in that case the general relationship of class forces was such that after Pearl Harbor we miners got our just due in this matter.

31. (English) Statutes at Large, 23 Ed. Ill (1349).

32. A. E. Smith, p. 305. Smith was here generalizing about the entire history of “white servitude.”

33. See pp. 65–6.

34. Documents relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements, principally on Long Island, with a Map of its Western Part, made in 1666, translated and compiled from this Historical Records by B. Fernow (Albany, 1883).

35. Voyages from Holland to America, AD 1632–1644, Collections of the New York Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. III, part 1, translated and edited by Henry Murphy (New York, 1857). There is no indication of de Vries’s feelings regarding the buying and selling of African bond-laborers in which the Dutch were then principal merchants.

36. See especially pp. 22–4.

37. Under English common and statute law, the failure of a servant to fulfill his or her contract could be remedied by pecuniary damages only, not by “compelling a specific performance.” (Hurd, 1:138). The English courts resolved as follows. By 27 Henry VIII, legal compulsion to performance of a contract was ended; failure to perform as contracted could only be remedied by the recovery of damages from the party failing to meet the contractual obligation. (Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law, 5th edition, 5 vols. [Dublin, 1786], 5:359, “Covenants to stand seized to Uses,” paragraphs 46–48).

The distinction between the penalty of adding time to the bond-laborer’s term of servitude in colonial Virginia and the provision of English law is underscored in a Virginia manumission agreement requiring a to-be-freed laborer to pay to his emancipator 6,000 pounds of tobacco over a three-year period, but with the proviso that the worker could “not bee restrained of his liberty for default of payment, but is left to the course of the Law as all other free subjects are in case of debt.” (Northampton County Records, 1668–80, pp. 158–9 [1678]).

38. Paul H. Douglas begins by equating plantation bond-servitude and apprenticeship. But he then honestly presents “the chief differences” until, in spite of his intentions, his premise is in tatters (Paul H. Douglas, American Apprenticeship and Industrial Education [New York, 1921], pp. 28–9).

Louis P. Hennighausen says that though “white servitude” was sometimes called “apprenticeship,” it was slavery (Louis P. Hennighausen, The Redemptioners and the German Society of Maryland [Baltimore, 1888], p. 1. Cheesman Herrick found that in Pennsylvania, “What ordinarily passes as the apprenticeship system differs from that now under discussion …” (Cheesman Herrick, White Servitude in Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, 1926; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1969], p. 108). There is no reason to think the conditions and status of bond-laborers were more favourable in Virginia in the seventeenth century than they were in Maryland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

39. Thomas Jefferson, Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia, from 1730 to 1740; and from 1768 to 1772 (Charlottesville, 1829); Gwinn v. Bugg, p. 89.

40. John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, 2 vols. (London, 1782); 2:1266–7. See also: William Salkeld, Report of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench …, (Philadelphia, 1822) 6th edition, 3 vols., 1:67–8; and Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1619; edited with an appendix, by William Nelson London, 1727), p. 191. (I am grateful to Director Frederic Baum and the staff of the Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York for making these old books available to me.) In a marginal note, Dalton says that by London custom (allowance for which appears to be made in the Statute of Artificers [5 Eliz. 4] section 40 – T.W.A.) an apprentice “may be turned over to another.” But the consent of the apprentice was presumably still required. With regard to such transfers of an apprentice to another master, according to Lipson, only rare exceptions were made, and these involved extraordinary and particular review and agreement by the wardens of the trade (Ephraim Lipson, Economic History of England, 3 vols. (London, 1926), 1:285).

The distinction between assignability and non-assignability, between chattel and non-chattel indenture to bond-servitude, was explicitly instanced in an order of the Charles County Maryland Court of 28 January 1661. The court approved an agreement between widow Ane Ges binding out her step-daughter (called “daughter-in-law” in those times) to one man for six years, and her three-year-old son, for fifteen years, to another man, specifying in each case that the child was bound to the man, “his heirs, Executors, administrators but not Assignes” (Archives of Maryland, 52:182–3). For Virginia examples of such specific provisions, see: Rappahannock County Records, 1656–64, pp. 275–6 (1683); Northumberland County Records, 1678–1698, pp. 250, 826 (1685; 1698).

41. This characterization is given by Gray in his History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (1:344), in concluding his discussion of the origin of “indentured servitude” (1:342–4). On this point, Gray appears to have misappropriated the authority whose title he cites but does not quote. Indeed, that authority seems to contradict Gray’s assertion most directly, as follows: “[T]he relation of master and servant in indented servitude was unknown to that [English apprenticeship] law, and could neither be derived from nor regulated by its principles. it had to depend entirely for its sanction on special statutes, or on the action of tribunals which had no precedents before them.” (James Curtis Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia: A Study of the System of Indentured Labor in the American Colonies [Baltimore, 1895; 1969 reprint], p. 46).

Awareness of the distinction between colonial indentured chattel servitude and terms of employment in the home country is revealed in the exceptional indentures that were conditioned upon non-assignability. See, for example, Virginia County Records, Rappahannock County Records, 1656–64, pp. 275–6 (18 February 1662/3; Lancaster County Records, 1660–80, p. 353 (8 March 1675/6); Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, pp. 250, 826 (1 January 1684/5 and 15 June 1698).

42. Tobacco seeds were first planted in England in 1565 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition (Chicago, 1997), 11:812, “Tobacco.”). The short-lived 1547 slave law (1 Edw. VI, 3) was repealed in 1550.

43. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 19, and p. 239 n. 96, for the names of half a dozen champions of the “paradox” thesis.

44. Bruce, Economic History 1:52–69; 238–9; 254–62; 411–12; 585–6; 2:43, 48–51, 415–17.

45. The patentee’s first seven years in possession were free of quit-rent (Hening, 1:228).

46. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill 1986), pp. 132–4. Authorities agree that elsewhere in Virginia tenancy was much less practiced, although the tax records provide no category for tenants. (Ibid., p. 134; Jackson Turner Main, “The Distribution of Property in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41:241–58 (1954–55); pp. 245 n. 12; 248 n. 21. The name of this publication was later changed to Journal of American History.)

47. Willard F. Bliss, “The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia,” VMHB, 58:427–41 (1950), p. 429.

48. Ibid., p. 427. Cf. Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650–1783, University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper No. 170, 1975. “Slaves did not cause tenancy and the decline of the yeomen,” says Earle (p. 226).

49. Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), p. 72.

50. Ibid., p. 76; Kulikoff, p. 133; Gregory A. Stiverson, Poverty in a Land of Plenty: Tenancy in Eighteenth-century Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), p. 10.

51. Kulikoff, p. 133.

52. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1812 reprint of 3 vols. in 1 by Ward Lock, & Co., London, n.d. [19th century]), p. 354.

53. Bruce, 1:586. A. E. Smith likewise rejects the possibility of any alternative to chattel bond-servitude, seeing it as being “too expensive,” for purposes of colonization “without rearranging society in some utopian fashion” (Colonists in Bondage, p. 305). Craven describes the bond-labor system as merely a part of Virginia’s being “allowed to follow what was perhaps her most natural development as a commonwealth of tobacco plantations” (Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company; the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), p. 334).

54. Incidentally, while it is true enough to say, as Bruce does, the “The system of large estates was the result of tobacco culture alone,” large estates are by no means necessary for the raising of tobacco. Indeed, tobacco is especially suitable for cultivation on small farms. (Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y Azucar [Havana, 1940], pp. 82–3, 466; Eric Bates, “The ‘Tobacco Dividend’: Farmers Who are Kicking the Habit,” The Nation, 13 February 1995, pp. 195–8. Bates quotes a “farm activist” as saying that, “If it weren’t for tobacco, we wouldn’t have small farms” [p. 196]).

55. Francis Bacon, Works, 6:93–5.

John C. Rainbolt (From Prescription to Persuasion, Manipulation of Eighteenth Century Virginia Economy [Port Washington, NY, 1974]) examines circumstantial factors that frustrated efforts at diversification of the Virginia economy. Although the title refers to the eighteenth century, Rainbolt’s main attention is directed to the 1650–1710 period, well after the commitment to tobacco had become a settled question in practical terms, and the guiding principle of colonial Virginia government had been firmly established: to secure the highest quickest profit for the Virginia planters, shippers, servant-trade merchants, English Crown interests, tax-and-customs farmers.

56. Bruce, Economic Histroy, 1:51–2.

57. Being of the aristocracy himself, Bacon favored control by “noblemen and gentlemen.” But this would seem to lapse from Bacon’s wonted attachment to empirical data. The Earl of Warwick, a prominent member of the Virginia and Bermuda companies, was so passionate for present gain that he directed his main adventurers to piracy (Wesley Frank Craven, “The Earl of Warwick – A Speculator in Piracy,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 10:457–79 [1930]). And by 1622 the arch-aristocrat King James I had come to a view of the matter quite opposite to that held by Bacon. Said the king: “Merchants were the fittest for the government of that Plantation [Virginia]” (RVC, 2:35).

58. In regard to the rate of expansion of the colony’s population and the colony’s relations with the native population, Bacon’s words seem like good advice wasted: “Cram not in people, by sending too fast company after company; but hearken how they waste, and send supplies proportionably; but so as the number may live well in the plantation, and not by surcharge [excess population] be in penury.” Then, in logical corollary to this doctrine of slow and controlled population expansion, Bacon urged that: “If you plant where savages are, do not only entertain them with trifles and jingles; but use them justly and graciously, with sufficient guard nevertheless: and do not win their favor by helping them to invade their enemies, but for their defense it is not amiss.”

Bacon was successively Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and Chancellor during the period of the completion of the plantation of Ulster by the English. In that light, it is especially interesting to find Bacon saying in this essay: “I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others. For else it is an extirpation than a plantation.”

59. James and Charles, father-and-son Stuart kings of England, decreed the encouragement of the sale of Virginia tobacco in England at the expense of English-grown tobacco (royal Proclamations of 29 September 1624 and 9 May 1625: reprinted in Ebenezer Hazard, Historical Collections, 1:198ff, 203ff). This act brought a net gain to the English balance of trade, in which English-grown tobacco was a negligible factor.

60. See Craven’s comment on Nathaniel Butler’s “Unmasking of Virginia” (Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 255).

61. “The practice was loudly condemned in England and bitterly resented on the part of the servants, but the planters found their justification in the exigencies of the occasion …’ (Ballagh, p. 43).

62. See p. 51.

63. RVC, 2:125.

64. RVC, 2:110–13.

65. RVC, 2:129.

66. RVC, 2:124–5, 128–31 (Report of the Committee on Registering of Contracts between men of the Company and their Servants, 18 November 1622).

67. RVC, 4:235 (12 April 1623).

68. RVC, 4:235 (12 April 1623). Atkins was also the employer who sold Thomas Best.

69. MCGC, p. 109 (28 August 1626).

70. RVC, 4:437 (30 March 1624).

71. RVC, 4:128–9 (26 April and 3 May 1623).

72. MCGC, pp. 75–6, 82.

73. MCGC, p. 105 (7 and 8 August 1626).

74. Martha W. Hiden, “Accompts of the Tristram and Jane,” VMHB, 62:427–47 (1954); p. 437.

75. Richard Kemp, Secretary of Virginia colony to Francis Windebank, English Secretary of State, 6 April 1638; in CSP, Col., Vol. 18). Hurd, 1:136, n. 4.

76. See pp. 17–19.

77. See pp. 55–6.

78. See pp. 17–18.

79. See p. 96.

80. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:618 (Reply to the questions of the royal commission for inquiring into the state of conditions in Virginia in 1624), emphasis in original. Looking back two and a half centuries later, Scharf, a most eminent historian of his state, seemed to confirm Smith’s prediction of “misery” and its root cause: “Unquestionably, tobacco made Maryland a slave State, and much poorer than she would otherwise be” (J. Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, 3. vols. [Baltimore, 1879; 1967 reprint], 2:48).

7 Bond-labor: Enduring …

1. Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947), p. 39. Smith makes this generalization for the entire period 1607 to 1776.

2. Smith, pp. 99, 102, and 103.

3. Essex [County, England] Overseers of the Poor, 1631 accounts (extract), Broadside, “Transportation of the Poor to Virginia, 1631,” courtesy of Francis L. Berkeley, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library Manuscripts Division, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

4. Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: the Seventeenth-century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971; New York, 1977), pp. 5, 14–16, 85–86. Craven’s count of some 66,000 head-rights granted in Virginia between 1625 and 1682, plus his estimated 6,000 free immigrants for the period prior to 1625, minus some 1,400 head-rights granted for persons of African ancestry, gives a European immigration total for Virginia of between 70,000 and 71,000. A. E. Smith, working with head-right records for Maryland, estimated the European emigrants to that colony in the period 1633 to 1680 at 21,000, practically all of them bond-laborers (Colonists in Bondage, pp. 323–4). See also: Russell R. Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 68:323–7 (1973); idem, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), pp. 117, 128; Eugene I. McCormac, White Servitude in Maryland 1634–1824 (Baltimore, 1904) p. 30; James Horn, “Servant Emigration in the Seventeenth Century,” in Thad Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays in Anglo-American Society and Politics (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 51–95; p. 54.

5. Governor William Berkeley’s answers to questions submitted by the Lords of Trade and Plantations: Hening, 2:511–17; 515 (1671). The same questions, together with answers stated in the third person plural, appear in Peypsian ms. 2582, Magdalene College, England, Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, 1676–1677 (available on microfilm of the Virginia Colonial Records Project, survey report 578, pp. 108–11, microfilm reel 6618). They are signed by John Hartwell as being “a true copy.” The date of the answers in the Hartwell copy is not given. Since Samuel Wiseman was the Secretary of the Royal Commissioners who arrived in Virginia in January and February 1677 to investigate the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion and to propose remedies in its wake, it would appear that the answers were sufficiently current for the Royal Commissioners’ purposes.

6. CO 5/714, Nicholson letter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 20 August 1698.

7. Robert Powis, a minister of the Church, lost out in the bidding for Eleanor Clure. But “in a drinking merriment,” in order to frustrate the high bidder, he married Clure to a third party, Edward Cooper. Months later, by way of penalty against Powis for his abuse of office, the court deducted 300 pounds of tobacco from a judgment of a debt of 3,200 pounds owed him by Cooper. It appears that Clure herself was not asked to testify. (Norfolk County Records, 1656–1666, pp. 125, 151 [16 February 1657/8; 15 June 1658].) As a general note on the marketing process, see also Smith pp. 17–18.

8. A Relation of Maryland (London, 1635), Ann Arbor University Microfilms, Inc., March of America Facsimile Series, 22; p. 53.

9. The military force dispatched from England in October 1651 to reduce Virginia to obedience to the Cromwellian Commonwealth also brought “one hundred and fifty Scotch prisoners, taken in the recent battle of Worcester, and sent over to be sold as servants” (John Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, 3 vols. [Baltimore, 1879; 1967 reprint], 1:209).

10. Of the total of some 250,000 limited-term bond-laborers that came to the continental colonies from 1607 to 1783, 35,000 to 50,000 were convicts; most of them, however, were sent following passage of a law (4 Geo. I 11) in 1717 “for the further preventing robbery, burglary, and other felonies, and for the more effectual transportation of felons and unlawful exporters of wool,” and at the same time supplying the “great want of servants who by their labor and industry might be the means of improving and making more useful the said colonies.” By that time the term “servants” was reserved for European-Americans bond-laborers.

A Council of State of the Commonwealth in 1653 authorized Richard Netherway of Bristol “to export one hundred Irish tories who were to be sold as slaves in Virginia.” (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; reprinted 1935), 1:609, citing Interregnum Entry Book, vol. 98, p. 405.) Perhaps the order was interpreted to include potential “tories”: in October 1654, two Maryland investors bought eight Irish boys, four of whom were so little that it was suggested that the buyers should have “brought cradles to rock them in.” (Archives of Maryland, 41:478). See also The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 74, for reference to “the Irish slave trade.” See also John W. Blake, “Transportation from Ireland to America, 1653–60,” Irish Historical Studies, 3:267–81 (1942–43), especially pp. 271, 273, 280 in relation to Virginia.

11. “Certain propositions for the better accommodating Forreigne Plantations with servants,” CO 324/1, ff. 275–83; f. 275.

12. The number of kidnapped British laborers in the entire colonial period has been estimated at between ten thousand and twenty thousand. (Albert Hart Blumenthal, Brides from Bridewell, Female Felons Sent to Colonial America [Rutland, Vermont, 1962], p. 76.)

13. William Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined (London, 1649), pp. 14, 47.

14. CO 324/1. “A much larger portion of our colonial population than is generally supposed found itself on American soil because of the wheedlings, deceptions, misrepresentations and other devices of the ‘spirits.’ ” (Smith, p. 86.)

15. CO 389/2, items “I,” “J,” and “K.” These were affidavits taken in proceedings before Justice William Morton in England in January 1671. Haverland’s aggressiveness is noted in the testimony given by Thomas Stone and by Mary Collins who, it seems, was also a spirit. According to her, Haverland was reckless and disdainful of the law in the practice of his profession. He replied to hints of possible trouble with the authorities in unrestrained language: “… He did not care a turd for my Lord Chief Justice nor his warrant and that he would wipe his arse with the Warrant.” Speaking of a Dorsetshire Justice of the Peace who was said to be seeking Haverland, Haverland “swore God damn him … He would have the life of … [the Justice of the Peace] Mr Thomas or hee should have the life of him [Haverland], and shooke his sword and Swore God damn him, his sword should be both Judge and justice for him” (CO 389/2, item “I”).

16. CO 389/2, items “I,” “J,” and “K.”

17. CO 389/2, item “K,” Haverland affidavit, 30 January 1670/1.

18. Bullock, p. 47.

19. Smith, p. 36.

20. Bullock, pp. 35–6.

21. Francis L. Berkeley (see note 3) cites that entry as evidence that “persons dependent on the parish were transported to the colonies.”

22. Smith. In 1668, sixty-nine bond-laborers were shipped from England to Thomas Cooper, Maryland merchant or planter, at a charge of about £3 10s. each.

23. Ibid., p. 36.

24. Ibid., pp. 41–2.

25. The principle was reinforced by Royal Instructions, as in Queen Anne’s directions to Francis Nicholson, who was then Governor of Virginia: “[N]one shall acquire a [head] Right meerly by importing or buying servants.” The patentee was required to employ the bond-laborers in work on the headright land within three years. (CO 5/1360, p. 268. 16 October 1702.)

26. Apparently young Verney opted for the latter course; he was back in England in less than a year. Verney Papers, Camden Society Publications, 56:160–63 (1853).

27. James Revel, ’The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years of Transportation at Virginia in America (circa 1680),” cited by John M. Jennings, VMHB, 56:189–94 (1948). There is no way of tracing the lineage of this poem to an actual identifiable author; its first publication was in the form of a chapbook, or popular pamphlet, sold by street peddlers in London in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its authenticity is indicated by certain place names, topographical references and travel routes, that were not familiar in England. Jennings refers to authorities such as Jernegan, Ballagh, and Bruce in concluding that, in any event, the work “presents a realistic picture of conditions in Virginia in the middle of the seventeenth century.” Jennings is able to deduce that the author would have had to have come to Virginia somewhere between 1656 and 1671. I would further hazard that, since the poem does not allude to Bacon’s Rebellion, Revel would have completed his term of servitude before that unignorable event. That fact would seem to fix the date of his arrival in the colony between 1656 and 1662. The poem is reprinted in Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 137–42. This particular passage is found there at pp. 138–9.

28. Richard Beale Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World, 1676–1701 (Chapel Hill, 1963), pp. 128–9.

29. See Chapter 3, especially pp. 40–45.

30. Hening, 1:396 (1656); 1:410 (1655); 1:455–6 (1658); 1:481–2 (1658); 1:546 (1660).

31. Hening, 2:143 (1662).

32. Hening, 2:283.

33. Hening, 2:346.

34. Hening, 2:404 (February 1677).

35. Hening, 2:492–3. This 1682 law resulted in the “importation of many more Indian slaves than has usually been recognized.” (Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia [New York, 1975], p. 330.)

36. Bruce, 2:129. Economic History. James C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), pp. 35–6.

37. Hening, 3:69.

38. Hening, 3: 69 n.

39. William W. Hening and William Munford, Reports of Cases, Relating Chiefly to Points of Practice, Decided by the Supreme Court of Chancery for the Richmond District, 2nd edn., “Hudgins v. Wrights,” (1806), 1:133–43; p. 137. But the court refused to extend the presumption of liberty to African-Americans as Judge George Wythe had urged. That privilege, the court stated, “relates to white persons and native American Indians” but not “to native Africans and their descendants” (pp. 134, 143).

40. Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, DC, 1932; reprinted 1958), 2:1025; Table 39 gives the number of African-American bond-laborers for four colonies/states (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) as 632,000. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 72, estimates the number of African bond-laborers brought into the thirteen original colonies to have been around 275,000.

41. Replying to an inquiry about the mortality rate made by the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in 1676, Governor William Berkeley said that, “whereas previously not one in five escaped the first year,” the situation had so improved that “not one in ten unseasoned hands die now.” Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, pp. 108–11. Cf. Hening, 2:515.)

The average annual death rate in England in the 1670s was less than 3 percent. (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction [Cambridge, Mass., 1981], p. 532.)

42. Russell R. Menard: Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), pp. 254, 268–9; idem., “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies, 16: 355–90 (1977); David W. Galenson, “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America,” Journal of Economic History, 41:39–47 (1981); idem, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981); idem, Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York, 1986), pp. 162–6.

43. Annie Lash Jester, comp. and ed., Adventurers of Purse and Person: Virginia, 1607–25 (Princeton, 1956; 2nd edition, 1964), pp. 1–70. The discussion of the muster by Irene W. D. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/25 as a Source for Demographic History” (WMO, 30:65–92), is of invaluable help to students of that period. Her use of the phrase “Negro servants or slaves” in the “or slaves” part does not reflect the record that she has produced and discussed.

44. Hening, 2:170 (1662). Archives of Maryland, 1:533 (1663–64). See further in Chapter 10.

45. MCGC, p. 466 (June 1640). Hening, 2:26 (1661). Helen Tuncliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning Emerican Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1926–37 Octagon reprint, 1968), 4:189.

46. Hening, 2:170 (1662). Archives of Maryland, 1:533 (1663–64). See also: Whittington B. Johnson, “The Origin and Nature of African Slavery in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 73:236–45 (1978); p. 237.

47. Gray, 1:203.

48. Morgan, p. 404.

49. “A Perfect Description of Virginia,” in Force Tracts, Vol. 2, No. 8, p. 14. A study of twenty-two estate inventories recorded in Surry County, Virginia in the years 1686 to 1688, found not one plow listed. (Kevin P. Kelly, “Economic and Social Development of Seventeenth-century Surry County, Virginia,” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1972; p. 138.)

50. Tobacco historian Robert says that in order to remove buds more efficiently in order to limit the number of tobacco leaves drawing on the plant’s nutrition, “Some of the yeomen who worked their own crops allowed their thumb nails to grow long and then hardened these nails in the flame of a candle.” (Joseph Clarke Robert, The Story of Tobacco in America [New York, 1940], p. 14 n. 3.) I have not seen any evidence of this practice among bond-laborers; perhaps they did not see any advantage for themselves in such an improvement in “the instruments of production.”

51. Gray, 1:215–17. Bruce, 1:439–43. Joseph Clark Robert, The Tobacco Kingdom: The Plantation, Market, and Factory in Virginia and North Carolina (1800–1860) (Durham, North Carolina, 1938), pp. 34–55. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929; 3rd edn., 1967), pp. 112–15.

52. Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), p. 462. Menard’s summary of extensive data that he presents on the previous two pages for the period 1619 to 1698 cites mainly, but not exclusively, Maryland data only from 1635 on. There is no significant discrepancy between the increase of product per worker in Virginia and Maryland. See also Gray, 1:218–19.

53. Morgan, pp. 126–9, 281–2. Morgan also attaches much importance to the “unadaptability” of English laborers for colonial labor. (He seems to imply that Africans were better suited by their previous labor experience.) But whereas Smith attributes the inability to adapt to those who had not been agricultural laborers in England, Morgan finds the typical rural English worker to have been unsuited for plantation labor. He even gives this typical emigrant worker a sobriquet, “The Lazy Englishman,” linking his unsuitability for plantation labor to that of “The Idle Indian” (Ibid., Chapter 3, especially, pp. 50–65).

54. Archives of Maryland, 54:234.

55. Hening, 1:257; 2:113. Archives of Maryland, 2:147–8. I have used the term “adult bond-laborers” to cover the various cases in which the non-youth ages range from sixteen for Irish and “aliens,” in 1643 and 1658, respectively, and then for all bond-laborers in 1662 in Virginia, to twenty-two in Maryland in 1666.

56. Archives of Maryland, 2:147–48.

57. Hening, 2:240.

58. John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States, 2 vols. (Boston, 1858; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1968), 1:138–9. Under the Statute of Artificers of 1562, a laborer who failed to fulfill the terms of a contract for a particular job might also be put in jail for one month. (See pp. 22–3.)

59. MCGC, p. 105.

60. MCGC, pp. 466–8.

61. Hening, 1:440. (1658).

62. Archives of Maryland, 1:107–8.

63. McCormac, p. 52.

64. Archives of Maryland, 2:524; “Runaway servants were usually rewarded with a severe whipping by their masters …” (Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1658–1666, and Manor Court of St Clement’s Manor, 1659–72, Archives of Maryland, 53:xxxiii (editorial comment).

65. Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1666–1674, Archives of Maryland, 60:xxxv-xxxvi (editorial comment).

66. Ibid., 2:149; 65:xxxiii.

67. At that time the average product per worker was 1,553 pounds of tobacco per year, and the price of tobacco was exceptionally low at 0.9d. per pound. The price of male bond-laborers with four years or more to serve was then 2,100 pounds of tobacco. (Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 249 (Table VII–2), 448 (Table A–7); 462 (Table A–14). The product of sixty-two weeks of labor would equate to nearly 1,800 pounds of tobacco.

68. Archives of Maryland, 65:92

69. Archives of Maryland, 69:154–5.

70. For Virginia laws, see Hening, 2:273–4 (1663), 277–8, (1669) and 283 (1672). See also Archives of Maryland, 54:502, 527, 524, for examples of court awards to captors of runaway bond-laborers.

71. Archives of Maryland, 2:523–8.

72. In authorizing the expenditure of 1,000 pounds of tobacco for construction of the apparatuses for these forms of punishment, the Northumberland County Court gave most particular specifications: “The said pillory is to be supplied with two Locust posts, the plank of which it is made to be white oake two inches and a halfe thick [not recommended for the short-necked], Eight foot in Length, and at least Seaven foot and a halfe high from the holes [for the hands and the head of the victim] in the pillory to the Ground, with a bench of Convenient height to stand upon[.] The stocks to be made of white oake ten foot long and three inches and halfe thick with a bench to sitt upon[.] The whip[p]ing post to be of Sound Locust at least Eight foot above the ground and three foot and halfe within the ground, to be eight-square [octagonal] and at least eight inches in Diameter” (Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 424 [15 February 1687/8]).

73. Hening, 1:265–7, 463–5; 2:143–6.

74. Raphael Semmes, Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1938), pp. 37–8. Semmes comments: “A man must indeed have been in wretched circumstances if life in one of the jails seemed attractive.” See also Hening, 2:278–9.

75. Hening, 2:278–9 (1670). Archives of Maryland, 10:292.

76. Good surveys of this aspect of the status of bond-laborers are to be found in: Smith pp. 270–274; Bruce, 2:35–9; Economic History (Baltimore, 1895) and James C. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia, pp. 50–51.

Smith generalizes: “Legal marriage without the consent of the masters was always forbidden” (p. 271). Bruce appears to empathize with the owners: “Secret marriages among the servants of the colony seem to have been a common source of serious loss to masters” (2:37).

77. If a master consented to the marriage of a woman bond-laborer belonging to him, the woman was freed from him (MCGC, p. 504 [12 March 1655/56]).

78. The record seems to reflect the fact that defiance of this law was more likely where the bond-laborer was attempting to marry a free person, since it almost necessarily involved absconding from the owner’s plantation. In 1656, the Lancaster County Virginia Court judged the marriage of a bond-laborer John Smith to be “no marriage” and ordered him to be returned constable-to-constable to his owner (Lancaster County Records, 1652–57, p. 285). The following year, the fine for ministers conducting such marriages was by law increased from 1,000 pounds of tobacco to 10,000 pounds (Hening, 1:332, 433). For other examples of such illegal marriages, see: Norfolk County Records, 1637–46, p. 51 (1640); Norfolk County Records, 1646–51, ff. 147–147a (1650); and Essex County Records, 1703–1708, p. 3 (1703).

79. Hening, 1:252–3 (1643). Archives of Maryland, 1:97 (1640). See also John Leeds Bozman, The History of Maryland from Its First Settlement in 1633 to the Restoration in 1660, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1837), 2:135.

80. Forlorn bond-laborer Sarah Hedges was unsuccessful in her invocation of this defense because the man she said was her husband, a seaman, did not return with “the next shipping.” (Norfolk County Records, 1656–66, f. 423 [17 April 1665]; Norfolk County Orders, 1666–75, f. 2 [10 May 1666].) For successful invocations of this immunity, see: Accomack County Records, 1690–97, pp. 173–173a (21 November 1695). See Also Northampton County records, 1657–64, ff. 163, 166 (23 March 1662/3; 28 April 1663).

81. See Hening, 3:74, 139, 361.

82. Ibid., 1:253.

83. Ibid. 2:114–15.

84. A minister’s salary was £80 by law (ibid., 2:45 [1662]). Ten thousand pounds of tobacco would have equated officially to £34 (ibid., 2:55).

85. When the English takeover of New Netherlands began in 1664, the so-called “Laws of the Duke of York” were promulgated for the former Dutch territories. These were compiled from those already in effect in earlier Anglo-American colonies. One paragraph of these laws declared that marriages of bond-laborers done without owner consent “shall be proceeded against as for Adultery or fornication.” Children of such unions were to be “reputed as Bastards.” (Cheesman A. Herrick, White Servitude in Pennsylvania Indentured and Pennsylvania Labor in Colony and Commonwealth [Philadelphia, 1926. Negro Universities reprint, 1969], pp. 28, 287.)

86. Hening, 2:114–15.

87. Bozman, 2:135n.

88. Ibid.

89. The Maryland Provinical Court in 1657 sentenced a free woman and free man to twenty lashes each for “having lived in a notorious and Scandalous Course of life tending to Adultery and Fornication.” The man’s punishment was remitted upon the payment of a fine of five hundred pounds of tobacco. (Archives of Maryland, 1:508–9, 588.)

In April 1649, in an instance that apparently involved no physical punishment, a Virginia county court ordered that “William Watts & Mary, Captain Cornwallis’s Negro Woman … each of them doe penance by standing in a white sheet with a white Rodd in their hands in the Chapell of Elizabeth Rivers in the face of the congregation on the next Sabbath day that the minister shall reade divine service and the said Watts to pay the court charges.” (Norfolk Wills and Deeds, 1646–51, p. 113a.) I have noted half a dozen early Norfolk County cases in which this “white sheet, white rod” penance was imposed on fornicators.

90. Archives of Maryland, Vol. LIII, Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1658–66; editor’s comment, p. xxx.

91. Bozman, 2:135n.

92. Hening, 2:115 (1662); 3:139 (1696).

93. For Virginia instances in which the “coverture” defense was used (once unsuccessfully and once successfully) see Henrico County Record Book No. 1, 1677–92, p. 164 (1 August 1684); and Accomack County Records, 1690–97, f. 153 (18 June 1695).

On the other hand, the Virginia Assembly in 1662 ordered the erection of a ducking-stool for punishment of women whose utterances might make “their poore husbands” subject to law suits under the “coverture” principle. But it appears that there were reasons for which unmarried women as well could be subjected to this sometimes fatal treatment. In 1663, Elizabeth Leveritt, a husbandless bond-laborer, was sentenced to endure the ordeal of watery suffocation for being “impudent” to her owner. In an order that was unique so far as my study of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake records goes, the same court ordered that her owner be similarly tortured for failing to maintain a proper discipline over Leveritt. (Accomack County Records, 1663–1666, f. 26.)

94. 18 Eliz. I, c. 3. George Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law in Connection with the state of the country and Condition of the People, 3 vols.; (supplementary volume by Thomas Mackay), (1898; 1904; Augustus M. Kelley reprint, 1967), 1:165–6.

95. Hening, 2:115, 167. In 1691, the added time was reduced to one year when the parents were European-Americans (Hening, 3:139–40).

96. Archives of Maryland, 1:373–4.

97. Hening, 2:115. Bruce, 2:35–6.

98. Archives of Maryland, 58:28. The editors of this volume (Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1658–1666 and Manor Court of St Clement’s Manor, 1659–1672) state that “Both men and women were whipped indiscriminately, women on the bare back apparently as frequently as men” (p. xxx).

99. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia, p. 48. Smith, p. 271.

100. York County Deeds, Orders, Wills Etc., 1684–87, f. 7 (26 January 1685).

101. Commenting on the common occurrence of sentences of two or three years for mothers in such cases, A. E. Smith notes that the actual time off for child-bearing rarely lasted for more than a month or six weeks. “[I]t is plain that the maidservant generally served far more extra time than she can possibly have lost through her misdeeds [let that judgementalism pass]; sentences of two and even three years are quite common, though childbirth can rarely have incapacitated a woman for more than a month or six weeks.” (Smith, p. 271.)

102. See Chapter 8, note 37, regarding the extent of these records.

103. Rating tobacco at 10s. per hundred pounds, and the cost of transportation of European-American bond-laborers at £6 each.

104. Output per worker in pounds of tobacco increased in every decade from 1619 to 1699, and it is estimated to have been more than 1,500 pounds in the 1660s. (Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 426, Table A–14.) Though the price of Chesapeake tobacco fluctuated, it was officially rated at about ten shillings a hundred pounds, 1.2d. per pound, during the last four decades of the seventeenth century. (See Morgan, p. 204 n. 29.)

105. Smith, p. 271. Hening, 2:168.

106. Accomack County Records, 1666–70, f. 176, 3 February 1669/70. Accomack County Records, 1697–1703, f. 78, 17 November 1699. Norfolk County Records, 1675–86, p. 44, 22 November 1677.

107. Norfolk County Records, 1646–51, f. 140, 26 March 1650.

108. Archives of Maryland,, 53:xxviii-xxix, pp. 28–30.

109. Ibid., 53:xxix, p. 37.

110. For instances of this aspect of gender-class oppression, see: Norfolk County Records, 1651–1656, ff. 35 and 46 (1653); Lancaster County Records, 1655–1666, p. 82 (1659); Charles City County Records, 1655–1665, p. 523 (1664); Norfolk County Records, 1666–1675 (part 2), f. 74a (1671); Norfolk County Records, 1675–1686, ff. 44 and 99 (1677, 1679); Accomack County Records, 1697–1703, ff. 78–78a, and 129a-130 (1699, 1702); Surry County Records, 1671–91, pp. 454–55 (1684). In four of these cases, the owner sold away his own child in the womb of the pregnant bond-laborer.

These acts were treated as “fornication,” which entailed a fine of 500 pounds of tobacco on each party. If the woman bond-laborer was unable to pay her fine, she was to suffer 20 or 30 lashes at the whipping post “on her naked back,” or alternatively, if the owner paid her fine, she was bound to serve six months for that, and two years more for the expense her pregnancy and the child would be to the master (Hening, 2:115; 3:74, 159). In Virginia after 1662, as is noted below, the extra two years was to be served under a different master, to whom she was to be sold by the churchwardens (Hening, 2:167).

111. Hening, 2:167. In Maryland in 1694 a woman in this situation was required to swear “in her pains of Travaille” that the owner was the father. This oath, which the bond-laborer could swear falsely only at the peril of hell’s eternal fire, would be taken as proof only if it seemed to the male judges to be consistent with all other evidence and testimony. (Archives of Maryland, 19:47.)

112. Archives of Maryland, 60:xxxvi, 9–11. The court record identifies Yansley as a “Spinster,” most likely a reference to her occupation, not to her unmarried status. The editor of this volume of the Archives of Maryland, says that Yansley was “presumably” a bond-laborer.

113. George Nicholls, 1:114–19, 121–5, 189. The laws were 22 Henry VIII c. 10, 27 Henry VIII c. 25, and 43 Eliz. c. 2.

114. Nicholls, 1:189.

115. Hening, 2:240. Archives of Maryland, 2:147–8. See also Semmes, pp. 85–7.

116. Hening, 2:115, 168.

117. Hening, 1:552.

118. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 460–61, 462. It is to be noted that European-American women were not tithable unless they were “working in the ground”; but the records indicate that many, perhaps most, were engaged directly in the cultivation of tobacco fields.

119. See the cases of Bridgett (last name omitted in the record) and Wilking (?) Jones: Norfolk County Records (part 2, Orders), 1666–75, pp. 94, 101 (June and August 1673); Norfolk County Order Book, 1675–86, p. 108 (2 March 1679/80). For the 1662 law, see Hening, 2:114–15.

120. When the plantation bourgeoisie was able to reduce its labor force to mainly lifetime, hereditary servitude, in the eighteenth century, the birth of the children did become “cost-effective,” as the bourgeois term is.

121. Hening, 1:361 (1649); 3:256. Under a law passed in 1680, imported children of African origin were not to be tithable until they were twelve years of age, those coming from Europe not until they were fourteen years old (Hening, 2:479–80).

122. Hening, 2:168 (1662).

123. Ibid., 2:298 (1672).

124. Ibid., 2:170.

125. Hening, 3:87.

126. In the opinion of Whittington B. Johnson, “This course of action was probably forced upon slaveowners because there were so few African females in the colony”; it brought the owner “potential monetary gain” (Johnson, p. 242.)

127. This calculation was propounded in an opinion delivered by Judge Daniel Dulany, himself a slaveholder, in a historical appendix to a decision delivered by him on behalf of the Maryland Provincial Court on 16 December 1767. (Thomas Harris Jr 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], 2 vols., 1:559–64; 563.)

128. Archives of Maryland, 1:533 (1662); 13:546–9 (1692).

129. Hening, 2:170. Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia, p. 57.

130. Hening, 3:87.

131. CSP, Col, 13:644 (Minutes of the General Assembly of Maryland, 21 May 1692).

132. Elizabeth City County Records, 1684–99 (transcript), p. 83 (30 December 1695).

133. Accomack County Records, 1703–9, ff. 107-a, 118 (3 February and 2 June 1708).

134. Hening, 1:153–4; 2:195; 273. Archives of Maryland, 2:523–4. For some Virginia cases arising under such laws, see Norfolk County Records, 1665–75, p. 42 (1670), and ibid., 1675–86; Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 135 (1678); and Accomack County Records, 1678–82, p. 173 (1680).

135. Hening, 2:115–16 (1662).

136. The situation reported by an emissary of the London government in 1701 surely was not of recent origin. “A great many,” he said, “choose to sit down loosers rather than go to the Law.” (Report of George Larkin to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, CO 5/1312, 22 December 1701.)

137. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946), pp. 312–13.

138. Charles City County Court Orders, 1655–1658, in Beverley Fleet, comp., Virginia Colonial Abstracts, 34 vols., (Baltimore, 1961), vol. 10, p. 441 (8 February 1663/64).

139. McCormac, p. 44.

140. Ibid., p. 66. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia, p. 59. Hening, 2:268 (1668).

141. Archives of Maryland, Vol. 60, Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1666–1674, pp. xxxv-xxxvi.

142. Ibid., pp. 45–47. The matter is presented in fuller detail in the record.

143. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

144. Northampton County [Wills] Order Book, No. 10, 1674–1679, p. 270.

145. Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts … Preserved in the Capitol at Richmond, 1652–1859 edited by W. P. Palmer, S. McRae, H. W. Flourney, et al., 11 vols. (Richmond, 1875–1893); 1:9–10.

146. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, H. R. McIlwaine, ed., 13 vols. (Richmond, 1915); 2:34–5. Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers, Series 8, Vol. 7 (Miscellaneous Documents), p. 232 (24 October 1666).

147. Smith, pp. 237–8. This was not so in Barbados in the late decades of the seventeenth century, where by law the European bond-laborers were guaranteed five pounds of meat a week and four pairs of shoes every year, along with corresponding quantities of other items of wearing apparel (Smith, p.237). This contrast is rooted in the relative difficulty of keeping European bond-laborers in the West Indies as compared with the continental plantation colonies. (See Chapter 12.)

148. Accomack County Order Book I, 1632–1640, p. 68 (1 February 1635/36); Accomack County Deeds & Wills [Orders], 1666–1670, p. 48 (17 February 1667/8). See also Smith, p. 250.

149. Gray, 1:366. Smith, p. 250.

150. For the customary diet in England, see E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables compared with Builders’ Wage-rates,” Economica, 23:296–307 (1956). Although the tabulation skips from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, it indicates a trend of increase in the importance of meat and dairy products in the English diet. While the grains-and-peas proportion declined slightly, beef replaced herring in the diet, and by 1725, out of every 100 pence [the equivalent of less than ten days builders’ wages] spent on “consumables” (food, drink, fuel and light, and textiles), the meat and dairy products portions accounted for 37½ pence and included 33 pounds of beef, 10 pounds of butter, and 10 pounds of cheese. (See ibid., Tables 1 and 2.) How nearly this approximated the wage worker’s diet is not revealed, however.

See pp. 151–2 for bond-laborers’ struggles over diet.

151. Aubrey C. Land, “The Planters of Colonial Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 67:109–28 (1972); p. 124.

152. Bruce, 1:486. Gray, 1:209.

153. E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Wage-rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,” Economica, 24:289–306 (1957); table 4, “England” column 1.

154. Bruce, 2:205–11.

155. Gray, 1:209.

156. Cf. Bruce, 2:8. Bruce cites York County records for 1657–1662 to argue that in 1661 bond-laborers were given meat three times a week. But he seems unable to find grounds for his speculation that, “It could not have been many years before this allowance was extended to each day in consequence of the enormous increase in the heads of hogs and horned cattle.” Perhaps he might have cited from the same volume of York County records the rebellious complaint of bond-laborers that they were dieted on only corn and water, whereas they were supposed to get meat three times a week. (York County Deeds, Orders, Wills, Etc, f. 149 [6 January 1661/2]. Besides the folio number given here, there is page number 297 inscribed by the Virginia State Library, and a typescript page 384 of the same record. Bruce cites “p. 384.” Could he have been using the typescript; and did he mean 1662 instead of 1661?) See references to this bond-laborers’ plot in Chapter 8.

157. “Questions proposed by his Majestie and Councell for which I return this humble plain and true answer.” [Henry] In Coventry Papers Relating to Virginia, Barbados and other Colonies, microfilm prepared by the British Manuscripts Project of the American Council of Learned Societies and available at the Library of Congress (originals at the estate of the Marquis of Bath, Longleat House, Wiltshire, England, hereafter to be cited as Coventry Papers.) The present citation is Vol. 77, f. 332. The report is not dated, but was obviously written in the fall of 1676. Henry Coventry was a Secretary of State with primary responsibility for the colonies.

158. Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679–80, translated and edited by Henry C. Murphy, Long Island Historical society Memoirs I (Brooklyn, 1867), p. 191.

The report of George Larkin to the Lords of trade and Plantations in December 1701 revealed that in Virginia and Maryland the owners still held to the principle of getting pennies by saving them at the expense of the bond-laborers’ food allowance: “… a man had really better be hanged than come a servant into the Plantations, most of his food being homene and water.… I have been told by some of them that they have not tasted flesh meat in three months.” (CO, 5/1312).

159. Gray, 1:365–6.

160. Using Menard’s tabulations for the period 1660–79 inclusive for Maryland, the average output per worker was 1,603 pounds of tobacco, and the average price was 1.18d. In five years the labor of each bond-laborer would thus have brought to the owner an income of £39 8s. (See Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 449 and 462.) In Virginia before 1660, according to Thomas J. Wertenbaker, “the average annual income from the labor of one able worker … was not less than £12” (The Planters of Colonial Virginia [Princeton, 1922], p. 71). Morgan says that Virginia tobacco prices were “probably somewhat higher” than those in Maryland, and he notes that in official transactions in Virginia in the last four decades of the seventeenth century, tobacco was rated at 10s per hundred pounds (1.2d per pound). (Morgan, p. 204 n. 20.) See also L. C. Gray’s discussion of tobacco prices, 1:262–8.

Semmes states that an owner made an annual profit of “about fifty pounds sterling,” citing, among other facts, the claim by a member of the Maryland Colony council that on average the bond-laborer “would produce to his master, at least fifty pounds sterling clear profit into purse, most commonly far more.” (Semmes p. 80; the quoted phrase is cited from “Letters of Robert Wintour”, unpublished manuscript in the collection of Dr Hugh H. Young, of Baltimore, Maryland.)

161. CO 5/1312. See notes 136 and 158 above. A quarter of a century before, the Virginia Assembly noted the practice among owners of pressuring bond-laborers who were nearing the end of their terms to agree to extend their servitude. (Hening 2:388–9.)

162. ‘… The observed increase in productivity probably resulted from making servants work harder” (Joseph Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore during the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993), p. 115).

163. Phillips, p. 126.

164. Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, p. 18.

165. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 239.

166. George Fitzhugh in De Bow’s Review, 30:89 (January 1861), cited in Phillips, p. 126.

167. Consequently, early in the season, when ready tobacco might not be available, exchanges were sometimes made completely or partially by direct barter, as in the following cases found in the Maryland court records. In April 1663, Elizabeth Holbrooke, a bond-laborer belonging to John Williams with four years to serve, was exchanged for “One yearling heyfer, with her encrease.” In March 1667, John Godshall acquired a parcel of land called “Hogge Quarter” for “a Servant named Thomas Porch in hand paid.” When Thomas King the following year bought five hundred acres of land on the north side of Nangemy Creek from Thomas and John Stone, he paid “Seven Thousand Pounds of Tobacco and Caske and two Servants” (Archives of Maryland, 49:7 [1663]; 60:147, 168–9 [1668]). The Lancaster County Virginia records for that same month reveal that Thomas Williamson had taken out a “mortgage” on a male bond-laborer, one Samuel Pen[?], on whom the mortgage holder, Thomas Williamson, was seeking foreclosure. (Lancaster Orders, Etc., 1666–1680, p. 34 [13 March 1666/7].)

168. Bruce, 1:447.

169. Land, p. 124.

170. Referring particularly to the 1660–80 period, when tobacco prices were much lower than in previous decades, Edmund S. Morgan writes that the small self-employed farmer was apt to be debt-ruined in times of especially low tobacco prices, but “a man with capital or credit to deal on a large scale” could thrive through it all by prudent market operations, and “by working his men [and women] a little harder” (Morgan, p. 191).

171. Bullock, p. 11. See also A Perfect Description of Virginia, Being a Full and True Relation of the Present State of the Plantation, Their Health, Peace, and Plenty … (London, 1649) in Force Tracts, II, No. 8, p. 6.

A century later the much-quoted William Eddis found that in Maryland, as a general rule, European bond-laborers were “strained to their uttermost to perform their allotted labor” under the watchful eye of the “rigid planter [who] exercises inflexible severity in matters of supervision.”

172. Accomack Court Orders, 1666–1670, ff. 60–62 (16 June 1668). The name of this entrepreneur is notorious to the fellowship of scholars of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.

173. Dankers and Sluyter, p. 216.

174. Archives of Maryland, 10:521 (22 September 1657).

175. Archives of Maryland, 1:21.

176. James Revel, “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account …,” VMHB, 56:189–94 (1948). Reprinted in Billings, p. 140.

177. Archives of Maryland, 10:484–5 (10 March 1656/7).

178. Bruce, 2:33.

179. Revel, p. 140.

180. According to the author of A Description of the Province of New Albion, And a Direction for Adventurers with small stock to get two for one, and good land freely, written in 1649, only one out of nine Virginia immigrants was dying in the first critical year in the colony, but in the first three decades, five out of six died in the first year of bondage, called the “seasoning” time. (Force Tracts, II, No. 7, p. 5.) Governor Berkeley reported to the Lords of Trade and Plantations in 1671 that the bond-laborers then generally survived the first “seasoning” year, but that “heretofore not one of five escaped the first year” (CO 1/26, f. 198. Hening 2:515).

The Virginia records led Thomas J. Wertenbaker to conclude in 1922 that in the 1635–60 period one-third or more of the bond-laborers died in the first year of their servitude, but that conditions improved so much that by 1671 the proportion was only one out of five (Wertenbaker, pp. 40, 80). Abbot E. Smith, in 1947, without giving specific dates, wrote thus of the bond-servitude of European immigrants: “kill them it usually did; at least in the first years, when fifty over seventy-five of every hundred … died without ever having a decent chance at survival” (Smith, p.304). Walter Hart Blumenthal, in 1962, believed that of the bond-laborers coming to the tobacco colonies between 1620 and 1680, 35 percent of the women and 50 percent of the men died within five years after landing. (Blumenthal, p. 23). Wesley Frank Craven, in 1971, noted the high death rate among the earliest Virginia immigrants, but believed that subsequently the “first year … was usually not fatal” (Craven, p. 26).

The odds against a chattel bond-laborer surviving the first year are indicated by the fact that a new laborer with five years to serve was commonly sold for less than a seasoned hand who had only three or four years to serve (Morgan, pp. 175–6). Russell Menard believes that the inflow of immigrant laborers did not rise steadily after 1644 as Morgan (p. 180) argues, but that it rose and fell in response to the rise or fall of tobacco prices (Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 119–26). But, he says, “the mortality rate among new arrivals must have been frightening” (ibid;, p.191; see also Table IV–4, p. 137).

Both Morgan and Menard call attention to the disparity between the mortality rates of New England and those in the tobacco colonies. That disparity explains why New England’s population growth in the seventeenth century did not depend upon immigration, while in Maryland and Virginia population growth did. Among the factors making for the difference was that while some 80 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake were chattel bond-laborers, only a small percentage of New England immigrants were in that category. (Morgan, p. 180; Menard, pp. 129–30, 140, and Tables IV–3 and IV–5, pp. 135 and 141.)

181. Dankers and Sluyter, p. 217.

182. Accomack County Wills, Deeds, & Orders, 1678–1682, p. 260 (18 August 1681).

183. Accomack County Order Book I (Orders, Deeds, Etc., No. 1), 1632–1640, p. 104 (3 July 1637). Norfolk County Wills & Deeds B, 1646–1651, p. 117a (19 April and 31 July 1649).

In 1692 the Provincial Assembly of Maryland enacted a law providing that owners who grossly abused “any English Servant or Slave,” or denied them provisions, or forced them to work beyond their strength, for the first and second offense were to be. fined, and if the offense were then repeated, the bond-laborers were to be “free from their servitude.’.’ Accordingly, Thomas Courtney, who “most barbarously dismembered and cutt off both the Ears” of a “Molattoe girl,” a limited-term bond-laborer, was merely ordered to set her free. There was no further “recompense” to the girl. Furthermore, that did not mean she was to be freed from servitude, but merely from servitude to Courtney. (Archives of Maryland, 13:451–7 [4 June 1692]).

184. Morris, pp. 485–7.

185. Hening, 2:53.

186. Although I am working directly with the colonial records as cited, almost all, or nearly all, of the cases mentioned here are also mentioned in Morris, pp. 485–8 and 491–96 (the Henry Smith case).

187. Northampton County Orders, Deeds, Wills, Etc., No. 2, 1640–1645 (3 August 1640). I have had to interpolate somewhat in describing the indenture, because of damage to the manuscript.

188. But the inquest jury said, ’how hee came by his death wee know not.” (Northampton County Order Book, 1654–1664, pp. 21–2 [29 June 1658].) Burton may have had no reason to feign a headache. In a subsequent autopsy, a physician found that Burton’s “heart [had been] very defective and … his Lungs imperfect blacke and putrefied.” (Ibid., p. 25 [same date].) For other examples, see: Charles City County Records, 1655–1665, p. 357 (3 February 1662/3; bond-laborer found starved to death, his body showing stripes from a whipping administered by the wife of his owner). Northampton County Order Book, 1657–1564, pp. 140, 142 (10 July and 24 August, 1662; owner posts “good behaviour” bond, which is returned’ to him three months later). Lancaster County Orders, Etc., 1666–1680, f. 10. (2 September 1666; bond-laborer dies “very shortly after” being “switched” by owner for “feigning” illness; court finds owner “innocent.”) Northampton County Order Book, 1664–1674, p. 130. (28 June 1672; owner’s agent kicks, a young African-American boy to death, depositions are taken from fellow bond-laborers but no further court action is recorded.) See also: Surry County Records, 1671–91, p.219. (12 September 1678; inquest finds owner to have caused the death of his woman bond-laborer; the court nullifies that finding.) Middlesex County Order Book, 1694–1705, pp. 234–42, 300, 458. (1 August and 2 October 1699; account of the whipping to death of a “Mulatto runaway boy” at the specific orders of his owner, Samuel Gray, a minister; there is no record of any penalties.) The minister remained “one of the boys” of the county elite; he served as a member of the first Board of Visitors and of the Board of trustees of the College of William and Mary. (Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. [Chapel Hill, 1960], 1:346 n. 15.)

189. Archives of Maryland, 3:146, 187–8; 10:522, 534–45. Seven years later, a member of the indicting grand jury, John Grammer, killed one of his bond-labors with a hundred lashes, but the grand jury declined to indict him. Archives of Maryland, 49:307–12.

190. Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1663–1666 Archives of Maryland, 49:290, 304–7, 311–14. Fincher’s last words before sentence of death was pronounced are a curiosity; after three months in jail he displayed none of the choler he had shown when in authority: “If I deserve it I must die” (p. 313).

191. Archives of Maryland, 54:390–91; 57:60–65. To be granted “benefit of clergy,” a person found guilty was merely shown a bible and asked if he could read it “as a cleric.” If the answer was “yes,” the defendant was let go with a formalistic branding of the base of the thumb. This routine was a vestigial relic of medieval times when only persons of clerical status were able to read the Bible and when priests were to be tried only in ecclesiastical courts. Carpenter was assessed 2,998 pounds of tobacco for sheriff’s fees, and 1,000 for the surgeon who “opened the skull” of the victim at inquest. (Ibid., 54:410.)

192. Smith appears in the record as a successful planter and as a thoroughgoing pathological brute. He scorned his wife, and beat her until she finally had to return to England to save her life. He sexually assaulted two of his women bond-laborers, so that they ran away. (Retaken, they were ordered to serve additional time double the days of their absence from Smith.) Another bond-laborer, mother of a child by him, charged that Smith had killed it. Accomack County Orders, 1666–1670, pp. 67 (December 1668); 112 (4 February 1668/9); 129, 131–7 (17 March and 2 April 1668/9); 168 (25 January 1669/70); 176–9 (3 February 1669/70). MCGC, p. 217 (1668–70), cited by Morris, p. 496 n. 145.

193. Archives of Maryland, 69:xvi–xvii, 413. Morris, p. 486.

194. Archives of Maryland, 41:478–80.

195. Ibid., p. 385.

196. Ibid., 49:166–8, 230, 233–5.

197. See Appendix II-D.

198. For cases in which special judicial consideration was given to psychopathic persons accused of crime, see Hening, 2:39 (1661) and Northumberland County Records, 1678–98 (1 November 1683).

199. See p. 22, above.

200. “You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odor of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating.” Thus spake Marx’s wage-worker in 1869. It was just as true for the relations of labor and capital in the plantation bond-labor system. (See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter X, “The Working Day,” Section 1.)

8 … and Resisting

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1909 (1911), a forerunner of his Black Reconstruction, published in 1935.

2. Timothy H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History, Fall 1973, pp. 3–25.

3. Ibid., p. 7.

4. Ibid., p. 17. It will be apparent that this chapter draws on many of the same records cited by Breen. However, as I have indicated briefly in the Introduction of this work (The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 20), I question Breen’s attribution of the disappearance of solidarity of European-American and African-American laborers against the plantation bourgeoisie after 1676 to exclusively objective factors (such as tobacco prices and the arrival of non-English-speaking laborers directly from Africa). I also object to certain assertions requiring the reader to share his undocumented speculations about the attitudes of the European-American workers (he called them “whites”) (pp. 7, 17). Finally, I attempt in this work to give some attention to the role of male supremacy and the resistance to it in the. history of the period embraced in the title of Breen’s article. This aspect appears to have been ignored, but not only by Breen.

5. “Servants responded to their lot in different ways. Some ran off at the first opportunity; other stole from their owners or attacked them; still others found momentary solace in drink or casual sexual liaisons. Planters viewed such behavior as a clear and constant danger to an orderly society and to their own economic well being. And why not? As a group the servile population accounted for half of Virginia’s settlers.” (Warren M. Billings, “The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 99:45–62 [January 1991]; p. 50.)

6. In the words of the Virginia Assembly in 1661 (Hening, 2:35).

7. Northampton County Records, 1655–57, p. 26. This first John Custis was the great-grandfather of Daniel Parke Custis, whose widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, married George Washington. (Edward Duffield Neill, Virginia Carolorum, the Colony under the Rule of Charles the First and Second, AD 1625–1685 [Albany, NY, 1886], p. 209.)

8. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 74, and Chapter 7, note 10 of this volume.

9. Hening, 1:411 (March 1655). After the restoration of the crypto-Catholic Charles II to the throne in England, the distinction was repealed in 1662, but the new law was not retroactive (Hening 2:113–14).

10. Westmoreland County Records, 1661–62, p. 52.

11. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 122. For other cases of bond-laborer suicide, see: Archives of Maryland, 53:501–2; Northampton County Records, p. 106 (1651); York County Records, 1657–62, f. 67. (1659); York County Records, 1665–72, p. 115 (1666); Accomack County Records, 1676–78, p. 29 (1677); Accomack County Records, 1676–90, f. 122 (1678).

Perhaps there was a class predisposition to “want of Grace”; I have found no seventeenth-century record of a suicide by a Chesapeake owner of bond-laborers.

12. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 46.

13. Archives of Maryland, 65:2–8. A second African-American bond-laborer was among the group of those originally charged, but the jury found him not guilty. Nevertheless, he was ordered to act as hangman of the other four.

The editorial definition of “petty treason” is “the killing of a master by his servants, of a husband by his wife, or of a high ecclesiastic by one of his inferiors” (p. xvii).

14. Hening, 2:118.

15. For a number of such Virginia “violent hands” cases, besides those detailed here, see: Accomack County Records, 1666–70, pp. 14, 38 (1666, 1667); York County Records, 1665–72, f. 52 (1666); Northampton County Records, 1664–74, pp. 69–70 (1669); Northumberland County Records, 1666–78, f. 93 (1670); Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, p. 200 (1671); Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 6 (1674); Northumberland County Records, 1666–78, f. 197 (1674); Accomack County Records, 1676–78, pp. 20–21 (1676).

16. Norfolk County Records, 1666–75, p. 7 (1666).

17. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, pp. 200–201.

18. Northampton County Records, 1664–74, pp. 133, 134, 137–8, 219, (1672, 1673).

19. Surry County Records, 1671–84, ff. 82, 97. You had to be there!

20. Hening 1:257 (March 1643).

21. Norfolk County Records, 1651–56, pp. 101, 105, 114. No reference is made to Bradley’s age. The next law on this subject (Hening, 1:441–2) required non-indentured, “custom-of-the-country” bond-laborers who were under fifteen years old at the time of their arrival to serve until they were twenty-one. But that law was not enacted until 1658.

22. Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 389.

23. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, ff. 132–3.

24. Hening, 1:244 (1643), 350 (1647); 2:129 (1662), 441 (1679). To kill a marked hog would logically make one subject to prosecution; but why did the ruling class insist on these severe penalties for killing and eating wild hogs? Was it a way of emphasizing to bond-laborers their general dependence on their owners for their “diet”? Was it aimed at discouraging runaways who might hope to maintain themselves on wild pork? Governor Francis Nicholson articulated that concern: the “stock of cattle and hogs” running “in the woods and about the frontiers,” he said, “would supply them [runaways] with victuals.” (CSP, Col., 16:391, Nicholson to Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 20 August 1698.)

25. For typical examples, see: Northumberland County Records, 1652–65, f. 351; ibid., 1666–78, f. 151; ibid., 1678–98, p. 6; Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, ff. 142, 215, 230, 352; Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 36; ibid., 1680–94, pp. 5, 31; ibid., 1694–1705, p. 98, 289–90.

26. Accomack County Records, 1676–90, pp. 389–90 (7 November 1684).

27. Archives of Maryland, 49:8–10 (31 March 1663). The sentence of the court was that six suffer 30-lash whippings, to be administered by the other two.

28. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, f. 158 (13 July 1670).

29. In regard to the components of the English diet at that time see page 321, n. 150.

30. York County Records, 1657–62, ff. 85 (24 July 1660); 143 (24 January 1661/2); 149 (25 January 1661/2); 150 (10 March 1661/2). A part of this record is printed in VMHB. 11:34–6 (1902–1903).

31. Library of Congress, Virginia (Colony) Collection microfilm, reel 4, depositions taken 13 September 1663. These materials have been printed in VMHB, 15:38–43 (1907–8). See also Robert Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia (1705); John Burk, The History of Virginia from its First Settlement to the Commencement of the Revolution, 3 vols. (Petersburg, Virginia, 1822), 1:135–7; and Charles Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1860).

32. Perhaps this was the Birkenhead mentioned in the Interregnum Record Book for 28 June 1653, who was scheduled to speak with a committee “concerning matters of importance” and to “give in names of such other persons as to be summoned before the Committee” (Great Britain Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 37:445).

33. Hening, 2:204 (16 September 1663).

34. Hening, 2:195.

35. Hening, 2:204.

36. A great portion, quite possibly half, of the seventeenth-century Virginia court records no longer exist. Of the lost seventeenth-century county records, a major part was destroyed by fires set when Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army retreated from Richmond in the first days of April 1865. However, says an archival specialist, “an awful lot of [the] dates of destruction have nothing at all to do with the Civil War,” many of the records having been lost in other wars, and in floods and non-wartime fires. Some few seem not to be accounted for at all. (Robert Clay, of the Virginia State Library Archives, in The Callaway Family Association Journal, 1979, pp. 48–56; see p. 51 for a list of Burned Record Counties.) This is simply a limitation to which historians must be reconciled, aware as they must ever be of the risks of attempting to generalize on the basis of incomplete information.

Of the approximately 1,675 total of all the years of existence of all the 27 Virginia counties that at some time existed in Virginia between 1634 (the beginning of county formation) to 1710, county court records of varying extents are available in photocopy and on microfilm as well as in abstracts from the records, at the Virginia State Archives in Richmond, comprising some 1,275 county-years. In the preparation of this study, I have examined the records covering some 885 of these county-years, including some made in four counties that were extinguished during that period: Accawmacke, Charles River, and Warrosquoake in 1643; Rappahannock in 1693. (See Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew, Virginia Counties: An Abstract of Their Formation, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 19 [Richmond, 1957], especially charts 1–9, pp. 83–5.)

37. Billings, p. 50, J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993), p. 126.

38. There were paradoxical cases, as noted in Chapter 7, when the owners might find it to their advantage to “encourage” flight of bond-laborers in the last month or so of their bondage to avoid payment of the customary “corn and clothes” due at the end of their terms.

39. Due to “the late unhappy rebellion,” the Assembly said in amending the statute of limitations in October 1677, “all judiciary proceedings were impeded and hindred for the greatest part of the last year.” (Hening, 2:419–20). The records of the Provincial Court of Maryland tell of the flight of eight African-American bond-laborers from that province to Virginia during the time of Bacon’s Rebellion. (Archives of Maryland, 49:355–6.)

40. Hening, 2:35.

41. Governor Berkeley to Lords of Trade and Plantations (Hening, 2:515): according to Berkeley there were bond-laborers in Virginia. 6,000 European-American and 2,000 African-American. Governor Culpeper’s estimate, 12 December 1681, put the numbers at “fifteen thousand servants,” of whom 3,000 were African-Americans (CSP, Col., 11:157).

42. When “takers-up” of runaways applied to be certified by the General Assembly for compensation, the list of the captives gave no indication of whether two or more had acted in concert.

43. MCGC, p. 467 (17 October 1640). In the end the costs were to be repaid by extensions of the servitude of bond-laborers recaptured.

44. MCGC, p. 466. The owner would have preferred to dispose of them in Maryland.

45. MCGC, p. 468.

46. MCGC, p. 467 (22 July 1640).

47. MCGC, p. 467 (13 October 1640). By “The Dutch Plantation” they may have meant present-day Delaware.

48. Ibid.

49. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, f. 2 (11 November 1645). In this and subsequent notes, the dates given are those of the court proceedings; where the dates of the events described are significantly different from the date of the court record, those dates will be given.

50. Accomack County Records, 1666–70, ff. 31–3. Although the depositions in this case were taken in August 1663, they were not entered in the record until 16 July 1667.

51. Two, and possibly three, of the women were married, from which fact I infer that they were probably not chattel bond-laborers. By the same reasoning, I conclude that the conspirator husbands of two of them were not chattels. In all probability they were former bond-laborers.

52. They were, respectively, the son-in-law and daughter of Colonel Scarburgh (Deal, p. 119).

53. “Black James,” was associated in the accounts with “Cornelius a dutchman’s wife.” James is not further identified. It is worth noting, however, that among the tithables of Lieutenant Colonel William Kendall in 1668 in neighbouring Northampton County were “Cornelius Arreale” and “James Negro.” (Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 55.)

54. Accomack County Records, 1671–73, pp. 93–7. Although the depositions were taken in December 1670, they are entered in the record on 23 April 1672, more than two years later. Possibly they were used in evidence against one of the plotters, Isack Medcalfe, who at the later date was appealing for leniency in the matter of the extension of his time of servitude.

55. Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 226 (4 October 1680).

56. Accomack County Records, 1678–72, p. 95 (16 July 1679).

57. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, ff. 487–8 (10 September 1679).

58. Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 176 (18 April 1683).

59. Accomack County Records, 1682–97, p. 131 (2 April 1688).

60. Norfolk County Records, 1686–95, p. 108 (17 February 1688).

61. Middlesex County Records, 1680–94, pp. 309–10 (14 October 1687).

62 Middlesex County Records, 1680–94, pp. 526–7 (9 October 1691); 535 (23 November 1691); 539 (4 January 1691/2. See also Rappahannock County Orders, 1686–92, p. 335 (3 February 1691/2).

63. Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 443 (17 October 1688).

64. York County Records, 1687–91, p. 527 (26 January 1690/91; the date of their flight was 18 August 1690). One might speculate that these men had hoped for a better lot in Quaker country.

65. Norfolk County Records, 1666–75, f. 37 (18 August 1669).

66. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, ff. 211–18 (10 March 1674/75).

67. Norfolk County Orders, 1675–86, f. 10 (15 December 1675). The Beverleys apparently represented the exceptional case of a bond-labor marriage.

68. Accomack County Records, 1697–1703, f. 67 (24 June 1699).

69. Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 123 (28 February 1671/2). A previous entry of the same date, concerning Rodriggus’s wife, indicates that Rodriggus was employed by planter Mr John Eyre (or Eyres), though not as a bond-laborer.

70. Norfolk County Orders, 1675–86, p. 99 (16 August 1679).

71. Northampton County Records, 1690–97, p. 4 (19 November 1690), Presumably this is the same Crotofte of the clandestine feasts (see p. 151). Has he survived as a bond-laborer after all these six years? But who is this John Johnson? Presumably he is neither the son nor the grandson of Anthony Johnson, the patriarch of Pungoteague Creek. And what were the respective offenses for which they were in jail?

72. Richmond County Records, 1694–99 (4 August 1697). When Loyd sued Thacker for the long loss of Redman’s services, Thacker, citing the 1662 Virginia law of descent through the mother, successfully contended that Redman was a free person, the child of an African-American father and a European-American woman.

73. Henrico County Records, 1694–1701, pp. 100–101 (1 April 1696).

74. In view of the fact that the woman was legally obligated to reveal the name of the father of the child, and in some instances was jailed until she complied, it is a mystery that the majority of the court records of such cases do not provide the name of the child’s father. Does that mean that the owner was being protected? The person who paid the bond-laborer’s “fornication” fine generally claimed the six months of servitude due from her on that account. Sometimes that claim was not explicitly asserted in the record. Although it might be surmised that in some such cases the fine-payer was the father, I have left them out of account.

In some of these 140 cases where the identity has been given only as “a negro,” the social status is assumed to be that of a bond-laborer. For the rest, when a person is not explicitly identified as a bond-laborer, it is assumed that he/she is a free person, because bond-laborers were identified as servants of an owner. It is possible to identify the male partner’s social status in fewer than half the “fornication” case records; no conclusions can be drawn as to the free-to-bond proportions among the male partners in the other cases.

75. This inference is based on two facts. The overwhelming proportion of the seventeenth-century male inhabitants of the Chesapeake arrived as bond-laborers. Second, of these 121 men, only one is termed “Mr,” the lowest order of honorific address.

76. Four of the women – three Europeans and one African-American – were free persons involved with male bond-laborers. Of the total of 139 women (one was involved with two different bond-laborers), eight were African-Americans, the rest were European-Americans.

77. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 148 (25 [?] January 1661/2).

78. See p. 131.

79. Two Middlesex County Court decisions applied this principle in declaring invalid two separate contracts executed by bond-laborers Rebecca Muns and of Martha Carroll (Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, ff. 54, 83 [10 April 1676, 19 November 1677).

80. Friedrich Engels dwells on this subject in relation to the proletariat, arguing that true monogamous relationships are best achieved where property considerations are absent (Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [New York, n.d.], p. 59]).

81. Four of the women, including one African-American, were free persons.

82. Accomack County Records, 1666–67, pp. 59, 150.

83. York County Records, 1677–84, p. 535.

84. Accomack County Records, 1682–97, pp. 70, 95 (1 and 7 September 1685).

85. Hening, 2:114 (1662).

86. Essex County Records, 1703–1708, pp. 3, 10 (August and September 1703).

87. This point will be elaborated on in the discussion of Governor Gooch’s letter to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations of 1736, in Chapter 13.

88. The general subject of the status of African-Americans in the Chesapeake colonies will be treated in Chapter 10.

89. Hening, 2:84 (March 1662); 170 (December 1662); 267 (September 1668).

90. Accomack County Records, 1666–70, p. 112 (4 February 1668/69).

91. York County Records, 1694–97, pp. 9–13.

92. Accomack County Records, 1676–78, pp. 54–5. (18 June 1677). Dun is identified as a bond-laborer of John David in the 1675 list of tithables.

93. Accomack County Records, 1678–82, pp. 271, 295–6. How much was Griffin’s attitude different from that of two bond-laborers who nearly beat to death a James “a Scotchman” whom their owner had appointed to be their overseer? Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 61 (1 March 1668/9).

94. York County Records, 1677–84, pp. 360, 362–4 (2 December 1681). It is not absolutely clear whether the “he” in Wells’s remark referred to himself or to Frank. What is not in doubt is that Wells and Frank were on the same side in the affair. All the persons mentioned in this account were European-Americans, except Frank.

95. Conway Robinson, “Notes from the Council and General Court Records, 1641–1672,” p. 279, April 1669, in VMHB, 8:243 (1900–01).

96. “If, as Winthrop Jordan has remarked, the language of the laws against miscegenation was ‘dripping with distaste and indignation,’ it was the language of the most politically active of the planter class. We have no evidence that during most of the seventeenth century, most whites shared it.… The ideology of racism may have been present in the culture of the elite as early as 1600, but nonslaveowning whites in the Chesapeake seem to have absorbed it only gradually, with the growth of slave society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (Deal, p. 181.)

9 The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum

1. Warren M. Billings, “ ‘Virginia’s Deploured Condition,’ 1660–1676: The Coming of Bacon’s Rebellion,” PhD thesis, University of Northern Illinois, June 1968, p. 128.

2. The county (originally “shire”) form was adopted in August 1634 (Hening, 1:224). Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew, Virginia Counties: An Abstract of Their Formation, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet No. 19 (Richmond, 1957).

3. Hening, 2:21 (March 1661).

4. Hening, 1:402 (March 1665/6). The county courts were courts of origin for all civil cases involving damages and costs amounting to less than 1,600 pounds of tobacco, and for all criminal cases except those in which the penalties included dismemberment or death (Hening, 2:66).

5. Hening, 2:280. The right of all freemen to vote had had its legislative ins and outs. In 1658, the last law on the matter (Hening, 1:475) enacted before that of 1670 had restored the right that had been taken away in 1655 (Hening, 1:411–12).

6. Hening, 2:59.

7. Hening, 1:483.

8. Hening, 2:21. As encouragement to the constables, they were to be rewarded by the owner of each runaway recaptured and returned.

9. Hening, 2:273–4.

10. Ibid. A year later the General Assembly, upon reflection on the prospective cost of the law and its susceptibility to local collusion, reduced the amount of the reward to 200 pounds of tobacco, payable for fugitives taken up more than ten miles from their owner (Hening, 2:277). See also Hening, 2:283–4, regarding fraudulent claims.

11. Charles City County Records, 1655–65, pp. 279–81, 284–8.

12. CO 1/30, pp. 114–15 (16 July 1673). This document may also be read in VMHB, 20:134–40 (1912).

13. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), pp. 247–8.

14. Sir Francis Bacon, Essay No. 15, “Of Seditions and Troubles” (1625) in Works, 6:406–12; p. 407. Bacon draws this reference from Isaiah, 45:1.

15. In the period 1660–76, seven out of ten of the colony elite had been in the country for no more than twelve years (Billings, p. 130).

16. Lionel Gatford, Publick Good Without Private Interest (London, 1657), p. 3.

17. John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth-century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, NY, 1974), pp. 19–20. William S. Perry, ed., Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford, 1870), 1:11, 15; Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1910), 1:131, 194–207; George M. Brydon, Virginia’s Mother Church and the Political Conditions under Which it Grew (Richmond, 1947–52), 1:passim.

Apparently disregarding the mammonistic implication of the observation, one doctoral student commented in a footnote that “tobacco was to prove almost the coalescing factor in Virginia that religious fanaticism was to prove in New England” (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; Arno Press, 1979], p. 231). In justice to Rutman, it must be noted that the book and the author had “grown very far apart” in the interval between its writing and its publication (see the author’s prefatory “Apologia,” dated 1978).

18. Hening, 2:48, 180–83, 198; 3:298.

19. Rainbolt, p. 19. Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970, p. 1168. Yet in 1692, when Commissary James Blair, head of the Anglican Church in Virginia, requested funds to found a college in order to train up soul-savers for gospel-starved Virginia, English Attorney-General Hedges expostulated, “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!” (Charles Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia [Philadelphia, 1860], p. 346; Campbell cites “Franklin’s correspondence”). This was reminiscent of the comment of a Barbadian slaveholder about 1680, that sugar planters “went not to those parts to save Souls, or propagate Religion, but to get money” (Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate [London, 1680], p. 39 marginal note). Godwyn repeated the observation five years later in his Trade Preferr’d before Religion and Christ made to give place to Mammon (London, 1685), p. 11. Nevertheless Blair’s proposal for a college was given financial support by the English government, and when it opened its doors in 1697, it was named after the then reigning English monarchs, William and Mary.

20. Thomas Ludwell to John Lord Berkeley (Sir William Berkeley’s brother), 24 June 1667 (Cited in Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. [New York, 1895], 1:394.)

21. Rainbolt, p. 6. Rainbolt examines circumstantial factors that frustrated efforts at diversification of the Virginia economy. Although the title of his book (From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth Century Virginia Economy) refers to the eighteenth century, Rainbolt’s main attention is directed to the 1650–1710 period, yet well after the commitment to tobacco had become a settled question in practical terms, and the guiding principle of colonial Virginia government had been firmly established: to secure the highest quickest profit for the Virginia planters, shippers, servant-trade merchants, English Crown interest, tax-and-customs farmers.

22. I fully accept the conclusion reached by Edmund S. Morgan, in a general note on tobacco prices, that “no reliable or regular series of annual prices current can be constructed for seventeenth-century Virginia” (Morgan, pp. 135–6, n. 7). Morgan refers to Russell R. Menard’s work in assembling the available data. I have chosen to draw upon Menard’s figures for present purposes, referring particularly to his summary of Chesapeake farm prices (Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland [New York, 1985], pp. 448–9). I feel justified in this course because I have found much of the same data by my own research, and because Menard’s picture of decade-to-decade trends is supported by other economic historians, such as Philip Alexander Bruce and Lewis C. Gray, and by Morgan himself.

23. Wilcomb E. Washburn is a dissenter from this generally accepted view. Washburn acknowledges the prevalence of desperate poverty among the people and their “unwillingness to accept their fate passively,” but at the same time he considers poor planters’ mutinies as insignificant (Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia [New York, 1957], pp. 31, 187 n. 63). Moreover, Washburn denies that Bacon’s Rebellion can be ascribed to the existence of class conflict within the colony. Rather, he regards the rebellion as merely a manifestation of “frontier” hostility to Indians (ibid., p. 235 n. 3).

Readers of Volume One of The Invention of the White Race will know how much I appreciate Dr Washburn’s research and argument regarding the white-supremacist treachery toward, and repression of, American Indians under Anglo-American and United States “Indian policy.” But his sensitivity to “racism” seems curiously limited in the dismissive terms with which he treats the participation by African-Americans in Bacon’s Rebellion. As bond-laborers they were not motivated by anti-Indian interests, but by a determination to be freed form their bondage. (Ibid., p. 88. See Chapter 11.)

24. Bruce, Economic History, 1:391.

25. Accomack (for all the years except 1660, 1661, and 1662), Lancaster, Lower Norfolk, Northampton, Northumberland, and York (all years except 1663 and 1664). (Billings, pp. 168–73.)

26. Ibid., p. 159.

27. Edmund S. Morgan shows a total population of 3,628 in these six counties in 1674. (Morgan, pp. 412–13.)

28. The total of all debts was 51,870,000 pounds of tobacco; those owed to the elite amounted to 12,225,000 pounds; those owed by the elite totalled 6,227,000 pounds.

29. In three years the amount owed by the elite exceeded the amount owed to them, in the amount of 585,000 pounds; in the other thirteen years, the account stood the other way by 6,596,000 pounds.

30. Edmund S. Morgan, “Headrights and Head Counts,” VMHB, 80:361–71 (1972); p. 366. The same information is largely recapitulated in Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 221–2.

31. Although Menard did not find a similar pattern of concentration of land ownership in three Maryland counties in the 1659–1706 period, he does not regard those findings as adequate for drawing a general conclusion regarding the matter. He comments on the rise in tenancy in this period, noting that an increasing number of people were falling into a landless status, a condition that would eliminate them from land ownership statistics altogether (Menard, pp. 309–12).

32. Kevin P. Kelly, “Economic and Social Development of Seventeenth-century Surry County, Virginia,” PhD thesis, University of Washington, 1972, p. 137.

33. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922), p. 58.

34. CO 5/1539, pp. 20–22 (margin date, 6 October 1696). By way of remedy, Randolph recommended a strict collection of the one shilling per fifty acre quit-rent and the limiting of future land patents to 500 acres.

35. Wertenbaker, p. 59.

36. Menard, p. 316.

37. CO 1/30, pp. 114–15 (16 July 1673). This document may also be read in VMHB, 20:134–40 (1912).

38. Ibid.

39. Surry County Records, 1671–84, pp. 40–43 (3 and 20 January 1673/4); 1671–91, pp. 41–2 (6 January 1673/4). Extensive excerpts from the record are printed in Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 263–7.

The proportion of propertyless freemen remained high. An exchange between the Surry County Court and Governor Effingham provides a rare example of precision regarding this economic differentiation among the free population. Surry County submitted the names of a total of 314 men for the militia at the end of 1687. Effingham returned the list and asked that the names of those who were “Free men [but] not free holders, or Housekeepers … be struck out.” As a result, the roll was reduced by 114, or 36 percent, presumably propertyless freemen. (Surry County Records, 1671–91, pp. 597–601; 619–23.)

40. Rainbolt, p. 12.

41. Sir William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), p. 5.

42. Rainbolt, p. 46.

43. Historians have frequently taken note of the recurring enthusiams for diversification of the Virginia economy and of efforts to curtail tobacco production; the most thorough study of the subject is John C. Rainbolt’s From Prescription to Persuasion (see note 17, and note 21 on the period mainly covered).

See also the special study of the subject by Sister Joan de Lourdes Leonard, “Operation Checkmate: The Birth and Death of a Virginia Blueprint for Progress,” WMQ. ser. 3, 24:44–74 (1967).

44. Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols., (Washington, DC, 1924); 1:374. House of Commons, 7 March 1671. CSP, Col., 11:318. Petition of sundry merchants possessing estates in America to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, received 7 November 1682.

45. Rainbolt, pp. 154, 155, 159.

46. CO 324/9.

47. Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, Vol I, 1651–1781 (Richmond, 1875), edited by William P. Palmer; pp. 137–8.

48. Archives of Maryland, 25:266–7.

49. “Representation of the Board of Trade relating to the Laws made, Manufactures set up, and Trade Carried on in His Majesty’s Plantations in America,” 1734; manuscript in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, Research Libraries.

50. See, for example, the justification of “An Act for Ports” as a design to stop the “import or export [of] goods and merchandises, without entering or paying the duties and customes due thereupon.” (Hening, 3:53–4 [1691]. In the end, the consequences of the prolonged struggle to achieve a diversified economy were thoroughly incongruous with the initial motives behind the effort. Designed as a solution to the economic ills of the tobacco economy, the various schemes often only disrupted the economy still more (Rainbolt, p. 171).

51. Eighteenth-century developments lie largely beyond the scope of the present work, but in the context of this discussion of diversification, brief mention is required of the increase in the relative importance of grain cultivations in the Chesapeake beginning in about 1740. This shift was not the result of any general diminution of demand for tobacco exports; indeed, tobacco exports to Britain, including that portion destined for re-export, followed a generally rising trend between 1740 and the War of Independence. (Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 [Washington, DC, 1976], Series Z-441, Z-442, Z-449.) Rather, it resulted from two principal causes. The exhaustion of the soil under tobacco cultivation was such that under the custom of field rotation, twenty acres per hand was required to maintain tobacco production on three acres. That compelled either the acquisition and clearing of new land or a reduction of the size of the labor force, both of which tended to reduce the rate of profit. Second, there was a rise in demand for grains, particularly wheat, in Europe, as well as in northern colonies and the West Indies. This shift hardly qualified, however, as significant diversification of the economy of the region. Despite the limited increase in the value of grains in total exports, tobacco still accounted for three times as much as wheat and corn together in the period 1768–72 (Klingaman, “Significance of Grain”, pp. 274–5, cited in full below); and the profits of the Chesapeake bourgeoisie remained absolutely dependent on exports of one major and one or two minor crops. (This paragraph is based on the following sources: Lewis Cecil Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols., [Washington, DC, 1932], pp. 166–9; David Klingaman, “The Development of the Coastwise Trade of Virginia in the Late Colonial Period,” VMHB, 77:26–45 [1969], especially pp. 30–31; idem, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History, 29:268–78 [1969] especially pp. 270–75; Allan Kulikoff, “The Economic Growth of the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake Colonies,” Journal of Economic History, 39:275–88 [1979], especially pp. 284–6.)

Yet instead of promoting the rise of a domestic market by investing in developing improved instruments of production and raising the productivity of labor, the plantation bourgeoisie spent their revenues “to increase their standard of living, improve their land, and expand the size of their labor force” (Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 [Chapel Hill, 1986], p. 118).

The capitalist exploiters of bond-labor seemed to sense their dilemma before Marx and Engels made it manifest: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production …” In 1690, Dalby Thomas pointed out that diversification of production in the colonies would lead the plantation bourgeoisie to “part with their black slaves” (Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account. Rise and Growth of the West Indies Colonies and great Advantages they are to England in Respect to Trade [London, 1690], in Harleian Miscellany, 12 vols., 9:432.) Obversely, among reasons cited by General James Oglethorpe in the eighteenth century for excluding slavery from the projected colony of Georgia was his conviction that it would result in a market-glutting monocultural economy rather than a diversified one (Diary of the Earl of Egmont, entry for 17 January 1739, cited in Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade [Washington, DC, 1931], 4 vols; 4:592.)

52. Rainbolt, p. 169.

53. In 1663, the English seized a number of labor-exporting locations in West Africa. The Dutch made a generally successful counterattack later that year, but the English did manage to maintain their hold on one major fort there, at Cape Corso, or Cape Coast Castle, and their position there was confirmed by the Treaty of Breda. (Sir George Clark, The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714, 2nd edn. [Oxford, 1956], p. 332.) Those disposed to deal with the almost arcane diplomatic language of the relevant documents may read them in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1929; volume 2, documents 53 and 57.

54. See Appendix II-E.

55. CO 5/1356, p. 47 (King in Council to Culpeper, 27 January 1681/82). The Royal African Company was headed by the Duke of York, Charles’s brother, who reigned as James II from 1685 to 1688. But a number of the leading shareholders had a dual interest as employers of plantation bond-labor. (Kenneth L. Davies, The Royal African Company [London, 1957], pp. 64–6.)

56. CO 5/1356, p. 138 (Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 20 September 1683).

57. See Gray, 1:369–71. I apologize for the tone of these lines, but that is how the bourgeoisie weighs investment choices. The Royal African Company in 1672 posted a price of £18 each for bond-laborers to be delivered in Virginia (Davies, p. 294).

58. CO 5/1356, p. 138. In the years 1680 to 1688, capitalists in both commerce and agriculture were naturally concerned that nearly one-fourth (23.5 percent) of their investment was lost in the Middle Passage. A half-century later they could congratulate themselves that these losses were down to 10 percent. (Davies, p. 292).

59. Reference has been made in Chapter 6 to Bruce’s exposition of the question, and to his conclusion that the Virginia colony was destined by nature for tobacco monoculture.

60. Sir Francis Bacon advised historians to leave observations and conclusions to others (Advancement of Learning, Book II, in Works, 3:339), but he himself could not forgo the opportunity, as when he interpreted the events of the reign of Henry VII.

61. Bacon, Essay Number 33, “Of Plantations,” in Works, 6:457–9; p. 458.

62. See p. 109.

63. Philip Alexander Bruce, A. E. Smith and Wesley Frank Craven are among those who propound this thesis. See Chapter 6, pp. 103–6, and p. 312 note 53 for full citations.

64. New England’s genocidal policy with regard to the native population, however, was far from that advocated by Bacon in his essay.

65. Michael G. Kammen, ed., “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke,” VMHB, 74:141–69 (1966); p. 155. Kammen says that while the opening lines were written by John Locke, the most influential member of the Commission of Trade and Plantation and a strong support of Blair, this work “has to be Blair’s composition” (p. 147).

66. See p. 69.

67. Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture: Patterns of Colonial America,” WMQ, 3d ser., 2:113–53 (1945) p. 118.

68. Melville Egleston, The Land System of the New England Colonies, Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, Vol. 4 (Baltimore, 1886), pp. 15, 21–2, 26.

This practice was the basis of the six-mile square “township” form of allotment of “public” land established by the Continental Congress in 1785 that prevailed in states formed out of the Northwest Territory. It is relevant to note that, “The southern members … did not believe in the township system of settlement.” (Payson Jackson Treat, “Origin of the National Land System under the Confederation,” in Vernon Carstensen, ed., The Public Lands; Studies in the History of the Public Domain [Madison, Wisconsin, 1968], pp. 11–12.)

69. Egleston, pp. 44–5.

70. Percy Wells Bidwell and John L. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (Washington, 1925; 1941 reprint), pp. 49–50.

71. Ibid., p. 54.

72. In the first three decades of the Massachusetts colony, before individual royal land grants were discontinued in favor of community land grants, just over one hundred individual land grants were made. Six were extremely large, ranging from 2,000 to 3,200 acres each; the rest averaged less than 400 acres each. But the greatest part of New England land distribution throughout the colonial period was made out of community land grants by the communities themselves. (Egleston, pp. 19–20.)

73. Gary B. Nash, “Colonial Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), p. 238. An economic historian, referring to “the northern colonies” generally throughout the colonial period, writes: “In the absence of a market strong enough to enforce specialization and necessitate acquiring anything by purchase, people produced for themselves.” (Robert E. Mutch, “Yeoman and Merchant in Pre-industrial America: Eighteenth-century Massachusetts as a Case Study,” Societas, 7:279–302; 282.

74. Recent academic discussions of the subject of “the transition to capitalism” in continental Anglo-America have directly and indirectly shed important light upon this aspect of the question. The discussion centers on the extent to which households in non-plantation areas were engaged in exchange of products, even to the extent of interregional exchanges. The time period that gets most attention begins about the middle of the eighteenth century. Regardless of how one may view the controversies that arise in this regard, for our present purpose all of these studies serve to show that communities of family households, largely independent of export/import exchanges, were characteristic of these areas. For a bibliography on this discussion see Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” WMQ 46:120–144 (1989).

This debate seems to have been induced by the long-running debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism as it occurred in Europe. I find discussion conducted under this heading useful for drawing conclusions regarding the degree of dependence on, or independence of, the New England colonial economy with respect to the export/import trade. But as Kulikoff points out (pp. 126–7), there is a fundamentally different significance to be attached to the class struggle interpretation of the revolutionary transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, on the one hand, and the evolution from subsistence farming to capitalist production (neither the producer nor the consumer being the owner) in non-plantation areas of rural continental Anglo-America.

75. Bidwell and Falconer, pp. 82–3.

76. One informative narrative of this transition is Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New York, 1949).

77. Gary B. Nash, “Social Development,” in Greene and Pole, eds., pp. 236, 243.

78. Ibid., pp. 236, 247.

79. Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations.”

80. Governor William Berkeley to Thomas Ludwell, 1 July 1676. In Coventry Papers, microfilm reel no. 63.

The outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion, says Thomas J. Wertenbaker, was the outcome of policies that “practically eliminated the middle class” (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 8 [Williamsburg, 1957], p. 55. Cf. Charles M. Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690 [New York, 1915], pp. 11–12.)