10 The Status of African-Americans
1. Works particularly concerned with this aspect of seventeenth-century Chesapeake history include: Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895), especially 2:121–9; James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1920; reprinted 1968); John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619–1865 (Baltimore, 1913); Susie M. Ames, Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1940); James H. Brewer, “Negro Property Owners in Seventeenth Century Virginia,” WMQ, vol. 12 (1955); Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth-century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 71:19–25 (1976); Whittington B. Johnson, “The Origin and Nature of African Slavery in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 73:236–45 (1978); Tomothy H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1980); Douglas Deal, “A Constricted World: Free Blacks on Virginia’s Eastern Shore,” in Lois Greene Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988); Joseph Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993).
2. See pp. 32 and 34 of The Invention of the White Race, Volume One.
3. “[E]xcluded from many civil privileges which the humblest white man enjoyes” – that was the contemptuous description of free Negroes as expressed by a meeting of white men in Northampton County, Virginia, in December 1831. (Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 [New York, 1942] p. 13.)
4. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel, Hill, 1968), p. 44.
5. Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” WMQ, 3d series, No. 7:199–222 (1950), pp. 211–12.
6. “Freedom, like slavery, acquired social meaning not through statute law or intellectual treatises, but through countless human transactions that first defined and then redefined the limits of that [the African-American condition].” (Breen and Innes, pp. 31–2.) I merely wish to stress that the essential character of those “human transactions” was the struggle between the contending social classes.
7. See pp. 19–22.
8. See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975) Chapter 8, “Living With Death,” especially pp. 158–63.
9. “… it was easier to incorporate the negroes in [the existing] system than to put them in a class apart.” (Helen Tunncliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. [Washington, DC, 1926–37], 1:55.)
10. See p. 154.
11. Each of the three was to receive a whipping of thirty lashes. The terms of servitude of each of the two European-Americans were to be extended by four years.
12. Jordan, p. 75. For a criticism of Jordan’s views, see the Introduction to Volume One of The Invention of the White Race.
13. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 80, 346 n. 34. But as pointed out, there was a sharp difference among the officers of the Providence Island venture regarding the enslavability or non-enslavability of Christians by Christians.
14. Breen and Innes, pp. 70–72.
15. The first Negroes who arrived in Virginia, says Phillips, “were … not fully slaves in the hands of their Virginia buyers, for there was neither law or custom establishing the institution of slavery” (Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Slavery of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime [New York, 1918], p. 75.)
16. Hening, 1:257; 2:113.
17. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 73–5. Recall Sir William Petty’s assessment made in 1672 of the values of human chattels: Irish men and Negro men at £15 each. Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols. (London, 1691; Augustus Kelley reprint; New York, 1963); 1:152.
In 1653 a license was granted to one Richard Netherway of Bristol, England, to export one hundred Irish men to be sold as slaves in Virginia. (Great Britain. Public Record Office. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, vol. IV; Interregnum Entry Book, Vol. 98, p. 405. Cited by Bruce, 1:609).
18. Hening, 1:411. Although this law was enacted in 1655, its provisions were made to apply to such surviving Irish bond-laborers as had arrived since the beginning of 1653. Recaptured runaway bond-laborer Walter Hind was ordered, “according to the act for Irish servants,” to “serve continue and complete the term of six yeares from the time of arriveall, and make good the time neglected.” (Charles City County Deeds, Wills, Orders, Etc., 1655–1665, p. 223. [3 February 1659/60].)
19. Hening 1:538–9.
20. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Appendix H.
21. The one brief, wavering exception was Anthony Johnson, as is noted below, p. 183.
22. The Accomack and Northampton records have been treated in great detail by other historians, most recently by Breen and Innes, and by Joseph Douglas Deal (Race and Class in Colonial Virginia). For that reason I shall select only a few individual cases recorded in those two counties for brief elaboration; I will attempt to cover the rest by suitable generalizations accompanied by full footnote references for the convenience of those who may desire to study the records directly.
23. MCGC, p. 33.
24. MCGC, pp. 66–8, 71–2, 73.
25. Accomack County Records, 1663–66, p. 54. The Northampton County Court found for Francis Payne in a suit arising out of his contract to build a house for Richard Haney. (Northampton Country Records, 1657–64, p. 173, 28 August 1663.)
26. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, p. 215 (3 January 1653/4). “Speciality” meant a bond or a contract. In August 1647, Mr Stephen Charlton was awarded a judgment for a debt against Tony Longo, to be paid out of the next crop. (Northampton County Records, 1645–51, p. 111.)
27. The name (variously rendered in the records as Manuel and Rodriguez, Rodriggus, Drigges, Drigs, etcetera) suggests a personal history with the Iberians or with the Dutch leaving Brazil.
28. Susie M. Ames, Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1940), p. 97.
29. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, p. 148; court record dated 12 September 1653.
30. Since all the entries listed in this note are from Northampton County Records, the volume years will serve to locate the citations. 1645–51, p. 26: sale of calf by John Pott to John Johnson, 6 May 1647. Ibid., p. 38: sale of a heifer by Francis Payne to slow-paying Marylander Jospeh Edlowe, 28 July 1651. 1651–54, p. 133: 8 February 1652/3. 1657–66, p. 30: sale of a cow and a heifer by John Johnson to Edward Marten, 30 May 1659. Ibid., pp. 49–50: gift of a heifer by Emanuel Driggs to Sande, son of a bond-laborer, 28 May 1659. Ibid., p. 47: signing over by Anthony Johnson of five calves to his son John, 30 May 1659. Ibid., p. 62: sale of a mare colt by Francis Payne (the name is variously spelled) to Anthony Johnson, 31 January 1659/60. Ibid., p. 88: sale by Emanuell Drigges of a gray colt to Alexander Wilson, 15 May 1661. Ibid., pp. 137–8: sale of a mare by Manuel Rodrigues to Willim Kendall, 11 March 1661/62, 1664–1674, p. 146: dispute in court between John Francisco and John Alworth over the sale of a filly, 19 September 1672.
31. The gift was recorded January 1657/8. Northampton County Records, 1657–64, pp. 2, 7.
32. Nell Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers; Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623–1666, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, 1963), 2:11 18 April 1667.
33. York County Records, 1665–72, p. 237–8 (28 August 1669); the court record is dated 12 April 1670.
34. Northampton County Records, 1657–66, p. 116, 236 (4 June 1662, 28 December 1665); and Northampton County Records, 1668–80, pp. 3, 34 (4 December 1668; 28 December 1672).
35. See Morgan’s discussion in American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 166–72.
36. Mongum first appears in the record in July 1650 when he and two other men – Demigo Matthews[?] and a European-American plantation overseer, Robert Berry – are said to have reported a plot of the Nanticoke Indians to attack the Eastern Shore settlements (Northampton County Records, 1645–51, f. 217). See also Northampton County Order Book, 1674–79, p. 273. For the joint tenancy, see Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2 vols. (Richmond, 1951), 1:228; 2:216. The name is variously spelled; I have decided to use the “Mongum” form throughout, except when direct quotations have an alternate spelling.
37. Northampton Country Records, 1651–54, pp. 32–3. The agreement was witnessed by Thomas Gilbert and Richard Buckland on 5 March 1650/1; it was entered in the court record on 22 December 1651. Joseph Douglas Deal reads the name as “Merris” and notes that she does not again appear in the records. She is not to be confused with the African-American named Mary, a second[?] wife of Mongum, who is listed in available Northampton tithable records beginning in 1665 and on through 1674. It seems that Breen and Innes confuse the two “Marys.” (see Breen and Innes, p. 83.)
Another such disclaimer in contemplation of marriage was subscribed by parish minister Francis Doughty of Northampton County Court before his marriage to Ann Eaton, whereby he did “disowne and discharge all right, to her estate and to her children.” (Richard Duffield Neill, Virginia Carolorum: The Colony under the Rule of Charles the First and Second, AD 1625–1685 [Albany, NY, 1986], p. 407.)
38. Northampton County Records, 1664–74, pp. 220–21. The will was dated 9 May 1673 and probated 29 September 1673.
39. Northampton County Records, 1674–79, p. 59 (29 August 1675). See also ibid., pp. 58, 70, 72.
40. The couple came to the notice of the court when Skipper (Cooper) was ordered to pay “levies tythes for his wife (shee being a negro)”; and again when they were suspected of shielding the father of her child from the hue and cry. (Norfolk County Wills and Deeds “E” 1665–75, Part 2, Orders, ff, 75, 76–7.) See Norfolk County Deed Book, No. 4, 1675–86, pp. 14 and 30, regarding the times of their deaths. See Nugent, 2:232, for the landholding of Skipper (Cooper).
With regard to other intermarriages of African-Americans and European-Americans, it is to be inferred that the Mary Longo who married John Goldsmith in Hungars parish on 13 October 1660 was an African-American, since the only Longos found in Northampton County records at that time were African-Americans; and that Emannuel Driggus’s first wife, Elizabeth, the mother of Thomas Driggus, was a European-American. (See Stratton Nottingham, Accomack, p.452; and ibid., cited by Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, pp. 271, 284.) See also the marriage of Elizabeth Key and William Greenstead, below.
41. Lerone Bennett Jr, The Shaping of Black America (Chicago, 1975), pp. 14–16, 24–7.
42. Breen and Innes make this point in relation to Anthony Johnson’s patent, saying that none of the names, except Richard Johnson, appear on subsequent Northampton tithables lists. They identify this Richard Johnson as the same Richard Johnson who later appears as Anthony Johnson’s son. But how could Anthony’s son, presumably born in Virginia, qualify for a headright? Was Richard Johnson, Negro, Anthony’s biological son, or possibly a Negro from England whom Anthony adopted?
43. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, f. 226; 8 March 1653/4. Some doubt remains, however, about Johnson’s final decision, since his original signed agreement to free Casar was entered in the record of 26 September 1654. (Ibid., 1654–1655/6, f.35-b) Archives of Maryland, 54:760–61. See also Clayton Torrence, Old Somerset on the Eastern Shore (Richmond, 1935), pp. 75–7.)
In 1638, George Menefie, a member of the Virginia Colony Council, laid claim to 3,000 acres of land for the importation of sixty bond-laborers, including twenty-three unnamed “Negroes I brought out of England with me.” (Virginia Land Patent Book, No. 1, 1623–34, abstracted in Nugent, 1:118.) Possibly Casar was one of that number.
44. See p. 326, note 36.
45. See Morgan, pp. 412–13, Table 3, “Population Growth by County.”
46. Deal is one who emphasizes that “a larger proportion of Eastern Shore blacks were free than was probably the case elsewhere in Virginia” (Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, p. xi).
47. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, ff. 118–19, 174–5 (13 May 1649). Court record date 30 December 1652. Estimates of tobacco production per capita in the Chesapeake at mid-century range between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds. See: A Perfect [or New] Description of Virginia, in Force Tracts, II, No. 8, p.4, “two thousand waight a year’; William Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, (London, 1649), p. 9; Russell R. Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-century Maryland,” WMQ, 30:37–64 (1973); p. 51.
48. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, ff. 118–19, 174–5. Note that Payne and the Elton-heads were all literate. Breen and Innes appear to have misread the year of the deal with Walker (Breen and Innes, p. 74).
49. Northampton County Records, 1654–55/6, p. 100-b. Northampton County Orders, No. 7, 1655–57, p. 19. A bond of £200 was pledged by Mrs Eltonhead to insure the Payne family against any challenge that might be made to their free status. At the current price of about 2d., this would be the equivalent of 24,000 pounds of tobacco.
50. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, f. 178.
51. Hening 2:26. The same phrase was used in a law on runaways passed a year later. (Hening 2:116–17).
52. Hening, 2:267.
53. Hening, 2:270.
54. Hening, 2:239.
55. Norfolk County Records, 1646–51, pp. 115–16. A year earlier the term “forever” was used in referring to the “conveyance” of three bond-laborers from the widow of George Menefie to Stephen Charlton. But since the phrase “heirs and assigns” is missing, the term may merely refer to the conveyor’s relinquishment “forever” of all claims to these workers. (Northampton County Records, 1651–54, p. 28.)
Argoll was the son of Francis Yeardley, the Governor of Virginia mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5.
56. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, pp. 165–6.
57. Lancaster County Records, 1654–1702, pp. 46–9.
58. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, p. 120.
59. Northampton County Records, 1655–57, p. 8.
60. Lancaster County Records, 1654–1702, pp. 46–9.
61. Northampton County Records, 1655–57, f. 78. At his death three years later, Pannell bequeathed Ann Driggus “and her increase” to his daughter. (Ibid., 1657–66, pp. 82–4.) Ann Driggus was the daughter of Emannuel Driggus (see note 27).
62. Northampton County Records, 1654–1655/6. ff. 25-b, 54-a. Some time before 29 August 1654, Phillip and Mingo did pay off the 1,700 pound obligation. (Ibid., f. 27-a.) For an earlier event involving Phillip, see p. 155.
63. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, p. 82.
64. He was so described at the Virginia General Court on 10 March 1653/4, the record of which is preserved apparently only in the record of the Baptista case as it was continued before the Maryland Provincial Court in 1661. (Archives of Maryland, 41:499.)
65. Norfolk County Records, 1651–56, ff. 8, 68, 75, 137, Archives of Maryland, 41:499. For further information on Baptista’s involvement with courts see: Norfolk County Records, 1656–66, pp. 226–7, 233, 244; Archives of Maryland, 41:460, 485, 499–500; and Beverley Fleet, Virginia Colonial Abstracts, No. 31, Lower Norfolk County, 1651–54, pp. 12–13.
66. Lancaster County Records, 1655–66, f. 370.
67. Charles City County Records, 1655–65, pp. 601–5, 617–18. Beverley Fleet, Virginia Colonial Abstracts, 34 vols. (Baltimore, 1961; originally published in 1942); 13:54–7, 65–6.
68. Northampton County Records, 1640–45, p. 16 (3 August 1640). Littleton himself was a member of the court.
69. Northampton County Records, 1654–55/6, ff. 60b–61a (1 November 1654.)
70. Accomack County Records, 1666–67, p. 151.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid. p. 154 (26 August 1669).
73. Robinson Transcripts, Virginia (Colony) General Court Records, Virginia Historical Society, Mss. No. 4/v 81935/a 2, p. 161. Printed in MCGC, p. 354.
74. In 1658 John Bland, a rich London merchant, recruited bond-laborers for his Virginia plantation from among inmates of Chelsea College jail; “two mulattoes offered to go rather than remain eternally in prison.” (Neill, p. 365 n. 1.)
75. Archives of Maryland, 66:294.
76. But it was apparently assumed that the Virginia law of 1662 (see p. 197) was sufficient guarantee that no claim could be made on the grounds of having been baptized a Christian, and that therefore Scarburgh did not need to post any bond against that contingency. (Accomack County Records, 1676–78, p. 7.)
77. Winthrop D. Jordan’s chapter titled “The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature” is a mine of informative bibliographic references on the relation between Christian principles and racial oppression, as revealed in the opinion of English and Anglo-American preachers and theologians during the colonial period. The works cited are with three or four exceptions products of the eighteenth century. (Jordan, pp. 179–215.) The chapter is made an integral part of his history of “American attitudes,” which, as is noted in the Introduction to the present work, is anchored in Jordan’s presumption of a psychological need for Anglo-Americans to know they were “white.” (Jordan, p. xiv. The page citation in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 236 n. 41, was erroneously given as p. ix.)
78. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church, or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negro’s and Indians in our Plantations, That as the Compliance therewith can prejudice no Mans just Interest, So the wilful Neglecting and Opposing of it, is no less than a manifest Apostacy from the Christian Faith. To which is added, A brief Account of Religion in Virginia (London, 1680); idem, A Supplement to The Negro’s and Indians Advocate: or, Some Further Considerations and Proposals for the Effectual amd Speedy Carrying on of the Negro’s Christianity in Our Plantations (Notwithstanding the Late Pretended Impossibilities) without any Prejudice to their Owners (London, 1681); idem, Trade preffer’d before Religion, and Christ made to give place to Mammon: Represented in a Sermon Relating to the Plantations. First Preached at Westminster Abby, And afterwards in divers Churches in London (London, 1681). For Godwyn in Virginia, see Neill, pp. 342–5.
79. George Fox, Gospel of Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of White, Blacks and Indians (London, 1676); idem, A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences, and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that ancient, Eminent and Faithful servant of Jesus Christ, 2 vols. (London, 1694).
80. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, or, a Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience (London, 1673).
81. Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, 1950), p. 3.
82. It is not my intention to undertake a treatment of this historical phenomenon, but merely to point to it as one of the elements of the institutional inertia that obstructed the imposition of lifetime hereditary bondage on Africans and African-Americans. It seems only fair to note that Quaker slaveholders late in the eighteenth century finally acceded to the logic of their doctrine and stopped owning or dealing in lifetime bond-laborers. (See Drake, pp. 68–84. In this way they were following the leadership of the Mennonites who had refused to engage in such traffic and exploitation from the beginning of their settlement in the colonies.
83. Godwyn, Trade preferr’s before Religion, p. 11.
84. Drake, Quakers and Slavery, p. 6
85. George Fox, Journal, 2:131. Cf. Drake, Quakers and Slavery, p. 6.
86. A century later, English enemies of the African slave trade such as James Ramsay and William Wilberforce were pointing to the possibility that ending that inhuman traffic would be of benefit to the bond-laborer already at work in the West Indies. (Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands [New Haven, 1965], p. 25.)
87. Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, pp. 3, 12.
88. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
89. Joseph Bess, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Consience …, 2 vols. (London, 1753); see the section on Barbados, especially pp. 305–8.
90. Hening, 2:48 (1662), 180–83 (1663). Under the terms of the 1663 law, Quaker Meeting was outlawed altogether, and violators were to be fined 200 pounds of tobacco for the first offense and 500 for the second offense, to be satisfied by seizure and sale of the offender’s assets, with the Quaker community made collectively responsible for any unsatisfied amount. For the third offense, the penalty was to be banishment from the colony to a place chosen by the Governor and Colony Council. Other provisions were aimed at preventing Quaker preachers from coming into Virginia by imposing a fine of 5,000 pounds of tobacco upon householders who hosted those preachers.
91. “… the freedom and equality of man [was] involved in the true profession of Christ.” (Ballagh, p. 46.)
92. See p. 21.
93. See Chapter 2, n. 65; Leviticus, 25:8–10.
94. The Virginia General Court ruled in 1772 that Indians were free by virtue of the 1691 “Act for a free trade with Indians.” (Hening 3:69.) The court, relying on ancient English legal precedent, held that allowing the right of free trade carried with it “all incidents necessary to the exercise of that right, as protection of their persons, properties, &c, and consequently takes from every other the right of making them slaves.” (Thomas Jefferson, Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia, From 1730 to 1740, and from 1668–1772 [Charlottesville, 1829].) The ruling was made in relation of Robin, an Indian being held as a slave, who sued for his freedom. The opinion was written by George Mason.
95. Northampton County Records, 1651–54, f. 114 (12 January 1652/3). The clerk noted in the margin that the statement, which was dated two weeks earlier, had been signed by Pott but not Charlton.
96. Northampton Country Records, 1645–51, ff. 150–51. “Hardly rejecting slavery outright,” notes Douglas Deal, “Charlton nevertheless displayed some uneasiness about the custom of owning and selling Africans for life.” (Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, p. 254.)
97. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, f. 205. Richard Vaughan, Stephen Charlton’s brother-in-law, “seems to have been wholeheartedly opposed to owning Africans and slaves for life.” (Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, p. 254.)
98. Northampton County Records, 1654–55/6, f. 54-b. Yet as noted above (p. 188), Charlton specified hereditary bondage for Sisley in a transaction in 1647.
99. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 16.
100. Northampton County Records, 1657–66, f. 47.
101. York County Records, 1657–62, ff. 82, 85, 89.
102. Northampton County Records, Deeds and Wills, No. 8 (1666–68), p. 17. Although the fact is not noted in this document, Driggus is elsewhere identified as a “Negro”; whether Williams may have been one of England’s Negro seamen is not indicated.
103. The facts presented here regarding the Key case are drawn from Northumberland County Court Records, 1652–58, ff. 66–7, 85, 87 and 124–5; 1652–65, ff. 40, 41, 46, 49; 1658–66, f. 28; and from MCGC, p. 504. Credit for bringing this case into the discussion on the origin of racial slavery is due to Warren M. Billings for “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in the Seventeenth Century,” WMQ, 30:467–74 (1973), and for his presentation of material from the record of the Key case in his edited work The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1698 (Chapel Hill, 1975); pp. 165–9. All the documents cited here by me, except one, are to be found in the latter work, though with certain errors of transcription. In Anthony Lenton’s deposition (p. 146), a passage is made unintelligible by the inadvertent omission of fifteen words, and the name “Mottrom” is given where it should have been “Key.” On the same page, a June and a July record entry are presented as if they were one entry and for a single day.
Regrettable as these editor’s errors may be, they do not detract from the force of the evidence he presents, evidence that led him to challenge Winthrop D. Jordan’s argument that racial slavery was the result of an “unthinking decision.” To the contrary, says Billings in “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Keys,” the laws passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1662 and 1667 (for descent through the mother, and uncoupling freedom from Christian conversion – see p. 197) “were deliberately calculated to undercut the meager rights of black laborers” (WMQ, 30:473–4).
However, his concluding allusion to “white alarm” as the motive for the course of events that ended in racial slavery seems too facile, and not based on his evidence. Furthermore, it would seem to undermine his own challenge to Jordan’s entire thesis, which is based on the presumption of an immemorial “white alarm.”
104. As indicated by the fact that he had paid the fine for “getting her Mother with Child.”
105. “The planters,” writes Billings, “were beginning to look upon slavery as a viable alternative to indentured servitude.” (Billings, “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key,” 30:471.) I belong with Billings in favoring the economic interpretation of history. But his phrase “the planters” suggests a unanimity among the plantation owners, whereas the great significance of the Elizabeth Key case is precisely that at that moment some “planters” had basic reservations that, had they prevailed, would have prevented the eventual imposition of racial oppression in Anglo-America.
106. From the brief of the appellant in the case of Eleanor Toogood v. Dr Upton Scott, held in October 1782 in the Maryland Provincial Court. (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, 1812] vol. 2; 26–38; p. 37.) One shrinks from the callousness of this language, but it proceeded in the circumstances of the time from the same “market principles” that still, today, leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ ” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow, 1955), 1:36.
107. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 86–7.
108. See ibid., pp. 8, 80, 236, n. 34.
109. See ibid., p. 80, 81.
110. Hening, 2:170.
111. Hening, 2:260.
112. Kenneth G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957), p. 41.
113. Hening, 2:280–81.
114. See p. 172.
115. Hening, 2:299.
116. Susan Westbury, “Slaves of Colonial Virginia: Where They Came From,” WMQ,, 42:228–48 (1985); pp. 229–30. In the absence of further records, Westbury makes this conjecture based on bills of exchange and the price prevailing at that time. These workers may be among those referred to in the following record: “A List of Ships freighted by the Royal African Company Since January 1673/4.” The account shows a total of 5,200 persons taken from Africa, of whom 300 on the Swallow and 350 on the Prosperous were supposed to be being sent to Virginia, the others being destined for Jamaica, Barbados and Nevis. (CO 1/31, f. 32.)
117. CO 324/1. “Certain Instructions and Additional Instructions to Colonial Governors, Comissions and Orders in Council.” The date is between 1662 and 1774, according to Charles. M. Andrews, Guide to the Materials for American History to 1783, in the Public Record Office of Great Britain, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1912–14); 1:226.
118. Bruce, 2:59. This comment, however, was made in the context of Bruce’s opinion that in general African-American bond-laborers were not defiant or rebellious.
119. Sir John Knight to the Earl of Shaftesbury, 29 October 1673 (CSP, Col., 7:530).
120. Sir Henry Chicheley to Sir Thomas Chicheley, 16 July 1673 (CSP, Col., 7:508).
121. See Appendix 2-A. That was precisely the prospect that concerned William Byrd II “of Westover.” Byrd noted that “On the back of the British Colonys on the Continent of America about 250 miles from the ocean, runs a chain of High Mountains.” He urged that steps be taken to “prevent the Negroes taking Refuge there as they do in the mountains of Jamaica” and making allies with the French against the English as did many of the Indian Tribes. (William Byrd II of Westover to Mr Ochs, ca. 1735, VMHB, 9:225–8 [1902]; 226.)
11 Rebellion – and Its Aftermath
1. See Chapter 6, note 80.
2. The reader is referred to: (1) the excellent bibliographic essay done by the late Jane Carson for the Jamestown Foundation, Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676–1976 (Jamestown, Virginia, 1976); (2) John B. Frantz, ed., Bacon’s Rebellion: Prologue to the Revolution? (Lexington, Massachusetts, 1969), a volume of extensive excerpts from source documents, supplemented by selections from the writings of ten of the principal historians of the colonial period, analyzing the causes and assessing the significance of the rebellion; (3) the entries for Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel, and Bacon’s Rebellion in The Virginia Historical Index, compiled by Earl G. Swem, an exhaustive bibliography compiled of materials published in the Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Hening’s Virginia Statutes, and five principal historical magazines published between 1809 and 1930. Finally, an indispensable guide to primary source materials is John Davenport Neville, Bacon’s Rebellion: Abstracts of Materials in the Colonial Records Project (Jamestown, 1976).
3. See Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-century America, Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, 1959).
4. Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel (Chapel Hill, 1957). The quoted phrase is at p. 162.
Washburn’s challenge to the uncritical glorification of Bacon’s Rebellion supplied an overdue corrective to the white-chauvinist “frontier democracy” myth, but he made the case in the form of an uncritical assessment of Governor Berkeley. As a result, there seems to be no room in Washburn’s account for the mass of poor freemen, freedmen and bond-laborers, relief of whose sufferings was of no more concern to Berkeley than it was to his peers, despite his invocation of those sufferings to pursue easement of the rigors of the Navigation Act. So far as any self-activation on their part is concerned, Washburn sees only “frontier aggression.” It is regrettable that Washburn, in his laudable purpose of exposing the counterfeit of “frontier democracy,” did not so much as look at the Virginia County Records. If he had done so, he might not have canonized Berkeley as he did, and he might not have so completely ignored the bond-laborers and their own independent cue and motive for rebellion unrelated to “Indian policy.” He particularly failed to give any historical significance to the bond-laborers’ participation in the rebellion. He mentions Negroes being among the rebels, for which he deserves credit; but he attaches no thematic significance to the fact. (See ibid., pp. 80–81; 88; 209 n. 23.) Francis Jennings’s research into the records regarding the Indians of the eastern section of the continent and his forceful, sympathetic treatment of them are a truly seminal contribution. (See particularly his The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest [Chapel Hill, 1975].) In an earlier article, Jennings defended Washburn’s The Governor and the Rebel as the best work on Bacon’s Rebellion, free of the common fault of relying on Virginians’ “self-serving depositions.” Apparently he, too, did not interest himself in a study of the Virginia County Records and he certainly takes no account of the bond-laborers; he is content to characterize the rebellion as nothing other than an action of “militant back settlers” led by a demagogue for the sole purpose of seizing “attractive real estate” from Indians. (Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102:15–53 [1968]; pp. 34–5.)
5. Craven believes it is an anachronistic error to interpret that event in terms of democratic principles that are standards of a much later time: “Bacon’s Rebellion belongs to the seventeenth century …,” he writes, and historians should leave it there (Wesley Frank Craven, The Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713 [New York, 1968], p. 142).
6. John B. Fiske, writing in the populist era at the end of the nineteenth century, presented a class-struggle interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion, but one short on equalitarianism. He draws the line at the “rabble … who [had] little or nothing to lose, … [and who] entertained communistic notions” typical of the “socialist tomfoolery” of such times. His single reference to the bond-laborers is as “servile labor,” without any political personality of their own. (John B. Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, 2 vols. [Boston and New York, 1900], 106.)
7. I am, of course, indebted to Edmund S. Morgan, Timothy H. Breen, and Lerone Bennett Jr, who before me ventured somewhat along this line. See my Introduction to Volume One of The Invention of the White Race, pp. 16–21.
8. Those who are interested in the details as they are presented by English and Anglo-American chroniclers will want to follow the bibliographies and sources as listed in note 1. Among works noted there, a good selection for the reader with a critical eye would surely include: the section on Bacon’s Rebellion in Charles M. Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690 (New York, 1915) pp. 16–28, 47–59; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1960) particularly Chapter 13 of Volume One, “Indian War – The Background of Rebellion”; and Washburn, particularly Chapter 2, “Background to Rebellion,” and Chapter 3, “The Occaneechee Campaign.”
9. Alden T. Vaughan writes: “[C]olor prejudice … happened to Indians … though not until two centuries of culture contact had altered Anglo-American perceptions … The perceptual shift from Indians as white men to Indians as tawnies or redskins was neither sudden not universally accepted” until the eighteenth century. (Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review. 87:917–53 (October 1982); pp. 918, 930.)
10. In July 1676 a petition apparently initiated by the local Gloucester County elite and asking Governor Berkeley for protection against Bacon, invoked the specter of “their wives & Children being exposed to the cruelty of the mercyless Indians.” (Sherwood, Virginia’s Deploured Condition, Or an Impaniall Narrative of the Murders comitted by the Indians there, and of the Sufferings of his Majesties Loyall Subjects under the Rebellious outrages of Mr Nathaniell Bacon Junior, dated August 1676, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 4th ser. 9:162–76 (Boston, 1871); p. 173. The text of the petition and Berkeley’s reply are printed in the same volume, pp. 181–4.)
11. Andrews, p. 110–11.
12. Jerry A. O’Callaghan, “The War Veteran and the Public Lands,” in Vernon Carstensen, The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain (Madison, Wisconsin, 1968), p. 112.
A similar analogy is presented by the English Revolution which began in a fury at the massacre of Protestants in an uprising of the Irish in the fall of 1641, but ended with the overthrow of the monarchy in England. (Brian Manning, “The Outbreak of the English Civil War,” in R. H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and after, 1642–1658 [Berkeley, 1970], p. 4.)
13. Bailyn, p. 99. In this paragraph I have followed Bailyn’s impressive treatment of the etiology of the division in the ranks of the Virginia colony elite.
14. As already mentioned (see note 4), however, that the Navigation Act was not an issue as such in Bacon’s Rebellion, although Nathaniel Bacon did speak of the Dutch trade as an alternative to dependence on England. (Dialogue with John Good, around 2 September 1676, CO 5/1371, ff. 121vo–122. It appears at this location on reel 32 of the microfilm prepared by the Virginia Colonial Records Project. Thomas J. Wertenbaker [The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922) p. 17, n. 22] and Washburn [Governor and the Rebel, p. 235 n. 22] both cite CO 5/1371, pp. 233–40. I cannot account for this confusion of page or folio numbers. In the Coventry Papers, I found it at 77:347–8, as did Washburn. The text is printed in Fiske, 82–6. Ever since 1663, Governor Berkeley had complained of the unfairness of the Navigation Act under which “40,000 people [were] impoverished to enrich little more than 40 [English] merchants, who being the whole buyers of our tobacco, give us what they please for it.” (Sir William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), p. 6. Berkeley to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 1671, CO 1/26, f. 77, cited in Wertenbaker, pp. 95–6.)
15. So called after the name of Berkeley’s home plantation.
16. In 1645, the Virginia General Assembly declared that taxation exclusively by the poll, or head, had “become insupportable for the poorer sort to bear,” and enacted that all levies were to be paid on “visible estates,” in which the poll tax was to constitute only 30 percent of a composite list of such taxable properties (Hening, 1:305–6). Meeting as a committee of the whole, the General Assembly adopted a resolution favoring the enactment of legislation providing for taxation on landholdings rather than by the poll (Hening, 2:204). Though this sentiment was regularly expressed, taxation continued to be by the poll throughout the seventeenth century.
In 1656, on the no-taxation-without-representation principle, all freemen, propertyless as well as propertied, were given the right to vote (Hening, 1:403), but in 1670 the Assembly repealed the 1656 provision and restricted the suffrage to landholders or “householders” because former bond-laborers were judged not to have “interest enough to tye them to endeavour of the public good” (Hening, 2:280). In 1661 and 1662, in the name of reducing the costs of government, the Governor and Colony Council were authorized for a period of three years to impose annual levies without consulting the House of Burgesses (Hening, 2:24, 85).
17. These “frontier” plantation owners were the vanguard of the emerging “county family” faction. The flare-up was in the context of English aggression and Indian defensive response. The particular incident, according to English accounts, was the result of a barter between an English planter named Mathews and some Doeg Indians, residents of Maryland on the other side of the Potomac. The Indians fulfilled their end of the bargain on time but Mathews did not, and the Indians acted to settle the account by taking some of Mathews’s hogs, The Susquehannock Indians (who had moved from Pennsylvania to Maryland on Maryland’s invitation, or else because of pressure from the Iroquois Seneca) became involved when five of their chieftains were murdered while parleying with the English under a flag of truce, an act of treachery that was condemned formally even by the Maryland and Virginia officials. (Andrews, pp. 16–19, 47–8, 105–6. Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration,” pp. 27, 34.)
18. Bacon is sometimes called Nathaniel Bacon Junior to distinguish him from his older cousin of the same name who was also a member of the Colony Council. The birth year of Bacon the rebel, 1697, is inferred from the date of the death of his mother, Elizabeth. (New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 37:191 [1883].) Wertenbaker so interprets the record (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader [Princeton, 1940] p.215). June Carson apparently accepts 1647 also, since she says Bacon was twenty-seven when he arrived in Virginia in 1674. Carson; p. 24.
19. Bacon arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1674; he was appointed to the Colony Council on 3 March 1675; and he assumed the role of leader of the anti-Indian campaign in April 1676, and was for the first time declared a rebel by Governor Berkeley. (Jane Carson, Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676–1976 [Jamestown, 1976], “Chronology,” pp. 4, 6.)
20. Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Governor Berkeley and King Philip’s War,” New England Quarterly, 30:363–77 (1957); p. 377. But Washburn cites Berkeley’s assertion that the English who were driving the Indians out of their land had “this privilege by his Majesties Grant.” (Ibid., p. 375, Berkeley to Secretary Joseph Williamson, 1 April 1676.)
21. Hening, 1:323–4, 353–4.
22. Rappahannock County Records, 1663–68, pp. 57–8. When Berkeley himself came into possession of a thirteen-year-old Indian girl as an item of booty from the estate of a Bacon rebel, he gave her “to the Master of a ship who bath caryed her for England.” (CO 5/1371, f. 243.) Cf. Warren M. Billings, “Sir William Berkeley – Portrait By Fischer: A Critique,” WMO, 3d ser., 48:598–607 (1991), p. 602; and “David Hackett Fischer’s Rejoinder,” ibid., 608–11; p. 610.
23. “… all but five which were restored to the Queen by Ingram who was Bacon’s Generall.” (Andrews, p. 127.) Andrews. cites CO 5/1371, “A True Narrative of the Rise, Progress, and Cessation of the Late Rebellion in Virginia, Most Humbly and Impartially Reported by His Majestyes Commissioners appointed to Enquire into the Affaires of the Said Colony” (July 1677).
24. Andrews, pp. 123–7.
25. Sherwood, p. 168.
26. See also p. 43.
27. Rappahannock County Records, 1656–64, p. 13. The date of the agreement is missing, but by interpolation it appears to have been in 1656 or 1657. Roanoake (or Wampompeake) was a medium of exchange made by the Indians. It was made of polished shell beads strung or woven together, and was sometimes exchanged as the equivalent of English money at the rate of five shillings per six feet (Encyclopedia Britannica, “Wampum or Wampum-Peage”). See also Hening 1:397.
28. Assistant Colony Secretary Philip Ludwell to Secretary of State Williamson, 28 June 1676, VMHB 1:180 (1893).
29. Hening, 2:20, 114, 140. See also p. 60.
30. Bailyn, p. 103.
31. County Grievances, CO 5/1371, ff. 149–9. Sixteen counties and one parish submitted a total of 204 grievances. Only two counties called for the enslavement of Indian war captives. Surry County requested “that the Indians taken in the late Warr may be made Slaves” (f. 156), and James City County asked that “Indian slaves that were taken in the late Indian Warr … be disposed to a Publick use and Profitt” (f. 150vo).
The names of the authors of the “grievances” are not supplied. It is certain that none of them were bond-laborers.
32. Sherwood, p. 164.
33. Thomas Ludwell and Robert Smith, Virginia representatives in England, writing to the king, 18 June 1676, Coventry Papers, 77:128. Cited in Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), p. 221.
“Few of the indentured servants, coming over after 1660,” writes Wertenbaker, “succeeded in establishing themselves in the Virginia yeomanry.” “[P]robably less than fifty per cent [of the bond-laborers] could hope even in the most favorable times [i.e. prior to 1650] to become freeholders,” he concludes, and by the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, the probability was reduced to about one out of twenty. (Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia, pp. 80–83, 97–98.) Menard finds a parallel experience in Maryland where “Opportunities declined after 1660,” when, the indications are, only 22 to 29 percent of the freemen became landowners. (Russell R. Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” WMO, 30:374 [1973]; pp. 57, 62–3.)
34. County Grievances, CO 5/1371, ff. 150vo–151. James City County grievance number 10.
35. The grievances of three counties (Lancaster, Isle of Wight, and Nansemond) expressed a desire for a general anti-Indian war. Every list of grievances included at least one complaint about taxes, the amount, the manner of their imposition, and their misappropriation, and the exemptions granted to some favored few. James City, Warwick and Isle of Wight wanted land taxes be imposed instead of poll taxes. The request by Rappahannock County and Cittenborne Parish that landholders be forced to pay their quitrents was, in terms of logic, linked with the desire for a break-up of the large landholdings. (CO 5/1371, County Grievances, ff. 150vo–151, 151vo, 153, 156vo, 157, 161vo.)
36. Ibid. In replying to each separate proposal of this tenor, the commissioners acknowledged that the “unlimited liberty of taking up such vast tracts of Lande is an apparent cause of many mischiefs,” and that the proposed remedy was desirable. But, they said that such a radical step was impractical because of the certain opposition of the great landholders. They proposed a more modest revision, whereby the poll tax would be retained but for every 100 acres over a thousand the owner would pay an added levy equal to that for one tithable. (CO 5/1371, ff. 150vo–151, 160, 161vo.)
37. Sherwood, p. 164.
38. CO 1/36. Received in England in June 1676 by English Secretary of State Joseph Williamson. See note 49.
39. Hening, 2:85. See also note 15.
40. Morgan, pp. 244–5. Hening, 2:518–43, 569–83. The second of these two grants, covering all of Virginia south of the Rappahannock, was limited to thirty-one years. (Hening, 2:571–2.) In 1684, Thomas Lord Culpeper sold his rights back to the king. (Ibid., 2:521.)
41. Noted by Francis Moryson and Thomas Ludwell in their urgent appeals to the king for a revocation of the massive grants he had made to his friends. (Hening, 2:539.)
42. From 1661 until the declaration of war against the Indians in March 1676, the Governor had the licensing of traders dealing with the Indians, authority that Berkeley could exploit for his own enrichment. Then all those licenses were revoked, and each of the counties was authorized to designate five or fewer traders, with the provision that no powder, shot, or arms might be sold to Indians. Under a law passed in 1677, all restrictions on trade with Indians were removed. (Hening, 2:20, 124, 140, 336–8, 402.)
43. Washburn, Governor and the Rebel, p. 29, citing Coventry papers, Vol. 77, ff. 6, 8.
44. Sir John Berry, Francis Moryson and Herbert Jeffreys, A True Narrative of the Rise, Progress, and Cessation of the Late Rebellion in Virginia, Most Humbly and Impartially Reported by His Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Affaires of the Said Colony (October 1677), VMHB, 4:117–54 (1896); p. 121.
This suspicion was voiced in popular irony: “Bullets would never pierce Bever Skins.” (Thomas Mathew, The Beginning, Progress and Conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in the Years 1675 and 1676, in Andrews, p. 20.)
45. Lee to Secretary Coventry, 4 August 1676 (Coventry Papers, 77:161).
46. VMHB, 1:433 (1893).
47. I take the formation of new counties as a rough index of colony expansion. Counties were first established in Virginia in 1634. In the nineteen-year period 1651 to 1669, ten new counties were formed. It was twenty-two years before the next county, King and Queen, was formed in 1691. (Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew – Virginia Counties: An Abstract of Their Formation, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 19, [Richmond, 1957], pp. 83–5.)
48. Bailyn, p. 105.
49. CO 1/36, ff. 111–12. The only date recorded is that of the receipt of the letter, June 1676; the time of transatlantic transmittal was usually over a month.
50. Major Isaac Allerton, one of the coerced burgesses, to Secretary Coventry 4 August 1676 (Coventry Papers 77:160–61). Hening, 2:380.
51. “A Review, Breviary and Conclusion drawn from the narrative of the Rebellion in Virginia” by Royal Commissioners John Berry and Francis Moryson, 20 July 1677, in Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, 1676–1677 Pepysian Library ms. no. 2582. In Neville, pp. 318–24. Wiseman was the clerk to the Royal Commission sent to investigate the rebellion and to suggest remedies.
52. Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Effect of Bacon’s Rebellion on Government in England and Virginia,” United States National Museum Bulletin 225 (1962), pp. 137–40; p. 139.
53. Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, p. 107 (16 July 1677). In Neville, p. 332.
54. CO 5/1371, Proceedings and Reports of the Commissioners for Enquiring Into Virginian Affairs and Settling the Virginian Grievances, f. 180 (15 October 1677).
55. Moryson to Secretary of State William Jones, October 1676 (CO 5/1371, ff. 8vo–13vo). Francis Moryson was a royalist veteran of the English Civil War and the son of Richard Moryson and nephew of Fynes Moryson who were engaged in the Tyrone War under Mountjoy in Ireland. (See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, especially pp. 61–5 and Appendix F.)
56. Berry and Morsyon to Thomas Watkins, Secretary to the Duke of York, 10 February 1676/7. Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record. See Virginia Colonial Records Project, Survey Report 6618, for microfilm number. The letter is also printed in Coventry Papers, 77:389.
57. Hening, 2:515. In Virginia in 1676, at age sixteen or over, all men, African-American women, and Indian women bond-laborers were tithable. There seems to have been no intersection of the two sets – all possible combatants and tithables – in which bond-laborers were not the majority.
58. Eric Williams stressed the bond-laborers’ struggle as the key factor in the general history of the British West Indies. (Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery [Chapel Hill, 1944], pp. 201–2.) C. L. R. James does the same in Black Jacobins, his full-blown history of the Haitian Revolution. Morgan, in his main work on colonial Virginia, does not ignore the bond-laborers, but in effect disparages their aptitude for rebellion, especially so far as African-Americans are concerned. (American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 296–7, 309.) Breen alone has, in passing, noted the bond-laborers’ role in Bacon’s Rebellion. (Timothy H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History, Fall 1973, pp. 10–12, 17.) See the fuller discussion of this aspect in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 15–21.
59. See, for example, the pioneering works done for Johns Hopkins University on “white servitude” in continental Anglo-America, including: James C. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia (Baltimore, 1895); and Eugene Irving McCormac, White Servitude in Maryland, 1634–1824 (Baltimore, 1904).
60. See, for example, Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985) and David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981).
61. In the Royal Commissioners’ report, the Lancaster County Grievances nos. 11 and 12 call for laws for “the encouragement of servants.” However, no particulars are supplied and the Royal Commissioners simply say the petitioners should seek remedy by the Assembly. (CO 5/1371, f. 156vo.)
62. CO 1/3, ff. 35–62/8/6 (October 1676), “Proposals most humbly offered to his most sacred Majestie by Thomas Ludwell and Robert Smith for Reducing the Rebells in Virginia to their obedience.” Printed in VMHB 1:433–5.
63. CO 1/37, f. 37 (Ludwell to Williamson, 28 June 1676).
64. Northampton County Records, 1168–80, p. 11, in a proclamation concerning the apprehension of runaway bond-laborers dated 30 December 1669.
65. G. N. Clarke, The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1934), pp. 5–8, 82–3. David Ogg, England Under the Reign of Charles II, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1934), 1:74–5; 2:342, 346, 446, 449.
66. CO 1/34, f. 200 (Petition of Virginia’s representatives to the King, June [?] 1675). CO 1/36, ff. 111–12 (letter from the collector of customs, Giles Bland, in Virginia to Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson, received in England in June 1676).
Besides the loss of tobacco revenues, the government spent £80,000 in quelling the rebellion. (Governor Alexander Spotswood to the Board of Trade, 4 June 1715, referring to “Journals of this Colony in 1676” [CSP, Col, pp. 199–201].)
67. So one might conclude from a letter from Mr William Harbord to the Earl of Essex, dated 17 December 1676, in which reference is made to revenue losses due to both Bacon’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War in New England: “[I]ll news from Virginia and New England doth not only alarm us but extreamly abates the customs so that notwithstanding all the shifts Treasurer can make this Parliament or another must sitt.” (Clements Edwards Pike, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, 1675–1677, Camden Society Publications, 3rd ser. [London, 1913], p. 87. My attention was directed to this letter by Washburn’s citation of it in Governor and the Rebel, p. 214, n. 5.) This crisis, to which the rebellion in Virginia so materially contributed, marked the beginning of party politics that was to lead to the so-called Glorious Revolution and the end of the Stuart monarchy. For the tobacco fleet number, see Ogg, 1:75.
68. Coventry Papers, 77:332. The document, which was apparently addressed to Secretary of State Williamson, is not dated, but it was probably written in October 1676 during preparations for sending troops to Virginia.
69. Charles City Records (Order Book) 1677–79, 9 August 1677.
70. The Vestry Book of Christ Church Parish, 1663–1767 (in Middlesex County), edited by C. G. Chambelayne (Richmond, 1927), p. 25.
71. Westmoreland County Records, 1675–89, p. 68.
72. Petsworth Parish Vestry Book, 1677–1795 (Gloucester County), edited by C. G. Chamberlayne (Richmond, 1933), p. 17. Chamberlayne suggestively noted that Nathaniel Bacon’s death occurred at the home of Thomas Pate, the churchwarden of Petsworth Parish.
73. Such conjecture would not suit John Finley, apparently. He steadfastly refused to be freed from servitude by the rebels, preferring to remain their close prisoner for the space of twelve weeks. That’s what he said, in support of his owner’s action for trespass against a rebel officer. His faithfulness presumably exempted him from the added year of servitude imposed on bond-laborers absent from their owners during the rebellion. (Charles City Order Book, 1677–79, pp. 179–80 [13 September 1677].)
74. Charles City County Records, 1655–66, p. 5234 (18 October 1664).
75. See p. 135.
76. Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 135 (2 September 1678).
77. Middlesex County Order Book, 1694–1705, pp. 234–42 (1 August and 2 October 1699).
78. See p. 154.
79. See p. 149.
80. “The Names and short Characters of those that have bin executed for Rebellion” submitted by Berkeley to the Royal Commissioners, in Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record. (See Neville, pp. 274–75.)
81. Neill identifies Wilson as a “servant,” and says the death sentence was passed on him on 11 January. (Richard Duffield Neill, Virginia Carolorum: The Colony under the Rule of Charles the First and Second, AD 1625–1685 [Albany, NY, 1886] pp. 373, 377.) York County Records, 1677–84, f. 88 (24 April 1679). Accomack County Records 1678–82, p. 158 (17 March 1679/80).
82. Fletcher was in court on four occasions between 17 February and 9 July 1677, and it appears that the beatings and kicking she suffered from her owner(s) followed her return from several months as a rebel. Even though she was sentenced on 4 July to two added years for bearing a child, and another five months for the time she was with the rebels, she embarked on a campaign of “wearying” her owner until he should sell her to someone else. As part of this wearying process, she resisted a whipping in the following manner, “when (her owner) began to strike her shee layd hold of him and flung him downe.” (Surry County Records, 1671–84, ff. 121, 131; ibid., 1671–91, 133, 152.)
83. Manscript of a letter from Andrew Marvell, poet and member of Parliament, to his friend Henry Thompson, 14 November 1676. I am grateful to the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, for supplying me with a photocopy of the letter.
84. New York Public Library, George Chalmers Collection, I, folio 49. The Bacon forces burned Jamestown on 19 September 1676. The letter was dated 19 October.
Why would Bacon want to free bond-laborers? Of 25 condemned rebels whose estates were inventoried, 14 were listed as owners of bond-laborers. The largest individual holding was that of Bacon’s own 11 bond-laborers – 1 Irishman, 2 African-American men, 1 African-American woman and her one-year-old “mulatto” daughter, and 5 Indians, ranging in age from four to sixteen years of age. (CO 5/1371, f. 219vo-246ro; Bacon’s list, 227vo-230vo.) Neither Bacon nor anyone else has left a record concerning his motives in this respect. One obvious reason is that he was fighting for his life – it was indeed victory, or death by drawing and quartering – that he needed the bond-laborers on his side, and that they would not go along without a promise of freedom.
85. Thomas Holden(?) to Secretary Joseph Williamson, 1 February 1677, at the end of a three-month return voyage from Virginia. (CSP, Dom., 18:530.)
86. Hening 2:395 (February 1677).
87. Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, entry for 11 March 1676/7. For an abstract of this document see Neville, p. 328; or Virginia Colonial Records Project Survey Report 6618 (old designation C-7) at Virginia State Archives.
By royal proclamation dated 26 October 1676 regarding the bond-laborers of rebel owners who failed to accept the king’s offer of pardon and surrender by the middle of November, those bond-laborers, if they enlisted in Berkeley’s forces, were to be freed from “the Said offenders.” (Coventry Papers, 77:263.) Berkeley’s offer was limited and did not promise liberty, but only liberty from Baconite owners.
88. Coventry Papers, 77:301–2. Unless otherwise explicitly noted my section on Grantham’s encounters with the rebels is based on this document.
89. CSP, Dom, 19:115.
90. “This History of Bacon’s and Ingram’s Rebellion,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 9 (1867), pp. 299–342. Reprinted in Andrews, pp. 47–104; pp. 93.4.
91. Berkeley wrote a letter to Walklett on 1 January thanking him for his “letters … so full and discreet and your Actings so judicious,” urging Walkett to go further and try to capture another rebel leader especially hated by Berkeley. He closed by saying that “Mr Ingram and Capt. Langston are with mee and wee shall dine togther within this quarter of an hour, where wee will drinke your health and happy success.” (Coventry Papers, 78:177.) Walklett and Langston had been commanders of horse troops under Bacon. (Andrews, pp. 34–5, 87.) Herbert Jeffreys, one of the Royal Commission to Virginia and successor to Berkeley as Governor there, declared that the rebels would not have been “so easily reduced had not the said Walklett and one Ingram then general, surrendred their armes to Sir William Berkeley and disbanded their forces whereby the country came to a speedy settlement.” (Coventry Papers, 78:175.)
92. Their bitterness was no doubt particularly caused by loss of West Point as a strategic location almost impregnable to heavily armed merchantmen or English naval attack by virtue of “the difficulty of the Channell and the Shoaliness of the water [that would] prevent any Great Shipps from pursuing … and where alsoe the Narrowness of the River and Commodiousness of the place Contribute soe much to our Advantage that we may with the Greatest facility given an effectuall Repulse to all the force that can their [there] Attack us.” Such was the assessment submitted by experts whose opinions were sought by the Virginia Governor and Colony Council regarding defense against a possible French invasion in 1706. I have assumed that at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion thirty years earlier both the rebels and Grantham similarly appreciated its strategic advantage. (See “Colonial Papers,” Virginia State Archives, Richmond, folder 17, item 29.) “Bacon, with the instinct of the true strategist, had already selected West Point … as his headquarters and his main point of concentration.” (Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution, p. 184.)
93. Grantham said that most of these four hundred rebels accepted his terms, “except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes.” Grantham tricked these one hundred men on board a sloop with the promise of taking them to a rebel fort a few miles down the York River. Instead, towing them behind his own sloop, he brought them under the guns of another ship and thus forced their surrender, although “they yielded with a great deal of discontent, saying had they known my resolution, they would have destroyed me.”
94. CO 1/38, f. 31. Andrews gives the number as “more than 1,100 officers and men.” (Andrews, p. 102.)
95. CO 5/1371, ff. 119vo–a23. Report submitted to Governor Berkeley, ca. 30 January 1676/7, by John Good, a Henrico plantation owner on or about 2 September 1676. See note 14.
96. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, sentenced for treason and beheaded 12 May 1641.
97. Aside from the garrison at West Point, and two others near West Point (the Brick House at King’s Creek, under William Drummond and Richard Lawrence, chief co-leaders of the Bacon movement, and the four hundred at the chief garrison at Colonel West’s house, scene of Grantham’s most historic encounter, three miles north from West Point), they were located at: Green Spring (now Williamsburg), on the north side of the James River; Arthur Allen’s expropriated house (since known as Bacon’s Castle), further down and on the south shore of the James, about twenty-five miles northeast of the scene of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831; the expropriated house of Bacon’s cousin, a Berkeley adherent, at King’s Creek on York River; and further down at the place later made famous as Yorktown, scene of Cornwallis’s surrender; and two other locations expropriated from prominent Berkeleyites, one in Gloucester County and another in Westmoreland. (Locations as given in Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution, pp. 184–6). The total number in all those places is not known; it appears that the one thousand in and around West Point comprised the majority of the rebel troops.
98. Andrews, p. 140. The Royal Commissioners’ narrative was dated 20 July 1677. (Neville, p. 220). The cessation of fighting on one river is noted laconically in the 29 January entry in the journal of the Young Prince: “Blowing, ‘thick weather.’ Wind at SW. The cundry being reduced so went about our owne businesse as per the Governor[’s] Proclamation.” (CO 1/37.)
99. Neill, pp. 373, 374. CO 5/1371, ff. 219vo–246ro. CO 1/39, ff. 64–5. Two other condemned rebels cheated the gallows by dying in prison before they could be executed.
100. Francis Moryson was the son of Sir Richard Moryson and the nephew of the chronicler Fynes Moryson. The uncle and the father are mentioned in Volume One in connection with the Mountjoy conquest of Ireland. (See The Invention of the White Race Volume One, pp. 62–5 and Appendix F.) However, the view taken there differs from that of Charles M. Andrews, who unreflectingly credits Sir Richard with “a long and honorable career in Ireland.” (Andrews, p. 102.)
101. Coventry Papers, 77:263. This proclamation is also to be found at Hening, 2:423–4, where the date is given as 10 October. But the defeated rebels were given no chance to swear such an oath.
102. Hening, 2:280 (1670), 356 (1676), 380 (February 1676/7). The “Bacon Assembly’s extension of suffrage to freemen was strongly condemned by the Royal Commissioners in response to a Grievance of Rappahannock County and by the Colony officials in Maryland” (5/1371, f. 152vo; “Remonstrance by the Governor and Council of Maryland,” Maryland Archives, 15:137–8).
103. For a defense of Berkeley in his quarrels with the Royal Commissioners, see Washburn, Governor and the Rebel, Chapter 8.
Excepting Washburn, historians have customarily characterized Berkeley’s demeanor as simple vindictive fury linked with the spoils-to-the-victors program. Some of them add references to the old Governor’s notorious irascibility, and to a possible sensibility about the great age disparity between Berkeley and Lady Frances, his wife. Paradoxical though it may seem, perhaps his attitude is better understood as foreshadowing the ultimately ascendant colony-centered, rather than “empire-centered,” position on which the Virginia ruling elite eventually united.
104. Charles II is reported to have reacted to news of Berkeley’s vendetta by noting that “that old fool has hanged more men in that naked country than I did for the Murther of my father.” (Andrews, p. 40.) The same point was made by Royal Commissioners Berry and Moryson. Letter to Mr Watkins, 10 February 1676/7, abstracted in Neville, p. 246.
The reliability of the attribution is not established, but the accuracy of the observation is. Charles II hanged a total of thirteen, not counting Cromwell and Ireton, whose dead bodies were exhumed for hanging. (“Regicide,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, [Chicago, 1997], 26:1035.
105. Samuel Wiseman’s Record Book, abstracted in Neville, pp. 245–6.
106. CSP, Col., 11:134 (31 October 1681).
107. CO 5/1356, f. 71, Spenser to Sir Leolin Jenkins, 8 May 1682.
108. Blathwayt Papers, ca. 1675–1715, 41 vols. on microfilm at Colonial Williamsburg; vol. 15, Spencer to Blathwayt, 29 May 1682. William Blathwayt was Secretary to the Lords of Trade and Plantations. I am indebted to the New York Historical Society Manuscripts Library for the use of its microfilm set of the Blathwayt Papers.
109. VMHB, 2:16, 136–7, 141, 142 cited in Morton 1:327.
110. Culpeper to Blathwayt, 20 March 1682/3 (Blathwayt Papers, Vol. 17).
111. Spencer to Blathwayt, 1 March 1688/9 (Blathwayt Papers, Vol. 15).
112. Dudley Digges to Blathwayt, 23 October 1710 Blathwayt Papers, Vol. 18.
113. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), p. 79.
114. CSP Col., 11:130 (Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 25 October 1681).
115. 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.; 9:425.
116. “It was evident,” says Professor Richard L. Morton, “that diversification of industry as a remedy for overproduction of tobacco would take years … But a remedy was needed at once” (Morton, p. 300). But I would respectfully suggest that, of all the Anglo-American colonies, none had had more time than Virginia; time was not the problem, but rather the plantation system based on bond-labor.
117. In 1708, Virginia Colony Secretary Edmund Jennings said that of a total of 30,000 tithables, there were slightly more than 12,000 bond-laborers, although the number of European-American bond-laborers was “inconsiderable” because “so few have been imported since the beginning of the war” (CSP Col., 24:156). But the Virginia and Maryland laws and official records show that in subsequent years their presence was anything but “inconsiderable.”
118. See p.119.
119. Hening, 2:515.
120. Kulikoff (p. 39.)
121. Ibid., p. 40.
122. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 433.
123. Kulikoff, p. 42, Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland Appendix II.
124. In Virginia in 1699 there were 21,888 tithables in a total population of 57,339, a ratio of 1:2.62, or 38 percent (CSP, Col., 19:635–6; Cf. Morgan p.414). In Maryland in 1712 the total population was 46,073. Of that number, European-American men werre 11,025, and the number of “Negroes” was 8,830, making a total of 19,855, On that basis, the ratio of tithables to total population in Maryland would be 1:2.42, or 43.1 percent. An uncertain number of European-American women in Maryland worked in the crop and were therefore tithable. (See CO 5/717 [15 July 1712] and 5/716, Governor Seymour to Board of Trade, 21 August 1706). These total population figures from the records correspond closely with the figures for 1700 and 1710 for Virginia and Maryland respectively as presented in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Period to 1970, series Z 13, 14.
125. CSP, Col., 16:390–91 (20 August 1698).
126. CSP, Col., 17:liv, 261.
127. CSP, Col., 25:83 (24 April 1710).
128. CSP, Col., 27:70 (15 October 1715).
129. CSP, Col., 36:414–15 (29 June 1729).
130. Louis B. Wright, ed., The History and Present State of Virginia, (Chapel Hill, 1947), p. 92. This edited work is a revised edition of the 1705 work, published in 1722.
131. “Culpeper Report on Virginia in 1683,” VMHB 3:222–38; p.222. A hogshead at this time probably contained 475 to 500 pounds of tobacco. Cutting as many plants in an hour “as well would have imployed twenty men a Summers tendance to have perfected,” in Gloucester alone these plant-cutting rioters destroyed 200 plantations in the first week of their campaign. (CO 5/1356, p. 70, Colony Secretary Spencer to Secretary Leoline Jenkins, 8 May 1682.)
132. Perhaps Governor Culpeper was exaggerating somewhat in saying, “scarce one of them was worth a Farthing” (“Report on Virginia in 1683,” VMHB, 3:231).
133. Morgan, p. 286, citing CO 1/48, ff. 261, 263, 275, and CO 1/49, f. 56.
134. Morgan, pp. 291–2.
135. Ibid., pp.308–9. See also my comment on Morgan’s book in the Introduction to Volume One of the present work.
136. VMHB, 3:222–38; p. 230.
137. See the discussion of Sir Francis Bacon’s essay on the history of the reign of Henry VII in Vol. I, Chapter 2, pp. 17–18.
138. The Colony Council had roughly estimated that one-third of free men in 1673 were either unable to make a living or were else mired in debt (see pp. 168–9).
139. Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, to Secretary of State Henry Coventry, 7 October 1676 (Coventry Papers, 77:233–4).
140. Admiralty Papers, 51/134, Log of HMS Bristol, entry for 15 February 1676/7.
141. CO 389/6, p. 200.
142. CO 5/1355. Culpeper’s request, 13 December 1677; Lords of Trade and Plantations reply, August 1678.
143. CO 5/1355, p. 408, Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 25 October 1681.
144. CO 5/1356, ff. 2–3, 22 November 1681.
145. CO 5/1356, 8 May 1682.
146. CSP, Col, 11:498.
147. CO 5/1356, pp. 183–4.
148. CO 5/1356, pp. 247–8.
149. Archives Maryland, 5:152–4. Proceedings of the Council 1671–1681. Governor Notley to [name not given in the record], 22 January 1676/77.
150. CO 1/40, f. 186, Notley to Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore, Proprietary of the Province of Maryland, 22 May 1677. It appears from the copy of this document made by the Virginia Colonial Records Project that this folio once was numbered “88,” by which number Wertenbaker refers to it. (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts [Princeton, 1914], p. 137, n. 58.) I thank Cecily J. Peeples for last-minute checking of the records relating to this and half a dozen other facts at the Virginia State Archives.
12 The Abortion of the “White Race” Social Control System in The Anglo-Caribbean
1. Speaking of those forms of the bourgeoisie whom he had studied most closely, Professor Dunn renders this documented judgement: “The sugar planters were always businessmen first and foremost, and from a business standpoint it was more efficient to import new slaves of prime working age from Africa than to breed up a creole generation of Negroes in the Caribbean.… Some of the slave masters found it hard to resist the temptation to get rid of the young and old by systematic neglect and underfeeding.” (Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1712 [Chapel Hill, 1972; W. W. Norton reprint, 1973] p. 321.
2. Strictly speaking, it is only after the formation of Great Britain by the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1707 that the Anglo-Caribbean islands are referred to as the British West Indies. But aside from the effect of the opening of trade between Scotland and the English islands, this is a distinction that may generally be ignored in the present discussion.
The British West Indies comprised a dozen island colonies, annexed over a period of 178 years: from Barbados (1625) to St Lucia (1803); from the Bahamas (1718[?], 1729[?]; see Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas [London, 1962], p. 120) in the northwest to Trinidad (1797) in the southeast; from formerly Spanish Jamaica captured by the English (1655) with its 4,470 square miles, to Nevis (1628), with 50 square miles. Some were captured from Britain one or more times by the French: for example, Nevis, St Kitts (St Christopher), Antigua, Montserrat, Grenada, and Dominica. Though I generalize regarding certain common characteristics of these colonies, I am aware that each has its own distinctive history and traditions. At the same time I believe that the Anglo-Caribbean colonies were characterized by a common history of a ruling-class social control policy that led to the establishment of a tripartite social structure that included persons of some degree of African ancestry in the intermediate buffer social control stratum, a social structure that differed fundamentally from that established in continental Anglo-America at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
3. Almost simultaneously, English colonies were begun on St Kitts (St Christopher), St Eustatius, Tobago, Antigua, and Montserrat. In 1655 the English began settling in Jamaica, which they had captured from Spain. All were essentially monocultural enterprises; the principal product was sugar; minor products were tobacco, cotton, aloes and indigo. The main labor force was made up of chattel bond-laborers.
4. Coventry Papers, 85:11 cited in Dunn, p. 74. See the testimony of Captain Henry Powell regarding his efforts to employ Indians in his Barbados plantation. “Papers relating to the early History of Barbados,” Timehri, new ser., 5:53–5 (1891) (cited in Dunn, p. 227). The Laws of Jamaica, Comprehending all the Acts in Force Passed between the Thirty Second Year of the Reign of Charles the Second and the Thirty-third Year of the Reign of King George the Third … Published under the Direction of Commissioners appointed for that Purpose, 2 vols. (St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1792), pp. 129–30. 8 Geo. I, c. 1 (1721), “An Act to encourage the settling the north-east part of this island,” refers to “every free mulatto, Indian or negro.”
5. When Dunn says p. 74 that “Indians could not be turned into acceptable agricultural laborers” I take him to mean bond-laborers. Dunn himself cites the record of Guiana Indians who in 1627 voluntarily came to Barbados with Captain Henry Powell to cultivate land as “free people” there and to help to promote trade with the mainland. (Ibid., p. 227.) Twenty years later, Powell returned to Barbados and found that those Indians and their families had been involuntarily integrated into the chattel bond-labor system. He petitioned the Barbados Assembly “to set these poor people free that have been kept thus long in bondage.” (Timehri [1891], 5:53–5.)
6. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Vol. xiv, part 2, Portland Manuscripts, III, p. 268; and CO 1/22, no. 55. (cited in Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados 1625–1685, [Oxford, 1926; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1969] pp. 152, 192).
7. Dunn, p. 74.
8. “A Briefe Relation of the Voyage Unto Maryland,” in the Calvert Papers, Number Three (Baltimore, 1899) p. 32. This account, of which there are two slightly differing versions, one in Latin, the other in English, is credited to Father Andrew White. A translation of the Latin version is found in Peter Force, Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in North America From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776 (Washington, 1836, 1947 reprint), vol. 4, no. XII (referred to throughout as Force Tracts). The Force Tracts version uses the word “slaves” instead of “servants.”
9. The Dutch invaded Brazil in 1624, and by 1637 had seized half of the Portuguese administrative areas of settlement (capteaneos) there. Dutch-held Pernambuco alone accounted for one-third of Brazil’s plantation and sugar mill enterprises, and imported more than half the African bond-laborers brought to Brazil. A rebellion of Portuguese, in which free Afro-Brazilians played a major part, succeeded in finally ousting the Dutch in 1654. Already for the better part of a decade before that final evacuation, Dutch plantation owners had been liquidating their Brazilian operations and leaving the country. A significant number of them settled in Barbados with their capital and technology, and with access to credit and markets in Holland. (Johannes M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815, [Cambridge, 1990] pp. 14, 16, 17, 19–20. R. K. Kent, “Palmares, An African State in Brazil,” in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, pp. 170, 171, 174. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Cambridge, 1967], [Volume IV of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe], p. 334. Harlow, p. 84.)
10. Harlow, p. 325.
11. Ibid., p. 305.
12. Barbados governor Daniel Searle to John Thurloe, Secretary of the Council of State, 18 September 1655 (A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe …, 7 vols. [London, 1742], 4:39–40.)
13. CSP, Col., 12:155 (Minutes of the Barbados Colony Council, 16 February 1686).
14. CSP, Col., 13:733–4 (Barbados Governor Kendall to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 3 November 1692). The investigation found that “the ringleaders” were mainly “overseers, artisans and domestic servants,” who could exploit their relatively greater freedom of movement for organizing the revolt.
15. Dunn, p. 256.
16. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society (London, 1967), pp. 266, 271–3.
17. R. C. Dallas, History of the Maroons, 2 vols. (London, 1803), pp. 23–4.
18. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies 3 vols. (West Indies, 4th edition, 3 vols. London 1807) 1:522–35, and 537–45 reprinted in Price, ed., pp. 230–32.
19. Dallas (History of the Maroons p. 60) says “fifteen hundred” acres, less than two and a half square miles, but such an area would seem absurdly small to provide farming land sufficient for even the one section of the maroons signing this particular treaty. I have substituted the figure given by Patterson: 15,000 acres. (Patterson, pp. 279–71, citing the Jamaica Journal of the House of Assembly, 3:458.)
20. Dallas, pp. 58–65.
21. The basic economic, demographic and sociological facts on which the following five points of differentiation rely are long established and are well known to every student of the history of the West Indies. The original colonial-period sources are familiar to all, and the vast bibliography of secondary works, although they differ in interpretation and emphasis, presents a general consensus regarding those facts.
22. I have used Morgan’s estimate of the total population, but excluded Henrico County (partially above the Fall Line) and the Eastern Shore counties of Northampton and Accomack. (See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), Table 3, pp. 412–13.) The Tidewater area is given in standard encyclopedias.
23. The 11,000 squares miles of the Tidewater area is equal to 7,040,000 acres. The quitrent rolls for Virginia’s twenty counties in 1704 show an area of some 2,780,000 acres. (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia [New York 1922], Appendix, “Rent Rolls of Virginia 1704–1705.”)
24. See pp. 164, 170. See also Virginia laws (Hening, 2:53–69 (1691), and 404–19 (1705), aimed at centralizing customs collections in specific port locations because otherwise royal “customes and revenues [were] impossible to be secured” (2:53). See also John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion (Port Washington, NY, 1974), pp. 6, 113.
25. For seventeenth-century Barbados population figures, see Harlow, p. 338; and Sheppard, p. 33. I have used Harlow’s figure here. I have made no attempt to investigate the decline of the total Barbados population suggested by the estimate of only 62,324 in 1748 contained in Jerome S. Handler and Arnold A. Sio, “Barbados,” in David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore, 1972), p. 338.
26. Hilary Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle Against Slavery, 1627–1838 (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1984), p. 62.
27. The 1698 population of Jamaica is given as 47,400 in Cohen and Greene, eds., p. 338.
28. Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Country (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955), p. 69. “Unlike Barbados and the Leewards, where all the land suitable for sugar cane was soon taken up and overproduction exhausted the soil, Jamaica was never quite fully exploited before sugar and slavery declined.” (Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery [Garden City, New York, 1974] p. 46.)
29. Dallas, p. 1xix. Dallas’s proportion of unused land is consistent with Curtin’s, but his absolute number of acres exceeds the area of Jamaica by some 40 percent.
30. Patterson, p. 270 (citing CO 137/18).
31. Dunn, pp. 170–71, 197, 266–7. Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715, pp. 157–58.
32. Dunn, pp. 171 (Table 18), 197, 266 (Table 24), 267 (Table 25).
33. According to Beckles, it was less than 3 percent in Barbados. Wertenbaker puts the Virginia proportion at between 5 and 6 percent. (Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, p. 158; Wertenbaker, p. 98.)
34. Sheppard, p. 33.
35. “Lacking means of sustenance, 30,000 Europeans streamed out of Barbados alone during the latter half of the seventeenth century … but the majority remained in the Caribbean relocating over and over again in Jamaica, Guiana, the Windwards, and Trinidad.” (David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies [London, 1972], pp. 29–30.)
In February 1679, however, only a minority appeared to have chosen other West Indies islands. Of 593 persons granted leave to depart Barbados in 1679, 233 were going to North America, 205 to England, 154 to other Caribbean islands, and 1 to Holland. It appears that somewhat over half of these were former bond-laborers. (Dunn, pp. 110–11.)
36. Dunn, p. 312.
37. Craton, p. 44.
38. Harlow, 174–5.
39. The novelty of this form of social identity is to be noted in the comments of George Fox and Morgan Godwyn. During a visit to Barbados in 1671, Fox, founder of the Quaker religion, addressed some members of a Barbados audience as “you that are called white.” (George Fox, Gospel of Family-Order … [London, 1675], p. 38.) About the same time, Godwyn found it necessary to explain to his readers that in Barbados “white” was “the general name for Europeans.” (The Negro’s and Indians Advocate … [London, 1680], p. 83.) Even a century later a historian, writing in Jamaica for readers in Britain, felt it necessary to supply a parenthetical clarification: “white people (as they are called here).” (Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of the Island, with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, 3 vols. [London, 1774], 2:289.)
40. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 80.
41. In ordering the forced exile of 1,500 to 2,000 Irish boys to Jamaica to serve as bond-laborers, Henry Cromwell, Oliver’s son and deputy in Ireland, wrote to Secretary Johne Thurloe, “who knows, but that it may be a measure to make them Englishmen, I meane rather, Christians.” (H. Cromwell to John Thurloe, Secretary of the Council of State, 11 and 18 September 1655. Papers of John Thurloe 4:23–4, 40.)
The free persons of color in Barbados made known their determination that “Christian” should not be regarded as a mere euphemism for “white.” When the “slave consolidation act” of 1826 was passed making it a crime for a slave to assault “any white person,” the free persons of color protested that it deprived them of a protection that they had had as Christians since 1688. (Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados [Baltimore, 1974], p. 98.)
42. English Attorney-General Edward Northey, in the normal course of his duty of reviewing laws passed in the colonies, objected to a Nevis Assembly enactment providing for punishment by death or dismemberment for slaves who attempted to escape their bondage. In particular he argued that “white slaves” who had been kidnapped and sent to bondage in the West Indies, should not be so treated merely for trying to regain the freedom of which they had been unjustly deprived. Joseph Jory, representative of Nevis in London, clarified matters by saying that “white servants are not to be taken as slaves.” Whereupon Northey withdrew his objection (though he did say that the application of such penalties against Africans should be approved for only a limited time, and then be subject to review as to their effects.) (CSP, Col., 23:126 [1 May 1706].)
43. A reminder given by the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations in 1709. (CSP Col., 24:454.)
44. CSP, Col., 17:423.
45. Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Nevis from 1664, to 1739, inclusive ([London?], 1740) pp. 37–9. Alan Burns (History of the British West Indies [London, 1954], p. 217) says that the general rule was one European man to every ten Africans.
46. CSP, Col., 13:348 (Lords of Trade and Plantations to Barbaros governor Kendall, 20 November 1690). This provision apparently was designed to prevent a repetition of the exodus of pardoned rebels from Jamaica that had been followed by a rebellion of five hundred African bond-laborers there on 29 July 1690. (CSP Col., 13:315–17 [31 August 1690].)
47. Harlow says that after 1660 in Barbados the former five-to-seven years of servitude required of English bond-laborers was reduced to three or four years. The motive was the plantation owners’ fear of “the slave menace.” (Harlow, p. 301.) Representatives of the Barbados plantation bourgeoisie asked the king to allow one or two thousand English bond-laborers, “though but for 2 yeares service for the charge of their passage.” (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Analecta Hibernia, No. 4 [October 1932], “Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies,” Aubrey Gwynne SJ, collector, p. 266 [16 September 1667]. Hereafter these materials will be referred to as “Gwynne, Analecta Hibernia, No. 4.”)
48. Dunn, p. 242, citing CO 30/2/114–25 (Barbados MSS Laws, 1645–82).
49. CSP, Col., 14:446–7.
50. Journal of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 2:63–4 (17 August 1709). CSP, Col., 24:450–52 (24 August 1709).
51. CSP, Col., 28:154–5.
52. Sheppard, p. 38. Philip Rowell of Christ Church Parish in Barbados was an exception; sometime around 1680 he gave five of his time-expired bond-laborers six acres of land and two lifetime bond-laborers each in order that they might avoid the common fate of beggary or dependency on parish charity. (Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, p. 159.)
53. Sheppard, pp. 38–9, 44, 63. This unique slim volume is indispensable for the study of the subject of “race” in Anglo-America. In Barbados, where the “poor whites” were the majority of the European population, the story of the “military tenants” epitomized the marginalization of that entire class in the system of social control. If our American sociologists were to examine this phenomenon, they might find a new application for their term “underclass.” An order of the Jamaica Colony Council Assembly provided that a European bond-laborer disabled in military service “shall have an able negro delivered to him forever, for his maintenance.” (CSP, Col., 7:474 21 March 1673.)
54. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, points 1 and 2 of “operative principles of social control in a stable civil society constituted on the basis of racial oppression,” pp. 134–5.
55. Europeans made up a higher proportion of the population in Barbados than in any other British West Indies colony. For the specific reference to the majority being “poor whites” in 1680 and a century and a half later, see Sheppard, pp. 31, 63, 68. Follow the declining social career of the “poor white” majority through Sheppard’s Chapter 4, “From Indentured Servants to Poor Whites (1704–1839)”; Chapter 5, “Disbandment of the Military Tenants (1839)”; and Chapter 6, “The Problems of Degeneration.” Beckles’s study of Barbados parishes found that “From the mid-1680s on [through 1715, the terminal year of his study] the majority of freemen were categorized by vestries as ‘very poore’.” (Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, p. 159.)
Concluding her study of the “Redlegs” of Barbados, Professor Sheppard supplies a comment that may yet prove to have a wider application: “As soon also as poor whites were forced, through the removal of any special status, to mix on equal terms with their black peers, then much of their former arrogance began, albeit slowly, to disappear.” (Sheppard, p. 120.)
56. The Nevis Assembly showed sensitivity to this challenge. In 1675 it made it a crime for “servants and slaves to company or drink together.” (CSP, Col., 9:236. Also cited by C. S. Higham, The Development of the Leeward Islands Under the Restoration, 1660–1688: A Study of the Foundations of the Old Colonial System [Cambridge, 1921], pp. 174–5.) Another Nevis law, passed in 1700, made it a crime for “any white Person to converse or keep Company with” “Negroes or other slaves.” (Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Nevis from 1664 to 1739, inclusive [London, 1740], p. 28.) A marginal note here says “Obsolete, but re-enacted in 1717.”
57. The Barbados Colony Council felt this Irish “whiteness gap” so keenly that in 1690, while urgently asking for “white servants,” they excluded “Irish rebels …; for we want not labourers of that Colour to work for us; but men in whom we may confide, to strengthen us.” (CSP, Col., Vol. 13, Item 1108, cited in Sheppard, p. 35.) Perhaps they meant green.
58. The War of Devolution, 1667–68; the War of the League of Augsburg (known in England as King Billy’s War), 1689–1697; the War of the Spanish Succession (known in England as Queen Anne’s War), 1701–1713; and the War of the Austrian succession, 1740–48, for which England’s War of Jenkin’s Ear, against Spain, was a prelude.
59. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One.
60. Gwynne, Analecta Hibernia, No. 4, p. 233.
61. Ibid., pp. 236–7.
62. Ibid., pp. 243, 245. According to an English eyewitness, during one engagement on St Kitts, the Irish in the rear of the English forces fired into the ranks of the English ahead of them. (Ibid., p. 244.) Compare this with Mountjoy’s policy of putting the Irish allies in the front ranks. (The Invention of the White Race, 1:64.)
63. Gwynne, Analecta Hibernia, pp. 265–6.
64. Ibid., p. 267.
65. Ibid., pp. 278–9.
66. CSP, Col., 9:236 (26 May 1675). See note 56.
67. CSP, Col., 13:733 (Governor Kendal to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 3 November 1692).
68. Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Nevis from 1664, to 1739 inclusive, pp. 35–9.
69. Gwynne, Analecta Hibernia, No. 4, p. 282.
70. See ibid., pp. 282–5.
71. See Fortescue’s Preface to CSP, Col., Sol. 16 (27 October 1697 31 December 1698), p. viii.
72. Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, Until the Beginning of his Majesties happie Reign (London, 1612), pp. 6–7. Cited in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 65.
73. Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Redcoats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven, 1979), p. 124, citing Great Britain Public Record Office, WO [War Office] 1/95, Brigadier General Thomas Hislop, “Remarks” enclosed to the Duke of York, 22 July 1804.
74. Dunn, p. 181.
75. Ibid., p. 4.
76. Patterson, p. 49.
77. Ibid., p. 282, citing CO 137/19, Governor Hunter to the Board of Trade.
78. Ibid., citing CO 137/20, ff. 165, 184, 192–3.
79. Dallas pp. 9–10.
80. Long, 1:147–8.
81. Dallas, 1:1xvii.
82. Ibid., 1:19–20. Buckley, p. 9 (citing C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, [New York, 1963] pp. 128–9, 139–142; and Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 [Knoxville, Tennessee, 1973], pp. 65–72, 82–3).
83. Buckley, p. 8.
84. CSP, Col., 16:vii–viii.
85. Sheppard, p. 42.
86. John Luffman, A Brief Account of Antiqua, together with the Customs and Manners of its Inhabitants, as well White as Black (London, 1789), pp. 15, 87, 172. This work is a series of letters addressed by Luffman in Antigua to a correspondent in London during the period 1786–88.
87. The 1700 total is for Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and North Carolina; the 1780 total includes Georgia, which was founded as a colony in 1732. Taking the continental plantation colonies/states as a whole, from 1700 to 1860 European-Americans were never less than 60 percent of the total population. (Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census [Washington, DC, 1975], p. 1168, Series Z 1–19. Cohen and Greene, eds., p. 339, Table A-9 “United States, Upper and Lower South, 1790–1860.”)
88. Dunn, p. 312 (Table 26). In Barbados by 1768 they were fewer than one out of six. (Sheppard, p. 43.)
89. CSP, Col., 7:141 (Barbados planters in London, 14 December 1670). p. 71.
90. Dunn, pp. 198, 319. On Barbados sugar estates already in 1667, an English observer noted that skilled Negro bond-laborers were being substituted for European tradesmen, while European workers were toiling at field work. (Harlow, History of Barbados, 1625–1685, p. 309, citing CO 1/21, No. 170.)
91. Douglas Hall, “Jamaica,” in Cohen and Greene, eds., pp. 202–3. Hilary Beckles devotes an entire absorbing chapter to Afro-Barbadian women bond-laborers in retail trade, “Marketeers: The Right to Trade.” Again and again laws were enacted designed to deny these women trading rights, but the laws proved ineffective. (Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados [New Brunswick, 1989] Recurring references to the ineffectiveness of the prohibitory laws are found at pp. 77, 79, 84, 86–7.) For the same activity by black women bond-laborers in Antigua, see Luffman pp. 138–41, Letter XXII, 28 March 1788.
92. Cohen and Greene, p. 339.
93. Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Connecticut, 1981). p. 7.
94. Handler and Sio, pp. 218–19.
95. Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965), p. 312.
96. Handler and Sio, pp. 240–41. In the West Indies, the terms “freedman” or “freedwoman” strictly speaking implied that the person had once been a bond-laborer. “Free black,” or Negro, was reserved for persons of presumed undiluted African descent. “Free colored,” or sometimes “mulatto,” was used to describe a person of mixed African and European ancestry. Such terminological differences implied important social distinctions in the West Indies. In continental Anglo-America they were not important. Except where the context requires a distinction, or where a quotation must be preserved intact, I shall feel free to use the term “freeman” or “freedwoman” to mean any non-bond-laborer in the West Indies who is of one degree or another of African ancestry.
97. Sheppard, p. 44. In continental Anglo-American colonies, by contrast, free African-Americans were excluded from trades by “white” workers, but they could do little to discourage the employers from employing African-American bond-laborers in skilled occupations. See Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States (New York, 1927), pp. 69–73. See also Frederick Douglass’s eloquent analysis of this peculiarity. (Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass [1892; New York, 1962], pp. 179–80.)
98. Heuman, p. 9. The quoted phrase is intended to apply to the British West Indies generally. (Hall, p. 202.)
99. Handler, pp. 129–30. George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written during the Expeditions under the Command of the late General Sir Ralph Abercromby, 3 vols., 2nd ed (London, 1803), 1:369–70.
100. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 93, 260 n. 52, and the references there to Lecky and Sullivan.
101. Hall, pp. 202–3. Handler, 126–7.
102. Heuman, p. 28.
103. There was a discrimination in favor of “whites,” who were offered thirty acres. Laws of Jamaica (8 Geo. I, c. 1, 1:129–30.) This combination of concession and discrimination parallels the Bogland Act of 1772 in Ireland granting Catholics expanded rights to lease, but not to purchase land; and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 in the United States allowing African-Americans only half the 160 acres allowed to whites under the Homestead Law of 1862. (See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 93, 140–41.)
104. Burns, History of the British West Indies, p. 441.
105. Heuman, p. 84. For the total number of slaves, see Hall, p. 194.
106. Handler, pp. 68–72.
107. Buckley, pp. 11, 17–18.
108. Buckley, pp. 13, 53–5. Between 1795 and 1808 the British army in the West Indies purchased 13,400 Africans for military service, of whom 8,924 were purchased in Africa.
109. Buckley, pp. 13, 30–31, 41, 127.
110. In 1673, the Barbados authorities had tried to have the best of both possibilities. While increasing the exploitation of the African bond-laborers unrelentingly, even as they reduced their rations, the authorities sought to strengthen the militia by recruiting and arming militiamen from among these same bond-laborers. But that proved a prelude to a plot for a general African rebellion in 1675. (Dunn, pp. 257–8. Sheppard, p. 34.)
111. Buckley, p. 124. Of the African-born soldiers, who generally did not want to return to Africa, some were settled in Trinidad and Honduras, the others, willingly or otherwise, were sent to Sierra Leone. Those who had been inducted from the West Indies, along with the youngest of those brought from Africa, remained in the West Indies. (Ibid., p. 35, citing CO 318/55.)
112. Edmund Burke, An Account of European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1758), 2:118, 130–31.
113. Long, 2:333–4.
114. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), pp. 288–9. Ramsay (1733–89) served as an Episcopal priest in the West Indies on two separate occasions, but his espousal of Christian charity toward the bond-laborers earned the hostility of the planters. On his final return to England he published the Essay, and became associated with the abolitionist movement. (Dictionary of National Biography.)
115. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume one, p. 112.
116. Pinckard, 2:532 (emphasis in original). Pinckard’s design seem to have worked out very satisfactorily for the British ruling class, at least as late as the second decade of the twentieth century. Sir Sidney Olivier, after serving as Governor of Jamaica from 1907 to 1913, was convinced that “this [mulatto] class as it at present exists is a valuable and indispensable part of any West Indies community, and that a colony of black, coloured, and whites has a far more organic efficiency and far more promise in it than a colony of black and white alone.… The graded mixed class in Jamaica helps to make an organic whole of the community and saves it from this distinct cleavage.” (Sir Sidney Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour new edition, rewritten and revised [London, 1928], pp. 65–6.)
117. Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados, p. 83, citing Minutes of the Council, 1 November 1803, Barbados Archives.
118. Handler and Sio, pp. 218–19. Table 7–1. Heuman, p. 7.
119. Sheppard, p. 61.
120. Long, 2:335. See also A. E. Furness, “The Maroon War of 1795” Jamaican Historical Review, 5:30–45 (1965).
121. Handler, p. 205. Handler was writing about Barbados.
122. The Jamaica figures are from Heuman, p. 7. Handler and Sio, pp. 218–19, Table 7–1.
123. Heuman, p. 30.
124. Handler, pp. 148, 150. These were not merely normal “owners” of members of their own families, as might be the case in the United States. See Carter G. Woodson, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Washington, 1935); Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property-Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 (New York, 1942), p. 22.
125. Heuman, p. 29.
126. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988), Chapter XI, “The Struggle for British Slave Emancipation, 1823–38,,” especially pp. 421–8, 432–7, 439, 447–8, 451–2, and 454–9.
127. Hall, “Jamaica,” pp. 207–8.
128. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Chapter 4.
129. Handler and Sio, p. 238. “The event that tipped the scales in favor of ameliorative legislation was a slave revolt which broke out on the night of April 14, 1816.” (Ibid., p. 234.)
“In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Jamaican legislature passed hundreds of bills granting well-educated and well-to-do coloured individuals the perquisites of whites.” (Foreword by Philip Mason to David Lowenthal, West Indies Societies [London, 1972], p. vi.)
13 The Invention of the White Race – and the Ordeal of America
1. Edmund Burke, An Account of European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1758); 2:118.
2. CO 5/1371, 150vo–151 (James City County Grievance No. 10).
3. John C. Rainbolt, “The Alteration in the Relationship between Leadership and Constitutents in Virginia, 1660–1720,” WMO, 27:411–34 (October 1970); p. 412.
4. John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion (Port Washington, NY, 1974), p. 97.
5. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), chapters 15–18, the closing section of the book.
6. “… social peace gradually arrived, according to several studies, as race, not class, separated the privileged from the unprivileged.” (A. Roger Ekirch, “Exiles in the Promised Land: Convict Labor in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 82:95–122 [Summer 1987]; p. 96).
7. Lyon G. Tyler, “Virginians Voting in the Colonial Period,” WMQ, ser. 1, 6:7–8 (1897–98). Tyler may also have been the author of a piece by “Lafayette,” “No Feudalism in the South,” in which it is stated that, “The great distinction in Virginia was color not class.” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 10:73–5, p. 74.
8. Gary B. Nash, “Colonial Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Modern Era (London, 1984), pp. 244–5.
9. Nash says that this all-class “white” unity was the result of the plantation bourgeoisie “relocating their reservoir of servile labor from … England and Ireland to … West Africa.” (Nash, p. 244).
10. Russel R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985) and David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981) are of particular interest in this regard. Neither seems to have taken into account the “racial quotas,” deficiency laws, and laws passed in the plantation colonies to bar Negroes from skilled trades – enactments that had nothing to do with a “free market” search for skilled workers, but everything to do with maintaining “the southern labor system.” See Galenson’s generalization of the argument (pp. 166–8). Menard combines the assertion that “African slaves could not compete with indentured servants for the few good jobs that did exist,” with a reference to “cultural barriers and the depth of racial prejudice” (p. 269). This seems at best redundant to the argument that the skilled labor shortage was the determinant of the transformation of “the labor system”; or tautological, if it is meant to explain racial discrimination in employment by reference to racially discriminatory ideas in employers’ heads; and at worst it is a reversion to the “natural racism” rationale for racial slavery. A very recent review by Menard, however, seems to indicate a readiness to take a new look at the “white race.” (Menard’s comments appeared in Journal of American Ethnic History, spring 1996, pp. 57–8.) Incidentally, while my point of view and interpretation differ from those of Menard regarding historical subjects of common interest, I have never presumed to characterize his work as “tendentious,”; and I am at a loss to know why Menard thinks I have done so.
11. “Slaves … had none of the rising expectations that have often prompted rebellions in human history.” (Morgan, p. 309.)
12. Orlando Patterson finds that the newly arriving Africans, who had been born free, were especially difficult to control. Though displaced from their native lands, their tribal stems retained a marked degree of vitality. In Jamaica in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, it was precisely they who were the most resistant, as shown in insurrections mounted by them in 1673, 1682, 1685 and 1690. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–1740,” Social and Economic Studies, 19:289–325 [1970], reprinted in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas [Garden City, NY, 1973], pp. 246–92; 255–8.)
13. Thomas Roderick Dew (1802–46), Professor of History and Political Law at William and Mary College and the thirteenth president of that institution, set forth this inversion of the cause and effect of “white solidarity” and racial slavery. Because of the imposition of lifetime hereditary bondage on African-Americans, he said, “there is at once taken away the greatest cause for distinction and separation of the ranks of [“white”] society.” (Thomas Roderick Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument [Charleston, South Carolina, 1852; Negro Universities reprint, 1968], p. 461.)
14. See p. 235.
15. Thomas N. Ingersoll, ed., “ ‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg’: An appeal from Virginia in 1723,” WMQ, 3d ser., 51:777–82. The author of this letter did not reveal his or her name for fear of being put to death if identified. There is some reason to believe, as Ingersoll points out, that the letter was a collective effort. The date of the letter is 8 September 1723, but there are indications that it may have been composed over a period of days.
16. West served as counsel to the Board of Trade from 1718 to 1725. Soon thereafter he assumed the office of Chancellor of Ireland, but survived there only a year. George Chalmers, comp. and ed., Opinions of Eminent Lawyers on Various Points of English Jurisprudence chiefly concerning the Colonies, Fisheries, and Commerce, 2 vols. (London, 1814; Burt Franklin Reprint, 1971, from the original edition in the Brooklyn Public Library), p. xxxiii.
17. Hening, 4: 133–4.
18. Chalmers, 2:113–14.
19. Alured Popple, Secretary to the Board of Trade, to Governor William Gooch of Virginia, 18 December 1735 (CO 5/1366, pp. 134–5). Although West made his report in January 1724, it was eleven years later that the objection came to the attention of the Board of Trade, who then instructed Popple to ask for an explanartion from Gooch. There is as yet no accounting for the board’s long delay in taking up the matter with the Virginia government. (See Emory G. Evans, ed., “A Question of Complexion,” VMHB, 71:411–13 [1963].) Is it possible that Bishop Edmund Gibson played some part in getting particular attention paid to the question after receiving the African-American appeal for freedom sent from Virginia in 1723? (See p. 241, n. 15).
20. CO 5/1324, ff. 19, 22. The Gooch quotations in the following paragraph are from this same document.
21. Along with Catholics who refused to conform to the Protestant way, “and others not being Christians,” Negroes were “incapable of in law, to be witnesses in any cases whatsoever” under terms of the Virginia code of 1795 (Hening, 3:298). It may be speculated that Gooch’s choice of words here implicitly referred to that law. But Gooch must have been aware that in 1723, and again in 1732, this loophole was closed by making it possible for African-Americans to give evidence in trials of other African-Americans for rebellion or other capital offenses. (Hening, 4:127 [1723], 327 [1732]).
22. The contrast between the denial of middle-class status to persons of any degree of African descent and the middle-class role of mulattos and free blacks in the Caribbean was occasionally dramatized in the Virginia courts. In 1688, on the cusp of King Billy’s War, John Servele (the name is variously spelled), a “molatto” born in St Kitts of a French father and a free Negro mother and duly baptized there, through a series of misadventures was sold into Virginia where he was claimed as a lifetime bond-laborer by a succession of owners. In consideration of testimonials from the Governor of St Kitts and a Jesuit priest there, and the fact that Servele had already served more than seven years, the Governor and Council ordered that Servele be released and given his “corn and cloathes” freedom dues. (Norfolk County Records, 1686–95, (Orders), pp. 107, 115, 17 September and 15 November 1688.) Another man, Michael Roderigo, a native of St Domingue, likewise a victim of misadventures that ended with him being sold as a lifetime bond-laborer in Virginia, took advantage of a lull in the Anglo-French warring to petition the Virginia Colony Council for his freedom. In support of his claim as “a Christian and a free subject of France,” he proposed to call as a witness a Virginia plantation owner “who hath bought slaves” from him in Petit Guaves, St Domingue. (Virginia Colony Council proceedings, 22 February 1699/1700. Library of Congress, Virginia [Colony] Collection, 80–75775.)
23. It would be another half-century before James Madison, speaking as a member of the Virginia Council of State, would propose, though unpersuasively, that freedmen were readily absorbed into the system of control over bond-laborers. Replying to the idea of inducing “whites” to join the “fight for freedom” by giving each one an African-American lifetime bond-laborer, Madison suggested a more direct approach to recruitment: “would it not be as well,” he said, “to liberate and make soldiers at once of [those] blacks themselves as to make them instruments for enlisting white Soldiers?” He reassured doubters that this course would constitute no danger to the institution of slavery, “experience having shown that a freedman immediately loses all attachment & sympathy for his former fellow slaves.” (William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachel, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 9 vols. [Chicago, 1962]; 2:198–201, 209–11; the cited passage is at page 209 [Correspondence with Joseph Jones, 24 and 28 November 1780]. See also Journal of the [Virginia] House of Delegates, 1777–1780 [Richmond, 1827], pp. 56, 64, 65, 67, 98, 100, 105, 113, 116, 119, cited by Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705–1786, Democracy or Aristocracy? [East Lansing, 1964], p. 68).
24. “Instead of creating problems, the union of a white man and a Negro woman was sometimes considered a judicious mingling of business with pleasure.” (Brown and Brown, p. 68). Thomas Jefferson’s considered opinion on the subject of “breeding women” was that “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” “What [such a] mother produces,” he wrote, “is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.” (Jefferson, letters to William Yancey, 17 January 1819, and to W. Eppes, 30 June 1820; cited in William Cohen, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 16:518 [1969].)
25. Hening, 3:87–8 (1691).
26. See Appendix II-F.
27. “In regard to the Reasons you have offered in behalf of the Act we shall let that Act lie by.” (Board of Trade to Gooch, 15 October 1736 CO 5/1366, p. 137.)
28. CSP, Col., 16:390–91.
29. CO 5/1363 Jennings to Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 24 April 1710. See also Virginia State Archives, “Colonial Papers’ collection, folder 20, items 11, 13, 14.
30. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619–1777, edited by H. R. McIlwaine and J. P. Kennedy, 13 vols. (Richmond, 1905–15); volume for 1702 to 1712, p. 240. Cited by Brown and Brown, p. 70.
31. See p. 219.
32. CSP, Col. 36:114, Gooch to the Board of Trade, 29 June 1729.
33. American Historical Review, 1:88–90 (1895, “Documents” [No.1]). Byrd to Lord Egmont. One may speculate that his reference to a man of “desperate fortune” was in memory of Nathaniel Bacon, whose rebellion Byrd’s father had first urged on, and then abandoned when the English and Negro bond-laborers enlisted in it.
34. Legislative Journal of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 3 vols., edited by H. R. Mcllwaine (Richmond, 1918), 2:1034–35 (11 April 1749). An estimated 30,000 convict bond-laborers were sent to America in 190 shiploads between 1717 and 1772. Of these cargoes, 100 went to the Chesapeake, 53 to Maryland and 47 to Virginia. (Arthur Price Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era [Newport News, 1953], p. 152.)
35. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, or the Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (New York, 1910, 1958, 1959). Idem, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922; New York, 1959). The “Middle Class,” to whom Wertenbaker devotes Part Two of the former work, is called “the Virginia yeomanry” in the latter (pp. 137, 160).
See Chapter 2 above for a discussion of the “forty-shilling freeholder.”
36. One historian drew the line between those who inherited any wealth at all and those who inherited none: “Herein lay the contrast between the two classes often but erroneously confused, the “poor whites” and the yeomen.” (Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929), p. 346). Another, Edmund S. Morgan, states that a man qualified as a yeoman if he owned land, (Morgan, p. 377.)
37. Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown reject such a definition of interests. After observing unselfconsciously that, “Slavery was profitable, it enabled a man to live with a minimum of physical labor,” they conclude with the self-standing assertion that: “Protection of slave property was of constant and vital concern to all classes of the white population.… [Slavery] definitely set off the white man as the master in society, and it did create a lower class – which could be exploited by the master race.” (Brown and Brown, p. 77).
38. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), p.262. Taking estates in personalty as the index, Aubrey Land says that the “great planters … never formed more than a fraction of the total community of planters, something like 2.5 percent in the decade 1690–1699 and about 6.5 percent half a century later.” (Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Behavior in a Planting Society: The Eighteenth-century Chesapeake,” Journal of Southern History, 33:469–85; pp. 472–3.
39. These latter constituted the self-perpetuating ruling bourgeois elite. “The wealthiest planters and planter-merchants,” writes Kulikoff, “dominated local [County Court) benches and provincial legislatures from the 1650s to the Revolution.… By 1705, three-fifths of Virginians who owned two thousand or more acres of land were justices or burgesses.” (Kulikoff, p.268.)
In Virginia over the period 1720 to 1776, 630 men held seats in the House of Burgesses. Of this number, 110 dominated the proceedings of the House by virtue of their committee positions in that body. Of that 110, three out of four each owned more than 10,000 acres of land. With regard to the extent of their holdings of lifetime bond-laborers, eleven held more than 300 each; 25 held from 50 to 300; 25 held from 50 to 300 each; and 22 others held more than ten. (Jack P. Greene, “Foundations of Political Power in the Virginia House of Burgesses,” WMQ, ser. 3, 16:485–506; pp. 485–8.) A tabulation of the population and the voting in seven Virginia counties in the period 1783–90 shows a total population of 80,893, including 45,111 “whites”. Free “white” males sixteen years of age and over numbered 11,084, of whom 4,242 were owners of the 25 acres required of qualified voters. (Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, Chapel Hill, 1952, pp. 141–3.)
40. Kulikoff, p. 268, While this definition of “yeoman” is more elastic than my standard for “middle class”, and Kulikoff’s “above half” may be on the high side of the estimates by Land and Main given below, it has the virtue of being related to ownership of lifetime bond-laborers.
41. Ibid., p.262. See also the half-dozen authorities cited by Kulikoff there. With regard to the yeomen’s credit dependency on the gentry, see ibid., pp. 288–9.
42. Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure; The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 25:639–54 (1965); p. 641. Although this study is limited to Maryland, Land believes that “differences between the areas [of the Chesapeake] are not very great” in respect to the thesis he presents.
44. Ibid., p. 648. See also my comments on eighteenth-century tenancy on pp. 104–5.
45. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 122–3.
46. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure,” p. 653.
47. Ibid., pp. 643–4.
48. Ibid., p. 644.
49. Ibid., pp. 644, 654.
50. Jackson Turner Main, “The Distribution of Property in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41:241–58 (1954–55). (The name of this publication was later changed to The Journal of American History.) See also Jackson T. Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, 1965), esp Chapter II, “The Economic Class Structure of the South.”
51. Main, “Distribution of Property,” p. 258.
52. Jackson Turner Main, “Distribution of Property,” pp. 241, 242–3, 248. The “Northern Neck,” the area between the Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers, had double the proportion of landless, and of these most were laborers, not tenants. (Ibid., p. 248.) See also Gloria L. Main’s study of probate records of Virginia and Maryland, “Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7:559–81; 570–2, 580.
Brown and Brown, p. 31 n. 142, refer to the contrast between their view and that of Jackson T. Main with regard to laboring-class expectations. However, they do not make any effort to challenge Main’s thesis. But also compare D. Alan Williams, “The Small Farmer in Eighteenth-century Virginia Politics,” Agricultural History, 43:91–101 (1969).
53. Not more than 49 percent of the total adult white male population were landowners. The large-owner one-fifth, plus three-fourths of the middle-size landowners’ two-thirds share of the total number of landowners, would make up a total of 70 percent as the approximate proportion of landowners who were also owners of lifetime bond-laborers, and that would represent less than 35 percent of the total adult white male population. Main does not even suggest any statistically significant employment of bond-labor by owners of one hundred acres or less. Taking into account Main’s mention of the ownership of bond-laborers by non-landowners, I have attempted to make a generous discount for that factor in setting the proportion of non-owners of bond-labor at around 60 percent of the total adult white male population.
54. Kulikoff, p. 262.
55. Governor Notley’s words of advice. See pp. 221–2.
56. The coincidence of names is not accidental. This Nathaniel Bacon and Sir Francis had a common ancestor; Nathaniel’s great-grandfather and Sir Francis were first cousins. It is also interesting to note that Nathaniel Bacon’s grandfather, also named Nathaniel, was an artist and a republican writer during the time of Cromwell. (“The Bacons of Virginia,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 37:189–98 [1883]; p. 197.)
57. Francis Bacon, Essay No. 15, “Of Seditions and Troubles,” in Works, 6:406–12. The slavocracy’s most eminent “theoretician” well understood the premise of that strategy. “The dominant party,” he said, “can only be overturned by concert and harmony among the subject party.” (Thomas Roderick Dew, An Essay on Slavery [Richmond, 1849], p. 103.)
58. Morgan, p. 328. Ira Berlin appears to endorse Morgan on this point. “Chesapeake planters,” he writes, “consolidated their class position by asserting white racial unity.” (Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review, 85:44–78 [1980]; p. 72.
59. Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, An Inquiry into the Origin of the Higher Plantation Class, Together with an Account of the Habits, Customs and Diversions of the People (Richmond, 1902), pp. 137–8.
60. H. M. Henry, Police Control in South Carolina (Emory, 1914), pp. 190–91. Henry asks rhetorically whether the poor whites cooperated with the slaveholders because they perceived that a threat was posed by African-Americans to “their personal security and that of their families.” (Ibid.) He does not attempt to sustain this speculation. If they were worried on that score why would they encourage the expansion of the system by providing security for the large planters?
61. Hening 3:87–8. In such cases the emancipator was required to pay for the exiling of the freed person within six months, or else to pay a £10 fine which would be used to pay for the freed person’s transportation out of Virginia as arranged by the church wardens of the parish.
62. Norfolk County Wills, p. 26. Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, edited by H. R. McIlwaine (Richmond, 1928), 3:332. The Colony Council justified this unprecedented infringement of testamentary rights on the grounds that the increase in the number of free Negroes would “endanger the peace of this Colony” by encouraging the freedom aspirations of others held in bondage.
63. Hening, 2:117–18 (1662). In Maryland, also in 1705, laws were passed to guarantee “white” servants against abuse and against being detained in servitude beyond their time, and declaring that “Negroes [were] Slaves during their Naturall Lives nor freed by Baptisme.” (CO 7/15, pp. 14, 15. Report of Governor John Seymour, 3 July 1705, to the Board of Trade on laws passed in Maryland that year.) Bond-laborer Margaret Godfrey sought in vain to claim the protection of her “white” status by defiantly telling her overseer, “If you whip me it will be worse for you for I am not a Slave.” The overseer, with the express leave of the mistress, cut Godfrey’s clothes from her body and beat her severely two successive times. Her offense had been to plead for humane treatment for her severely injured husband. The Godfreys’ petition for relief was rejected by the Court. (St George’s County Records, HH, pp. 165–8 [June 1748]. Maryland State Archives, Annapolis.)
64. Hening, 3:448 (1705).
65. Hening, 3:449
66. Hening, 4:351.
67. Hening, 3:103, 459–60. As noted in Chapter 12, throughout the British West Indies it was customary for even bond-laborers to earn money by marketing goods produced on plots of land allowed them whereby they might buy themselves out of bondage. Hilliard d’Auberville proposed, among other measures to control the bond-laborers of St Domingue, “to give them wives, encourage them to raise cattle, hold them with ties of property.” (Hilliard d’Auberville, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de St Domingue, 2 vols. [Paris, 1776–77]; 2:59–62. Cited in Gwen Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St Domingue and Cuba, [Baltimore, 1971], p. 83.)
68. Hening, 2:267 (1668).
69. Hening, 2:280–81 (1670).
70. Hening, 3:251 (1705).
71. Hening, 3:298 (1705); 4:327 (1732).
72. Hening, 3:459 (1705).
73. Hening, 4:119 (1723).
74. Hening, 4:130 (1723). A provision was made for free African-American “householders”, and any free African-American who lived on a “frontier plantation” and was able to secure a license from a justice of the peace, to keep one gun and the powder and shot needed for it.
75. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 89. “The white man’s pursuit of black women frequently destroyed any possibility that comely black girls could remain chaste for long,” writes Blassingame. According to autobiographies of former bond-laborers, the home of a bond-laborer was “considered by many white men … as a house of ill-fame.” (John W. Blassingame, Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South [New York, 1972], p. 82.)
76. Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1988), p. 159.
77. “A white man may go to the house of a free black, maltreat and abuse him, and commit any outrage upon his family, for all of which the law cannot reach him, unless some white person saw the act committed.” Thus observed Mr Wilson of Perquimon County, speaking at the 1835 North Carolina State Constitutional Convention of 1835. (John S. Bassett, Slavery in the State of North Carolina [Baltimore, 1899], bound as one of a number of studies in Bassett, Slavery in the United States, Selected Essays [New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969], p. 42.)
78. Hening, 3:447–62, 4:126–34 (emphasis added). The citations of these laws that follow are from Hening.
79. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips spoke of “the methods of life which controlled the history of Virginia through the following centuries and of the many colonies and states which borrowed her plantation system.” This was “Dixie,” where, he said, “the white folk [are] a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained – that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” (Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese [Baton Rouge, 1968], pp. 8, 274. The dates of these pronouncements were 1910–11 and 1918, respectively.)
80. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), p. 123. I find Jordan’s observation accurate and very pertinent, but I have appropriated it for an argument that he does not support. His “unthinking decision” approach to the origin of racial slavery rejects Morgan’s (and my) attribution of deliberate ruling-class manipulation for social control purposes.
81. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian, p. 212.
82. Hening, 4:202.
83. Schwarz, p. 13.
84. Brown and Brown, p. 48.
85. Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in the Colony of South Carolina (Columbia, 1961), p. 30. The American Revolution wrought no difference in this respect. Seventy-five years later “[p]oor white men habitually kept their eyes open for strange Negroes without passes, for the apprehension of a fugitive was a financial windfall … [W]hite workingmen on the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad caught several Maryland bondsmen who had escaped to within five miles of the Pennsylvania border. The workingmen returned them to their owners and collected the reward.” (Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South [New York, 1956], p.153.)
86. Basset, Slavery in the State of North Carolina, pp. 29–30.
87. Smith, pp. 30–31. Other variations of the same quota principle were enacted.
88. Ibid., p. 35.
89. Elizabeth Dorman, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, 1935), 4:595 (1739), 605 (1742).
90. Ibid., 4:610. See also Klaus G. Loewald, Beverley Starika and Paul S. Taylor, eds., “Johann Martin Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire on Carolina and Georgia,” WMQ, ser. 3, 14:218–261 (1957); pp. 227, 242.
91. “Irish-Americans [arriving in the United States in the ante-bellum period] were not the originators of white supremacy; they adapted to and were adopted into an already existing ‘white’ American social order.” (The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 199.)
92. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Slave Labor Problem in the Charleston District,” Political Science Quarterly, 22:416–39 (1907); reprinted in Phillips, Slave Economy of the Old South, p. 198.
93. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946), p. 182.
94. James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776–1860 (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1970), p. 58, citing Archives of Virginia, Legislative Papers, petitions: 9789, Culpeper, 9 December 1831; 9860, Dinwiddie, 20 December 1831; 177707, Norfolk, 12 November 1851). It would seem relevant to note that the first two of these petitions were submitted in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion and during the Virginia House of Delegates’ debate on slavery. (See Theodore William Allen, “ ‘… They Would Have. Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism,” Radical America, 9:41–63 (1975); pp. 58–9.)
95. For this aspect of the question, see the Introduction in Volume One of The Invention of the White Race, pp. 4–14, “The Psycho-cultural Argument.” ’
96. Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 12 vols. (London, 1803). 2:123–4.
97. Dew, Essay on Slavery, p. 99.
98. Morgan, p. 376. The general term “Virginians” is used by Morgan to mean “white” people in Virginia. In the concluding Chapter 18 the term appears some twenty-two times, but only twice is it modified by “white”. Morgan’s imposition of this “white” assumption on the reader, objectionable in itself, more importantly conforms with his treatment of the African-Americans as mere background to the rise of “liberty and equality.”
99. Ibid., p. 380.
100. Ibid., p. 364.
101. Ibid., pp. 366, 369.
102. Ibid., p. 386.
103. See page 240.
104. Hutchinson and Rachel, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 2:209.
105. Letter from “Civis,” an eastern Virginia slaveholder, in the Richmond Enquirer, 4 May 1832.
106. Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom, The American Paradox,” Journal of American History, June 1972, pp. 5–6.
107. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 386, 387.
108. Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia, p.160.
109. See pp. 245–7, particularly the summary on p. 247.
110. Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North-America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, translated by an English gentleman who resided in America at that period, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (London 1787; 1968 reprint), 2:190.
111. See p. 255.
112. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian, p. 211.
113. “[T]here existed a numerous supply of potential tenants … from that group of small planters who, in consequence of the trifling quantity of poor tobacco produced on their overworked land in the east, could not successfully compete with a large amount of excellent tobacco grown on the fresh land of the great planters. Faced with impoverishment they looked to the more fertile lands of the Piedmont and Valley as a means of bettering their condition.” (Willard F. Bliss, “The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia,” VMHB 58:427–442 (1950).
114. Kulikoff, pp. 150, 152, 153, 296, 297–8. See also pp. 104–5.
115. George W. Summers of Kanawha County, speaking in the Virginia House of Delegates, during the debate on slavery, following Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Richmond Enquirer, 2 February 1832).
116. “[T]he ‘warlike Christian men’ recruited by Virginia to defend its borders in 1701 were the direct ancestors of the dragoons whose Colts and Winchesters subdued the Sioux of the Great Plains a century and a half later.” (Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage [New York, 1966], p. 40.) The interior quotation is from an Act passed by the Virginia Assembly in August 1701, designed to encourage English frontier settlers (Hening, 3:207).
117. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920; 1947), p. 38.
118. Ibid., p. 1. A century has passed since that first essay, and Turner’s frontier thesis continues to be meat and drink for historiographical evaluation and disputation. But a marked tendency has been apparent to limit the “frontier” concept, reducing it to a Western regional subject, which of course risks “abandonment of the cross-regional and national emphasis he [Turner] sought to establish for the field” (William Cronon, cited in John Mack Farragher, “The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West,” American Historical Review, 98:106–17 [1993], p. 117). Since the 1960s, critics have shown a welcome sensitivity to Turner’s neglect of Indians, Mexicans and Chinese or, worse, his chauvinistic attitude toward them. Finally, in 1995, a reference was made to Turner’s pervasive “whiteness,” the significant fact that “his own racial identity was a completely foreign concept to him” (Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” American Historical Review, 100:697–716 [1995], p. 715).
119. Turner, p. 38.
120. Ibid., pp. 280–81.
121. Ibid., p. 321.
122. James C. Malin, Essays on Historiography (Lawrence, Kansas, 1946, p. 38, cited in Harry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, 1950), p. 302.
123. The free-land “safety valve” theory at one time was the subject of extensive debate among economic, labor and land historians. Its limitations, even in its own white-blind terms, as an explanation of the low level of proletarian class-consciousness were forcefully pointed out decades ago by such historians as Carter Goodrich, Sol Davison, Murray Kane, and Fred A. Shannon, whose names are prominent in the extensive bibliography of the “safety valve” controversy. Subsequently it could only be defended in a greatly watered-down form of the original Turner formulation. See Ray Allen Billington, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (Washington, DC, 1971, pp. 20–25, and idem, America’s Frontier Heritage, pp. 31–8, 292–3.
124. I borrow here the title of a well-known work of William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (New York, 1988; originally published in 1966).
125. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 145–7, 152–7, 184–6, 195–7, 198–9.
Appendix II-A
1. Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York, 1973), pp. 1, 3.
2. Jose L. Franco, “Maroons and Slave Rebellions in the Spanish Territories,” in Price, ed., p. 47, 48.
3. David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1659,” in Price, ed., p. 91.
4. Ibid., pp. 96–7.
5. Aquiles Escalante, “Palenques in Colombia,” in Price, ed., pp. 77–9.
6. Price, ed., pp. 20, 33; Franco, p. 41.
7. Roger Bastide, “The Other Quilombos,” in Price, ed., pp. 191–2.
8. R. K. Kent, “Palmares: An African State in Brazil,” in Price, ed., p. 172.
10. Ibid., pp. 177, 178–80, 183, 185.
11. Ibid., pp. 180–81.
12. Price, ed., “Introduction,” p. 20.
13. Kent, p. 172.
Appendix II-B
1. No one, then or since, could know within any great degree of exactitude the proportion of the English population destroyed by the plague. The lowest estimate seems to be 20 percent. (Josiah Cox Russell, “Demographic Patterns in History,” Population Studies, No. 1, 1948; cited in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 4:612.) The same economic historians say the toll was one-third to half of the population. James E. Rogers, in The Economic Interpretation of History (London, 1889), says it was one-third (p. 263). George M. Trevelyan says three-eighths of the people perished (A Shortened History of England [New York, 1942] p. 192).
2. Rogers, p. 22.
3. H. S. Bennett says that, even before 1348, “once the serf made up his mind to run away, it was difficult to restrain him.” (H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor [London, 1948], p. 306.) See also Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (Oxford, 1906), pp. 8–9.
4. This discussion of the revolt of 1381 is based mainly on Oman, The Great Revolt and R. B. Dobson, The Peasants Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970).
5. Oman, p. 1.
6. Ibid., p. 56.
7. Ibid., p. 64.
8. “Anonimal Chronical”; cited by Oman, pp. 200–201.
9. Dobson, p. 25.
10. Ibid., p. 30.
11. Rogers, p. 82.
Appendix II-D
1. Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895; reprint, 1935), 2:15.
2. James C. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia, A Study of the System of Indentured Labor in the American Colonies (Baltimore, 1895; 1969 reprint), pp. 75–6.
3. Eugene I. McCormac, White Servitude in Maryland, 1634–1824 (Baltimore, 1904) p. 75.
4. Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1932) 1:506.
5. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America, (New York, 1946), p. 484.
6. McCormac, pp. 61, 72–5.
7. A. E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776, p. 204. In considering Smith’s conclusions cited here, one must keep in mind that his book dealt with bond-servitude in all Anglo-American colonies during the entire colonial period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas the present work is concerned with bond-servitude in the continental colonies, and particularly the seventeenth-century tobacco colonies, Virginia and Maryland.
8. Ibid., pp. 254, 258–60.
9. Russel R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), pp. 190–91. David W. Galenson, a University of Chicago economics professor, brings “bottom-line” logic to bear: “it would be surprising if severe physical abuse had been very common, for it would have interfered with the servants’ work capacity, to the detriment of their masters’ profits.” “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History, 44:1–126 [1984]; p. 8. Galenson’s argument on this point is essentially the same as that made by South Carolina governor Hammond and by George Fitzhugh in justification of slavery in the ante-bellum period. (See Volume One, p. 163.)
10. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975) pp. 63–8.
11. Russell R. Menard, commenting on his own finding of a wide gap between life expectancy of immigrant Marylanders and men born in New England in the seventeenth century, does suggest that “This wide regional variation in mortality might prove a useful reference point for scholars concerned with differences in the social history of New England and the Chesapeake colonies.” (Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 140.)
See Chapter 9 for further discussion of the New England contrast.
12. See Gloria L. Main, “Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7:559–81 (1977),
13. Morris, pp. 282–3.
14. Ibid., p. 482.
Appendix II-E
1. Leslie A. Clarkson, The Pre-industrial Economy of England, 1500, New York, 1972, pp. 26–7.
2. Eleanora Mary Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, 3 vols. (London, 1962), 2:299.
3. Clarkson, pp. 26–7.
4. George M. Trevelyan, Blenheim, pp. 113, 216, 218.
5. Ibid., pp. 216–18.
6. Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1924), 1:343, n.
7. Cited in Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), p. 72.
8. Roger Coke, A Treatise Wherein is demonstrated that the Church and State of England are in equal danger with the trade of it, p. 16. Cited in C. H. Hull, ed., The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (London, 1899; 1963 reprint), 1:242, n.
9. William Petty, Political Arithmetick, in Hull, ed., pp. 293, 301–2.
Appendix II-F
1. Hening, 3:181.
2. Hening, 3:229–481.
3. CO 5/1356 (emphasis added). These instructions were addressed to Governor Effingham in 1684.
4. Hening, 2:117–18 (1662); 3:448 (1705).
5. Hening, 3:449.
6. Virginia State Archives, “Colonial Papers,” folder 17, item 13. “Amendments proposed by the Council to the Bill entituled and concerning Servants and Slaves.” [17 May 1706].
7. Hening, 3:459.
8. CO 391/16, f. 357, 1–2 March 1703/4.
9. CO 391/8.
10. Virginia State Archives, “Colonial Papers,” folder 15, item 17. See also CO 5/1361, f. 46, 28 November 1704.
11. CO 391/7.
12. See CO 5/1312, Part 1, ff. 303, 305–11; and part 2, ff. 1–4, 202, 205–6, 228; and CO 5/1313, ff. 83, 249–55.