The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2

Praise for The Invention of the White Race

“A powerful and polemic study.” Times Literary

Supplement

“A monumental study of the birth of racism in the

American South which makes truly new and convincing

points about one of the most critical problems in U.S.

history … a highly original and seminal work.” David

Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness

“A must read for all social justice activists, teachers, and

scholars.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt:

Growing Up Okie

“Allen transforms the reader’s understanding of race and

racial oppression from what mainstream history often

portrays as an unfortunate sideshow in U.S. history, to a

central feature in the construction of U.S. (and indeed

global) capitalism. Allen destroys any notion that ‘race’ is

a biological category but instead locates it in the realm of

a construction aimed at oppression and social control.

This is more than a look at history; it is a foundation for a

path toward social justice.” Bill Fletcher Jr., coauthor of

Solidarity Divided

“Decades before people made careers ‘undoing racism,’

Ted Allen was working on this trailblazing study, which

has become required reading.” Noel Ignatiev, coeditor of

Race Traitor, author of How the Irish Became White

“A real tour de force, a welcome return to empiricism in

the subfield of race studies, and a timely reintroduction of

class into the discourse on American exceptionalism.”

Times Higher Education Supplement

“As magisterial and comprehensive as the day it was first

published, Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White

Race continues to set the intellectual, analytical and

rhetorical standard when it comes to understanding the

real roots of white supremacy, its intrinsic connection to

the class system, and the way in which persons committed

to justice and equity might move society to a different

reality.” Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections

on Race from a Privileged Son

“One of the most important books of U.S. history ever

written. It illuminates the origins of the largest single

obstacle to progressive change and working-class power

in the U.S.: racism and white supremacy.” Joe Berry,

author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower

“As organizers of workers, we cannot effectively counter

the depth of white racism in the U.S. if we don’t

understand its origin and mechanisms. Ted has figured

something out that can guide our work – it’s

groundbreaking and it’s eye-opening.” Gene Bruskin, U.S.

Labor Against the War

“An intriguing book that will be cited in all future

discussions about the origins of racism and slavery in

America.” Labor Studies Journal

“A must read for educators, scholars and social change

activists – now more than ever! Ted Allen’s writings

illuminate the centrality of how white supremacy continues

to work in maintaining a powerless American working

class.” Tami Gold, director of RFK in the Land of

Apartheid and My Country Occupied

“If one wants to understand the current, often

contradictory, system of racial oppression in the United

States – and its historical origins – there is only one place

to start: Theodore Allen’s brilliant, illuminating, The

Invention of the White Race.” Michael Goldfield, author

o f The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainspring of

American Politics

“An outstanding, insightful original work with profound

implications.” Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Social

Control in Slave Plantation Societies

“Few books are capable of carrying the profound weight

of being deemed to be a classic – this is surely one.

Indeed, if one has to read one book to provide a

foundation for understanding the contemporary U.S. – read

this one.” Gerald Horne, author of Negro Comrades of the

Crown

“A richly researched and highly suggestive

analysis … Indispensable for readers interested in the

disposition of power in Ireland, in the genesis of racial

oppression in the U.S., or in the fluidity of ‘race’ and the

historic vicissitudes of ‘whiteness.’ ” Choice

“The Invention of the White Race’s contributions to the

debates on notions of a ‘white race’ are unquestionable

and its relevance not simply for scholars of American

history but for those interested in notions of race and class

in any historical and geographical setting is beyond

doubt.” Labour History Review

“Theodore W. Allen has enlisted me as a devoted reader.”

Metro Times Literary Quarterly

“The most important book on the origin of racism in what

was to become the United States – and more important

now perhaps than when it was first released in the mid

nineties.” Gregory Meyerson, coeditor of Cultural Logic

“This ‘modern classic’ presents an essential

reconstruction of concepts necessary to any understanding

of the Western heritage in the context of World history.”

Wilson J. Moses, author of The Golden Age of Black

Nationalism

“Truly original, and worthy of renewed engagement.”

Bruce Nelson, author of Irish Nationalists and the

Making of the Irish Race

“The Invention of the White Race is an important work

for its meticulously researched materials and its insights

into colonial history. Its themes and perspectives should

be made available to all scholars … A classic without

which no future American history will be written.” Audrey

Smedley, author of Race in North America: Origin and

Evolution of a Worldview

“The most comprehensive and meticulously documented

presentation of the historical, or as he calls it,

‘sociogenic’ theory of racial oppression.” Freedom Road

Magazine

This edition published by Verso 2012

First published by Verso 1997

Introduction to the second edition and appendices G and H

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84467-844-0

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84467-770-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

“There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the

beginnings of all government.” (Edmund Burke, 16

February 1788, on the impeachment trial of Warren

Hastings for maladministration of British rule in

India)

“The origin of states gets lost in a myth, in which one

may believe, but which one may not discuss.” (Karl

Marx, The Civil War in France, 1848–1850)

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Lists of Figures and Tables and a Note on Dates
Introduction to the Second Edition
PART ONE   Labor Problems of the European Colonizing
Powers
1   The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case
2   English Background, with Anglo-American
Variations Noted
3   Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of Social
Control

PART TWO   The Plantation of Bondage
4   The Fateful Addiction to “Present Profit”
5   The Massacre of the Tenantry
6   Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No Intermediate
Stratum
PART THREE   Road to Rebellion
7   Bond-labor: Enduring …
8 … and Resisting
9   The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum
10   The Status of African-Americans
PART FOUR   Rebellion and Reaction
11   Rebellion – and Its Aftermath
12   The Abortion of the “White Race” Social Control
System in the Anglo-Caribbean

13   The Invention of the White Race – and the Ordeal of
America
Appendices
Notes
Index
List of Figures
1   Map of the Chesapeake region, circa 1700
2   List of governors of Colonial Virginia
3   Virginia counties, and dates of their formation
List of Tables
4.1  Shipments of persons to Virginia by the Virginia
Company and by separate planters, 1619–21
4.2  Comparative day wages in Virginia, January 1622,

and in Rutland County, England, in 1610–34

5.1 Approximate number of English emigrants to

Virginia and the death rate among them in the

Company period 76

9.1 Increase in concentration of landholdings in Virginia,

1626–1704 167

10.1 African-American and European-American

landholding in the entire state of Virginia in 1860

and in Northampton County in 1666 185

A Note on Dates

Prior to 1750, the legal year began on 25 March.

Therefore, dates from 1 January through 24 March are

often rendered with a double-year notation. For example,

24 March 1749 would be written as 24 March 1748/9, but

the next day would be given as 25 March 1749. But a year

later the dates for those March days would be, in the

normal modern way, 24 March 1750 and 25 March 1750.

Where one year only is indicated, it is to be understood to

accord with the modern calendar.

Introduction to the Second Edition

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there

were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the

colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the

first volume of The Invention of the White Race by

Theodore W. Allen, first published in 1994, reflected the

fact that, after twenty-plus years of studying Virginia’s

colonial records, he found no instance of the official use

of the word “white” as a symbol of social status prior to

its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others

living in the colony at that time were English; they had

been English when they left England, and naturally they

and their Virginia-born children were English, they were

not ‘white.’ ” White identity had to be taught, and it would

be another six decades until the word “would appear as a

synonym for European-American.”

In this second volume of The Invention of the White

Race, Allen elaborates on his findings in order to develop

the groundbreaking thesis that the ruling class invented the

“white race” as a social-control mechanism in response to

the labor solidarity manifested in the later, civil-war

stages of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–77). To this he adds

two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite deliberately

instituted a system of racial privileges in order to define

and establish the “white race”; and 2) the consequences

were not only ruinous to the interests of African-

Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-

American workers, whose class interests differed

fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.

In Volume I, subtitled Racial Oppression and Social

Control, Allen prepared the conceptual groundwork for

Volume II to be free of what he calls the “White

Blindspot.” He offered a critical examination of the two

main historiographical positions on the slavery and racism

debate: the psycho-cultural approach, which he strongly

criticized, and the socioeconomic approach, which he

sought to free from certain theoretical weaknesses. He

then proceeded, using the mirror of Irish history, to

develop a definition of racial oppression in terms of

social control, a definition free of the absurdities of

“phenotype,” or classification by complexion. The volume

offered compelling analogies between the oppression of

the Irish in Ireland (under Anglo-Norman rule and under

“Protestant Ascendancy”) and white supremacist

oppression of African-Americans and Indians. Allen

showed the relativity of race by examining how Irish

opponents of racial oppression in Ireland were

transformed into “white American” defenders of racial

oppression. He also examined the difference between

national and racial oppression through a comparison of

“Catholic Emancipation” outside of Ulster and “Negro

Emancipation” in America.

In this volume, The Origin of Racial Oppression in

Anglo-America, Allen tells the story of the invention of the

“white race” in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-

century Anglo-American plantation colonies. His primary

focus lies with the pattern-setting Virginia colony, and he

pays special attention to how the majority-English labor

force was reduced from tenants and wage-laborers to

chattel bond-servants in the 1620s. In this qualitative

break from long-established English labor laws, Allen

finds an essential precondition for the emergence of the

lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude imposed upon

African-American laborers under the system of white

supremacy and racial slavery. He also documents many

significant instances of labor solidarity and unrest,

especially during the 1660s and 1670s, most spectacularly

during the civil-war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion, when

“foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms” fought

together to secure freedom from bondage.

It was in the period after Bacon’s Rebellion that the

“white race” was invented as a ruling-class social-control

formation. Allen describes systematic ruling-class

policies that conferred privileges on European-American

laborers and bond-servants while blocking normal class

mobility and imposing or extending harsh disabilities on

African-Americans. Eventually, these policies culminated

in a system of racial slavery, a form of racial oppression

that also imposed severe proscriptions on free African-

Americans. Allen emphasizes that, in 1735, when African-

Americans in Virginia were deprived of their long-held

right to vote – with the aim, in the words of Governor

William Gooch, “to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free

Negros & Mulattos” – it was not an “unthinking decision.”

Rather, it was a deliberate step in the process of

establishing a system of racial oppression by the

plantation bourgeoisie, even though it entailed repealing a

law that had existed in Virginia for more than a century.

The key to understanding racial oppression, Allen

argues, can be found in the formation of the intermediate

social-control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of

the ruling class. In the case of racial oppression in

Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European

ancestry after Bacon’s Rebellion were denied a role in the

social-control buffer group, the bulk of which was made

up of laboring-class “whites.” In the Anglo-Caribbean, by

contrast, under a similar Anglo ruling elite, “mulattos”

were included in the social-control group and often

promoted to middle-class status. For Allen, this was the

key to understanding the difference between Virginia’s

ruling-class policy of fixing “a perpetual Brand” on

African-Americans and the West Indian planters’ policy of

formally recognizing the middle-class status of “colored”

descendants who earned special merit through their

service to the regime. Here, the difference between racial

oppression and national oppression can be explained by

the fact that in the West Indies there were “too few” poor

and laboring-class Europeans to create an adequate petit

bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were

“too many” laborers to extend social mobility to all of

them.

The references to an “unthinking decision” and “too

few” poor and laboring class Europeans are consistent

with Allen’s repeated efforts to challenge what he

considered to be the two main arguments that undermine

and disarm the struggle against white supremacy in the

working class: 1) white supremacism is innate, and it is

therefore useless to challenge it, and 2) European-

American workers benefit from “white race” privileges.

These two arguments, opposed by Allen, are related to

two master historical narratives rooted in writings on the

colonial period. The first argument is associated with the

“unthinking decision” explanation for the development of

racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop D. Jordan in

his influential work White Over Black. The second

argument is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s

similarly influential American Slavery, American

Freedom, which maintains that, as racial slavery

developed, “there were too few free poor [European-

Americans] on hand to matter.” Allen’s work directly

challenges both Jordan’s theory of the “unthinking

decision” and Morgan’s theory of “too few free poor.”

Allen convincingly argues that the racial privileges

conferred by the ruling class upon European-American

workers not only work against the interests of the direct

victims of white supremacy, they also work against the

workers’ interests. He further argues that these “white-

skin privileges” are “the incubus that for three centuries

has paralyzed” the will of European-Americans “in

defense of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the ruling

class.”

With its meticulous primary research, its equalitarian

motif, its emphasis on the dimension of class struggle in

history, and its groundbreaking analysis, Allen’s The

Invention of the White Race is now widely recognized as

a scholarly classic. It has profound implications for

American history, African-American history, labor

history, American studies, and “whiteness” studies, as

well as important insights in the areas of Caribbean

history, Irish history, and African Diaspora studies. Its

influence will only continue to grow in the twenty-first

century.

In an effort to assist readers and encourage meaningful

engagement with Allen’s work, this new edition of

Volume II of The Invention of the White Race: The

Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America includes a

few minor corrections, many based on Allen’s notes.

There are also two new appendices, “A Guide to The

Invention of the White Race, Volume II” (drawn in part

from Allen’s unpublished “Synoptic Table of Contents”)

and a select bibliography. In addition, you will find a new,

expanded index at the end of this volume.

Jeffrey B. Perry

PART ONE

Labor Problems of the European

Colonizing Powers

The Labor Supply Problem: England

a Special Case

In 1497, within half a decade of Columbus’s first return to

Spain from America, the Anglo-Italian Giovanni Caboto,

o r John Cabot as he was known in his adopted country,

made a discovery of North America, and claimed it for

King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch of England. The

English westering impulse, after then lying dormant for

half a century, gradually revived in a variety of projects,

schemes and false starts. By the first decade of the

seventeenth century, an interval of peace with Spain

having arrived with the accession of James I to the throne,

English colonization was an idea whose time had come.

In 1607 the first permanent English settlement in America

was founded at Jamestown, Virginia. By the end of the

first third of the century four more permanent Anglo-

American colonies had been established: Somers Islands

(the Bermudas), 1612; Plymouth (Massachusetts), 1620;

Barbados, 1627; and Maryland, 1634.

The English were confronted with the common twofold

problem crucial to success in the Americas: (1) how to

secure an adequate supply of labor; and (2) how to

establish and maintain the degree of social control

necessary to assure the rapid and continuous expansion of

their capital by the exploitation of that labor. In each of

these respects, however, the English case differed from

those of other European colonizing powers in the

Americas, in ways that have a decisive bearing on the

origin of the “peculiar institution” – white racial

oppression, most particularly racial slavery – in

continental Anglo-America.

European Continental Powers and the

Colonial Labor Supply

The continental European colonizing powers, for

economic, military and political reasons, and in some

cases because of access to external sources, did not

employ Europeans as basic plantation laborers.

Spain and Portugal

The accession in 1516 of Francis I of France and in 1517

of Charles I of Spain, and the installation of the latter as

Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1519,

set off a round of warring that would involve almost every

country in Europe, from Sweden to Portugal, from the Low

Countries to Hungary, for a century and a quarter. The

Spanish-headed Holy Roman Empire was at the same time

heavily engaged in war with the Ottoman Turks until after

the defeat of the latter in the Mediterranean naval battle of

Lepanto in 1571. Portugal, with a population of fewer than

1.4 million,

was involved in protecting its world-circling

empire against opposition from both Christian and

Moslem rivals. France was Spain’s main adversary in the

struggle over Italy, the Netherlands and smaller European

principalities.

These wars imposed great manpower demands on every

one of the continental governments seeking at the same

time to establish colonial ventures. Belligerents who

could afford them sought to hire soldiers from other

countries. The bulk of Spain’s armies, for example, were

made up of foreign mercenaries.

Portugal, however,

lacking Spain’s access to American silver and gold to

maintain armies of foreign mercenaries, had to rely on its

own resources.

So critical was the resulting manpower

situation in 1648 that Antonio Vieira, the chief adviser to

King John IV, felt obliged to advocate the temporary

surrender of Brazil to Protestant Holland as the best way

out of the sea of troubles besetting the Portuguese interest

in Africa, Asia, America, and, indeed, vis-à-vis Portugal’s

Iberian neighbor. Portugal was so depleted of men for

defense, he said, that “every alarm” took “laborers from

the plough.”

Even if, despite this circumstance, a

ploughman did manage to get to Brazil, he was not to be

expected to do any manual labor there: “the Portuguese

who emigrated to Brazil, even if they were peasants from

the tail of the plough, had no intention of doing any manual

work.”

Bartolomé de Las Casas, concerned with the genocidal

exploitation of the native population by the Christian

colonizers in the West Indies, suggested that, “If

necessary, white and black slaves be brought from Castile

[Spain] to keep herds, build sugar mills, wash gold,” and

otherwise be of service to the colonists. In 1518, Las

Casas briefly secured favorable consideration from King

Carlos for a detailed proposal designed to recruit “quiet

peasants” in Spain for emigration to the West Indies. The

emigrants were to be transported free of charge from their

Spanish homes to the colonies. Once there, they were to be

“provided with land, animals, and farming tools, and also

granted a year’s supply of food from the royal granaries.”

But, again, these emigrant peasants were not expected to

do much labor. Rather they were to be provided with

slaves from Spain. It was specified that any emigrant who

offered to build a sugar mill in the Indies was to be

licensed to take twenty Negro slaves with him. With his

assistants, Las Casas toured Spain on behalf of the plan

and received a favorable response from the peasants he

wanted to recruit for the project. But as a result mainly of

the opposition of great landowners who feared the loss of

their tenants in such a venture, the plan was quickly

defeated.

Thus was defined official emigration policy; it

assured that Spaniards going to the American colonies

were not to be laborers, but such as lawyers and clerks,

and men (women emigrants were extremely few) of the

nobility or knighthood, who were “forbidden by force of

custom even to think of industry or commerce.”

A few

Spanish and Portuguese convicts, presumably of

satisfactory Christian ancestry, were transported to the

colonies early on, but they were not intended and

themselves did not intend to serve in the basic colonial

labor force.

The single instance in which basic plantation labor

needs were supplied from the Iberian population occurred

in 1493. In that year, two thousand Jewish children, eight

years old and younger, were taken from their parents,

baptized as Christians, and shipped to the newly founded

Portuguese island sugar colony of São Tomé, where fewer

than one-third were to be counted thirteen years later.
11
In Spain, seven years of plague and famine from 1596 to
1602, followed by the expulsion of 275,000 Christianized
Moors in a six-year period beginning in 1602,
12
  reduced
the population by 600,000 or 700,000, one-tenth of all the
inhabitants.
13
 Thus began a course of absolute population
decline that lasted throughout the seventeenth century.
14
 As
it  had  been  with  the  Jews  before,  the  expelled moriscos
were officially ineligible for emigration to the Americas,
since émigrés were required to prove several generations
of Catholic ancestry.
15
Holland
For the better part of a century up to the 1660s, Holland, in
the process of winning her independence from Spain in the
Eighty  Years’  War  (1568–1648),  was  the  leading
commercial  and  trading  country  of  Europe.  Holland’s
10,000 ships exceeded the total number held by the rest of
northern Europe combined.
16
 On this basis the new Dutch
Republic  developed  a  thriving  and  expanding  internal
economy. Large areas were diked and drained to increase
the  amount  of  cultivable  land.
17
  Up  until  1622,  Dutch
cities grew, some at a phenomenal rate; in that year, half
of  Holland’s  population  lived  in  cities  of  more  than
10,000 inhabitants.
18
 The population of Amsterdam alone

had  grown  to  105,000,  three  and  a  half  times  its  size  in
1585.
19
 These cities were expanding not from an influx of
displaced Dutch peasants, but because urban needs were
growing  faster  than  those  of  rural  areas,
20
  and  because
Holland’s  “obvious  prosperity  …  acted  as  a  lodestar  to
the  unemployed  and  the  underemployed  of  neighboring
countries.”
21
Although the casual laborer in Holland was frequently
out  of  work,  “unemployment  …  was  never  sufficiently
severe  to  induce  industrial  and  agricultural  workers  to
emigrate on an adequate scale to the overseas possessions
of  the  Dutch  East  and  West  India  Companies.”
22
  Those
who  did  decide  to  emigrate  to  find  work  “preferred  to
seek  their  fortune  in  countries  nearer  home.”
23
  Plans  for
enlisting  Dutch  peasant  families  for  colonizing  purposes
came to little, outside of the small settlement at the Cape
of  Good  Hope,  which  in  the  seventeenth  century  was
mainly  a  way  station  for  ships  passing  to  and  from  the
Dutch  East  Indies.
24
  As  far  as  the  East  Indies  were
concerned, it was never contemplated “that the European
peasant  should  cultivate  the  soil  himself.”  Rather,  he
would supervise the labor of others.
25
France
In  seventeenth-century  France  the  great  majority  of  the

peasants were holders of small plots scarcely large

enough to provide the minimum essentials for survival.

The almost interminable religious wars that culminated in

the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had ravaged much of the

country, and epidemic disease had greatly reduced the

population.

But while French poor peasants groaned

under the burden of feudal exactions, they were still bound

by feudal ties to the land;

they had not been “surplussed”

by sheep, as many peasants had been in Spain and

England.

The first successful French colonization efforts were

undertaken on the Bay of Fundy (1604) and at Quebec

(1608). The laborers for the colony’s upbuilding and

development were to be wage workers, transported at the

expense of the French government or other sponsoring

entity, and employed under three to five year contracts.

But New France was not destined to become a plantation

colony, indeed not even a primarily agricultural colony.

A century after these first Canadian settlements were

established, their population was only ten thousand,

including a few persons representing a soon-abandoned

notion of supplying the labor needs of Canadian colonies

from African sources.

Some time before the end of the

seventeenth century, the French government turned to the

idea of Christianizing and Gallicizing the Indians as a

means of peopling New France and developing a labor

force for it; that plan also failed, however, because the

Indians did not perceive sufficient advantage in such a

change in their way of living,

and they had the resources

and abilities to be able to fend off French pressure on the

tribal order. Indeed, until the establishment of the

Louisiana colony early in the eighteenth century, the entire

question of supplying labor for French agricultural

undertakings became irrelevant for North America.

French participation in the development of plantation

colonies was to occur in the West Indies and, as

mentioned, in Louisiana. Having begun with Martinique

and Guadeloupe in 1635, in 1697 the French capped a

series of Caribbean acquisitions by taking control from

Spain of the previously French-invested western half of

Hispaniola under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick.

the beginning, wage laborers called engagés, hired under

three-year contracts at rates four or five times those

prevailing in France, were shipped to serve the labor

needs of these colonies.

The supply of labor in this form

seems to have reached its peak, however, well before

1697. Although the total number of engagés is not known,

some 5,200 were shipped from La Rochelle, the chief

embarkation point, in the period 1660–1710, a rate of

around one hundred per year.

This was numerically

miniscule compared to the total number of imported

laborers, which was running at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000

per year in the latter half of this period.

The reasons for the relegation of engagé labor to

economic insignificance were both economic and

political.

The mortality rate among plantation laborers

on St Domingue, whatever their nativity, was such that

most did not survive three years.

However, the

obligation to pay relatively high wages to the engagés, be

their numbers large or small, coupled with the fact that the

French colonies had ready access to African labor

supplies, first through the Dutch and later from French

businessmen, made engagé labor relatively less

profitable, provided that the costs of social control of the

laboring population drawn from African sources could be

kept satisfactorily low.

Moreover, the need to recruit large French armies for

the wars first with Spain and then with England, and the

drain on revenues entailed in their support, rendered

politically inappropriate the export of engagés to the

French West Indies. Louis XIV finally forbade even the

forcible transportation of indigent persons to the American

colonies. His chief minister from 1661 to 1683, Jean

Baptiste Colbert, declared that he had no intention of

depopulating France in order to populate the colonies.

Other sources of labor

The Spanish and the Portuguese first looked to the native
populations  to  solve  their  colonial  labor  problem.  The
Spanish  did  so  with  such  spirit  that,  in  the  course  of  a
century  and  a  half  from  1503  to  1660,  they  tripled
Europe’s silver resources and added one-fifth to Europe’s
supply of gold.
38
 In the process, the fire-armed and steel-
bladed  Conquistadors  almost  completely  destroyed  the
indigenous population by introducing exotic diseases, and
by the merciless imposition of forced labor in gold mining
and in the fields. The native population of Hispaniola was
thus reduced from 1 million in 1492 to around twenty-six
thousand  in 1514, and to  virtual  extinction by  the end  of
the sixteenth century.
39
 The same  genocidal  labor regime
in  mines  and  fields  simultaneously  destroyed  the  native
population of Cuba at a comparable rate.
40
Epidemic European diseases – smallpox, measles, and
typhus – and forced labor under a system of encomienda
a nd repartimiento
41
  reduced  the  population  of  central
Mexico  from  13.9  million  in  1492  to  1.1  million  in
1605.
42
  The  impact  of  disease  and  of  the mita,
43
  the
equivalent  of  the  Mexican repartimiento,  was  equally
devastating  to  the  Indian  population  of Peru,  which  was
reduced from 9 million to 670,000 in 1620.
44
In Brazil, the Portuguese (and the Dutch as well, during
the life of the New Holland colony, 1630–54) also sought
to  recruit  their  labor  force  from  the  native  population.

However,  they  found  that,  while  the  people  “were
prepared to work intermittently for such tools and trinkets
as they fancied,” they were unwilling to work for them as
long-term agricultural laborers, or as bound-servants.
45
 In
the  test  of  wills  that  lasted  until  late  in  the  seventeenth
century, the indigenous population was largely successful
in avoiding reduction to slavery.
46
Thus for two opposite reasons – the accessibility of a
native  labor  force  that eventually  led  to  its  destruction,
and  the  inaccessibility  due  to  resistance  by  the  native
population  ensconced  in  dense  continental  forests  –  the
Iberians turned to Africa as a source of labor for colonial
America.  This  was  a  labor  reserve  with  which  they,  as
part  of  medieval  Europe  and  as  colonizers  of  Atlantic
islands,  were  already  somewhat  familiar.
47
  Medieval
Europe secured its slaves by trade with southern Russia,
Turkey,  the  Levant  and  the  eastern  coast  of  the Adriatic
Sea  (the  ethnic  name  Slav  is  the  root  of  the  various
Western  European  variations  of  the  word  “slave”),  as
well as by purchasing Negroes supplied by North African
Arab  merchants.
48
  Spain  enslaved  Moslem  “Moors”  in
border  regions  during  the “reconquista” wars  against the
Arab regime on the Iberian peninsula.
49
  In  the middle  of
the  fifteenth  century,  the  Portuguese  established  direct
access to African labor sources by successfully executing
a maritime end run around the North African Arabs.
50
 By

the  end  of  that  century  Portuguese  enterprise,  with  papal
blessing,
51
 had supplied twenty-five thousand Africans as
unpaid  laborers  to  Europe,  plus  one  thousand  to  São
Tomé,  and  seven  and  a  half  thousand  to  islands  in  the
Atlantic.
52
 In the sixteenth century the African proportion
of the slave population increased in Portugal and Spain. In
Lisbon,  a  city  of  100,000  people  in  1551,  there  were
9,950  slaves,  most  of  them Africans.  In  Seville  (1565),
Cadiz  (1616),  and  Madrid  (up  to  about  1660),  the  slave
population  included  Turks  and  Moors,  but  the  largest
number  were  Africans.
53
  During  the  very  early  days  of
American  colonization,  a  number  of  American  Indians
were shipped to be sold at a profit in Spain.
54
In  1518,  King  Charles  I  of  Spain,  acting  with  papal
sanction, authorized the supply to Spanish America of four
thousand Africans as bond-laborers, for which project he
awarded the contract to a favorite of his.
55
 This  was  the
origin  of  the  infamous Asiento  de  negros  (or  simply
Asiento,  as  it  came  generally  to  be  called),  a  license
giving  the  holder  the  exclusive  right  to  supply  African
laborers  to  Spanish  colonies  in  the  Americas  (and  to
Portuguese  Brazil  as  well  during  the  sixty  years,  1580–
1640,  when  Portugal  was  united  with  Spain  in  a  single
kingdom). At various times it was directly awarded by the
Spanish crown  to  individuals  or  to  governments  by state
treaty.  The Asiento  was  the  object  of  fierce  competition

among European powers, especially in the last half of the

seventeenth century. Allowing for brief periods of

suspension, it was held successively by Portugal, Holland,

and France, and passed finally to Britain as a part of the

spoils of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–14).

The

Asiento was finally ransomed from Britain for £100,000

in 1750.

Scholars’ estimates of the total number of Africans

shipped for bond-servitude in the Americas under the

Asiento and otherwise range from 11 to 15 million.

the 2,966,000 who disembarked in Anglo-America,

2,443,000 went to the British West Indies and 523,000 to

continental Anglo-America (including the United States).

Two other aspects of the matter seem to have been

slighted in previous scholarship: first, the significance of

this movement of labor in the “peopling” of the Americas;

and, second, the implications to be found in the story of

this massive transplantation of laborers for the history of

class struggle and social control in general in the

Americas.

I am not qualified to treat these subjects in any

comprehensive way, but I venture to comment briefly,

prompted by an observation made by James A. Rawley,

whose work I have cited a number of times:

The Atlantic slave trade was a great migration long ignored by historians.

Euro-centered, historians have lavished attention upon the transplanting of

Europeans. Every European ethnic group has had an abundance of

historians investigating its roots and manner of migration. The transplanting

of Africans is another matter … [that] belongs to the future.

As to the first of the questions – the African migration and

the “peopling” of the Americas – it is to be hoped that

among subjects that belong to the future historiography

invoked by Rawley, emphasis may be given to the degree

to which the migration (forced though it was) of 10 or 11

million Africans shaped the demographics of the Americas

as a whole. It is certain that more Africans than Europeans

came to the Americas between 1500 and 1800.

It would

seem that such a demographic assessment might add

strength to arguments that place the African-American and

the “Indian” in the center of the economic history of the

hemisphere, and in so doing sustain and promote the cause

of the dignity of labor in general. Such a demographic

assessment might be of service in responding to the cry for

justice for the Indians from Chiapas (from Las Casas to

Subcómmandante Marcos), or to an African-American

demand for reparations for unpaid bond-servitude; or in

assessing the claim of the “Unknown Proletarian,” in a

possibly wider sense than even he intended:

We have fed you all for a thousand years –

For that was our doom you know,

From the days when you chained us in your fields

To the strike of a week ago
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share;
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We have bought it fair.
62
Second,  with  regard  to  the  class  struggle  and  social
control in general in the Americas, attention will need to
be given to the  resistance  and rebellion practiced by the
African  bond-laborers  and  their  descendants,  from  the
moment of embarkation from the shores of Africa
63
 to the
years of maroon defiance in the mountains and forests of
America;
64
  from  the  quarry’s  first  start  of  alarm
65
  to  the
merger  of  the  emancipation  struggle  with  movements  for
national independence and democracy four hundred years
later.
66
Historically  most  significant  of  all  was  the  Haitian
Revolution – an abolition and a national liberation rolled
into one: it was the destruction of French rule in Haiti that
convinced  Emperor  Napoleon  to  see  and  cede  the
Louisiana territory (encompassing roughly all the territory
between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains)
to the United States, without which there would have been
no  United  States  west  of  the  Mississippi.  By  defeating
Napoleon’s plan to keep St Domingue in sugar plantation
slavery,  the  Haitian  Revolution ushered  in  an  era  of
emancipation  that  in  eighty-five  years  broke  forever  the

chains of chattel bondage in the Western Hemisphere –

from the British West Indies (1833–48), to the United

States (1865), to Cuba (1868–78), to Brazil (1871–78). It

was in Haiti that the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar,

twice found refuge and assistance when he had been

driven from Venezuela. Pledging to the Haitian president,

Pétion, that he would fight to abolish slavery, Bolivar

sailed from Haiti at the end of 1816 to break the colonial

rule of Spain in Latin America.

England and the Colonial Labor Supply

English colonialists were to share the motives and

aspirations felt by their counterparts looking westward

from the European continent: the search for uncontested

access to the fabled treasures of the East; the hope of

finding rich gold and silver mines; an eagerness to find

alternate sources of more mundane products such as hides,

timber, fish and salt; and the furtherance of strategic

interests vis-à-vis rival military and commercial powers

in the development of this new field of activity.

Much

would be said and proposed also in the name of the

defense of one Christian faith (of the Protestant variety in

the English case of course). But all endeavors, holy and

profane, were to be held in orbit by the gravitational field

of capital accumulation.

In regard to the problem of a colonial labor supply,

however, the situation of the English bourgeoisie was

unique; this was as a result of developments that are so

familiar to students of English history that a brief summary

will suffice in the present context. With the end of the

Wars of the Roses (1450–85), a convergence of

circumstances – some old, some new – launched the cloth-

making industry into its historic role as the transformer of

English economic life to the capitalist basis.

Principal

among these circumstances were: (1) the emergence of a

strong monarchy; (2) England’s relative isolation,

compared to the countries of continental Europe;

(3)

improved means of navigation, especially benefiting the

coastal shipping so well suited to the needs of an island

nation; (4) improved and extended use of water power for

cloth-fulling mills, and for other industrial purposes; and

(5) the rural setting of the cloth industry, outside the range

of the regulations of the urban-centred guilds.

The price of wool rose faster than the price of grain,

and the rent on pasture rose to several times the rent on

crop land.

The owners increased the proportion of

pasture at the expense of arable land. One shepherd and

flock occupied as much land as a dozen or score of

peasants could cultivate with the plough. Ploughmen were

therefore replaced by sheep and hired shepherds; peasants

were deprived of their copyhold and common-land rights,
while  laborers  on  the  lords’  demesne  lands  found  their
services  in  reduced  demand.  Rack-rents  and
impoverishing  leasehold  entry  fees  were  imposed  with
increasing  severity  on  laboring  peasants  competing  with
sheep for land. At the  beginning  of  the sixteenth century,
somewhere between one sixth and one third of all the land
in England belonged to abbeys, monasteries, nunneries and
other church enterprises. In the process of the dissolution
of the monasteries, most of the estimated 44,000 religious
and  lay  persons  attached  to  these  institutions  were  cast
adrift  among  the  growing  unemployed,  homeless
population.
73
  As  these  lands  were  expropriated,  under
Henry  VIII  the  process  of  conversion  to  pasture  was
promoted more vigorously than it had been by their former
owners.
74
 Henry VIII’s return of 48,000 English soldiers
in 1546 from a two-year turn in Boulogne tended further to
the creation of a surplus proletariat.
75
 The effect was only
partially  offset  by  the  participation  of  regular  and
volunteer  English  soldiers  in  the  Dutch  war  for  the
independence of Holland from Spain later in the century,
and by  the Tyrone War in Ireland.
76
  Generally  speaking,
the  sixteenth  century  was  relatively  free  of  war  and
plague.
77
 The population of England is estimated to have
grown  by  1.3  million  in  the  last  six  decades  of  the
sixteenth  century,  to  4.1  million,  but  by  only  another 0.9

million in the entire seventeenth century.
78
 Occurring at a
time  when  employment  in  cultivation  was  being  reduced
more rapidly than it was being increased in sheep raising
and industry, this demographic factor added substantially
to the swelling surplus of the semi-proletarian and vagrant
population.
79
 During the early decades of the seventeenth
century, the oppressive effects of this catastrophic general
tendency  to increasing  unemployment and  vagrancy were
exacerbated  by  purely political  and  cyclical factors,  and
by market disruptions occasioned by continental wars. In
1614–17,  James  I  –  enticed  by  Alderman  Cockayne’s
scheme whereby  the  Crown  coffers  were  to be  enriched
by five shillings on each of 36,000 pieces of finished and
dyed  cloth  to be  exported  annually  –  imposed  extremely
strict limitations  on  the export  of unfinished  cloth.
80
  The
effect  was  a  serious  dislocation  of  trade,  and  mass
unemployment in the cloth industry. English cloth exports
fell until in 1620 they were only half the pre-1614 level.
81
The  man  who  had  been  serving  for  some  time  as
treasurer  and  chief  officer  of  the  Virginia  Company,
Edwin  Sandys,  urged  the  colony’s  cause  by  pointing  out
that  in  Britain,  “Looms  are  laid  down.  Every  loom
maintains forty persons. The farmer is not able to pay his
rent. The fairs and markets stand still …”
82
 Recovery was
slow. In 1624, an investigating committee of the House of
Commons  reported  that  there  were  still  twelve  thousand

unemployed cloth workers.

A modern scholar has

concluded that the next decade did not mark much

improvement, noting that the proportion of the people

receiving poor relief was greater in the 1631–40 period

than at any other time before or since.

East Anglia, the

native region of most of the emigrants to Anglo-America

in those years, was at that time especially hard hit by a

depression in the cloth trade.

The English case for colonization came thus to be

distinguished from those of Spain, Portugal, France, and

Holland in its advocacy of colonization as a means of

“venting” the nation’s surplus of “necessitous people” into

New World plantations.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

favored colonization as a way to “disburthen the land of

such inhabitants as may well be spared.” Just who those

were who could be spared had been identified some time

before by the premier advocate of overseas exploration

and settlement, Richard Hakluyt (1552?-1616): it was the

surplus proletarians who should be sent. Contrasting

England with the continental countries interminably

devouring their manpower in wars and their train of

disease and pestilence, Hakluyt pointed out that “[t]hrough

our long peace and seldom sickness wee are growen more

populous … (and) there are of every arte and science so

many, that they can hardly lyve by one another.” Richard

Johnson, in his promotional pamphlet Nova Britannia,

noted that England abounded “with swarmes of idle

persons … having no meanes of labour to releeve their

misery.” He went on to prescribe that there be provided

“some waies for their forreine employment” as English

colonists in America.

Commenting on the peasant

uprising in the English Midlands in 1607, the House of

Lords expressed the belief that unless war or colonization

“vent” the daily increase of the population, “there must

break out yearly tumours and impostures as did of late.”

The English Variation and the “Peculiar

Institution”

The conjunction of the matured colonizing impulse, the

momentarily favorable geopolitical constellation of

powers, the English surplus of unemployed and

underemployed labor, coupled with the particular native

demographic and social factors as the English found them

in Virginia, and the lack of direct English access to

African labor sources, produced that most portentous and

distinctive factor of English colonialism: of all the

European colonizing powers in the Americas, only

England used European workers as basic plantation

workers. This truly “unthinking decision,”

or, more

properly, historical accident, was of incidental importance

in the ultimate deliberate Anglo-American ruling class

option for racial oppression. Except for this peculiarity,

racial slavery as it was finally and fully established in

continental America, with all of its tragic historical

consequences, would never have been brought into being.

Essential as this variation in the English plantation

labor supply proved to be for the emergence of the Anglo-

American system of racial slavery, however, it was not

the cause of racial oppression in Anglo-America. The

peculiarity of the “peculiar institution” did not derive from

the fact that the labor needs of Anglo-American plantation

colonies came to the colonies in the chattel-labor form.

Nor did it inhere in the fact that the supply of lifetime,

hereditary bond-laborers was made up of non-Europeans

exclusively. These were common characteristics

throughout the plantation Americas.

The peculiarity of the “peculiar institution” derived,

rather, from the control aspect; yet not merely in its

reliance upon the support of the free non-owners of bond-

labor, as buffer and enforcer against the unfree proletariat;

for that again was a general characteristic of plantation

societies in America.

The peculiarity of the system of social control which

came to be established in continental Anglo-America lay

in the following two characteristics: (1) all persons of any

degree of non-European ancestry were excluded from the

buffer social control stratum; and (2) a major,

indispensable, and decisive factor of the buffer social

control stratum maintained against the unfree proletarians

was that it was itself made up of free proletarians and

semi-proletarians.

How did this monstrous social mutation begin, evolve,

survive and finally prevail in continental Anglo-America?

That is the question to be examined in the chapters that

follow.

English Background, with Anglo-

American Variations Noted

The same economic, social, and technological

developments in sixteenth-century England that supplied

the material means for the final overthrow of Celtic

Ireland in the Tyrone War (1594–1603) provided the

impetus that launched England on its career as a world

colonial power. The capitalist overthrow of the English

peasantry in the first half of the sixteenth century was the

forerunner of the destruction of the Celtic tribal system in

the seventeenth. The expropriated and uprooted sixteenth-

century English copyholders had their counterparts in the

“kin-wrecked” remnants of broken Irish tribes reduced to

tenantry-at-will and made aliens in their own country.

But while the adventitious factor of the English

Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century was a

decisive condition for the seventeenth-century English

option for racial oppression in Ireland, it was not the force

that shaped the events that culminated in the establishment

of racial oppression in continental Anglo-America.

Rather, the system of class relations and social control

that emerged in the colonies in the seventeenth century

rested on the rejection in fundamental respects of the

pattern established in England in the sixteenth century.

With few exceptions, historians of the origin of racial

slavery have generally ignored, or inferentially denied, the

significance of this oceanic disjunction in social patterns.

The “social control” approach which the present work

takes to the origin and nature of “the peculiar institution”

makes it necessary to revisit the epoch of English history

that produced the founders of Jamestown.

On the Matter of “Transitions”

Many economic historians, taking the long view, have

agreed with Adam Smith that the transition to capitalist

agriculture in England in the sixteenth century was “a

revolution of the greatest importance to public

happiness.”

At the threshold of the sixteenth century,

however, the English copyholder, plowing the same land

that his grandfather had plowed with the same plow,
4
 had
little feeling for “transitions.” If it had been given to him
to speak in such terms, he might well have made his case
on  historical  grounds.  It  was  the laboring  people  –  the
copyholders, freeholders, serfs, artisans and wage earners
– and not the bourgeoisie, who had swept away the feudal
system.  Out  of  the  workings  of  the  general  fall  in
agricultural prices in the period between the third quarters
of  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries  as  a  result  of
which  landlords  preferred  to  get  cash  rents  rather  than
rents in produce; out of the shortage of labor induced by
the worst-ever onset of plague in England, which, within a
space of sixteen months in 1349–50 carried off from one-
fifth  to  one-half  of  the  population;
5
  out  of  the  constant
round  of  bloody  and  treacherous  baronial  wars  for  state
hegemony (ended only with the Wars of the Roses, 1450–
85), and the desultory Hundred Years’ War with France,
1336–1453;  and, above  all, out  of  the Peasant  Revolt of
1381,  Wat  Tyler’s  Rebellion,
6
  which  drew  a  line  in  the
ancient soil beyond which feudal claims would never be
reasserted – thus had been wrought the end of the feudal
order in England. And so occurred the English peasant’s
Golden Age,
7
 wherein the self-employed laboring peasant,
as  freeholder,  leaseholder,  or  copyholder,  held
ascendancy in English agriculture.
8
Our  copyholder  might  then  go  on  to  say  that  now  the

bourgeoisie, burgesses, landlords, merchants and such

were apparently attempting to destroy the peasantry; and if

that was what was meant by transition to capitalism, the

price was too high.

And he would conclude with a

reminder and a warning: he – his kith and kin – had fought

once, and would fight again, to maintain their place on the

land and in it.

Fight they did. Between 1500 and 1650, “hardly a

generation … elapsed without a peasant uprising.” In local

fence-destroying escapades, in large riots, and in

rebellions of armed forces of thousands which “at

intervals between 1530 and 1560 set half the counties of

England in a blaze,”

the English “commons” fought. In

some cases they were allies of the anti-Reformation,

sensing the connection between the Reformation and the

agrarian changes that threatened the majority of the

peasantry. Even then, the peasants still forwarded their

own demands regarding land ownership and use,

enclosures, rack-rents, etc. Years that their revolts have

made memorable include 1536, 1549, 1554, 1569 and

1607.

In these struggles the peasants made clear their sense of

the great heart of the matter; in the words of Tawney:

Reduced to its elements their complaint is a very simple one, very ancient

and very modern. It is that … their property is being taken away from

them … [and] to them it seems that all the trouble arises because the rich

have been stealing the property of the poor.
12
For  this  they  fought  in  the  northern  rebellion  of  1536,
known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
13
 This revolt, set off by
Henry  VIII’s  suppression  of  monasteries,  confronted  that
king  with  the  greatest  crisis  of  his  reign.
14
  Although
ecclesiastical  issues  united  the  movement,  “the  first
demands  of  the  peasants  were  social  and  not  religious”;
for  them  it  was  a  class  struggle  “of  the  poor  against  the
rich,”  and  their  demands  “against  raised  rents  and
enclosures”  were  included  in  the  program  of  the
movement.
15
The  peasants  fought  again  in  1549,  climaxing  a  three-
year  period  of  “the  greatest  popular  outcry  against
enclosing.”
16
 In that year, peasant revolts spread to more
than  half  the  counties  of  England.  Led  by  Robert  Ket,
himself  a  landowner,  a  rebel army  of  sixteen  thousand
peasants captured Norwich, England’s second-largest city.
They set up their “court” on Mousehold Heath outside the
city,  where  they  maintained  their  cause  for  six  weeks.
17
They  demanded  that  “lords,  knights,  esquires,  and
gentlemen”  be  stopped  from  commercial  stock-raising,
and rent-gouging, and from privatizing common lands. We
can  agree  with  Bindoff  that  this  was  “a  radical
programme, indeed, which would have clipped the wings
of rural capitalism.”
18

The peasants fought also in 1607, the very year of the

founding of Jamestown. These were the peasants of the

Midland counties. Thousands, armed with bows and

arrows, with pikes and bills, and with stones, sought

justice by their own direct action. The later use of the term

“Levellers,” though more figurative, still was socially

congruent with the literal sense in which these Midland

rebels applied it to themselves as “levellers” of fences

and hedges set up by the landlords to bar peasants from

their ancient rights of common land. To the royal demand

that they disperse, they defiantly replied that they would

do so only if the king “wolde promis to reforme those

abuses.”

The peasants fought, but in the end they could not stop

the “rich … stealing the property of the poor.” Small

landholders constituted the majority of the laboring

population in English agriculture at the end of the fifteenth

century,

but by the end of the seventeenth century more

than four-fifths of the land was held by capitalist

employers of wage-labor.

Well before that time, the

majority of the English people were no longer self-

employed peasants but laborers dependent upon wages.

Not only were they to be dependent upon wages, making

crops and cloth that they would never own, but at wages

lower than they had ever been. In the course of the

sixteenth century the real wages of English laborers fell

into an abyss from which they would not emerge until the

end of the nineteenth century.

As a typical peasant, “Day

labourer was now [his or her] full description … and the

poor cottager[s] could expect only seasonal employment at

a wage fixed by the justice of the peace.”

One-fourth of

the people of England in the 1640s were but “housed

beggars,” the term used by Francis Bacon to distinguish

them from wandering roadside mendicants.

“Why No Upheaval?”

“Why did it not cause an upheaval?” That is a logically

compelling question which some historians have posed in

light of their findings regarding the general deterioration

wrought upon the lives of the laboring population during

the “long” sixteenth century, 1500–1640.

The same

question, but in a form more particularly suited to this

present study, is, “How did the English bourgeoisie

maintain social control?”

In establishing its dominance over the pillaged and

outraged peasantry, the English bourgeoisie did, of course,

meet rebellion with armed repression (generally after

deceitful “negotiations” designed to divide the opposition

and to buy time for the mobilization of government

military forces). Having traditionally no standing army, the

government employed German and Italian mercenaries on

some occasions, along with men recruited from the

personal retinues of the nobility. But foreign mercenaries,

however important they might have been in certain critical

moments, for fiscal and political reasons could not supply

the basic control functions on a regular basis. And the very

economic transformation that brought the laboring masses

of the countryside to revolt was simultaneously reducing

the ranks of the retainers whom the nobility might

profitably maintain for such ongoing repressive services.

Saving a portion of the yeomanry

The solution was found by deliberately fostering a lower-

middle-class stratum. It was in the nature of the capitalist

Agrarian Revolution that non-aristocrats rose out of the

ranks of the bourgeoisie into the highest councils and

organs of power, to serve side by side with the

increasingly bourgeoisified old-line aristocrats. Likewise,

lower and local functions at the shire level were filled by

men from the ranks of the lesser bourgeois country

gentlemen and exceptionally upwardly mobile peasants

turned capitalist farmers, who might buy into a knighthood.

But yet another layer was needed, which would be of

sufficient number to stand steadfast between the gentry and

the peasants and laborers.

But the juggernaut of the Agrarian Revolution threatened

the land titles of the laboring peasants of all categories,

from those with hereditary freeholds through all the

gradations of tenants to the “customary” tenant-at-will.

The state therefore made a political decision to preserve a

sufficient proportion of peasants – preference going

naturally, but not exclusively, to hereditary freehold

tenants – as a petit bourgeois yeomanry (typified by the

classic “forty-shilling freeholder”

) to serve in militia

and police functions.

The case has not been better understood or stated than it

was by Francis Bacon, looking back at close range in

1625 to write his History of the Reign of King Henry VII

(1485–1509):

Another statute was made for the … soldiery and militar[y] forces of the

realm.… That all houses of husbandry, that were used with twenty acres of

ground and upwards, should be maintained and kept up for ever; together

with a competent proportion of land to be used and occupied by them; and in

no wise severed from them (as by another statute in his successor’s [Henry

VIII’s] time was more fully declared).… This did wonderfully concern the

might and mannerhood of the kingdom, to have farms of a standard,

sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury, and did in effect amortise

a great part of the lands of the kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the

yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers

or peasants.… For to make good infantry, it requireth men bred not in a

servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner. Therefore

if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandmen and

ploughmen be but as their work folks and labourers, or else mere cottagers

(which are but housed beggars), you may have a good cavalry, but never

good stable bands of foot [soldiers].… Thus did the King secretly sow

Hydra’s teeth whereupon (according to the poet’s fiction) should rise up

armed men for the service of this kingdom.

Bacon likened the process of expropriation of the peasants

to the necessary thinning of a stand of timber, whereby all

but a few trees are cleared away to allow sound growth of

the rest for future needs. By this policy, he said, England

would escape certain ills besetting the governments of

other countries such as France and Italy

[w]here in effect all is noblesse or peasantry (I speak of people out of

towns), and therefore no middle people; and therefore no good forces of

foot; in so much as they are enforced to employ mercenary bands of

Switzers and the like for their foot [soldiers].

Here was the recognition of the curbs that policy must

sometimes impose on blind economic forces, restraining

“the invisible hand” in order to avoid promoting “an end

which was no part of [the] intention” of the ruling class.

It was in the nature of the transformation powered by the

capitalist Agrarian Revolution that the non-aristocratic

bourgeois gentry should move increasingly into the control

of affairs. On the other hand, the deliberate preservation of

a portion of economically independent self-employed and

laboring small property-owners was not an economic

necessity but rather a first derivative of the economic

necessities, a political necessity for the maintenance of

bourgeois social control, upon which the conduct of the

normal process of capitalist accumulation depended.

(Even so, it was not a total loss economically, since the

yeoman was a self-provider and a principal source of tax

revenue.)

The inner conflicts of the bourgeoisie, the conflicts with

self in its own various parts – now the governors of a

strife-torn nation among striving nations; and, again, as

land-grabbing, rack-renting landlords, gentry, merchants,

squires, and occasional interloping peasant upstarts, “like

tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for

themselves,” as Bacon put it

– caused this basic policy

to evolve by vicissitudes. But the center held: the same

guiding principle obtained when Bacon wrote his history

of Henry VII’s reign that been in force more than a century

before.

The successful day-to-day operation of the social order

of the newly ascendant bourgeoisie depended upon the

supervisory and enforcement functions performed at the

parish level by yeoman constables, church wardens,

Overseers of the Poor, jailers, directors of houses of

correction, etc.

They were charged with serving legal

orders and enforcing warrants issued by magistrates or

higher courts. They arrested vagrants, administered the

prescribed whippings on these vagrants’ naked backs, and

conveyed them to the boundary of the next parish,

enforcing their return to their home parishes. As Overseers

of the Poor, they ordered unemployed men and women to

the workhouses and apprenticed poor children without

their parents’ leave. Trial juries were generally composed

of yeomen, and they largely constituted the foot soldiery of

the militia, the so-called “trained bands.” They discharged

most of these unpaid obligations unenthusiastically, but

with a sense of duty appropriate to their social station.

Nevertheless, prior to the Great Rebellion and Civil War

of the mid-seventeenth century, yeomen militiamen

showed themselves less than reliable for major armed

clashes with peasants. In Ket’s Rebellion they were left

behind when the final assault was made by the king’s

forces of cavalry and one thousand foreign mercenaries.

And, on account of the “great backwardness in the trained

bands,” the king’s commanders were constrained to rely

exclusively on the gentlemen cavalry and their own

personal employees in the battle against one thousand

peasant rebels at Newton in the Midlands in 1607.

Yeomen did enjoy certain special privileges. For one,

they were entitled to vote for their shire’s member of

Parliament. Of far more substantial importance was their

right to apprentice their sons to lucrative trades and

commerce, and to send their sons to schools and

universities.

But like the civic duties to which they were

assigned, these privileges were theirs because, and only

because, of their property status. It never occurred to the

ruling classes of England that they could enlist such a

cheap yet effective social control force from the ranks of

the propertyless classes, the housed beggars, laborers and

cottagers, or the vagabonds. That notion would await the

coming of the Anglo-American continental colonies.

The “Labor Question”: Conflict and

Resolution

The ruling class effected the same balance of class policy

and the blind instinctual drive for maximum immediate

profits by its individual parts in regard to the costs of

employment of propertyless laborers.

In the century and a half, 1350–1500, following the

great plague, it had been seen that no amount of legislation

could keep down labor costs where labor was in short

supply. Laws designed to prevent laborers from moving

about in search of higher wages, and laws fixing penalties

for paying or receiving wages in excess of statutory

maximums, were equally ineffective in restraining wages.

Half a dozen such laws were passed in that period,

but

by its end the laborer’s real wage was nearly thrice what

it had been at its beginning.

The objective might have

been accomplished if it had been possible to reimpose

serfdom, but the landlord class no longer had the power to

do so.

But the emergence of a massive labor surplus in the

early decades of the sixteenth century presented the

employing classes with an opportunity which they were

quick to exploit for regulating labor costs. At a certain

point it occurred to the government to redress the

imbalance by instituting slave labor. Parliament

accordingly in 1547 enacted a law, 1 Edw. VI 3, which

would have had the effect of creating a marginal, yet

substantial, body of unpaid bond-labor, to serve as an

anchor on the costs of paid labor. Refusing to recognize

the legitimacy of the offspring of their own agrarian

revolution, the ruling class presumed that every

unemployed person was merely another “vagabond,”

willfully refusing to work and thus frustrating the proper

establishment of fair wages. The 1547 law sought remedy

along the following lines:

who so ever … man or woman [being able-bodied and not provided with the

prescribed property income exemption] shall either like a serving man

wanting [lacking] a maister or lyke a Begger or after anny other such sorte

be lurking in anny howse or howses or loytringe or Idelye wander[ing] by

the high waies syde or in stretes, not applying them self to soem honnest and

allowed art, Scyence, service or Labour, and so do contynew by the space

of three dayes or more to gither and offer them self to Labour with anny

that will take them according to their facultie, And yf no man otherwise will

take them, doe not offer themself to work for meate and drynk … shall be

taken for a Vagabonde …

Any person found to be transgressing the provisions of the

law, upon information provided to a magistrate by any

man, was upon conviction to be formally declared a

“vagabond,” branded with a V, and made a slave for a

period of two years to the informant. The slave was to be

fed only bread and water and, at the owner’s discretion,

such scraps as the owner might choose to throw to the

slave. The law specified that the slave was to be driven to

work by beating, and held to the task by chaining, no

matter how vile the work assignment might be. Such a

two-year slave who failed in a runaway attempt was to be

branded with an S and made a slave for life to the same

owner from whom he or she had tried to escape. A second

unsuccessful attempt to escape was to be punished by

death.

This was not just one of the many anti-vagabond laws

enacted by the English Parliament in the sixteenth

century;

it was distinguished from others by three

features: (1) the definition of “vagrancy” was extended to

cover any unemployed worker refusing to work for mere

board; (2) the beneficiary of the penalty was not the state

in any of its parts, but private individual owners of those

who were enslaved; (3) the enslaved persons were

reduced to chattels of the owners, like cattle or sheep, and

as such they could be bought, sold, rented, given away,

and inherited (“as any other movable goodes or

Catelles”).

With this 1547 law, the quest for wage

control had passed its limits in a double sense, by going to

zero wages, and by exceeding the limits of practicability.

In 1550, Parliament repealed the law, citing as a reason

the fact that “the good and wholesome laws of the realm

have not been put in execution because of the extremity of

some of them.”

Many contemporary observers perceived the causal

connection of the officially deplored depopulating

enclosures of arable land and the growth of vagrancy, and

they viewed the case of the displaced peasants and

laborers with sympathy. “Whither shall they go?” asked

one anguished commentary. “Forth from shire to shire, and

to be scattered thus abroad … and for lack of masters, by

compulsion driven, some of them to beg and to steal.”

During the life of the slave law, bold, honest preacher

Bernard Gilpin made the point in a sermon in the presence

of Edward VI himself: “Thousands in England beg now

from door to door who have kept honest houses.”

There were those who considered such facts a

justification for slavery as a means of saving these victims

of expropriation from running further risks to their very

souls, by the sin of idleness. But a widespread reluctance

to attempt slavery as the answer seems to have had much

to do with the paralysis of the will that kept the law from

being “put in execution.”

The interval between the passage and the repeal of this

slave law was also the period of “the greatest popular

outcry against enclosing,”

which, as we have noted, took

the form of mass peasant revolts, culminating in Ket’s

Rebellion. John Cheke, scholar, member of Parliament and

former tutor of Edward VI, lectured the Norfolk rebels on

“The Hurt of Sedition,” linking their contumacy with the

spirit of lawless vagabondage plaguing the country.

Certainly the rebels were as aware as anyone else of the

connection between the threat they were facing, that of

depopulating enclosures, and the rise of vagrancy. But

there seem to be no reports as to the attitude, if any, that

the rebels may have held towards vagrancy in general, or

toward the slave law of 1547 in particular. Perhaps we

may agree with Davies in seeing this fact as evidence that

the law was effectively defunct in 1549.

In any case, the

Ket rebels evinced no disposition to clear their skirts of

the splatters of John Cheke’s vagabond-baiting.

What they did say, touching bondage, was this: “We

pray  that  all  bondmen  may  be  made  free,  for  God  hath
made all  free  with his precious bloodshedding.”
54
  There
has  been  some  conjecture  about  the  significance  of  the
inclusion  of  this  demand  in  the  program  issued  from
Mousehold  Heath.
55
  Whatever  scholars  may  finally
conclude  on  the  point,  it  was  a  demand  that  sounded  in
sharp  dissonance  to  the  cruel  clanking  of  chains  in  the
1547 slave law. The rebels were, furthermore, voicing the
main  moral  scruple  which  contributed  so  much  to  the
nullification of the law: namely that it was wrong “to have
any Christen man bound to another.”
56
“Doubtless,  moral  scruples  could  have  been
overcome,”  Davies  says,  “if  slavery  had  been  practical
and profitable.”
57
 He explains that “dealing with a single
slave  or  a  small  number  …  slavery  would  have  been
utterly  uneconomic;  the  constant  driving,  the  continuous
need to  check  into  the  work  done,  the  ease of  flight,  the
difficulty  of  recapture,  easily  outweigh  any  advantage
which might have accrued from ‘cheap labor.’ ” He then
takes note of a fact that is of particular relevance for the
understanding  of  racial  slavery  and  social  control.  He
contrasts the situation as it would have obtained under the
1547 law in England and the slavery system in continental
Anglo-America,  which  was  operable  only  because  “half
the population of the South [was] employed in seeing that
the other half do their work.”
58
 The maintenance of such a

system of  social  control  was  neither  an  economically
valid  option  nor  a  necessary  resort  of  bourgeois  social
control in sixteenth-century England. In this attempt to turn
“anti-vagabondism”  into  a  paying  proposition  by
enslaving  laborers,  the  bourgeoisie  found  that  its  reach
exceeded its grasp. When in 1558–59 diehards proposed
that the old slave law be reinstated, even with amendments
to lessen its “extremity,” the idea failed of adoption.
59
Wages had to be paid, low though they were
The  slave-law  experiment  had  revealed  to  the  English
employing classes a limit beyond which they could not go,
but  they  were  not  disposed  to  miss  the  opportunity  to
validate  their  prerogative  to  control  labor  costs  by  state
intervention.
60
  The  result  was  the  Statute  of Artificers,
61
which was made law on 10 April 1563.
62
 Whether the aim
of controlling labor costs was achieved by this act, and, if
so to what degree, is a subject beyond the concern of this
present work.
63
 What is significant is that it remained the
basic English master-servant law for more than two and a
half centuries until its repeal in 1813.
64
 It represented the
achievement  of  an  historic  equilibrium  –  after  two
centuries  of  class  struggle,  blow  and  counter-blow  –
between  high  wages  and  unpaid  bondage,  between
freedom  and  compulsion,  in  the  disposition  of  alienable

labor power.

English historians of the liberal, labor and socialist

tendencies have correctly emphasized the compulsion

aspect of the Statute of Artificers.

This emphasis would

seem to be altogether appropriate for the study of the

continuum of English national development. But when one

comes to consider Anglo-American history, particularly

during the crucial seventeenth century, special concern

needs to be directed to the limits of compulsion under the

Statute of Artificers, to that counter-balancing residue of

freedom of labor which experience had shown to be

necessary for the maintenance of social control in England

in order that the process of normal capitalist accumulation

might go forward. Consider briefly the relevant provisions

of the Statute of Artificers in terms of a compulsion-

versus-freedom analysis.

Any unpropertied, unemployed, unapprenticed man

between the ages of twelve and sixty was obliged to work

at farm labor by the year in his locality for any farmer

requiring his services. But he had to be paid the

established wages. Equally significant, recalling the law

of 1547, the 1563 Statute of Artificers put the onus on the

employers to offer employment, rather than on the workers

to find employment, before the penalties of vagrancy could

be imposed upon the worker.

Workers who entered into contract to perform specific

works were compelled to continue in them, without

leaving to seek other employment, until that job was

finished, on penalty of a month in jail and, in some cases,

being liable to a suit (in “Action of Debt”) by the

employer for damages amounting to five pounds sterling.

But the punishment entailed no extension of service to the

private employer, and the employer had no further

recourse than the debt action.

Workers bound to serve by the year were subject to a

penalty of thirty days in jail for leaving their employers’

service before the completion of their terms. But they

could terminate their employment legally by giving three

months’ notice prior to the scheduled completion of their

terms. If a person wished to go outside his own parish or

town to take a job, he had first to secure from the

authorities a formal written testimonial from the town

authorities. If such a worker failed to present such a

testimonial when taking a job outside his own town or

parish, he was to be given twenty-one days to obtain the

needed testimonial, being held in jail the while. Upon

failure to secure the testimonial within that time, he was

“to be whipped and used as a Vagabond.”

Male youths were indentured as apprentices to

employers, usually for seven years, but sometimes for

longer periods. No person might, without prohibitive

penalty, practice any trade without having completed the

appropriate apprenticeship. Therefore, the more lucrative

the prospective trade, the greater was the incentive and the

less the compulsion involved in the recruitment of

apprentices. In the more remunerative occupations,

apprenticeship was restricted to sons of men already in the

trade, or to owners of property yielding an annual revenue

of two or three pounds. For more common trades, there

were no property or family qualifications, but the number

of apprentices might be limited to a quota of one

apprentice to one journeyman, after an initial quota of

three to one. For “Apprenticeship to Husbandry

[farming],” however, there were no restrictions except as

to age, and it had generally more the aspect of

impressment than selection of a career. Under a policy

conceived “for the better Advancement of Husbandry and

Tillage,” any male between the ages of ten and eighteen

and “fit” for such employment was obliged to enter into an

“indenture” to serve as a “husbandry apprentice” to any

farmer who required him for that purpose, for a term

lasting until the youth reached twenty-one years of age at

least, and possibly until he was twenty-four, depending

upon the terms of the individual arrangement.

Refusal to serve as an apprentice was punishable by

commitment to jail until the culprit was placed under bond

to assure compliance. An apprentice was forbidden to

marry without the employer’s consent. He was a member

of the employer’s household and was obliged to obey the

employer in any legal command.

It would seem therefore that, observing the limits of the

law of 1547, the English bourgeoisie had decided – as far

as male workers were concerned – to venture no further in

that direction than the terms prescribed for Apprenticeship

to Husbandry. Whatever the apprentice’s infractions of the

terms of the apprenticeship, his punishment for them

entailed no extension of his time of service. If the proper

authorities approved, in special circumstances and if the

apprentice consented, he might be assigned to another

master.

The apprentice could be freed from his service

before the end of his term upon a validated complaint

made to the authorities (magistrates, mayors, etc.) of ill-

treatment or of misuse, including failure to provide

instruction in the trade as agreed upon in the indenture.

Finally, any woman of the laboring class, between the

ages of twelve and forty, being unmarried and “forth of

work” (unemployed) was compellable to serve by the

year, week, or day in any “reasonable” sort of work and at

such wage rates as any two magistrates or aldermen, or the

mayor, having local jurisdiction might assign for her.

Upon refusal so to serve, the woman was to be held in jail

“until she shall be bounded to serve.” Even if impressed

for labor, she was to be paid wages. At least as far as this

law was concerned, there was no impediment to her

marrying and chancing thereby whatever better escape

such a course might afford.

The oppressive intent of the Statute of Artificers was

obvious on the face of it. In a situation made especially

difficult by the oversupply of labor, workers were

compelled to work for whatever the employing class,

through the magistrates, chose to offer, and to forgo any

improvement through individual or collective bargaining.

By both its general and its apprenticeship provisions, the

statute consigned the generality of the wage-earning

population to agricultural labor. Women workers were

excluded from apprenticeship and made to serve in the

lowest-paid drudgery. The severest censures of the anti-

vagabond laws were threatened against the worker who

sought to move from one place to another to improve his

lot, unless he bore the magistrate’s certificate of

permission. Yet oppressive as that law was, neither its

contrivers nor its victims would have believed that within

several short generations, in a “New Albion,”

English

workers would be worked as unpaid chattel bondmen and

bondwomen, bought and sold from hand to hand for long

terms of years, subject, for infraction, to extensions of that

servitude for private owners; denied the right to marry,

their children “bastards” by definition – and that such

would be the common lot (not a real apprentice in a

hundred) under “the custom of the country!”

The Poor Law as Social Control

A third major problem of social control – after the peasant

revolts and labor relations – arose out of the mass

pauperization wrought by the Agrarian Revolution. The

presence of a set of persons having no fixed abode was

not a new phenomenon in England. But prior to the

sixteenth century it was more likely to be associated with

a shortage of labor, leading laborers to slip their villein

bonds to take better offers from new employers. The

vagrancy problem of the sixteenth century, by contrast,

was associated with a protracted general decline of

wages, and with a stubborn struggle by laboring people to

maintain their rights to stay on their land.

The extent of this “structural unemployment,” as it

would be called today, is not statistically verifiable,

but

it cannot be doubted that its appearance presented the state

with serious difficulties. It was fundamental; a by-product

of the vitality of ascendant capitalism. It was intimately

linked with the resistance of the copyholders to

expropriation of their lands. In the words of Queen

Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Lord Burghley, the problem

arose from “the depopulating of whole towns … and

keeping of a shepherd only, whereby many subjects are

turned without habitation and fill the country with rogues

and idle persons.”

The repeal of the 1547 slave law (1 Edw. VI 3), after

three years of ineffectualness, marked the first glimmer of

official acknowledgement that unemployment was not

synonymous with willful idleness, vagabondage and

roguery. A series of laws still sought to draw a significant

distinction between the “impotent poor,” who were to be

relieved, and the “sturdy beggars.”

The former were to

be certified and provided for by propertied persons of

their parishes. But the “sturdy beggars” were still to be

subject to whipping, to transportation to their home

parishes, and, in some cases, to exile or hanging as felons.

But the threat to the orderly transaction of affairs

continued. “All parts of this realm of England and Wales,”

said Parliament in 1572, “be presently with rogues,

vagabonds, and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered … to

the great annoyance of the common weal.”

They had

become so emboldened by their desperate plight that in

1580 they even pressed their clamor upon the Queen

personally “one evening as she was riding abroad to take

the air.”

“Many thousands of idle persons are within this realm,”

warned Hakluyt in 1584, “which, haveing no way to be

sett on worke, be either mutinous and seeke alteration in

the state, or at least [are] very burthensome to the

commonwealthe.”

Two years later, another observer

expressed fear that a surfeit of paupers must lead to

“divers kinds of wrongs, mutinies, sedition, commotion, &

rebellion.”

A royal decree of 1593 demanded stricter enforcement

of the laws against the multitudes of rootless people who

were wandering the highways, begging and extorting relief

from the more prosperous persons they encountered. It

was said that many of the predators were military and

naval veterans “exacting money on pretense of service in

the wars.”

In time the government came to see, as Nicholls, the

pre-eminent student of the Poor Law, puts it, that “severe

punishment loses its terrors in the presence of actual want

– that a man will beg, or steal, or resort to violence rather

than starve;” and that it was not wise to force the

unemployed into that hard choice.

In 1601 Parliament

accordingly made the law (43 Eliz. 2) that was to govern

English poor relief for more than three centuries.

provided for a system of guaranteed work to be

maintained under the supervision of the Overseers of the

Poor of each parish, comprised of the church wardens and

from two to four other property owners. In central

locations, called workhouses, or in their own abodes, the

otherwise unemployed persons were to be set to work on

materials such as hemp, wool, iron and thread. The

proceeds from their products were to defray the costs

incurred and to provide for payment for the workers

“according to the desert of their work.” Refusal to work

on such terms was a legal offense, punishable by a term in

the house of correction or common jail. Funds needed for

furtherance of work and relief programs were to be raised

by the Poor Rate, a regular tax periodically assessed

against the property holders of each parish.

In practice this formal relief was supplemented by

illegal or semi-legal resort by the pauperized population

to unauthorized infiltration into supposedly guild-

protected trades, or by “squatting” on wastelands to eke

out enough of an existence to escape the ministrations of

the Overseers of the Poor.

But to the extent that such

diversions were attempted, they were but supplementary

to the workings of 43 Eliz. 2, the Poor Law, the ultimate

monumental “attempt on the part of the powerful Tudor

state to prevent the social disorder caused by economic

changes, which in spite of its efforts it had not been strong

enough to control.”

Notorious as the operation of the English system of

Poor Relief was ever to be for its parsimony and

sanctimony, the right of workers to be paid wages for the

work done under its program, and the right to leave that

employment if and when a turn of fortune – a legacy, a

good apprenticeship opportunity, a decent job, or, for a

woman, a marriage prospect – occurred, were matters

never questioned by those who first established the system

in 1601. Yet within a few decades, irreducible rights and

privileges of the most condemned ward of the parish were

to be denied to the general run of English workers

performing the most essential labor in Anglo-America. To

those contrivers of the Poor Rate, it would have seemed

unthinkable that the support of the poor might, even in the

slightest degree, be derived from impositions on other

propertyless laborers.

Oppression of Women

The social transformation wrought by the Agrarian

Revolution and the rise of capitalism in England was

indeed great. But the class coming to power found no need

to amend common or statute law with regard to the

subordination of women; it found male domination to be

no less congenial to the functioning of the new order than

it had been to the old.

Given the absence of a women’s rights movement – the

first concerted cries for justice would not be heard for

another two centuries; and, given the quick bourgeois

appetite for wealth accumulation, making their historical

ruling-class antecedents dilettantes by comparison – the

brutal treatment of women in the new era proceeded

unchecked.

As it was in man’s record of the beginning, and had

since been, the non-person civil status of women should

ever be, so far as the bourgeoisie of England was

concerned.

Classed with children in matters of civil

rights, women continued to be classed with heretics when

punishment for treason was prescribed; only women were

to be burned at the stake for that offense.

And, like

servants who killed their masters, women who killed their

husbands were guilty of petty treason. By law, persons

convicted of a felony were subject to the death penalty.

But priests so convicted could be pardoned for the first

offense by claiming “benefit of clergy,” a relic of a former

time when cleric felons were dealt with by ecclesiastical

courts. (Persons granted this privilege were to be branded

in the meat of the thumb to prevent their claiming that right

a second time.) From the eve of the sixteenth century

onwards, increasing categories of non-clerical men were

admitted to this privilege. But women, barred by gender

from being priests, were excluded from this mercy. They

were granted full access to the benefit-of-clergy plea only

in 1692.

The men of the ruling classes had immemorially

exercised sex-class privileges at the expense of the

women of the laboring classes. In feudal times in England

the custom said to have been most hated by the serfs was

that of “merchet,” which required payment in kind or in

money by the serf to the lord when the serf’s daughter was

to be married.

This was considered the most degrading

and certain mark of servile status, since it forced the serfs

to acknowledge possessory claims of one degree or

another by the lord to every female virgin among his

“family” of “dependants.” The same theme was evident in

the fact that a woman serf who married a free man and

was later divorced by him again became a serf of her

former lord. On the other hand, a woman who had

originally been free but who married a serf herself, fell to

the status of serfdom, which she could not escape by being

divorced; instead she remained a serf, at least during the

lifetime of her husband. The widow of a serf was

designated by the special term “widewe,” meaning the

lord’s widow.

She was obliged to guarantee production

sufficient to meet the lord’s due. Failing in that, a woman

was required to surrender her holding, or else to make

arrangements (with the lord’s sanction) for the proper

performance of her duties, as the ward of some man.

In the new order, women of the propertied classes

continued to be hostages to the property to which they

were linked through inheritance laws. As before, the cult

of female chastity, with all its concomitant social and

legal repression and sanctions imposed on women,

remained an essential of the process of fortune-building

through inheritances and marriage portions.

When the

most important decisions were to be made concerning a

woman’s life, her personal interests or preferences

carried less weight than the property and power interests

of the men with whom her life was involved.

As of old,

but with possibly greater cynicism, fatherless under-age

daughters were, as “wards,” dealt about like commodities.

A man well regarded by the Court of Wards stood to gain

when such a girl or woman was made his ward, for that

brought him control of her property with all the

opportunity for self-advancement it might make possible

for him.

There was to be for women no reformation in the

Reformation. The notorious 1547 slave law, even in its

general extremity, found a special disability to impose on

the woman. If a man slave, by coming into an inheritance

or otherwise, secured a “convenient living” he was to be

freed. If, for instance, such a possibility presented itself in

the form of marriage, a male slave had the unimpeded right

to free himself by that course. But the female slave, if she

were under twenty years of age, could avail herself of

such an opportunity only if she could secure the

permission of her owner to do so.

And, as we have seen,

the Statute of Artificers of 1563 assigned unmarried,

unpropertied women to the lowest labor status. If they

were unemployed and between the ages of twelve and

forty, they could be compelled to serve in any employment

to which the magistrates might assign them. Furthermore,

their wages were set at only about half of those paid to

men doing comparable services.

Above all, there were the reasons of state. The “ancient

rights and liberties” of the small-propertied and

propertyless classes were, as noted, subject to heavy

assault in the sixteenth century. But the new order brought

no threat to their rights and liberties as English men vis-à-

vis English women.

Sir Francis Bacon voiced official sanction of this

limitation on interference with traditional ways, saying

that male domination and patriarchy were “natural and

more ancient than the law.” Addressing “The Lord

Chancellor and all the Judges of England” in his capacity

as Solicitor-General in 1608, Bacon set forth the premise

that monarchy was the best form of rule because its

authority was first of all based on the “platform” of male

domination and patriarchy.

The first [platform], he submitted, “is that of a father or chief of a family;

who governing over his wife by prerogative of sex, over his children by

prerogative of age, and because he is author to them of being, and over his

servants by prerogative of virtue and providence (for he that is able of body

and improvident of mind is natura servus), is the very model of a king.

But before the king is every man, every man must be a

king.

In feudal England, in the exercise of male

domination over the wife, the serf’s claims had priority

over those of the feudal lord. The wife was a “feme

covert,” against whom the lord had no process of claim

except through the husband. And in the new day, after the

repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry VIII did not

venture to pursue vengeance against the persons of a

number of women who had been active rebels. The

definitive work on this event explains that royal discretion

as follows:

Henry knew that in the excited state of public opinion it would be dangerous

to meddle with them. His reign was not by any means the age of chivalry,

but there still remained a good deal of the old tribal feeling about women,

that they were the most valuable possessions of the clan, and that if any

stranger, even the King, touched them all the men were disgraced.

In the “new age”, a man’s home was still to be his

castle and, if the matter were forced to an issue, a

woman’s prison. Men could divorce women; women

could not divorce men. Some time late in the sixteenth

century, Joan Wynstone ran away from her husband John, a

man of humble station.

Taken up as a vagrant, she was

sentenced under the law to work as a servant of the

husband she had fled. Finding that life intolerable, Joan

again escaped, but she was again recaptured. For this

second offense she was hanged on the gallows.

The poor and laboring people of England might not

prevail over their kings, or their queens, or their lords and

masters, but the man of these classes could be king and

lord and master to his wife. Male domination in this way

served as a link between the beaten-down peasants and

proletarians and the very authority that was beating them

down. As such it operated as another instrument of ruling-

class social control, disguised as the natural outcome of

the sexual differentiation occurring in the population.

No English man of that day, from Lord Chancellor

Francis Bacon to lowly John Wynstone, would have

imagined that propertyless, yet non-apprenticed, English

men would ever be so degraded (as they would have

considered it) that under the law they might not have their

own “castles” and the male privileges appertaining to

their gender status.

Nor would Bacon or Wynstone have

thought to find in “nature” an apology for the assertion of a

general sexual privilege by one set of men – propertied

and unpropertied – over all women of another set of the

propertyless population. Yet the first of these

inconceivable ideas would not only be thought of, it would

become an essential operating principle of the Anglo-

American plantation economy.

100

And, more amazing, the

second, thought of and instituted, would become an

indispensable element in the maintenance of bourgeois

social control in continental plantation Anglo-America.

101

Euro-Indian Relations and the

Problem of Social Control

For all the talk of using colonies as vents for proletarian

discontent, the first group of English to arrive in Virginia

in 1607 included a disproportionate number of aristocrats

and gentlemen, and their personal attendants, for whom

productive labor was as unthinkable as it was for any

Spanish hidalgo bound for New Spain.

Like Cortés, they

were prepared to find ready access to gold and silver

rather than to start cultivation of the soil.

By 1622,

however, the Virginia Company investors, realizing that

Virginia was to be no El Dorado, rationalized their

abandonment of dreams of emulating the treasure hunts of

the Spanish in Mexico and Peru. “[T]o thinke that Gold

and Silver mynes in a Country [Virginia] (otherwise most

rich and fruitful) the greatest wealth of a Plantation is but

popular error,” wrote Edward Waterhouse in a long letter

of advice to fellow members of the Virginia Company. He

now saw the Spanish case in a different light. The law of

diminishing returns had set in for silver and gold mining in

Spanish America, he said, and Spain had turned to

agricultural products, such as sugar, cotton, indigo, and

brazil wood, to offset the decline of mining output.

left no doubt that, in his opinion, the future prosperity of

the Virginia plantation likewise lay in exploiting the

country’s natural potential for commodity production.

Why, he thought, could not the English do as the Spanish

had done and recruit a labor force from the native

population for that purpose? True, the colony was

intended as a vent for the “troublesome poor” of England,

but why should they not serve in the English plantation as

an intermediate stratum, as overseers and tradesmen, such

as had been formed by a certain portion of Spanish

immigrants and Spanish creoles in Mexico and Peru?

Why should not the Virginia Indians be

compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply the roome of men that

labour, whereby even the meanest [Englishmen] of the Plantation may

imploy themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are

more generous, whilest Savages performe their inferior workes of digging in

mynes and the like, of whom also some may be sent for the service of the

Sommer Hands [Bermuda Islands].

Old planter John Martin likewise suggested that the

Indians be “brought into subjection,” they being “apter for

worke then yet our English are … and fitt to rowe in

Gallies & friggetts and many other pregnant uses.”

Captain John Smith (1580–1631), the most famous leader

of the early Jamestown settlers, retrospectively regretted

that the English had not from the beginning done as the

Spanish had done, namely “forced the … [Indians] to do

all manner of drudgery worke and slavery for them,

themselves [the Spanish] living like Souldiers upon the

fruit of their [the Indians’] labours.”

The Spanish option

was not to be dismissed out of hand. Indeed Captain John

Smith reasoned that, vis-à-vis the respective native

populations, the English in Virginia and New England

were better situated than the Spanish had been in the West

Indies. The Spanish, outnumbered by the West Indies

Indians by fifty or more to one, had “no other remedy” but

mass extermination of the natives. “Ours,” said Smith,

referring possessively to Virginia and New England

Indians, were “such a few, and so dispersed, it were

nothing in a short time to bring them to labour and

obedience.”

If the English had subdued and forced “their” Indians

into “drudgery and slavery,” they would have had to

confront, as the Iberians had had to do, the problem of

establishing a system of social control over the native

population that would be, as the phrase is nowadays,

“cost-effective.”

Social Control: Haiti (Hispaniola), Cuba and

Puerto Rico

When European colonization of the so-called New World

began in Hispaniola in 1492, the population density of that

island was about the same as that of Portugal (around 33

and 38 inhabitants per square mile, respectively), but the

society of the island was not highly stratified.

Speaking

of the Indians of the West Indies, Las Casas said, “They

are very poor folk, which possess little … they are

accustomed to have no more store than they ordinarily

have need of and that such as they get with little travail

[labor].” He elaborated with notations of the people’s

diet, apparel, and shelter.

There was no distinct native

social stratum that could act as a buffer between the

laboring people and the Spanish conquerors in the

administration of a normal, orderly, colony. Hence the

encomienda system, whereby the King of Spain

“commended” the natives to “the care” of individual

Spanish colonists as laborers,

was conducted “in an

irregular, uncontrolled, and highly exploitative form.

… Spaniards raided Indian communities, took captives,

and, in order to prevent escape or to ensure the full

measure of work, practiced large-scale enslavement.”

The native population did not willingly submit to such

brutal administration. In Hispaniola the Maguana people

rose in revolt after the treacherous Spanish killing of the

captive Maguana chief Canaobo.

In 1511 in Puerto Rico,

the Borinqueños under the leadership of a cacique named

Guaybana mounted a major rebellion against the

imposition of the Spanish system of forced labor. A

second Borinquen uprising was led by another cacique,

Humacao, four years later.

Other Borinqueños, possibly

one-third of the population, sought refuge in remote

mountainous areas, or fled by boat to other islands.

But

i n Haiti (Hispaniola/Santo Domingo) and Cuba, the

Spanish advantage of overwhelming military strength

exerted without restraint, in the context of the even more

devastating toll of epidemic European diseases, resulted

in almost complete extermination of the native population.

There it was a mathematical certainty that without an

intermediate social stratum, “social control” by mere

unbridled military force would be self-defeating because

it exceeded the limits that had to be observed to preserve

an exploitable labor force.

Social Control: Mexico and Peru
At the time of the Spanish invasion in 1519, the population
of  central  Mexico,
17
  an  area  of  about  200,000  square
miles,  was  an  estimated  13.9  million,
18
  representing  a
density  of  almost  70  people  per  square  mile.  Of  this
population,  2.5  million,  concentrated  more  than  350  per
square  mile,  lived  in  the  8,000-square-mile  area  in  and
near the Basin of Mexico.
19
 Tenochitlan (Mexico City), in
the heart of this area, had a population of 300,000.
The  invaders  found  already  in  place  “an  elaborate
system of levy providing products of all kinds, slaves, and
services  for  the  three  capitals  of  the  so-called Aztec
Empire,” and a similar system in other large states outside
the  Aztec  territory.  In  each  case  it  was  organized  to
support its central government ruling group.
20
 Originally a
three-layered  stratum,
21
  the  ruling  group  came  to  be
designated  by  the  Spanish  under  the  general  name  of
caciques.
22
The Spanish  were able to adapt  this pre-existing form
of social organization to extort labor and tribute from the
Indians,  even  in  the  most  rapacious  manner,
23
  using
“Indian office-holders … at the subordinate levels of the
hierarchy  for  the  enforcement of  Spanish  rules.”
24
  In  the
opinion  of  the  well-known  historian  of  colonial  Mexico
Charles  Gibson,  it  was  “[t]he power  and  prestige  of  the

pre-Spanish states, and their continuing traditions of

popular subservience, [that] made it possible for the

Spaniards to exact labor and tribute with little

opposition.” Summarizing, Gibson writes that in both

Mexico and Peru, “Spaniards took charge of an

established society, substituting themselves for the rulers

they had deposed or killed.”

But such a displacement at the top would not have been

effective in gaining the Spaniards’ purposes without the

preservation of a buffer social control function for the

socially demoted caciques.

The ease with which the first Spaniards manipulated huge numbers of native

peoples, even the ease with which the first missionaries induced huge

numbers of conversions, depended upon the intermediate position of the

caciques.… Caciques were in the vanguard in the adoption of Spanish dress,

foods, language, and styles of house construction. They were excused from

tribute and labor exactions and given special privileges, such as permission

to ride horses and carry arms.… Indian caciques and Spanish corregidores

[Spanish officers in charge of local districts] joined forces to extract from

the mass of the Indian population whatever wealth it possessed over and

above the subsistence level of its economy.

Considered in terms of social control and resistance,

the story of the Spanish defeat of and rule over the Inca

civilization of Peru in the sixteenth century closely

corresponds to the pattern set in Mexico. The Inca word

for  chiefs, kurakas,  was  by  Spanish  decree  in  1572
changed  to cacique,
27
  appropriately  enough  it  would
seem, since the buffer social control function of that office
in  Peru  was  identical  with  its  function  in  Mexico.  The
hereditary  Peruvian caciques  were  exempt  from  paying
tribute  or  labor  service.  They  were  the  collectors  of
tribute  to  be  paid to  the  Spanish  by Indians  between  the
ages of eighteen and fifty. They were responsible also for
furnishing the mita laborers for service to Spanish masters
in industries, in farming and, worst of all, in the silver and
mercury mines of Potosi and Huancavelica.
28
In  Peru,  the caciques  “exercised  considerable  power
over Indians, even within the borders of Spanish towns.”
29
In 1558, supreme Inca chief Sayri Tupac struck a sort of
surrender-and-regrant  “bargain”  with  the  Spanish  –  as
O’Neill  and  other  Irish  chieftains  had  done  a  few  year
earlier in Ireland (see Volume One).
30
For at least a century and a half, the caciques of Mexico
and  Peru  served  as  the  principal  buffer  social  control
stratum  in  the  Spanish  system  of  social  control  in  those
domains.
31
  But  in  Mexico,  the relatively  class-
undifferentiated  Chichimecs  drew  a  line,  and  long
maintained  it,  beyond  which  the  Spanish encomienda
could not be established.
32
 In Peru, the Incas defended the
remnants of their independent state in two open rebellions.
In 1536, Inca Manco and his uncle Titu Yupanqui, taking

advantage of a momentary political and military division

among the Spanish, rose in revolt to end the desecration of

their lands and temples. Manco led a five-month siege of

Cuzco, and Titu headed a large army in an assault on

Lima.

Thirty-five years later, Tupac Amaru, youngest

son of Inca Sayri Tupac, served as a rallying symbol for a

last great uprising to throw off the Spanish yoke.

The Social Control Problem in Brazil

Brazil, like Hispaniola, presented no previously

established social stratum adaptable to the colonizing

power’s social control purposes, and Catholic religious

orders, most notably the Jesuits and Franciscans, largely

succeeded in substituting themselves in that function. It

was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas,

however, who first raised the standard of battle for

“protection of the Indians” of the West Indies in the

sixteenth century, but his pleas were brushed aside by the

gold-crazed colonists. A basic factor in the genocide of

the native peoples of the West Indies in the early sixteenth

century was the difficulty of their making a mass flight by

sea. The Indians of Brazil, on the other hand, would serve

to establish a general principle of social control in

European colonies in the Americas: dominance was less

easily  established  and  maintained  over  continental
colonies than over insular colonies.
35
In  the  continental  expanse  of  Brazil,  there  was  space,
and  therefore  time, for development of an effective class
struggle  of  the  Indian  laborers  and  the  Portuguese
plantation  bourgeoisie  (the moradores).  The  Indians,  as
we have noted, were successful in making the point in the
sixteenth century that they had no desire to become long-
term  sugar  plantation  bond-laborers  (see this  page).
Indeed,  in  the  sixteenth  century  a  number  of  projected
areas of Portuguese settlement had to be abandoned in the
face  of  Indian  attacks.
36
  More  generally,  the  Indians
resisted  plantation  servitude  by  removing  themselves  to
the  continental  interior.
37
  The  Portuguese  plantation
owners  countered  by  conducting  armed  expeditions
(entradas)  into  the  interior  in  order to  “entice  or  force”
Indians  into  Portuguese-controlled  villages  (aldeias),
38
which were located to provide easy access to a supply of
Indian plantation laborers, to be used under conditions that
were,  for  all  practical  purposes,  mere  slavery.
39
  Just  as
elsewhere  in  the  plantation Americas,  super-exploitation
of  labor  and  the  spread  of  epidemic  European diseases
took  a  heavy  toll  on  the  indigenous  labor  supply  in
Brazil.
40
 In any case, since Indians, having the continental
advantage, “deserted their aldeias in large numbers,”
41
 the
colonists were unable to solve the labor-supply problem

by resort to raw force through the entradas.

It was in the Amazon region of Brazil during the

seventeenth century that the Franciscans and then the

Jesuits, led most prominently by António Vieira, after a

campaign lasting from 1624 to 1686, were able to win a

royal decree outlawing enslavement of Indians and

bestowing custody of the aldeia Indians on the religious

orders. These Indians were then to be assigned by the

religious authorities as free laborers to plantation owners

for a limited part of each year.

In terms of social control,

the religious orders were filling in relation to a class-

undifferentiated native population a role similar to that

performed by the caciques in relation to the native class-

differentiated societies of Mexico and Peru.

In the Amazon region, Portuguese plantation owners

rebelled against the idea of non-enslavability of Indians as

government interference with free enterprise; they insisted

that the free play of market forces required slave labor.

Vieira met the objection by proposing the extension to the

Amazon region of the practice that had been in operation

in more southern coastal regions of Brazil since the

middle of the sixteenth century, namely, by the

enslavement of Angolans “of both sexes to assure their

propagation.” The principle was to be “The Negroes to

the colonists, the Indians to the Jesuits.” A suitable

religious exegetical rationale was contrived. The

Angolans, by being baptized Christians, were afforded an
opportunity to escape the everlasting torment to which they
had been certainly doomed as “pagans.” Their souls were
to  be  redeemed  by  the  Calvary-like  suffering  of  lifetime
hereditary  servitude  in  the  sugar  industry.  The  Indians,
having been made wards of a Christian order, could not be
consigned  to  slavery.
44
  For  an  indication  of  the
widespread  failure  of Afro-Brazilian  bond-laborers  to
find  comfort  in  this  thesis,  see  the  note  on  the  Palmares
guilombo in Appendix II-A.
The Powhatans of Virginia
Of all the Ibero-American cases, Brazil was the one that
most resembled Anglo-American Virginia with respect to
the  problem  of  establishing  that degree  of  social  control
essential  for  basing  the  colonial  economy  on  the  forced
labor of  the  indigenous population. Like  Brazil, Virginia
was  a  continental  colony,  not  an  insular  one.  Like  the
indigenous society of Brazil,
45
 Powhatan society exhibited
little significant stratification, lacking a strong rulership
46
and  concomitant  intermediate  stratum
47
  adaptable  to  the
social  control  purposes  of  the  conquerors.  Storage
facilities  were  insufficient  to  permit  long-term
accumulation in the hands of the ruling element of products

upon which the people were dependent. There was no

wealth in the form of domesticated animals, nor did

wealth exist in any other form such as to permit

accumulations adequate for the support of a permanent

leisure class or a non-productive politico-military

bureaucracy. The people derived three-fourths of their

living from hunting, fishing and gathering, one-fourth from

cultivation. With a population density of only one or two

persons per square mile,

the Powhatan Indians for most

of the year were on the whole well-provisioned, so that

they could even share with the starving English colonists

on occasion.

There was a degree of social stratification; a chief

(Powhatan, the person himself, when the English first

arrived) lived on the tribute assessed on the people and

had privileged access to the best hunting grounds. He

received labor tribute by having his fields planted for him,

and tended by a multiplicity of women bound to him. But

social distinction was insufficient to produce a permanent

category “intermediate between rulers and ruled,”

or any

politico-military bureaucracy. Powhatan had authority to

make alliances and war, and to control trade with other

tribes and the English. But he was not always able to

enforce his will on all his subjects, nor was he always

able to enforce it upon the supposedly tributary tribes. The

result was to limit the intensity of the exploitation of the

laborers; indeed, the chief himself did productive labor at

“men’s work” such as hunting and hand crafts.

Any attempt by the English plantation bourgeoisie to

subjugate the Indians to “drudgery and slavery” would

have to face the “Brazilian” problem, but without the

agency of the Catholic religious orders; they had been

banned in the sixteenth-century English Reformation.

More immediately to the point, at the time that Smith and

others were fantasizing about emulating the Spanish

Conquistadors, the English simply did not have the

preponderance of military force such as that which the

Spanish unleashed against the indigenous peoples upon

whom they made war.

The weakness of the English

colony in the early period was such that in the three years

1620–22 the colony was dependent upon trade with

neighboring Indians to save itself from “absolute

starvation.”

In these respects, the Powhatan social order was

essentially the same as those found among the Pequots,

Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and other peoples in New

England, and the Yamassees, Creeks, Tuscororas,

Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other peoples

confronting the colonists of the southernmost region, the

Carolinas. With regard to establishing social control, the

Anglo-American continental bourgeoisie faced the

“Brazilian” problem: a continental people without a

cacique class.

Despite their early difficulties, the English from the

beginning had a fundamental potential advantage over the

Indians due to the discrepancy in the development of

productive forces and productivity of labor. This

advantage was enhanced by the fact that the Indians could

not possibly have known what the appearance of the first

handfuls of settlers portended for the land.

Yet, even if

they had foreseen from Powhatan to Powder River, and

had been able to mobilize a united resistance to the taking

of the Trail of Tears, the Indians probably could not have

prevented eventual European colonization in North

America,

although by such a united effort they might

have given American history a more humane course than

the one it took.

English Buying and Selling of Indian Captives

The actual strength of the English colony in relation to the

Virginia Indians changed markedly to the disadvantage of

the latter in the period between 1622 and 1644, the dates

of two concerted Indian attacks on the colony. By 1644,

the relative superiority of the forces at the disposal of the

colony was well established, and all Indian hope of

ousting the settlers from the Chesapeake region was lost.

The treaty of 1646

that ended the Indian war begun by

Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan’s brother and

successor, marked the beginning of Anglo-American

“Indian policy.” At first that policy contemplated only the

displacement of the Indian tribes obstructing the advance

of the Anglo-American “frontier,” but ultimately it would

challenge the legitimacy of Indian tribal society itself.

the context of this chapter, consideration is limited to the

relationship of that policy to the general labor supply and

social control problem faced by the continental colonial

bourgeoisie. The basic considerations that shaped the

policy, the optimizing of the combination of the rate of

capital accumulation and social control,

were essentially

the same in Virginia as elsewhere, although in one respect,

namely the commerce in Indian chattel bond-laborers, the

grossest development occurred in South Carolina and

secondarily in New England.

Fourteen years after the 1646 treaty, the Virginia

General Assembly declared that if the Indians of

Northumberland County failed to pay the damages to be

assessed by the court of that county for damages done by

the Indians to a colonist there, then “soe many off them as

the court shall determine shall be apprehended and sold

into a forraigne country to satisfie the award.”

Although

in that particular instance no legal justification was cited,

it appears to have been under the principle of lex talionis,

simple retaliation. In general, however, the Anglo-

Americans throughout the continental colonies drew on the

ancient principle that victors in “just” wars who spared

the lives of “heathen” captives thereby gained the right to

hold them as slaves, which Europeans used to justify the

forced transportation of Africans to perpetual servitude in

the Americas. The Virginia Assembly gave this principle

the force of law regarding Indians during Bacon’s

Rebellion in 1676. It was reasserted in 1677 following the

defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion, and subsequently in 1679,

1682, 1711 and 1722.

Enslavement of Indian captives –

children and women as well as men – was general in

Massachusetts following the Pequot War of 1636–37, and

again after King Philip’s War of 1675–76.

In Carolina

province (both before and after its division into South and

North Carolina, first called Albemarle, in 1691), the

Anglo-Americans made direct war on Indians and

enslaved the captives.

But the chief means of securing Indian bond-laborers

was by trade with Indian tribes, in the course of which

captives of intertribal warfare, along with deer skins and

beaver pelts, were exchanged for English commodities

such as firearms and ammunition, metal tools and

containers, woven fabrics and garments, mirrors and

rum.

It was English policy to foment “just wars”

between tribes for the particular purpose of securing

Indian captives as chattel bond-laborers.

As tribes

became increasingly dependent upon the English for trade

goods, some, out of narrow considerations of tribal

interests, made war on other tribes in order to maintain

their trade with the English.

Nash states for a certainty

that “the number [of Indians] enslaved reached into the

tens of thousands in the half-century after Carolina was

settled by Europeans.”

The Abandonment of the Native Sources of

Plantation Bond-labor

Yet the fantasy of an Anglo-America based on Indian

drudgery and slavery was not to be realized. Why not?

The standard reference work in the field is still Almon

Wheeler Lauber’s Indian Slavery in Colonial Times

within the Present Limits of the United States, published

more than eighty years ago.

Lauber presents four theses

to explain “the decline of Indian slavery.” First,

depopulation caused by a combination of European

diseases, a declining Indian birth rate, and internecine

wars in considerable degree fomented by the English

interested in trading for the captives whom they would

then use in commercial transactions, principally with other

English colonies, most often those in the West Indies.

Second, Indians “disappeared” as a result of “the

amalgamation of red and black slaves.” Third, Indians

were “unfitted for servitude,” being “unable to endure

sustained labor,” incapable of developing to a “civilized”

social level, and bred and reared to be “opposed to all

restraint … by an exterior force.” Fourth, if kept in the

capturing colony, Indian bond-laborers were possibly

even more likely than other bond-laborers to run away,

because of the Indians’ hope of “returning to their own

people.”

It is argued here, from a somewhat different

perspective, that the failure of the European power to

establish a plantation system based on the bond-labor of

the native population in the Anglo-American continental

colonies was analogous to that of the Portuguese

colonizers in Brazil. The decisive factors in each case

were two: each colonization was enacted on a continental

land mass, as distinct from insular areas such as those in

the West Indies; and, second, the indigenous society was

not stratified, in any case not stratified enough to produce

a separate and distinct social class of caciques,

accustomed to command and adaptable for colonialist

social control purposes, particularly as mobilizers of

forced labor for the European capitalist investors.

From those premises I venture a criticism of Lauber’s

first and third theses about “the decline of Indian

slavery.”

I take them in reverse order because the third

directly confronts the one assumption for which I crave

indulgence in the first paragraph of the Introduction to the

first volume of this work.

The “unfitness” sour-grapes rationale

Some historians whose approach to the subject is

informed with the spirit of the civil rights movement, and

whose citations of Lauber have been quite appropriate,

have perhaps thought it redundant to take note of the white-

supremacist assumptions encountered in a work conceived

in what Rayford W. Logan called the “nadir” of the

struggle for civil rights in the United States. One latter-day

scholar even endorses the Lauber view of this issue,

“despite the racist implications of arguments about the

relative adaptability of one people over another to

tropical labor.”

In my view, if being “constitutionally unfitted” for

servitude could explain the “decline of slavery,” then it

should have led to the extinction of bond-servitude in such

places as the following:

• Virginia, where for four or five early decades, not one

in five of the English chattel laborers survived the

period of “indenture.” (Governor William Berkeley in

reply to queries of the Lords of Trade and Plantations,

in 1671 [Hening 2:511.])
•      St  Domingue,  where  the  average  French engagé  or
African  bond-laborer  survived  only  three  years.  See
note 35 of Chapter 1.
•      Barbados,  where  in  1680  an  annual  supply  of  five
thousand African laborers was required to maintain a
Negro  population  of  forty  thousand  (Vincent  T.
Harlow, A  History  of  Barbados,  1625–1685  [1926;
Negro Universities reprint, 1969], this page–this page);
where  from  1680  to  1800  hundreds  of  thousands  of
African  bond-laborers  arrived,  but  the  population
increased by less than ten thousand. (David Lowenthal,
“The  Population  of  Barbados,” Social  and  Economic
Studies, 6:445–501.)
•      The  British  West  Indies  as  a  whole  which,  between
1700 and 1780, absorbed about 850,000 African bond-
laborers,  yet  the  Negro  population increased  only
350,000.  (Gary  B.  Nash, Red,  White,  and  Black
[Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974] this page.)
•   Mexico and Peru, where in the first centuries after the
beginning of Spanish rule, the repartimiento  and mita
recruitment  by  the caciques  contributed  so  heavily  to
the  reduction  of  the  Mexican  and  Peruvian  native
populations. (See page 7.)

Why were the Spanish so slow to learn what the

Portuguese capitalists, with whom they shared a common

realm for much of the time, had learned: “the unfitness” of

Indians for sustained labor? Was it perhaps because they

were laughing so hard all the way to the counting house in

Seville? Or could it have been that they felt satisfied that

the total value of the gold and silver produced by the

Indians of Mexico and Peru was probably as great as, if

not greater than, that of the sugar produced by Angolans in

colonial Brazil?

Did forced labor itself exact a greater toll among

Indians than it did among Africans and their descendants?

Despite pious protestations in religious quarters and in

occasional formal governmental expressions of sympathy,

neither the encomenderos of Mexico and Peru, nor the

moradores of Brazil, nor the “planters” of Anglo-America

cared a fig about the unfitness of the labor as long as they

could be assured of an affordable functioning supply.

Time and again in the seventeenth century the Portuguese

moradores in northern Brazil rebelled against royal and

religious authority in order to keep the Indians enslaved,

driving out the religious troublemakers, who themselves

were forced to admit that “without the Indians the

inhabitants [meaning the Portuguese settlers] would die.”

In South Carolina, for fifty years, the English colonists

ridiculed and evaded the strictures of the London

proprietors against trading in captive Indian laborers, the

profits of which went to the locals rather than to London.

On the other hand, as the record shows, laborers

throughout the Americas considered forced labor “unfit”

for themselves, and resisted servitude as well as they

could. In the cacique-habituated countries of Mexico and

Peru they could not prevail. But the tribal Indians in

continental situations did resist enslavement successfully,

and in the process provided the frustrated colonialists

with the sour-grapes argument about the “unfitness” of

Indians for plantation labor.

It would seem that little time needs be spent in this

post–World War Two era on Lauber’s notion that the

North American Indians were not enslavable because of

their inability to become “civilized.” Are we to believe

that, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, “civilization grows out

of the barrel of a gun”? Without that one advantage, the

work of the Anglo-American “blessings-of-civilization

trust,” as Mark Twain called it, would surely have been

brought to an end before it ever got to South Carolina. In

reacting to Lauber’s doubt about the “capacity of the

Indian for civilization,” because “the dominant idea of

Indian life was the love of liberty,” one can only ask,

“What price civilization?” Looking at the figures on the

depopulation of the indigenous Americas, one might better

ask: If “civilization” is assumed to correlate with

increased well-being, did the age of colonization of the

Americas demonstrate a “capacity for civilization”?

Finally, how was it that Lauber could ignore that precisely

the opposite premise was the mainstay of slaveholder

ideology, namely that slavery was the only possible

normal basis for “civilized” people like themselves to

relate to the “uncivilized”?

Enslavement of Indian labor not a problem of supply,

but of social control

Lauber’s first thesis, namely that European colonization

had a devastating depopulating effect through infections of

smallpox, tuberculosis, and other exotic diseases, is

undoubtedly true. So also did the intensification of

warfare, both against the English and between Indian

tribes. These general conditions, coupled with the English

policy of trading away a disproportionate number of male

captives, would certainly tend to lower the birth rate

among the Indians. Before South Carolina came to be

chiefly a producer of rice and cotton early in the

eighteenth century, the colony was primarily dependent

upon commerce with the Indian tribes. It was in that

colony’s trading sphere, therefore, that the depopulating

effect of enslavement was most in evidence. In 1708, the

Spanish governor of Florida charged that some 10,000 to

12,000  Florida  Indians,  chiefly Apalachee  people,  had
been  taken  as  slaves  by  Creek  and Yamassee  Indians,
directed by English Carolinians; only 300 Florida Indians
survived,  by  finding  refuge  in  St  Augustine.
73
  The
extension  of  slave-trading  into  the  interior  in  that  same
year was justified by South Carolina businessmen on the
ground that “it serves to lessen their [the Indians’] number
before the French can arm them.”
74
 The shipment of Indian
captives from Carolina to bond-servitude in other English
colonies,  particularly  those  in  the  West  Indies,
75
  was,
while it lasted, a major cause of Indian depopulation. The
practice was also a factor in New England in the wake of
the  defeat  of  the  forces  commanded  by  the Wampanoag
chieftain Metacom (called King Philip by the English) in
1675–76. An  undetermined  number  of  the  captives  were
sent  as  bond-laborers  “to  various  parts,”  namely  the
Spanish West Indies, Spain, Portugal, Bermuda, Virginia,
and  the Azores.
76
  The  Virginia  colony  Indian  trade  was
primarily  for  beaver  pelts  and  deer  skins  in  the
seventeenth  century;
77
  the  labor  supply  was  mainly
English, together with a number of other European bond-
laborers,  and,  to  an  increasing  extent  at  the  end  of  the
seventeenth  century,  Afro-Caribbean  and  African.
78
Consequently, in Virginia the employment of and trade in
Indian  labor  was  comparatively  limited.
79
  But  whatever
the degree of involvement of the respective colonies, it is

certain  that  depopulating  wars  were,  paradoxically,  the
necessary condition for the beginning and continuation of
Indian  slavery,  while  it lasted,  in  the  continental Anglo-
American  colonies.  I  know  of  no study,  however,  which
concludes that the ending of enslavement of Indians within
the capturing colony, or for trading abroad, was the result
of the depopulating effect of that practice.
80
 It was not the
“supply’  aspect,  but  rather  the  “control”  aspect  that  was
decisive in ending the labor policy of Indian enslavement
in continental Anglo-America.
It  was  the  common  rule  that  enslaved  Indian  war
captives, most particularly the men, be shipped out of the
colony,  sometimes  to  other  continental  colonies,  even  to
England or Spain, but most commonly to England’s West
Indian  sugar  plantation  colonies.
81
  The  proportion  of
Indian  bond-laborers  was  by  far  the  highest  in  South
Carolina.  There  it  peaked  in  about  1708,  when  1,400
Indians  (500  men,  600  women  and  300  children)
constituted one-fourth of the total lifetime hereditary bond-
labor force.
82
 Yet “only a small proportion of the whole
number  of  Indians  enslaved  were  kept  in  the  [South
Carolina]  colony.”
83
  The  total  numbers  of  Indians
enslaved in the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies was
far less, but it was policy to send male captives “outside
the colonies.”
84
 Shipping value-producing Indian labor out
of the colony was not what policy advisers to the Virginia

Company had in mind in the early 1620s. Why was it, then,

that the great majority were transported by sea to other

colonies or countries?

It was not that Indian laborers were unemployable in

plantation labor; after all, that is why they were wanted in

the West Indies. Nor was it that those colonies were

oversupplied with plantation laborers; indeed, the Indians

shipped to the West Indies were traded for Afro-

Caribbean plantation laborers to be employed in the

continental colonies.

It was not that Indians could not

learn trades; actual instances of Indian craftsmen working

within the colonies showed that they could, even as chattel

bondmen.

Rather, the reasons were rooted in three

intractable problems of “white race” social control: (1)

resistance by the Indian bond-laborers, principally by

running away, which merged sometimes with the same

form of resistance of African and European bond-laborers;

(2) the necessity to maintain nearby friendly, or “treaty,”

Indians in the buffer role,

in the first instance between

the Anglo-American colonies and the more remote

“hostile,” or foreign-allied, tribes; and then against the

escape of African-American bond-laborers beyond the

Anglo-American “frontier”; and (3) with the institution of

the “white race” system of social control, the key

necessity of preserving “white skin” privileges of

laboring-class European-Americans vis-à-vis all non-

European-Americans.

Indian resistance to being reduced to plantation bond-

labor

In the absence of a cacique class

that from positions of

traditional upper-class authority could be co-opted as

recruiters of plantation bond-labor, the Anglo-American

bourgeoisie adapted the phenomenon of inter-tribal

rivalries for their purposes. This was a basic element of

the colonialist “Indian policy,” and it was made to

dovetail with the strategy according to which Indian

“allies” were to serve as a protective buffer for the colony

against the generally more remote tribes.

But if the English colonizers had the advantage of

firearms and the buffer of dependent tribes, the victim

tribes had a continental space at their backs.

This

“continental factor” made possible Indian resistance by

migration. When the Savannah Indians of South Carolina

migrated north in 1707, “[t]he Iroquois themselves

received [them] as brothers and the Delaware called them

grandsons.”

Sometimes migration would enable a tribe

largely to avoid the enslaving onslaught;

sometimes

victim tribes retained sufficient cohesion to be able to

maintain their identity even as they migrated; and in other

cases broken remnants found refuge with other tribes into

which they were adopted.
93
Unlike the African bond-laborers displaced from home
by  thousands  of  ocean miles into  an utterly  strange  land,
those  relatively  few  Indian  captives  retained  in  a  given
colony  were  not  so  “completely broken  from  their  tribal
stems,”
94
  and  were  still  in  at  least  somewhat  familiar
terrain,  facing  a  familiar  enemy  whom  they  had  already
met in open battle. South Carolina Provincial policy was
focused  on  the  constant  danger  of  Indian  bond-laborers
escaping into the woods, or conspiring with enemy tribes,
or  mounting  insurrections,  such  as  the  one  suspected  in
1700.
95
Colonialist concern was heightened by fears of Indians
joining  with  African-Americans  in  resistance  to  their
common  bondage.  In  1729,  the  French  governor  of
Louisiana expressed his concern that “Indian slaves being
mixed with our negroes may induce them to desert.”
96
 That
same year he abandoned a mission of revenge against one
Indian  tribe,  the  Nabanez  (Natchez?),  lest  Choctaws  and
Negroes seize the opportunity to attack New Orleans “to
free  themselves  from  slavery.”
97
  In  South  Carolina,
precautions were advised to prevent “intimacy”  between
Indians  and  Negroes,  “any  Intercourse  between  Indians
and Negroes” being seen as a threat to the colony.
98
 In his
signal study of the relationship of the Indians and African-
Americans  in  the  southeastern Anglo-American  colonies,

William S. Willis found that “[t]he determination [on the
part of the English colonial authorities] to prevent Indian-
Negro  contacts  within  the  White  settlements  was  a  main
cause for curtailing the enslavement of Indians.”
99
The threat was made more acute by the constant efforts
of  the  Spanish  in Florida  and  the French  in Louisiana to
encourage  resistance  to  and  flight  from  the  English
colonies.
100
  In  1716  and  for  some  years  thereafter,
Yamassees  and  some  Creeks,  as  well  as  numbers  of
Negroes,  deserted  English  Carolina  for  Spanish  Florida;
from  there  Yamassees  and  Negroes  carried  on  raids
against  the  English  colony,  spreading  the  word  to  the
South  Carolina  Indians  and  Negroes  that  freedom  was
theirs  for  the  having  in  Florida.
101
  When  the  English
commanded  by General  Oglethorpe  invaded  Spanish
Florida  in  1740–42,  they  were  opposed  there  by  joint
forces of Indians, Negroes, and Spanish.
102
As time went on, Indian peoples grew less inclined to
engage  in  internecine  wars  simply  to  provide  slaves  for
the trade and exploitation of English “planters” who were
intruding  on  villages  of  “friendly”  and  “hostile”  Indians
alike.
103
  This  trend  matured  in  the  great  Indian  revolt  in
1715,  called  the Yamassee  War  (see  this  page),  which
marked the beginning of the irreversible discontinuation of
enslavement  of  Indians  in  South  Carolina,  the  province
where it had been most extensively practiced.
104

The inherent ambivalence of the “buffer” role

The buffer tribes had a dual role in the English colonial

system of social control.

105

They served as a shield for the

English against hostile tribes, including those linked to

French and Spanish colonial rivals. Prior to 1715, South

Carolina colonial policy “sought to consolidate a double

bulwark of Indian allies in the zone of the Savannah and

Altamaha Rivers” (present-day east-central Georgia). In

the northwestern region, it was the mountain-dwelling

Overhill Cherokee who long “bore the brunt of the French

Indians.” In 1723 the South Carolina Assembly solemnly

affirmed, “The safety of this Province does, under God,

depend on the friendship of the Cherokees.”

106

In England

t h e Commissioners of Trade and Plantations

communicated to the King their concern that this

dependence had even wider ramifications: if the

Cherokees were to desert “your Majesty’s interest,” then

“not only Carolina, but Virginia likewise would be

exposed to their excursions.”

107

The buffer tribes were also a buffer between the

runaway African-American bond-laborer and refuge

beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American colony.

108

This function was a regular provision in every treaty or

memorandum of understanding between the colonies and

their “tributary,” “friendly,” or newly “subject” tribes.

Nash notes the “persistent inclusion in Indian treaties of a

clause  providing  for  the  return  of  escaped  slaves.”
109
“Most treaties,” Willis writes of the southeastern region in
the  eighteenth  century,  “stipulated  that  Indians  surrender
all  Negroes  and  return  all  future  runaways  at  an  agreed
price.”
110
  But  the  pattern  had  been  set  more  than  half  a
century  earlier  in  the  1646  treaty  between  the  Virginia
colony and “Necotowance, King of the Indians.”
111
 Under
the terms of the treaty made in 1700 between the Maryland
colonial  government  and  the  chief  of  the  Piscataway
Indians,  “[i]n  case  any  servants  or  slaves  runaway  from
their masters” to any Piscataway town, “the Indians shall
be  bound  to  apprehend  them  and  bring  them  to  the  next
English  Plantation,”  or  be  subject  to  the  penalties  of
Maryland law for the harborers of fugitives.
112
By definition, “buffer” tribes were those located nearer
to,
113
  more  accessible  to,  and,  above  all,  economically
more dependent upon the English colonists than were other
tribes.  But  by  the  same  token  they  were  therefore  more
vulnerable to the predations of colonists who were ready
to risk, to some degree, the buffer’s protective function. It
was  precisely  this  sort  of  undermining  of  the  buffer
understanding that led to the Westo War of 1708. For the
same reason, in the 1701–8 period the  Savannah Indians
acted out their resentment by emigrating northward out of
South  Carolina,  “much  to  the  annoyance  of  the  white
government, which found them useful as a bulwark against

other tribes, and what was probably more important, as

slave raiders.”

114

As mentioned above, the aggravation of

Indian grievances culminated in the Yamassee War

(1715–17). The fate of southeast Anglo-America hung by a

single thread, namely the loyalty of the Cherokees to the

English, and that linkage was itself gravely weakened. But

the tie held, and as a result the rebellion was defeated.

115

But it was, nevertheless, a historic victory over Indian

enslavement, which immediately went into decline.

“Justice to the Indians,” Crane writes, “and, in particular

the suppression of the traffic in Indian slavery, these were

injunctions to successive [South Carolina Provincial]

governors and councils,” from 1680 to 1715.

116

In the

wake of the Yamassee War, the issue could no longer be

avoided. South Carolina was becoming a rice, cotton and

indigo plantation enterprise for which were wanted

African bond-laborers, such as many of the colony elite

had been exploiting in the Barbadian sugar plantations. In

1690 the Lords Proprietors had sent an urgent instruction

to the Carolina authorities:

We hear that Indians are still being shipped away underhand.… You will do

your best to prevent this.… [W]ithout them you cannot recover runaway

Negroes.

117

Twenty-five years later, the logic of their lordships’

warning finally struck home. That logic was fundamentally

dictated by the “continental factor” – providing the vast

area for bond-labor escape that no army could patrol, and

no navy could surround – and by the absence of an Indian

cacique class.

Indian Labor and the Invention of the White

Race

If not by compulsion, if not as “drudges” for the English

colonists of every class, what were the possibilities of

voluntary enlistment by Indians in the work of the colony,

alongside the “surplus” English men and women who

were brought to Anglo-America? In the period ending in

1622, there were instances of Indians who did work

voluntarily within the Virginia colony.

118

In 1709 Robin,

an Indian shoemaker, was granted leave to practice his

trade among the English colonists “wherever he shall find

encouragement.”

119

But in general the Indians found their

tribal life more comfortable and better supplied than the

life offered by the English community so sore beset with

starvation and disease. The English laboring people after

1622 worked as bond-laborers for terms which most of

them did not survive, for debts they should not have had to

owe for the trip to America. The Indians, as natives of the

country, could not be bound by any such “transportation

charges.” It was hardly to be expected that Indians would

submit voluntarily to the oppressive life endured by the

English bond-laborers. Nor would the English employers

be willing to spend more for Indian laborers than they had

to spend for English laborers in such plentiful supply.

Was there another way? Despite the general

inaccessibility of Indians as plantation laborers and the

continual displacement of the tribal settlements, could they

not, as groups or individuals, still have abandoned the

Indian way of life for the English way? Although by far the

greater number of the European immigrants arriving in the

southern colonies came as bond-laborers, there were some

who were able to make the trip from Europe at their own

expense, and who began their lives in Anglo-America as

independent farmers or artisans. Why might not Indians

have opted for the same sort of enterprise within the

colony? The English homeland itself was mainly a nation

of immigrants, Saxons, Angles, Danes, Normans,

Flemings, consolidating with the ancient Angles, Celts and

Scots. True, the Indians’ tribal lands were being taken

away, but might not the inducements for individual Indians

entering into the Anglo-American common economic life

well have outweighed the disinclining factors, just as it

did for some Scots-Irish, for example? Such inducements

included credit from capitalist land speculators and

freedom from taxes for as much as ten years.

120

With

access to English-made iron implements and utensils, and

other manufactured goods and supplies, the prospects

might well have persuaded enterprising Indians to take up

the life of the free yeoman farmer or artisan. Evidence of

the appeal of Anglo-American commodity culture would

become woefully evident in its ability to dissolve Indian

society. Why should not at least a few individual Indians

be successful in that culture as members of the colony?

This avenue to use of the labor of the Indian was never

taken. The policy of special inducements to independent

farmers referred to above was not developed until the

early eighteenth century. The immigrants to whom this

opportunity was opened were counted upon to provide a

barrier against external dangers from French and hostile

Indian attacks, and against the establishment of maroon

centers of freedom and resistance by African-American

bond-laborers in the Allegheny Mountains.

121

By that time,

by a historical transformation which is the central concern

of this volume, the bourgeoisie had drawn the color line

between freedom and slavery, and established white

supremacy as article one of the Anglo-American

constitution. Only European-Americans, as “whites,” were

thereafter to be entitled to the full rights of the free citizen,

Indians being by definition not “white.”

122

The presence

within the colony of free independent Indian farmers or

tenants would have been a constitutionally intolerable

anomaly.

The fate of the Indians under the principle of racial

slavery and white supremacy was thus in the end

controlled by twin parameters: nonenslavability and

nonassimilability. These parameters would eventually

govern Anglo-American “Indian policy” throughout the

continental colonies.

PART TWO

The Plantation of Bondage

The Fateful Addiction to “Present

Profit”

The years 1607–24 are known as “the Company period”

of Virginia history, when the affairs of the colony were

conducted under the aegis of the Virginia Company of

London, chartered by James I in 1606, successively re-

chartered in 1609 and 1612, and reformed in 1618 under

Sir Edwin Sandys. Historians have long noted that the

development of the Virginia colony during the Company

period falls naturally into three time phases.

(1) 1607 to

1610: Virginia as an experimental colony, 24 May 1607 to

the granting of a new charter in May 1609 through the

“starving time” in the winter of 1609–10. (2) 1610 to

1618: the expansion of the royal territorial grant to the

Virginia Company; the establishment of a special royal

council for the Virginia Company; the beginning of

tobacco cultivation and export, with the widening of the

Company’s charter in 1612 to cover the Bermuda

(Somers) Islands, and authorization of a local Colony

Council to function as a legislative body. (3) 1619 to

1624: the installation of George Yeardley as Governor of

Virginia under the Sandys instructions (which the colony

elite called the “Great Charter”), authorizing the

establishment of an elected General Assembly “for the

happy guiding and governing of the people there

inhabiting;”

the growth of independent, non-Company,

plantations; the bankruptcy of the Virginia Company; the

devastating Indian attack on the colony in March 1622; the

revocation of its charter, and the reversion of custody of

Virginia affairs to a royal commission in June 1624.

Most historians treat the Company period primarily in

terms of the rise of the Virginia Company, its internal and

external struggles, and its eventual dissolution, rather than

in terms of the counter-revolution in labor relations that it

brought. Some among them see in those events a

confirmation of their particular strain of the “germ” theory

of American history. This theory is summarized by

Alexander Brown in his First Republic as follows:

[T]his nation was not brought forth in a day.… The evolution had been going

on ever since the free air of America inspired the first petitions against a

royal form of government in 1608, to the present day [1898]. The germ is

still unfolding and so long as it remains true to the seed it will continue to put

forth to the glory of the nation and for the betterment of mankind.… The

seedling, after being fostered in England under the advanced statesmen of

that transition period, continued to grow in the political system of the new

nation …

Works of this genre interpret the history of the 1606–24

period in Virginia as an aspect of the struggle of the

English bourgeoisie in general against the absolutist

tendencies of the bourgeois monarchy, which culminated

in the English Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth

century. This, for example, is the approach taken to

consideration of the successive Virginia Company charters

of 1609 and 1612; to the instructions to the newly

designated colony governor, Francis Yeardley, in 1618,

the so-called “Great Charter”; and to the internal factional

disputes of the Virginia Company.

Since such scholars find no differences between the

contending policy-setting English parties with respect to

the status to be imposed on the laboring people, they find

it unnecessary to inquire into the anomalous character of

labor relations that evolved in the Company period. Nor

do they perceive the causal link between that

transformation and the later institution of lifetime chattel

bond-servitude as the basis of the continental plantation

colonies’ economy, which the final victory of the

Parliamentary bourgeoisie at home “brought forth.”

For the present work on the origin of racial slavery as a

particular form of racial oppression of African-

Americans, the Company period of Virginia history is of

crucial significance, even though only a very small number

of Africans or African-Americans were then living in

Virginia. The findings of historians of seventeenth-century

economic development in Virginia, the plantation system,

and racial slavery offer a firm foundation for this

approach. A century ago, Philip A. Bruce concluded thus:

But for the introduction of the indented servant into the Colony upon the

threshold of settlement.… [t]he unique social conditions established at a

later period would never have existed, or, indeed, if such had been the case,

only in a modified form.

James C. Ballagh made the point more explicitly:

Servitude not only preceded slavery in the logical development of the

principle of subjection, standing midway between freedom and absolute

subjection, but it was the historic base upon which slavery, by the expansion

and addition of incidents, was constructed.

Eric Williams, though centering his attention on Caribbean

history, included colonial Virginia in the generalization

that “[w]hite servitude was the historic base upon which

slavery was constructed.”

Lerone Bennett Jr, looking at

colonial Virginia, found:

[W]hite servitude was the proving ground.… The plantation pass system,

the slave trade, the sexual exploitation of servant women, the whipping-post

and slave chain and branding iron, the overseer, the house servant, the

Uncle Tom: all these mechanisms were tried out and perfected on white

men and women.… [I]t is plain that nothing substantial can be said about the

mechanisms of black bondage in America except against the background

and within the perspective of white bondage in America.

Of English “Liberties, Franchises and

Immunities”

As profound as the implication of this general premise is,

it has never been confuted, although it has been ignored

and implicitly rejected by many,

and expressly

challenged by two.

But when it is accepted, attention is immediately drawn

to a basic constitutional principle that informed all of

these charters and instructions as first stated in the 1606

charter and reaffirmed in the 1609 charter, establishing the

Royal intent that all colonists

shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises and immunities of free denizens

and natural subjects, … to all intents and purposes as if they had been

abiding and born within this our Realm of England, or any other of our said

Domains.

Before the social demotion of the laboring people to

chattel bond-servitude could form the basis for the

subsequent lifetime hereditary chattel bondage of African-

Americans, those “liberties, franchises and immunities”

established in England had to be overthrown insofar as

they concerned the relations between employer and

employee established in the Statute of Artificers of 1563.

The parity of colonists’ rights with those prevailing in

England was stated again in the 1612 charter that

established a Virginia Colony Council, with authority to

legislate for the colony, provided that the law and

ordinances “be not contrary to the laws and statutes of this

our realm of England.”

So how then was it that the

plantation bourgeoisie was able to overthrow basic

English constitutional principles and reduce the laboring-

class in colonial Virginia to a general condition of chattel

bond-servitude? Following the lead of Edmund S.

Morgan, I will examine this question by emphasizing the

transformation of the relations of production, the relations

between laborer and employer.

The 1607–1610 Years

The conditions of life were unimaginably difficult for the

English colonists during much of the 1607–1610 period.

One statistic will suffice: nine out of ten of the emigrants

who came in that period died, an annual death rate of

almost 50 percent.

The winter of 1609–10, the “starving

time,” reduced the population of the colony “from 500 to

about sixty as a result of disease, sickness, Indian arrows,

and malnutrition.”

In June 1610, Governor Thomas

Gates ordered the abandonment of the premises by a

demoralized remnant of colonists, and on 17 June the

entire company embarked for England. Much to the dismay

of the abandoners, they were intercepted by newcomers

under the command of Governor de la Warre, at whose

order the old settlers returned to Jamestown.

The records of the sufferings of these earliest of

Virginia colonists have been extensively reprinted and

discussed in the sources noted. I wish, however, to direct

special attention to two aspects of the story that are of

special relevance for the thesis I am presenting.

First, however appalling the situation was in other

regards, the labor, whatever it was, conformed to the

traditional English system; none of the laboring people

was a chattel bond-servant. In 1607, the Virginia Colony

Council complained of English sailors diverting colony

laborers from their proper work to pursue a sideline in the

sassafras trade. Referring to these men, the council said,

“they be all our waged men.”

It has been questioned

whether this use of the term “waged men” should be

understood in the modern sense.

But the Colony Council

was composed of persons who were familiar with the

wages system of labor, and who had no experience at all

with chattel bond-servitude of English workers.

Furthermore, in later years, when the chattel-labor relation

of production was established for English workers in

Virginia, those workers were never referred to as

“waged” workers. Finally, in 1624 when his advice was

sought, the famous Captain John Smith, who was a

member of the Colony council from 1608 to 1610 and its

president for most of that time, firmly believed English

workers in Virginia should be “hyred good labourers and

mechanical men.” He explicitly denounced the buying and

selling of workers as an un-English practice.

Second, the sex ratio in this first period was extremely

high. The total number of women in the colony was raised

to two on the arrival of the second supply ship on about 1

October 1608. Some one hundred women were among the

four or five hundred passengers who arrived in Virginia in

the nine ships of the so-called Great Supply in 1609. But

the death toll of the following winter’s “starving time”

canceled the sex ratio as a meaningful statistic. English

women continued to arrive; still, in the middle of the

1610–1618 period, women and children together

constituted less than a one-fifth of the 351-member

colony.
20
 Whether the scarcity of women contributed to the
demoralizing death toll that led to the aborted decision to
abandon the colony is speculative. Some of the men were
veterans  of  European  armies,  accustomed  to  the  ready
services  of  women  camp  followers.  Perhaps  even  then
complaints were heard like one made a decade later, that
men were dying for the lack of women to tend them in their
sickness.
21
 This attention to the sex ratio could perhaps be
omitted,  if  it  were  not  for  the  fact  that  it  was  not  a
transitory phenomenon soon to be eroded as a result of the
normal  process  of  natural  reproduction.  (See this
page–this page, below.)
The Middle Years, 1610–1618
The  middle  period,  1610–1618,  began  under  the  new
charter of 1609.
22
 It was the  interlude between the fade-
out of the “gold fever” and the beginning of the “tobacco
fever”;  between  the  factional  president-and-council
conduct of the colony’s affairs and the establishment of the
Virginia Assembly under the “Great Charter” of 1618. It
was a period of military dictatorship in the colony headed
by a succession of veteran officers of the wars in Ireland
and the Netherlands;
23
 it saw the creation of the privately
organized,  separate  plantations  and  the  beginning  of

increasing difficulties for the Company. It ended with the

frustration of the social control efforts of the military

regime, whose attempts to enforce the progam for

balanced economic development wilted in the heat of the

“tobacco fever.”

The author of the standard study of the Virginia

Company regards this 1610–1618 period as primarily an

ebb tide in the life of the colony.

Nevertheless, it was a

time of great significance with regard to the development

of the status of labor. The English had, as noted, realized

that the Indians were not going to labor for them; therefore,

[a]fter 1609 the chief attention of all concerned was concentrated on the

task of sending a sufficient labor supply to produce in Virginia the

commodities that would find a ready and profitable market at home.

Under the new administration, production relations were

to be those of a producer’s cooperative type of enterprise.

The projected arrangement was outlined in the pamphlet

Nova Britannia, published in 1609:

All charges [expenses] of settling and maintaining the plantation, and of

making supplies shall be borne in a joint stock of the adventurers

[stockholders], for seven yeares after the date of our new enlargement

[1609]: during which time there shall be no adventure, nor goods returned in

private from thence, neyther by Master [ship’s captain], Marriner, Planter,

nor Passenger, they shall be restrained by bond and search, that as we

supplie from hence to the Planters at our own charge all necessaries for

food and apparel, for fortifying and building of houses in a joynt stock, so

they are to returne from thence the encrease and fruits of their labours, for

the use and advancement of the same joynt stocke, till the end of seven

years.

The joint stock was made up of shares purchased by

investors, the minimum cost of one share being £12 10d. A

distinction was made between those who invested money

but stayed in England, and those who went to Virginia as

colonists. The former were called “Adventurers,” the

latter were called “Planters.” Among the colonists, the

power-structure personnel, “the extraordinarie men [as

distinguished from the ‘ordinary man or woman’],

Divines, Governors, Ministers of State and Justice,

Knights, Gentlemen, Physitions, and such as be men of

worth for special services,” were not required to labor,

but were still counted as Planters and were “to be

maintained out of the common store.” At the end of seven

years a dividend was to be declared which, it was

anticipated, would amount to “five hundred acres, at

least,” for each stockholder. These Adventurers and

Planters would then be free and independent Virginia

landowners.

In a further quest for settlers, the Company turned its

attention to the destitute proletarians of London, charitably

described as “a swarme of unnecessary inmates … a

continual cause of dearth and famine, and the very

originall cause of all the Plagues that happen in this

Kingdome.” In 1609, the Virginia Company, in a letter to

the bourgeoisie corporate of London, “The Lord Mayor,

Aldermen and Companies,” sought to stress the value of

ridding “the city and suburbs” of the surplus poor by

shipping them to Virginia.

The Company proposed that

the London bourgeoisie, individually or in organized

forms, should purchase shares of Virginia Company stock.

For every share thus purchased, the Company would offer

to transport one poor London “inmate” to Virginia. Since

it was a fundamental right of English men and women that,

except by explicit order of the Crown, they might not be

sent out of the kingdom without their own consent, the

Company suggested persuasive arguments whereby the

city fathers might get that consent:

And if the inmate called before you and enjoined to remove shall alleadge

that he hath not place to remove unto, but must lye in the streets; and being

offered to go this Journey, shall demaund what may be theire present

mayntenance, what maye be their future hopes? it may please you to let

them Knowe that for the present they shall have meate, drinke and clothing,

and with an howse, orchard and garden, for the meanest [poorest] family,

and a possession of lands to them and their posterity, one hundred acres for

every man’s person that hath a trade, or a body able to endure day labour,

as much for his wife, as much for his child, that are of yeres to do service to

the Colony, with further particular reward according to theire particular

meritts and industry.

The exact terms on which these people were to “have

possession” of the allotted land was not stated; as tenants,

apparently,

with future prospects of becoming

independent landowners. They certainly were not to be

chattel proletarians.

In 1614, Acting Governor Thomas Dale sought to rouse

the labor force of the colony to a more consistent effort.

Among the measures he instituted was the allotment of

three acres each to a large number of the colonists. These

persons were referred to as “farmers,” that is, tenants.

Their relation to production was described at the time as

follows:

They are not called into any service or labor belonging to the Colony, more

than one month in the year, which shall neither be in seed time, or in harvest,

for which, doing no other duty to the Colony, they are yearly to pay into the

store two barrels and a half of corn.

The rest of the workforce were to be Company

laborers. It is not known how the selection of tenants was

made, but it is a reasonable conjecture that the expatriated

proletarians were found more frequently among the

Colony laborers than among tenants. These workers were

required to labor eleven months a year for the Company in

exchange for supplies and were additionally allowed to

work one month’s time for their own private accounts.

Among this number some were also given a day a week,

from May to harvest time, to tend their own crops.

The

laborers were, like other colonists, subject to the

severities of “Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall.”

Offenses against the code could bring down on a worker

the harsh cruelty of the military camp, such as pillorying,

cutting off of ears, boring through of the tongue, whipping

of offenders through the town tied to a cart, banishment

from the colony to the wilderness, and inducement of the

premature birth and death of an infant by the whipping of a

pregnant woman, for offenses such as speaking ill of a

master or official, stealing food from a master’s store, and

failure to complete a work task.

By way of summary of the production relationships as

they existed in the period July 1614 to March 1616, we

have John Rolfe’s account:

The general mayne body of the planters are divided into … Officers;

Laborers, and Farmors

(1) the officers [soldiers, guards, etc.] have the charge and care as well

over the farmors as laborers generallie – that they watch and ward for their

preservation, etc.

(2) The Laborers are of two sorts – 1st those employed only in the

generall works, who are fed and clothed out of the store. 2nd others,

specially artificers, as smiths, carpenters, shoemakers, taylors, tanners, etc.

do work in their professions for the colony, and maintayne themselves with

food and apparrell, having time permitted them to till and manure their

ground.

(3) The Farmors live at most ease – yet by their good endeavors bring

yearlie much plentie to the plantation. They are bound by covenant, both for

themselves and servants, to maintaine your Majestie’s right and title in that

Kingdom, against all foreign and domestic enemies. To watch and ward in

the townes where they are resident. To do thirty one days service for the

colony, when they shall be called thereunto – yet not at all times, but when

their own business can best spare them. To maintayne themselves and

families with food and rayment – and every farmor to pay yearlie into the

magazine, for himself and every man servant, wheat [corn], which

amounteth to twelve bushells and a halfe of English measure.

There is not one laboring person in this catalogue whose

status is that of chattel bond-servant.

Even the least

favored member of this labor force was working under a

bilateral, mutually binding contract which could not

legally be dissolved except by common consent of the

laborer and the employer. The laborer was not a chattel;

the employer, whether it were the Virginia Company or an

independent farmer, could not dispose of the laborer as he

could of property. Furthermore, these laborers were

assured at least a degree of propertied status at the

completion of the terms of their contracts.

A prominent English colonist and member of the

Virginia Company returned in 1610 from a trip to the

colony and published his “Newes from Virginia,”

enthusiastically setting forth the prospects of the new land.

He described the relations of production in verse:

To such as to Virginia

Do purpose to repaire;

And when that they shall hither come

Each man shall have his share,

Day wages for the laborer,

And for his more content,

A house and garden plot shall have.

In March of 1616 there were, by Colony Secretary John

Rolfe’s account, 81 tenants and some 140 laborers

working for the Company in Virginia, out of a total

population of 351.

Later that same spring, the servants

belonging to the group favored with extra time for tending

their own private crops were granted complete freedom

from servant status; this was in accordance with the

agreement made between them and the Company three

years before in England, prior to their signing on for

service in Virginia.

They now became tenants like those

previously mentioned or, possibly, they joined others in

the classification of artisans, or they became agricultural

laborers for farmers. A year later, in 1617, at the time of

Captain Samuel Argall’s assumption of his duties as

Governor in Virginia, the number of laborers employed by

the Company was reduced to only fifty-four.
38
 Perhaps 20
percent of the total population of the colony (after making
allowance for the death rate) was thus shifted in one year
from the status of contract wage-laborer for the Company
–  not  to  chattel  bond-servitude  but  upward  to  a  status
preferable and more profitable for them.
39
It was during  the latter  part of  this middle  period  that
the  English  first  cultivated  tobacco  in  Virginia.
40
  The
discovery of tobacco was “by far the most momentous fact
in  the  history  of  Virginia  in  the  seventeenth  century,”
writes  Bruce,  declaring  that  it  shaped  the  fate  of  the
people  of  Virginia  absolutely.
41
  The  high  profits  that  the
crop soon began to yield drew the labor of the colony like
a  magnet.  The  Company  and  colony  authorities  offered
special inducements and prescribed penalties to stem the
tendency, but to no avail. By the spring of 1618, the former
food surplus had become a scarcity:
The lack of corn became so great in consequence of the exclusive attention
paid  to  the  culture  of  tobacco,  that  there  would  have  been  ground  for
anticipating a severe famine if two hundred quarters of meal had not been
imported into the magazine.
42
Governor Argall  at first  attempted  to  enforce  limitations
on tobacco planting, and to encourage needed attention to
food production.
43
 But he had come just at the time when
separate  private  plantations  outside  the  Company  were

beginning to operate, making the task of enforcing controls

on production practically impossible by the efforts of

colony officials alone. In 1616, the operation of the supply

magazine was farmed out to a separate company of

merchants.

In that same year, the Virginia Company,

having no other means of paying the seven-year dividend

that was due to its stockholders, awarded land titles to the

original investors.

The initial effort at imposing minimum corn cultivation

while limiting the planting of tobacco was soon allowed

to lapse.

In June 1617, the newly arrived Governor.

Samuel Argall, proclaimed a fixed price of three shillings

per pound of tobacco. In order to secure compliance with

this regulation, he decreed a scale of penalties which

serve to throw light on the question of production

relations. Violators of the price decree were subject to a

“penalty [of] 3 years slavery to the colony.”

To protect

the colonists against profiteering by the newly privatized

magazine, the same penalty was to be exacted on those

who bought tobacco at less than three shillings. Though

Argall’s interest in controlling tobacco planting

diminished sharply, his belief in slavery as punishment for

malefactors remained constant. The following year,

desiring to encourage piety among the colonists, Argall

ordered that persons failing to attend church on Sundays

and holidays should suffer corporal punishment, “and be a

slave the week following – 2nd offense a month – 3rd, a

year and a day.”

What did Argall mean here by “slavery”? And what

does it tell us of the nature of the production relationships

at that time prevailing? Since this slavery was intended as

a punishment, it could not have been the normal condition

of labor as it then existed in the colony. The culprit under

punishment would be unpaid, but would receive

maintenance. It can be inferred, therefore, that workers

were normally entitled to recompense other than mere

maintenance. This penalty-servitude was imposed without

regard to the will or consent of the person subject to it. On

the other hand, the laborer under this sentence was not a

chattel, subject to purchase and sale. It appears that what

Argall meant by “slavery” in this instance was a status

between that of the “waged man,” the colony laborer

working for pay under contract, and that of limited-term

unpaid servitude.

Further evidence that the typical laborer at this time

was a hired wage worker, and not one employed for “meat

and drink only,” is to be seen in the following two items.

In June 1618, Argall complained that he had personally

had to pay “sundry debts of the Company,”

including

“wages … payde” for Company laborers.

The Company

denied knowledge of any such debts, but did not deny the

possibility of them. Furthermore, Article XIV of the

Virginia Charter of 1612 was specifically aimed at

checking the practice of workers who, “having received

wages etc. [in England] from the company, and agreed to

serve the colony, have afterwards refused to go thither,”

or who, having gone to Virginia, returned before their

contracts expired.

Argall occupied a dual position; he was the Governor

of the colony, appointed to serve by and for the Company,

and he was also the holder of a 400-acre land patent,

being therefore a private planter. As time went on, it was

said, he showed an increasing tendency to resolve any

conflict of interest in favor of his private-planter side

rather than his Company-official side. In August 1618, the

Company in London addressed a letter to Argall charging

him with peculation and other violations of trust, and

notifying him that he was to stand trial before the Company

Court in England upon his return to that country. Argall, it

was alleged, had used the Company’s ships and crews for

trading for his own private profit; he had forbidden any

other person from trading with the Indians for furs, in

order that he, Argall, might have the monopoly of that

profitable commerce; he had appropriated Company-

owned corn for his own private plantation use; and he had

disposed of the Company’s livestock to private planters,

including himself, in violation of explicit orders from the

Company.

One of the Company’s accusations is

particularly relevant to the question of the status of the

laboring classes in the colony:

that you take the ancient Planters which ought to be free and likewise those

[colony servants] from the common garden to sett them upon your corne to

feed your own men as if the Plantacon were onely intended to serve your

turne.

Here is the first alleged instance of a worker being

treated like a chattel, in that the worker is transferred

without his prior consent from one employer (in this

instance, the Company) to another (Argall, the private

planter). Lastly, and equally significant, these alleged acts

were officially condemned as violations of the rights of

the laborers under the Virginia charter, for which the

violator would have to render account before English

authorities.

In the end, Argall was able to avoid trial. His guilt or

innocence is of no particular importance today, except for

historical scholars.

What is of lasting significance is that

these charges against Argall anticipated in detail the

known course of self-aggrandizement followed by colony

governors, and by other strategically advantaged officers,

who succeeded Argall, conduct that was to have historical

consequences.

Finally, in this listing of innovations in property and

production relations in the 1610–1618 period, we come to

the establishment of what would in time come to be called

the “headright” principle. As has been mentioned, the

investors of 1609 were given their dividend in 1616 in the

form of land titles, this being the only form in which the

financially embarrassed Virginia Company could meet its

obligations. Having struck on this device, the Company

decided to use it for raising capital.

This new procedure was distinguished from the old in

the provisions it contained for facilitating the free flow of

capital. These features betokened not only the difficulties

facing the Company in securing capital, but also the

impending break-up of the Company’s monopoly of

colonial enterprise. Under the new Company policy, the

investor, or group of investors jointly, though remaining in

England, could receive immediate title and possession of

Virginia land, at the rate of fifty acres for every £12½

sterling paid to the Company; this clearly was a more

attractive arrangement than the previous one of having to

leave the investment in the parlous environment of the

Company treasury for seven years, with dubious prospects

of profitable returns, before getting any land title. Or,

alternatively, these private investors could get land by

means of the headright,

which allowed the investors the

same portion of fifty acres for each person whose

emigration expenses were paid by the investors. No less

significant for our present focus, it was specified that this

new opening to capitalist investment in Virginia land was
to be  used  for “sending families to manure [work]  it for
yearely rent, or for halfe the clear profits as many others
doe.”
58
  These  enterprises  were  called  “particular
plantations.” The perspective here being put forward was
that  of  a  capitalist  agriculture  of  the  English  style,  with
landlord, tenants and wage laborers, distinguished only by
the fact that the landlord was an absentee.
59
Under  this  provision,  by  1618  six  such  separate
companies had been granted patents for land in Virginia,
60
some of really vast extent, including one for 200,000 acres
and  another  for  80,000  acres.
61
  These  independent
capitalists  were given,  along  with  the  land,  beginning  in
February 1619, legal jurisdiction over the control of their
tenants and laborers; in the words of the Company’s order:
“to  make  Orders,  Ordinances  and  Constitutions  for  the
better  ordering  and  dyrectinge  of  their  servants.”  Yet,
significantly, they added the stipulation, “provided they be
not repugnant to the Lawes of England.”
62
The  new  departure  represented  by  the  issuance  of  the
Virginia charter of 1609 reflected a change in perspective
for  the  colony;  the  gold  fever  was  abated,  and  attention
was directed toward the establishment and development of
agriculture and of extractive enterprises of sea and stream,
of forest and mine, as well as to the trade with the Indians
for  beaver  skins.  Virginia,  under  the  new  direction,  was

expected to become a supplier of a wide variety of

products, supporting and supplementing the profit-making

processes of the home country. The author of “Newes from

Virginia” had rhapsodized on the prospects foreshadowed

in his mind by two ships he had recently seen coming into

England from the colony:

Well fraught, and in the Same

Two ships, are these commodities

Furres, sturgeon, caviare,

Black-walnut-tree, and some deal boards

With such they laden are;

Some pearl, some wainscot and clap boards,

With some sasafras wood,

And iron promis’t for ’tis true

Their mynes are very good.

As our account has indicated, these hopes were not, in

the main, to be realized. On the other hand, the colony’s

success in achieving self-sufficiency in food production

and in developing commerce with the Indians no doubt

explains in large part the lowering of the annual death rate

in the 1610–1618 period to less than 9 percent, compared

with the rate of just under 50 percent in the 1607–1610

period.

In 1616, John Rolfe, his term as Secretary of the

Colony having ended, returned temporarily to England

with his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas, and their

infant son;

there he wrote an account of the colony, now

at peace with its neighbors. He said:

The great blessings of God have followed this peace, and it next under him,

hath bredd our plentie – every man sitting under his fig tree in safety,

gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.

But now, at the close of the 1610–1618 period, the system

of allocation of land by head-right, and the opportunity for

a freer flow of and quicker turnover of capital had cast a

shadow over the peace, the land and the laborer. It was to

be a capitalist farming system in Virginia.

But what kind

of capitalist farming – the English type, or some peculiar

system? That was the question to which the next and final

phase of the Company period would give an answer.

The Final Phase, 1619–24: The Tobacco Price

Problem

The 1619–24 period begins with the installation of Sir

Edwin Sandys as Treasurer and chief executive of the

Virginia Company, and the entrance of George Yeardley

upon his duty as the Company’s governor in Virginia, in

the spring of 1619. Basic lines of policy, however, had

been worked out in the latter part of 1618, in discussions

that sought to draw lessons from the experiences of the

past, and of the Argall regime in particular.

The program that emerged was fashioned along three

main lines: (1) the reclamation of Company lands and

stock, and the revitalization and extension of various

Company enterprises, all to be financed initially by the

sale of patents for separate plantations to be organized by

individual and group capitalists outside the Company; (2)

the promotion of a generalized economy, and avoidance of

reliance upon tobacco as the mainstay; (3) the definition

and systemization of land tenure in the colony, and the

encouragement of emigration of laboring hands to the

colony.

Integrally and separately, from the beginning the

three points of this program bore within themselves latent

contradictions which quickly matured.

As a capitalist operation, the Virginia Company was a

failure in 1619. For twelve years of effort and the outlay

of £75,000 sterling of investors’ money and credit, the

Company had nothing in Virginia to show for it but – six

goats!:

[The] wholl State of the publique [Company property in the Colony] was

gone and consumed, there beinge not lefte att that time to the Company

either the land … or any Tennant, Servant, Rent or trybute corne [from the

Indians], cowe or salte-worke and but six Goates onely.

Paradoxically, however, the colony was beginning to

throb under the first stimulus of “America’s first Boom,”

as  Professor  Morgan  has  called  it.
71
  It  was  the  tobacco
boom, of course, and it drew into itself an increasing share
of  the  colony’s  labor.  The  shipment  of  tobacco  from
Virginia  to  England  in  1615  amounted  to  less  than  one-
third of a pound for every person in the colony. By 1619,
the figure was twenty pounds per person, and by 1622 it
had reached forty-eight pounds.
72
 The number of separate
non-Company  plantations  showed  a  parallel  growth.
Between  1616  and  1619,  six  patents  were  issued  to
separate  capitalist  plantation  groups.  Between  1619  and
1623,  forty-four  such  patents  were  granted  by  the
Company.
73
Conceived as a means of financing the development of a
generalized economy  under  Company  leadership  in  the
colony, the policy of selling land for separate plantations
produced the opposite effect. The directors of these new
enterprises emerged increasingly as the vital force in the
direction  of  the  economic  and  political  affairs  of  the
colony, and in the ever-increasing reliance upon tobacco
cultivation.
74
  Although  they  made  some  gestures  toward
developing  non-tobacco  enterprises,  they  were  not
interested in risking very far along a path that had proved
so  costly  to  the  Company.  Their  eyes  were  fixed  on
tobacco,  with  its  quick  turnover  and  profits.  From  1619
on,  writes  Craven,  “the  chief  interest  of  the  Virginia
planter was devoted to his tobacco crop.”
75

A competition developed between the Company and the
separate plantations for the supplies of labor and capital.
In  1619  and  1620,  separate  planters  were  already
accounting for the transport of 30 percent of the emigrants;
after  that,  the  majority  were  supplied  by  the  separate
planters.
76
  This  competition  took  its  most  dramatic  and
sharpest form in the Argall-like practice of colony officers
diverting Company tenants from Company service to these
officers’ own private exploitation. In its instructions to the
new  Governor Yeardley,  the  Company  had  endowed  the
colony  officers  with  lands  to  be  cultivated  for  their
support by tenants supplied by the Company. Leading the
list was an allotment of 3,000 acres to be attached to the
office  of  the  governor.  In  addition  to  this  substantial
perquisite  of  office,  Yeardley  was  granted  outright  a
personal  plantation  of  2,200  acres.
77
  Yeardley  was  an
especially arrant offender among the colony officers who
appropriated  tenants  for  “their  own  private  Lands,  not
upon land belongeth to their office,” and wasted the time
of many others by  requiring  personal  services of them.
78
When he surrendered his office at the end of his three-year
term,  Yeardley  kept  for  himself  all  but  forty-six  of  his
Company  complement  of  one  hundred  tenants.
79
  The
Company officers also betrayed their trust and advantaged
themselves  by  hiring  out  Company-supplied  tenants  to
private non-Company employers.
80

In  the  competition  for  investment  capital,  the  Virginia
Company was also being outdone. In 1620 and 1621, the
Company was forced on this account to rely mainly on its
public lottery as its capital funds source.
81
 By the summer
of 1621, the par £12½ sterling  Virginia  Company shares
were selling in London at from £2 to £2½.
82
The  definition  and  systemization  of  land  tenure  was
elaborated in the instructions for Yeardley, adopted by the
Company  Court  in  London  in  November  1618,  prior  to
Yeardley’s  coming  to  Virginia.
83
  These  instructions
represented  a  further  development  of  the  trend  to  large-
capitalist agriculture and  a freer  flow  of  capital, both  of
which  were  established  principles  informing  the  1616
policy.
84
  The  tenants  who  had  been  brought  to  Virginia
prior to mid-1616 were, upon completion of their term of
service, to receive one hundred acres “to be held by them,
their  Heirs  and assigns  for  ever,”  paying  only  two
shillings annual rent. But persons transported at Company
expense since mid-1616 had a less attractive option. They
could remain as tenants for the Company at the completion
of their seven-year term, or be “free to move where they
will,” but with no land guarantee.
85
Obviously the prospective creation of a permanent class
of  tenants  would  be  designed  to  encourage  capital
investment,  as  would  the  reduction  of  the  growth  in
numbers  of  self-employed  freehold  farmers,  through  the

accretion of landless ex-tenants. On the other hand, this

was a policy that would increase class differentiations by

reducing social mobility from tenant to landowner, and

sharpen class contradictions. The same effects were to be

expected from the expansion of the headright principle to

provide a grant of fifty acres to any investor who would

pay for the transportation of “persons … which shall go

into Virginia with intent there to inhabit, if they continue

there three years or dye after they are shipped.”

Under Sandys’s leadership the Company launched a

number of projects – iron mining, processing wood for

potash and pitch, timbering, fishing, glass making and fur

trading – designed to promote a generalization of the

Virginia economy, as a market for and a supplier to

England, and in the interest of the strength and stability of

the colony itself. Lacking capital of its own, the Company

farmed out a number of these efforts to subsidiary joint-

stock companies. Although one of these projects –

shipping women to be sold for wives among the more

prosperous men – was profitable, most of the other

endeavors were less remunerative for the investors.

the summer of 1621, writes Craven: “The company was

for all practical purposes bankrupt.”

Crisis of overproduction of tobacco

Most disastrous, however, was the outbreak of a

characteristic capitalist crisis of overproduction:

[T]he Company had not reckoned with the effect of the rapidly expanded

supply of Virginia tobacco, nor with the increasing competition from the new

British settlements in Barbados and St Christopher. Consequently, during

1620 and 1621, the adventurers who had underwritten the purchase of the

product had been compelled to sell much of it at less than they had paid in

Virginia.

In the hope of riding out the storm, the Sandys

administration joined, indeed put itself at the head of, the

tobacco party.

Succumbing to what one of Sandys’s

opponents called the “straunge dream”

of salvation

through tobacco, the Company decided to stake all on an

application for a royal grant of the monopoly of the

English tobacco import trade. They got the contract, but

the terms dictated by King James were so onerous that it

was guaranteed to fail so far as the Company’s interests

were concerned.

Although the insupportable conditions

of the contract led the Company to surrender it within a

year, it was of momentous historic significance. It

expressed the choice of the Anglo-American plantation

bourgeoisie as a whole to base the development of

Virginia Colony on a monocultural, rather than on a

diversified economy. From the time of the forlornly

ambitious projects for non-tobacco products plotted by the

Virginia Company, the records of seventeenth-century

Virginia are filled with instructions, advice, appeals,

exhortations and injunctions aimed at diversifying the

economy and avoiding dependence upon tobacco.

With

even greater consistency the colony was fashioned at

every turn in the opposite image. In the end it was a

victory of blind instinct over articulate wisdom. But not

instinct in general: Indian society had mastered the uses of

tobacco without letting tobacco master Indian society. It

was, rather, the victory of the specifically bourgeois class

instinct for their annual rate of profit and quick turnover of

capital.

The “Adventurers” Seek Ways to Support the

Tobacco Addiction

The drop in tobacco prices fell upon the just and the

unjust, the “publique” and the separate private plantation

owners, alike. The Virginia Company passed into history

in 1624, but the price of tobacco continued a general

course of decline; by 1630 it was less than a penny a

pound in Virginia.

By the middle of the seventeenth

century, Barbados and St Christopher had been

transformed into sugar plantation colonies in the interest of

a higher rate of profit, but the price of Virginia tobacco

never again rose to even one-third of what it had been in

the day of the “straunge dream.” If the losses sustained on

other enterprises had dried up the source of capital

flowing into the Virginia Company, the decline in the price

of tobacco implied a similar effect, if it were not

somehow to be averted, upon the flow of English capital

into Virginia tobacco cultivation, whether that cultivation

were conducted by a royally chartered company or by

separate entrepreneurs operating on their own account.

The capitalists would have to find a way to counteract

the market-driven tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As

we have noted, the Company and the Virginia Assembly in

1619 had indicated their idea of a fair profit, stipulating a

limit of 25 percent mark-up on English goods brought for

sale in Virginia. Faced with falling tobacco prices in

England, the merchants accordingly discounted the

tobacco with which the Virginia people paid for English

goods. From a contentious exchange of letters between the

Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Colony

Council in Jamestown in 1623, we learn that a bushel of

meal delivered in Virginia and worth thirteen shillings

was exchanged for nine or ten pounds of tobacco,

officially rated at three shillings the pound, a discount of

55 percent.

Conceivably this deterioration of the Virginia tobacco-

seller’s position could have been countered by

administrative measures. This was not a practical

possibility, however, as more than a century of subsequent

efforts at “stinting” tobacco, pegging prices, destroying

surplus stocks, etcetera, would prove.

Almost the entire cost of production in Virginia was in

payment for labor power, and since these payments were

made in tobacco, the capitalists’ cost of production

declined proportionately to the decline in the price of

tobacco.

Therefore, although the capitalists’ profit was

being reduced, the decline was not caused by a rise in the

absolute or relative wages of the laboring people, but by

the fall of tobacco prices. This built-in elasticity of

laborer and tenant costs served to reduce the impact of the

lowered price of tobacco upon the interests of the

capitalists, in Virginia or in England or in both places.

However, it did not protect the capitalists against a

reduction of their equity or profit rate in terms of their

pound-sterling investment. If the adventurer or planter

invested one hundred pounds sterling in Virginia tobacco

and the price of tobacco declined by half, the rate of profit

on the investment would be cut in half. The plantation

bourgeoisie accordingly sought ways to raise its share of

the net product by an attack on “entitlements,” as they

would be called by today’s “Conservatives,” namely the

tenants’ “moiety” and the laborers’ free-market wage

levels.

Intermediate Bond-Servitude Forms:

Convicts, Apprentices and “Maids-for-wives”

For some time before 1622, the adventurers and planters

had taken measures to secure supplies of non-tenant

laborers on conditions more favorable than those provided

under the Virginia wage scale. For this purpose they

turned their attention to those segments of the English

population most vulnerable to such superexploitation,

namely prisoners, impoverished youth, and women of the

laboring classes.

In the spring of 1617, the Privy Council issued a

warrant for the transport of a number of “malefactors” then

being held in custody; the king specified that they be sent

to Virginia and nowhere else.

In October 1619, the king

supplied the Company with another one hundred “divers

dissolute persons,” who were to be transported as

“servants” to Virginia. The exact terms on which they

were to serve in the colony were not specified, but it was

anticipated that the conditions would not be agreeable to

the prisoners. This feeling was, it has been said, all the

stronger on account of the fact that the group of prisoners

included a number of Irish persons captured in their own

country in the course of the brutal English plantation of

Ulster.

Their disaffection caused some delay in the

execution of the order for their transportation, as Edwin

Sandys explained in speaking of the intended shipment of

the first fifty of these persons:

[T]hey could not goe in lesse than fower Shipps, for feare they beinge many

together may drawe more unto them and so muteny and carry away the

Ship, which would stand [cost] the Company fowre thousand pounds.

100

The records of the Privy Council proceedings are

sprinkled with orders for the surrender of imprisoned

convicts to Company authorities for transportation to

Virginia as “servants,” on the condition that “they retourne

not again into England,” on pain of death.

101

For instance:

• 13 July 1617: Chris Potley, Roger Powell, Sapcott

Molineux and Thomas Chrouchley, prisoners at Oxford

jail; and George Harrison, convicted of stealing a

horse, prisoner at Hartford jail.

• March and November 1618: William Lambe and James

Stringer, respectively, prisoners at Newgate prison.

• May 1622: Daniell Frank,

102

William Beare and John

Ireland, prisoners at White Lion jail in Southwark.

• Also in 1622: James Wharton, convicted of picking

pockets, in Norfolk; and John Carter of London,

convicted of horse-stealing, but for whom injustice

was tempered with mercy since it was doubtful

“whether the horse was stolen or not.”

Still, as Sandys had warned in 1619, there was a critical

mass where further congregation of such deportees meant

mutiny. Therefore, whilst they might supplement the labor

supply, they were not to be the main source of it, and thus

were not the means of achieving a general reduction of

labor costs in the colony.

The “Duty boys”

In the 1618–22 period, considerable effort was made to

recruit “vagrant” children – mainly, but not exclusively, in

London – to work in Virginia. In autumn 1618, the London

Common Council and the Virginia Company agreed upon

the “taking up” of one hundred homeless boys and girls,

aged eight to sixteen, for shipment to Virginia.

103

A year

later the Company congratulated itself and the city fathers

on the successful delivery of the full one hundred, minus

“such as dyed on the waie.”

104

The Company then

proposed a renewal of the collaboration, with the object

of sending another one hundred youths, but this time they

were to be “twelve years old and upward.”

105

The program encountered opposition on the part of the

youth who were its objects. Two months after the second

plan was proposed, it was discovered “that among that

number there are divers unwilling to be carryed thither [to

Virginia].” Special care was taken that the

“troublemakers” who sought to obstruct the program were

included among those selected for transport, but they were

to be taken to jail for punishment before their departure.

106

Fifty such young persons were delivered in Virginia in

May of 1620 on board the ship Duty; thereafter,

apprentices brought on the same sort of program were

called “Duty boys.”

107

From the standpoint of labor costs, the apprentice role

for which these “Duty boys” were destined had obvious

advantages for the plantation bourgeoisie. Apprentices

were bound to serve seven years, the common apprentice

term in England. The cost of getting them to Virginia was

“Three pounds a peece for the Transportation and forty

shillings a peece for their apparrell.”

108

In addition to this

outlay, the expenditure for their equipment and food for the

first year of the term was not likely to amount to more than

another £5 sterling, since their own labor provided their

own food and most of their other necessities, except

clothing, bedding, metal products and other manufactured

goods supplied from England. The cost of maintaining the

apprentice declined to practically nothing in subsequent

years of the term.

109

The apprentice received no wages

except his board and keep; thus the cost of the apprentice’s

labor, assuming the worker survived for the full term,

came to less than thirty shillings per year.

The annual output of the apprentice in the period 1619–

23 averaged 712 pounds of tobacco,
110
 which would yield
£44 10s., at 15d.,
111
 in Virginia and £106 16s., at 36d.,
112
in London. The Virginia “planter” would thus get for his
tobacco in one year thirty times its annualized labor cost.
The use  of apprentice youth as a labor supply, however,
involved certain negative features. The planters expressed
a  preference  for  men  “such  as  have  been  brought  up  to
labor  &  those  between  20  &  30  yeres  of  age”
113
  rather
than inexperienced and less muscular teenagers such as the
apprentices mostly were.
114
Yet  each  of  these  drawbacks  carried  its  own  partial
offset.  If  the  youthful  apprentice  was  not  so  strong  as  a
mature  adult,  he  was  perhaps  more  tractable  for  that
reason. If the apprentice died before the end of his term,
then at least he would  not be  around to raise the cost of
labor by becoming first a tenant-at-halves and then a free
farm owner.
There  remained  one  unmitigated  handicap  in  the
apprentice  arrangement,  so  far  as  the  needs  of  the
capitalist  plantation  development  in  Virginia  was
concerned. Under English custom and law, even the parish
or  country  apprentice  was  bound  to  one  particular
employer  in  a  one-to-one  relationship.  It  was  a
relationship  equally  binding  on  each  party  and  the
apprentice  could  not  be  sold  to  or  bought  from  another
employer.
115

A new opportunity for venture capital: “maids-

for-wives”

A third direct and indirect source of labor power that was

unpaid was sought by the importation of women. As early

as 1618, enterprising men were specializing in this labor

supply service. This was revealed in two arrests made in

the fall of that year. One man, Owen Evans,

116

who was a

messenger for the king, ranged over three counties of

southeastern England “pressing maidens” for “His

Majesty’s service for the Bermudas and Virginia.” Paying

four shillings to one man, five to another, twelve pence to

third, and threatening them with hanging for refusal to

comply (so they testified), Evans ordered women to be

taken up in the king’s name and delivered to him at

Sherborne in Dorset. He bore a badge of authority from

the King’s Chamber which, it was later said, was validly

his, but which he used illegally in this business. As many

as forty women were said to have fled the one parish of

Ottery in Devon to escape this frightful form of class and

sex oppression. They must have had to flee to points far

distant, because young women from adjoining parishes

were also taking flight in terror. Jacob Crystie of Ottery

sold his daughter to Evans for twelve pence. A member of

the local establishment paid Evans ten shillings to

dissuade him from further oppression of the Ottery parish.

Evans was finally arrested and sent back to London, being

treated  in  due  course  with  the  deference  reserved  for
personal agents of the king. What if anything in the way of
punishment  was  given  to  Evans  for  this  crime,  our
historians do not tell us.
Another man, named Robinson, forged a commission for
himself and used it “to take up rich Yeomen’s daughters to
serve  his  majesty  for  breeders  in  Virginia”  unless  they
were  ransomed  by  their  parents  and  friends.  He  was
apprehended,  tried,  hanged,  drawn  and  quartered  for
counterfeiting the Great Seal.
117
Subsequently,  bourgeois  gentlemen  and  aristocrats
made the trade respectable and profitable: respectable, on
the  ground  of  “making  of  the  men  feel  at  home  in
Virginia”;
118
 and profitable, by operating it as a Virginia
Company monopoly. Of 650 persons sent by the Company
to  Virginia  between  August  1619  and  April  1620  (see
Table 4.1), ninety were “Young maids to make wives for
so many of the former tenants.”
119
 This item is included in
a  “Noate  of  Shipping,  Men  and  Provisions  Sent  to
Virginia”;  women,  it  seems,  were  counted  as
“provisions.” The Company in June 1620 projected a plan
for  sending  one  hundred  more  “maids-for-wives,”  in  a
total of eight hundred emigrants.
120
 On 20 December 1621,
the Warwick  arrived  in  Virginia  with  a  cargo  that  the
Company’s  accompanying  letter  advertized  as  “an
extraordinary  choice  lot  of  thirty-eight  maids  for

wives.”
121
  Investors  were  apparently  encouraged  by  this
bright aspect of an otherwise not very promising general
business  outlook.  In  November  1621,  a  subsidiary  joint
stock  for  trading  in  “maids-for-wives”  to  Virginia  was
established  in  the  amount  of  £800  sterling.  Virginia
Company  leaders  Edwin  Sandys  and  the Earl  of
Southampton patriotically headed the list of investors with
subscriptions of £200 each.
122
The  shipment  of  “one  widow  and  eleven  maids  for
wives”  on  board  the George in the late summer of 1621
was  accompanied  by  a  Company  letter  to  the  Colony
Council regarding the disposal of the cargo.
123
 That letter,
when considered together with other records of the time,
helps  to  outline  the  economic  aspects  of  this  branch  of
business,  as  well  as  to  suggest  inferences  regarding  the
life of the women traded. The George women were to be
sold  at  “120  lb  waight  of  the  best  leafe  Tobacco.”  The
price  of  the Warwick  women  who  arrived  in  Virginia  a
month  later  was  increased  to  150  pounds  of  tobacco,
partially on the grounds of the declining price of tobacco
in England.
124
 It was provided that the total payment on the
George’s twelve would have to be equal to 12 times 120
pounds of tobacco, and that, therefore, “if any of them dye
(before sale was made) that proportion must be advanced
to  make  it  uppon  those  that  survive.”
125
  Some  of  the
business had to be done on credit, judging by an order of

the Virginia General Court of 2 May 1625 requiring

“Debtors for Maids” to pay up or face punitive action by

the Court.

126

Such problems arose despite the effort made to limit the

purchasing rights to men of substance. While allowing

love its dominion, the Company authorities directed that it

operate within the limits of sound business practice.

Accordingly, the Company kept one eye on the

improvement of prospects; it promised the women that

they would not be married off to poor men, “for we would

have their condition so much better as multitudes will be

allured thereby to come unto you.”

127

Therefore, a line

was drawn on eligible men for wiving: the Company

would “not have those maides deterred and married to

servants but only to such freemen or tenants as have

meanes to maintain them.”

128

There is evidence of resentment on the part of poor men

on account of the deprivation they had to endure because

of this pounds-shillings-and-pence approach to the woman

question. Thomas Niccolls expressed indignation at this

discrimination in a letter he sent to England.

129

Women

were so “well sold,” he said, that a poor man could never

get possession of one. Poor tenants, he wrote, desperately

needed wives, for “they depart this world in their own

dung for want of help in their sickness.” Furthermore,

Niccolls could not see why women should not

be bound to serve the Company for a certain number of years whether they

married or not, [since] all the multitude of women [do is] nothing but to

devour the food of the land without doing any day’s deed whereby any

benefit [may] arise wither to the company or the Country.

To speed the turnover of their capital, the stockholders

offered a special inducement to prospective customers:

“you may assure such men as marry those women that the

first servants sent over by the Company shall be consigned

to them.”

130

Niccolls’s comment and Company promises to the

contrary notwithstanding, these women were not

absolutely insured against becoming “servants.” In its

instructions, the Company said that they might “be

servants … in case of extremetie.” Extremity of what exact

sort is left to our own inferences. Several years later, a

case came before the Virginia General Court concerning a

woman who had been brought over to the colony to serve

as a wife. But the marriage plan had aborted “because of

some dislike between them,” and “it was agreed” that the

woman was to be a servant to her former fiancé for two

years.

131

The Virginia census of 1624–25 showed that of

the 222 English women in the colony, forty-six were

propertyless workers. How many of this unmarried group

had originally come to be sold as wives, and how many

came as girl apprentices, or by some other particular

arrangement, is not known.

132

The same census showed that there were 107 Virginia-

born English children in Virginia. This statistic points up

the special contribution to be had from the importation of

women in connection with the reduction of labor costs, but

Virginia births were not to furnish the quick solution

sought by the tobacco plantation bourgeoisie. In fact, there

was a contradiction between the woman’s role as child-

bearer and as laborer. Her pregnancy, child-bearing and

childcare responsibilities entailed an uncompensated

expense and loss of labor time for the employer. The child

would not reach working age during the mother’s term of

service, and in any case the child was born free and not

under any contractual obligation to the mother’s employer.

For that reason, severe penalties were imposed upon

servant women who became pregnant, or who risked

becoming pregnant, and upon men (except the particular

employer) who were thus involved with servant

women.

133

On the other hand, if a landholder wanted to

establish an ongoing estate, male heirs must be produced

of undoubted paternity. In those cases, one particular

woman in the capacity of wife and mother was

indispensable, in spite of the added expense at a time of

rising labor costs, it being understood that this particular

woman would not be available for common labor as a

general rule.

A man could buy a wife, but he could not sell her. Once

the investment was made, it dropped forever out of the

sphere of circulation of capital, by the law of coverture.

The investment could not be restored to its original money

form by a return to the market; nor could it be used to

settle outstanding debts or as collateral to meet needs for

credit. This form of “property,” whatever the benefits to

its possessor, clearly inhibited the free flow of capital.

For these several reasons, therefore, the importation of

women was not a means for reducing the general cost of

labor to any degree commensurate with the fall in tobacco

prices, which by 1622 was already a critical problem.

Sex Ratio and Economic Base: Virginia and

New England

The maids-for-wives program may have contributed to a

reduction of the sex ratio, but in the colony census of

1624–25 the sex ratio among adults was still nearly four

men to one woman.

134

Although it is not surprising to learn

that the ratio of men to women in the earliest colonial

settlements was high, the ratio in Virginia was

significantly higher than it was in New England. In the

four-year period 1620 to 1623, 212 persons left England

for New England. Among the 203 identified by sex, the

sex ratio was just over two to one.
135
 Among the adults on
the first of these ships, the Mayflower, there were 56 men,
26 women, and 19 children.
136
The contrast would prove to be more than momentary.
In the years 1634 and 1635, among passengers embarking
for Virginia, males outnumbered females by more than six
to  one. A  similarly  derived  index  for  English  emigrants
going to New England in the years 1620 to 1638 indicated
a rough ratio of 150, 60 men to 40 women.
137
 A tabulation
by  Russell  R.  Menard  of  eleven  selected  quantifying
items,  yields  a  weighted  sex  ratio  of  338  for  European
immigrants to Maryland and Virginia for the period 1634
to 1707.
138
This contrast with New England was a function of the
differing relations of production in the two regions. Of the
5,190  bond-laborers  shipped  for  continental  Anglo-
America from the port of Bristol between 1654 and 1686,
New  England  took  only  165,  while  Virginia  took  4,924.
The  relatively  insignificant  proportion  of  bond-labor  in
New England reflected the fact that there the relations of
production originally developed in the matrix of the family
kinship  group.
139
  In  Virginia,  where  bond-servitude  was
the  status  of  the  great  majority  of  European  immigrants,
family formation was inhibited because the laborers, being
chattels, were legally barred from marrying. The retarding
effect on family formation due to the bond-labor system is

seen in the fact that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake the

average age of female European immigrants, who were

mainly bond-laborers, was 24.9 years at the time of the

first marriage; the corresponding figure for native-born

European-American women was 16.8 years.

140

Tenantry, Wage Labor and Captain Nuce’s

Plan

The laboring people in Virginia in the beginning of 1622

were predominately tenants, not convicts, wives, or

apprentice youth. This is a fact of obvious importance in

any effort to investigate the beginnings of the system of

chattel bond-servitude as the basic form of labor in the

Anglo-American plantation colonies. Since it deserves

greater attention than most historians of the period have

given to it, the matter merits some documentation here.

141

Prior to 1622, most emigrants to Virginia were

transported by the Virginia Company.

142

The proportion of

tenants among those sent by the Virginia Company in the

1619–21 period, and for whom we have a categorization

in the records, was about 60 percent, that is, 860 out of

1,450 (see Table 4.1). If the 190 “maids for wives” are

left out of the account, or if they are counted in the

category into which they were inducted by marriage, the

tenant proportion among these Company emigrants would

amount to around 70 percent.

There is much evidence in the records to indicate that in

this period the proportion of tenants was as high, or

possibly higher, among emigrants dispatched from

England by separate, non-Company, enterprisers. The best

and most complete, if not the only, substantial record of a

non-Company plantation which has come down from that

time is that of Berkeley Hundred, in the form of the papers

of John Smyth of Nibley, one of the four incorporators of

that enterprise.

143

These documents present a picture of the

employment relation of those engaged for service in

Berkeley Hundred. The terms of employment are written,

specific for each individual (or family), and they are

formalized before the emigrant leaves England. The

contracted arrangement is mutually binding on both

parties; the person employed is bound to service to this

employer only; his or her contract is not “assignable” to

another employer.

The list includes thirty-four men sent to Berkeley

Hundred in September 1619 to serve under plantation

manager John Woodleefe, apparently as tenants, excepting

two men sent apparently to serve only in their trade of

joiner.

144

Beside each tenant’s name is the term to be

served, in years. The shortest term is three years; all of the

“assistants” to Woodleefe are in that category, and that

term is most common (nine cases) among the other twenty-

eight tenants. There was one serving the longest term, of

eight years. Four of Woodleefe’s five assistants were

assigned 50 acres each; the fifth, one of the two non-

tenants, was a skilled artisan (one of the two joiners), who

was to receive a percentage of the business. Of the twenty-

eight rank-and-file tenants, eighteen were assigned 30

acres each, two were assigned 40 acres each, and the

single smallest allotment was 15 acres. Five of these

persons were put on a supplemental wage (in some cases

paid in whole or part in advance, in England), apparently

in consideration of special expected services in trades

such as sawyer, cooper, gunsmith, etcetera. Thirteen of

these men, including five who were tradesmen, were paid

individual earnest money and promised family

maintenance money before leaving England. They were

engaged as tenants for from three to seven years, and were

assigned land, most commonly 30 acres.

145

Table 4.1 Shipments of persons to Virginia by the Virginia

Company and by separate planters, 1619–21

Total Tenants Servants

Apprentices Maids

Sent by

Company

l,450

for own

use 1,060 860 100 -   100
for former
tenants
390 -   100 200 90
for
separate
plantations
221
c
     
Sent by
separate
planters
(estimate)
750
d
     
Source: Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols. edited by
Susan Myra Kingsbury [Washington, DC, 1906–35]), 3: 313.
a.  The  Company  records  distinguish  between  tenants  and  servants  among
those shipped by the Company, but not in the case of those shipped for the
separate plantations.
b. The Company figures include some persons who were to have gone, but did
not;  and  others  who  died  en  route.  Yet  a  comparison  with  Alexander
Brown’s figures (The First Republic in America [Boston and New York,
1898], this page, this page, this page, this page) shows the proportion sent by
the Company and by the separate planters to have been as presented in this
table.
c.  In  the  1619–20  period,  of  the  611  sent  to  private  plantations  221  were
transported by the Company.
d.  The  ratio  of  privately  shipped  to  Company-shipped  persons  remained
constant at about 45 per cent during this period. (See Wesley Frank Craven,

The Dissolution of the Virginia Company [New York, 1932], this page.)

For the 800 shipped by the Company in 1620–21, 360 thus would have been

shipped for private planters. This number plus the 390 sent by separate

planters in 1619–20 equals 750.

A year later, in September 1620, seven persons entered

into a contract to go to Berkeley Hundred as tenants.

146

This agreement is remarkable in that there is no time set

for the expiration of the agreement; indeed, reference is

made to a continued arrangement of the “heires” on both

sides. Still, two things are clear: (1) these tenants are to

have two-thirds of the corn and wheat they raise, and half

of everything else they produce; and (2) there is no

provision for a “setting over,” “assigning,” or “selling” of

the tenants to another employer.

These papers show the employers as paying the cost of

the transportation of the employees; the laboring emigrants

are not obligated to “pay back” this expenditure by

servitude or otherwise. The contract agreed to by Robert

Coopy, a smith, carpenter and turner, in September 1619

is seen by A. E. Smith as the “first genuine servant’s

indenture.”

147

But Coopy’s arrangement was obviously

quite different from that of the “indentured servant” that

was to be. Although the only recompense appears to have

been “to maintayne him with convenient [appropriate] diet

and apparell meet for such a servant,” it is equally

provided that, at the end of his three-year term, he is to be

given 30 acres of land, and is “to enjoy all the freedomes

and privileges of a free man”; that is to say, within three

years Coopy would be a self-employed owner of a 30-

acre farm.

148

More fundamental, Coopy was not a chattel,

alienable to any person to whom his employer might

“assign” him; and his right to a land grant was written into

the contract.

149

The significant aspect of the Robert Coopy document is

that it is the earliest evidence in the record that

rationalizes transferring the burden of a transatlantic

transportation costs from the employer to the laborer. It is

perhaps also worth noting that Robert Coopy did not

actually come to Virginia, but stayed in England.

150

Whether or not he reneged on the arrangement on account

of the obnoxious uniqueness of its wageless feature is not

revealed in the record.

While the documentation presented here is not

exhaustive, there is nothing in the record, or in the

argumentation based on it, to negate its clear implication.

The typical form of labor in Virginia at the beginning of

1622 was that of the tenant, “the planters being,” as

Alderman Johnson said in reviewing the period 1619–22,

“most of them Tenants at halves.”

151

A new proposal for getting “hands at Cheaper rates”

The  relationship  of  tenant-at-halves  interposed  limits  to
the recoupment of profits by the reduction of labor costs.
The  tenant  relationship  also  involved  a  relatively
important and less reducible cost of the initial installation
in Virginia. Tenants transported by the Virginia Company,
for  instance,  were  to  be  provided  with  “Apparell,
Victuall, Armes, Tooles and Household Implements,” the
cost of which, delivered with the tenants in Virginia, came
to  a  total  of  £20  sterling,  of  which  only  £6  sterling
represented the cost of the transportation of the person, the
remainder  being  for  the  purchase  and  freight  of  the
equipment and supplies.
152
A wage worker, on the other hand, was provided only
with transportation, a cost amounting, as in the case of the
person of the tenant, to £6 sterling.
153
 But once in Virginia,
the wage worker was entitled to wages set by the Colony
Council  several  times  as  great  as  those  of  England  (see
Table 4.2). Even as the Colony Council was establishing
that schedule of wages, in January 1621/2, it was telling
London that the advancement of the work was hindered by
a  lack  of  “hands  at  so  Cheape  a  rate  as  cannot  yett
possibly bee.”
154
 Although Captain Thomas Nuce was one
of  the  council  members  who  signed  their  names  to  the
proclamation of wages that January, four months later he
was moving for a reconsideration.
155
 He had been sent to
the  colony  to  superintend  the  revival  of  the  Company’s

enterprises, but he found the prevailing wage rates an

obstacle. With patriotic discretion, Nuce chose for

illustrative contrast not the wage scale of the Mother

Country, but that of Catholic lands. Virginia, he said,

where “wee pay iii s [three shillings] a day for the labor

of a man who hath no other waie but to digg and dealve,”

must not be confused with “Italie, Spain, or ffraunce:

countries plentiful and prosperous: where are thousands of

women and children and such ydle people to be hyred for i

d [a penny] or ii d [two pence] a day.”

Table 4.2 Comparative day wages in Virginia, January

1622, and in Rutland County, England, in 1610–1634

with meals without meals

Virginia England

Master carpenter 3s.

8d. 4s. 14d.

Helper

2s. 3d

4d. 3s. 6d.

Master bricklayer 3s. 5d. 4s. 9d.

Helper 2s. 3d. 3d. 3s. 7d.

Master sawyer 3s. 6d. 4s. 12d.

Helper 2s. 3d. - 3s. -

Master mason 3s. 8d. 4s. 12d.

Helper 2s. 3d. - 3s. -

Master joiner 4s. 6d. 5s. 12d.

Helper 3s. 4d. 3s. 9d. 8d.

Master tailor 2s. 4d. 3s. 8d.

Helper 1s. 6d. - 2s. 9d. -

Farm laborer 2s. [40s./year] 3s. 8d.

a. English wages are for spring and summer; fall and winter wages were one-

fourth to one-third less.

b. 1s. equals 12d.

c. “Helper” is intended here as a generic for “apprentice” (England) and

“labourer in husbandry” (Virginia).

d. The Virginia helper’s wage was set at one-fourth less than that of the

respective master tradesman.

Sources: For England: James E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and

Prices in England, 7 vols. in 8 (London, 1886–1902), 6:691–3. For Virginia:

Virginia Colony Council, Settlement of the Wages of Tradesmen in Virginia,

14 January, 1621/22, (Records of the Virginia Company of London [4

vols. edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury, Washington, DC, 1906–35], 3: 589–

90). See also wages of farm laborers paid by the year, in G. E. Russell, ed.,

Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, 1610–1620, Camden Society

Publications, 3rd ser., vol. 53 (London, 1936), pp. xxviii-xxix.

Two things were obvious: first, the decisive element in

the cost of labor in the colony at that time was the tenant.

Second, given the irrevocability of the bourgeois

commitment to the tobacco plantation monoculture in the

situation of everlastingly low tobacco prices, wage labor

was not to be the alternative to the tenant.

In the course of discussions within the Virginia

Assembly on the problem of how “yett” to get “hands at so

Cheape a rate” as would satisfy the employers, Captain

Thomas Nuce, having these two above-mentioned

imperatives in mind, advanced a plan that received

enthusiastic endorsement. In January, 1622, the Governor

and Council forwarded that proposal to London:

Wee have heerin closed sent you a project of Capt newces which if you

shalbe pleased to take likinge of, it is thought here will yeelde you, a more

certain proffitt then [than] your Tenantes to halfes, which beinge proposed

to the generall Assemblie, was by them well approved of.

156

In reply the Company promised to give careful

consideration to the “project of Capt Newce concerning

the altering of the Condicons with our Tenants,” especially

because it was recommended by the Virginia Assembly.

157

A few months later the Company returned to the subject,

and assured the colony officials that the Company was

more than prepared to send Virginia employers “servants

instead of tenants” and to do so “in a manner very

advantageable to you.”

158

A year after the Virginia

Governor and Council had initiated the proposal in the

interest of “a more certain profitt,” the Virginia Council

urged the question again:

159

Wee conceave that if you would be pleased to Chaunge the Conditione of

Tenants into servants for future Supplies, … your revenues might be greatly

improved.

In the spring of 1623 Alderman Johnson declared that the

Colony officers had all desired to reduce their tenants to

servants.

160

The Massacre of the Tenantry

English historical experience had shown that the reduction

of non-proletarian laboring people to proletarians, and the

creation of a large surplus of labor were the conditions

necessary for bringing about a general lowering of labor

costs. The essence of the matter was shown to be the

placing of the laborers in a position of great and growing

dependency upon capitalist employment under conditions

in which many workers compete for relatively few jobs.

The English bourgeoisie had accomplished both these

steps in one operation, the enclosures, during the late

fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Virginia in the

1620s the starting point was to be the destruction of

tenancy. But whereas the enclosures involved the

replacement of one hundred peasant tillers of the soil with

one shepherd, the mere transformation of tenants into non-

tenants did not involve any increase in labor productivity.

Therefore, the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie,

unable to create a labor surplus above labor demand,

sought by other means to achieve a condition of extreme

dependency of the laboring people.

The first requisite for the successful completion of the

general offensive against the rights of the laboring classes

that reduced them to chattels in Virginia was the

maintenance of social control. The Anglo-American

bourgeoisie did not need to be told that they were dealing

with people who were not to be taken for granted in such a

matter. The rebellious resistance of the English freehold

and copyhold tenants in the sixteenth century had produced

a large peasant revolt in the Midlands in the very year

Jamestown was founded. Fresher in the minds of the rulers

was the meltdown of the regime of Lawes Divine, Morall

and Martiall in the face of colonists determined to defy

attempts to restrict the planting of tobacco.

Open military dictatorship was over; the colony was

now governed by the newly created General Assembly,

the Colony Council and General Court. Reliance would

still be placed on English mercenary veterans of wars in

Ireland and the Netherlands, not only to command in

warfare against the native population but also for the

maintenance of social control in the interest of the tobacco

bourgeoisie. The fulfillment of this social control function

was favored by four special conditions prevailing in the

colony at this time.

Four Special Conditions

First of these was the appalling death rate. The record is

filled with testimony of the dying, the doomed and the

fearful, about the insufficiency of food, clothing and

housing; and about the perils of the period of “seasoning,”

the first year of acclimatization. Half of the six hundred

colonists living in Virginia at the beginning of 1619 were

still living in March 1625. But only one out of every six of

the new immigrants who came during that period was

alive at the end of it. An influx of nearly five thousand

persons increased the population by less than five hundred

(see Table 5.1). By modern standards, the death rate in

England in these years was very high, being about 2.7

percent per year;

but it was not such as to interfere with

the continuity of the social pattern, as happened at the time

of the great plague of the fourteenth century. In the Virginia

colony, however, the death rate in this period was seven

times that of England. In such a small, far-distant colony,

the sheer physical annihilation of property owners implicit

in these figures inevitably overwhelmed the orderly

procedures of property transfers and afforded exceptional

opportunities for illegal expropriations, including the

“expropriation” of laboring people.

From the standpoint

of social control, mere survival in these circumstances

became the overriding concern for many of the working

people, and the question of rebellion or social rights came

to be of lesser concern for the moment.

The second special condition affecting the

bourgeoisie’s ability to maintain social control was the

external contradiction represented by the Indians’

resistance to massive, rapid and aggressive English

encroachment upon the land. On the one hand, this

contradiction made ruling-class social control more

difficult, since it presented the laboring people of the

colony with a means of frustrating the bourgeois pressure

on their living standards and social rights, by abandoning

the colony and joining one or the other of the nearby Indian

communities. This was more than an abstract possibility.

Instances of English colonists fleeing to the Indians are

found throughout the records of the early colonial period.

They went despite the fact that recapture could mean death

“by hanginge, shootinge and breakinge uppon the

wheele.”

The death penalty was not always imposed,

however, as the following entries in the record for 20

October 1617 seem to show:

Table 5.1 Approximate number of English emigrants to

Virginia and the death rate among them in the Company

period (omitting May 1618 to November 1619)

1607-

1610-

1619-

Shipped from England 640 1,125 5,009

Survivors in Virginia 65 900

Total in Virginia, start of

period

1,191 5,909

Alive at end of period 65 600 1,218

Dead en route or in Virginia 575 591 4,691

Death toll 90% 45% 80%

Annual death rate 49.5% 8.2% 26.4%

Death rate in England 2.5% 2.6% 2.1%

Sources: Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New

York, 1898). pp. 129, 285, 612; Charles E. Hatch, The First Seventeen

Years: Virginia, 1607–1624 (Williamsburg, 1957), pp. 3, 7, 5; Irene W. D.

Hecht, ‘The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic

History,’ William and Mary Quarterly 30:65–92 (1973), p. 70; E. A.

Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–

1871, (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p.532. Cf. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D.

Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790

(New York, 1932), pp. 134–6.

a. December 1606 to prior to May 23, 1610, 3.42 years.

b. May 1610 to May 1618, 8 years.

c. November 1619 to February 1624/25, 5.17 years.

Geo White pardoned [by Governor Argall] for running away to the Indians

with his arms & ammunition which facts deserve death according to the

express articles & laws of this colony in that case provided and established

and for which offenses he stands liable to censure of a marchalls Court.

Henry Potter for Stealing a Calf & running to Indians death [blank space in

manuscript].

On the other hand, the increase of immigration worked to

the advantage of the plantation bourgeoisie in dealing with

the flight of laborers. Expansion of the colony permitted

the development of an English institutional superstructure

as an inhibitor to self-banishment in a strange country. A

second factor was more immediate. While the Indians had

been able to absorb a score or so of English left at

Roanoke in 1587, the level of development of the

productive forces among the Indians, and the need to avoid

the strange epidemic diseases of the English, set rather

close limits on the numbers of English defectors who

could be absorbed into the Indian settlements. English

national consciousness aside, the great inpouring of

colonists made impossible a general resort to escape from

bourgeois oppression by going to the Indians.

Third among these special conditions facilitating the

attack by the Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie

against the social status of the laboring people in the

colony was the intensified economic pressure on the

laboring people in England that occurred just at this time,

and that might be assumed to predispose more workers to

consider emigration than would have been the case at

other times. As I have previously noted,

in England real

wages had pursued a generally downward course since the

close of the fifteenth century. The situation became

particularlay acute with the onset of the severe depression

in England’s chief industry, cloth making, in the period

1620–25. In 1624 there were still twelve thousand cloth

workers out of work in England.

Finally, there was the fact of the complete and utter

dependence of the colony upon England for supplies,

especially of clothing and metal products but also, to a

considerable extent, of food and beverages. Not a nail, let

alone a plow or a saw, but had to be brought a long sea

voyage from England. Not a requested ball of yarn, let

alone a coat, a shirt, or a bit of bedding, not a hoe, axe or

pail, but must be waited for for six months at least to come

from England. This was a major factor in the maintenance

of social control, even when the greatest provocation to

revolt was being brought to bear on the working people. If

they were to succeed, the situation would not be as in

England, where there were means of production to be

taken over in the form of manufacturing facilities. This

dependence upon English supplies enhanced the power of

the bourgeoisie, the governor and Colony Council

members, the plantation owners, the Cape Merchant in

charge of the Company’s “magazine,” and free-trading

ship captains relative to the “dependent classes.”

The Emergent Colony Elite

The basis for the rise of an elite of rich Virginia planters

was laid at the very outset of the Edwin Sandys regime, in

1619; it is seen outlined in the famous “Instructions”

issued to George Yeardley upon his appointment as

Governor of Virginia that April.

For every £12½ share of

Virginia stock, “separate planter” capitalists were granted

free title to one hundred acres of land, and when that land

was “sufficiently peopled,” an additional amount was to

be given to the stockholder equal to the original amount.

The term “sufficiently peopled” is not defined. The four

incorporators of Berkeley Hundred, for example, jointly

purchased forty-five shares and were given a patent for

4,500 acres of Virginia land, the price being equivalent to

2½ shillings per acre.

Furthermore, the separate planters

were to benefit from the “headright” principle under

which they were to be compensated for transporting

laboring people to Virginia at the rate of fifty acres per

“head.” Later, when the next sections of land were

surveyed, the planters were to receive an equal additional

amount, provided they had sufficiently peopled the first

grant. The capitalist was entitled to the headright land

even if the person whose passage he had paid died before

the ship ever reached Virginia, or starved or died of

disease in Virginia, as most of them did before their three-

year term was completed. Such a provision would seem

designed to exacerbate the shortage of food and other

supplies in the colony. Six pounds sterling invested in

supplies and the freight for them to be used by laborers in

Virginia could yield a return only if the laborers lived and

produced commodities for the capitalist, which were then

sold at a profit. But the same amount invested in getting a

laborer on board a ship bound for Virginia brought the

capitalist a patent on fifty acres of Virginia land. Of

course, land needed laborers, and laborers needed

provisions, and there was a point beyond which a stinting

of supplies would prove counterproductive. But the

“headright” privilege tended to push the contradiction to

the limit in terms of maximum profit for the capitalist and

minimum provisions for the laboring people.

The new governor, Yeardley, who had served as Acting

Governor in 1616–17 and was already, before his

appointment, the owner of two hundred acres by virtue of

his two Company shares, was granted two thousand more

acres in appreciation of his “long and faithful service.”

Those lands were to be held by him, his heirs and assigns

forever. Three thousand acres, to be called “the

Governor’s Land,” were set aside “in the best and most

convenient place,” and one-fourth of the produce of them

was to belong to the Governor in his official capacity. A

similar one-fourth share of the output on twelve thousand

acres, called “Company lands,” was to be apportioned

among four or five other colony officers,

such as the

Treasurer, the Secretary, and the Vice-Admiral, and for

payments to lesser functionaries. One-twentieth of the total

product of the Company lands was to be provided for the

services of overseers of the Company tenants and other

laboring people, and for compensating those who were

responsible for dividing the product according to the

proper shares.

While concentration of land ownership at this time was

less than it would become by the end of the seventeenth

century,

it was still significant. The land patent rolls for

the year 1626 in Virginia show that 20 percent of the

patents, comprising those of two hundred acres and more,

accounted for 50 percent of the patented acreage. More

than half the patents were for one hundred acres or less,

but they accounted for only one-fourth of the total acreage.

This phenomenon was by no means merely the working

out of the natural processes of capitalist competition

whereby the advantage generally accrues to those who are

operating with the largest resources of capital, or who

benefit from the development of new techniques or

instruments of labor. Those favorably placed in the colony

government used their legal authority to secure special

advantages for themselves.

They were able to succeed

each other in various high offices, including that of

Governor; acting as the Colony Council, they determined

the local laws and controlled the public stores of food,

arms and gunpowder. They also commanded the special

bodies of armed men who enforced “order,” and they

controlled the colony’s relations with the mother country

and with the Indians. Acting as the Virginia General Court,

Colony Council members dispensed judgments as harsh as

they pleased.

In these ways, the special difficulties of

colonial life, coupled with the crass partiality of the

Colony Council and the Virginia General Court, placed the

tenants at an extreme disadvantage in contending with the

bourgeois attack upon their rights and status.

“Renting Out” of Tenants

The operative principle for using the shortage of supplies,

whether absolute or relative, to undermine the position of

the tenants is perfectly exemplified by the cases of the one

hundred tenants sent at the Company’s expense on the

Bona Nova, who arrived in Virginia on 4 November 1619

to work “under the Comand” of Captain Weldon and

Lieutenant Whitaker. The terms under which these men had

been engaged to come to Virginia as tenants were

explicitly and emphatically published by the King’s

Council for Virginia:

Every man transported into Virginia, with intent there to inhabit, as Tenants

to the Common land of the Company, or to the publike land, shall be freely

landed there at the charge of the Company: And shall be furnished with

provisions of victual for one whole year next after his arrival, as also of

Cattle: And with apparell, weapons, tooles and implements, both of house

and labour, for his necessary use. He shall enjoy the ratable moytie [half] of

all the profits that shall be raised of the land on which he shall be Planted, as

well Corne and Cattle, as other commodities whatsoever: the other halfe

being due to the Owners of the land.

But a week after their arrival in Virginia, the Governor

and Colony Council wrote the authorities in London of a

different arrangement that had been made:

It was thought expedient by the governor and Counsell to advise the said

two gentlemen [Weldon and Whitaker] to rent out the greatest part of their

people to some honest and sufficient men of the Colonie till Christmas Come

twelve month for iij [three] barrels of Indian Corne and 55 [pounds] waight

of tobacco a man.

This manner of proceeding occasioned, as Weldon

reported, “no small discontent among my whole Company

[of tenants].

Not only did it involve the chattel-like

transfer of tenants from one employer to another without

the consent of the persons transferred, it also carried with

it a drastic reduction of their prospective income from that

which they had been promised as tenants-at-halves.

According to contemporary authorities,

these tenants

might normally be expected to produce by the end of that

year of service from twelve to thirty-two barrels of corn

and 250 to 1,000 pounds of tobacco, of which they would

be entitled to a half-share. To be required to labor the full

year for three barrels of corn and 55 pounds of tobacco

was clearly oppressive.

As to who the lucky “sufficient men” were who were to

have the services of these tenants assigned to them, there

is no doubt that colony officials were prime beneficiaries

of the policy, and of similar appropriations of tenants

subsequently. John Rolfe, writing to England,

called

attention to the

many complaints against the Governors, Captaines and Officers in Virginia:

for buying and selling or to be set over from one to another for yearly rent,

was held in England a thing most intolerable, or that tenants or servants

should be put from their places, or abridged their Covenants, was so odious

that the very report thereof brought a great scandall to the generall action.

The colony authorities justified the “renting out” of the

tenants on the ground that they had come ill-provisioned,

having only meal for food, and of that only enough for five

and a half months, possibly less.

Captain Weldon

defended his compliance with the arrangement on the same

grounds, inadequate food supplies, and added that instead

of the promised three suits of apparel for each of his

tenants, there were only two, of which one was

unserviceable for winter wear.

Furthermore, he said,

there were only “5 iron pots & 1 small kettle for 50 men.”

Of “butter Cheese rice oatmeale or any other English

victuall” there was none at all.

Yet, the record shows that there was no shortage of

food in Virginia in that year. Colony Secretary John Pory

wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton in September 1619 that

Virginia was enjoying “a marvelous plenty, suche as hath

not bene since our first coming into the land.”

The

ground was so fertile, he said, that with less cultivation

than was required in Europe, “we shall produce miracles

out of this earth.” Cattle, hogs and goats, he said, grew

larger in Virginia than in England, and they multiplied

rapidly. He spoke of the general prosperity based on

tobacco, noting that Governor Yeardley was the most

prosperous person of all. The labor of the tenants, Pory

said, was the most valuable asset of the colony, but he

noted that the employer had to pay for the tenants’ “armes,

apparell, & bedding; and for their transportation, and

casuall both at sea & for their first year comonly at lande

also.”

In an exchange of charge and countercharge with

Captain Weldon two years later, the Virginia Company in

London condemned the captain for his “renting out” of the

tenants, and said that contrary to the claims of Weldon and

the colony authorities, the Bona Nova invoices showed

that the tenants had been supplied with one pound of meat

a day for the first year.

John Rolfe, who had preceded Pory as Colony

Secretary, remained an active correspondent with persons

in England specially interested in Virginia affairs. In

January 1620 he reported to Edwin Sandys that toward the

end of the previous August, Yeardley had exchanged

victuals for “20 and odd” African laborers, men and

women, who had been brought to Virginia in a “Dutch man

of Warr.”

The readiness to trade victuals for these

workers, as Professor Morgan first pointed out, cannot be

squared with the plea of a food shortage being advanced

by the Governor and Colony Council, but it would be

consistent with a policy of reducing labor costs by

inducing an oversupply of laborers relative to the amount

of food that would be available to them.

Great significance attaches to the reaction of the

Company to this “renting out” of its tenants, the violation

of their contract rights, and their consequent

impoverishment and deprivation of status. In order to

appreciate that significance, it is helpful to contrast the

Company’s reaction in 1618 when Governor Argall

expropriated Company tenants to his own private use, and

committed other abuses of authority. The very violations

of public trust for private gain that the company charged

against Argall were practiced on a greatly expanded scale

by the governors and Council of Virginia in the 1619–24

period. They included appropriating “the Indian trade to

yourselfe”;

using the Company boats and sailors to

conduct private affairs; taking tenants from Company

service, and using them for private plantations of colony

officials.

The message sent to Argall regarding his alleged

peculations ended with the stern promise that he would be

called to account: “either you must think highly of

yourselfe or very meanely of us … to do what you list

[wish] … without being called to account.”

They then

acted; they dispatched a special set of instructions to the

Governor designate, Lord Delaware, then en route to

Virginia, to “cause him [Argall] to be shipped home in this

ship … to satisfy the Adventurers by answering everything

as shall be layde to his chardge.” Furthermore, to secure

their interest in these proceedings, the Company instructed

Delaware to “ceaze upon his [Argall’s] goods, as

Tobacko and Furrs, whereof it is reported he hath gotten

together great stoare to the Colonies prejudice, and so

sendinge them to us to be in deposite till all matters be

satisfyed.”

The Company had the same authority to recall Governor

Yeardley or his successor, Francis Wyatt, or any of the

other “Captaines and Officers” denounced by Rolfe for

violating tenants’ contracts. The grounds for such action

were certainly present. Captain Weldon, however, was

merely reprimanded for his complicity in the matter. He

continued his Virginia career, being granted a large land

patent there in 1622.

Yeardley and the members of the

Colony Council who had forced the transfer of the tenants

were the recipients of no more rebuke than might be

gleaned from the following paragraph in a letter from the

Company to the Governor and Council, dated 25 July

1621:

We cannot conceale from youe, that it is heare reported that contrary to the

public faith given, not the sicke but the ablest men are lett out to hire and

theire provisions converted to private uses. And where it is pretended this

planting them with old planters is for theire health, they are so unmercifully

used that it is the greatest cause of our tennant’s discontent; and though we

hope this is not in all parts true, yet we cannot conceive such unwillingness

to proceed in this worke should they not have some other grounds than is

alledged: lett it therefore be your worke at the first general session of the

Counsell to effect this business, and it shall be our care to provide for the

well orderinge and furnishinge of them.

As that letter was being delivered to the Virginia

colony, George Yeardley’s term in office was coming to

an end. As Governor, Yeardley had had one hundred

tenants assigned to him. When his successor, Wyatt,

counted the tenants turned over to him, he could find only

forty-six. The Colony Council inquired about the other

fifty-four. Yeardley coolly declined to supply the missing

number.

To have done so would have required him

either to return those he had taken or else to pay for the

installation of a new supply from England. Seizure of

Argall’s property had been ordered in a similar situation,

but now things were different. In reporting on the Yeardley

matter in January 1622, the Colony Council showed no

disposition to press the issue. “Sir George Yeardley

denieth to make them good,” it wrote to London, “[and]

we have foreborne to Compell him thereunto, until we

Receave your further directiones therein.”

Apparently,

these were not forthcoming. Yeardley remained a member

of the Colony Council, restored no tenants to the Company,

and continued to thrive in fortune and honors. Having

come to the colony in 1610 with nothing but his sword, he

lived sumptuously, and died in the second year of his

second term as governor, possessed of a very large

fortune.

In the contrasting treatment of Argall and Yeardley, we

can see measured the progress of the Company’s

conversion to the cause of tobacco monoculture, to the

liquidation of its own productive enterprises in the colony,

and to its own transmutation into merely a monopolist of

English tobacco imports. It further reveals the essential

concord that had been reached by the Anglo-American

plantation bourgeoisie for the overthrow of the tenantry.

Another way of bringing pressure on the Company

tenant was found in the restriction of tobacco planting.

Although official policy was generally ineffective and

pursued with steadily diminished vigor,

it none the less

presented the employing class with opportunities for

increasing the tenants’ dependency and making tenants

more vulnerable to degradation of their status.

When Captain Weldon informed his tenants, those

remaining to him after the “renting out” of half their

original number, that their tobacco planting was to be

restricted, they denounced the policy. They well

understood that, completely dependent upon supplies from

England as they were, a lack of the medium of exchange,

tobacco, would render them destitute. In a report to

London, Captain Weldon described the angry mood of

these tenants:

[T]hey will with no patience endure to heare of it bitterly Complayninge that

they have no other meanes to furnish themselves with aparell for the

insuinge yeare but are likely as they say (and for ought I Cann see) to be

starved if they be debarred of it.

As a result of the tenants’ strong resistance, the Governor

consented to an easing of the restriction, although not to its

outright and formal revocation.

When Yeardley was succeeded by Francis Wyatt as

governor in 1621, the policy of restricting tobacco

planting was officially continued, with output to be limited

to 112 pounds per year per laboring hand.

To the extent

that such a policy was effective, the burden fell with much

greater impact upon the laboring tenants than upon the

land-owning employer of a number of tenants; the tenant

had only one half-share, but the employer would receive

as many half-shares as he had tenants. The employer had

an additional advantage since he, not the tenant, had the

dividing of the product into the employer’s and the

tenant’s shares.

An altercation, involving corn not tobacco, occurred

between tenant William Moch (variously spelled) and

John Harvey, later to be governor, who was sent by the

king and Privy Council to conduct an inquiry into Virginia

affairs in 1624–25. Harvey summoned Moch and

demanded to see his covenant papers, that is, the

agreement under which Moch had been engaged as a

tenant. The court minutes continue:

To which he [Moch] replyed, first lett me see my Corne[.] Capt. Harvey

told him he scorned to keep back his Corne, Mutch replyed againe he would

have his corne before he should see them. Then Capt. Harvey told him he

was an idle knave, and that he could find in his heart to Cudgell his Coate.

To which Mutch answered scornefully, alas Sir it is not in you.

Although according to testimony Harvey then struck

Moch a blow across the head with a truncheon, Moch

continued to “give other provoking speeches” to the king’s

appointed commissioner. Tenant Moch appears to have

been a man of courage, and the record shows that he could

have drawn strength from knowing that his stand

represented the basic sentiments of the tenants generally.

The majority of the colonists were tenants, and,

although they too were as hooked on tobacco as anyone

else, they were determined to have their “moiety” of the

crop, whatever the particular crop happened to be, and not

to be “set over” from one landlord to another without their

consent, nor to have their tenant status degraded to one of

servitude. Like Captain Weldon’s tenants they would

“with no patience endure to hear of it.” The tradition of

Tyler and Ket was bred in their bones, and they had a

deep sense of chartered “liberties, rights, and immunities”

as their English birthright. Like tenant Moch in his retort to

Commissioner Harvey, they could not believe that the

landowners had the power to “cudgel the Coates” of the

tenantry in a land where labor was destined to be in short

supply for a long time to come.

Making One Crisis Serve Another

It was the external contradiction that precipitated the

consummating crisis.

On 22 March 1622, the Indians of

the Powhatan Confederacy mounted what was to be in

relative terms the strongest effort ever made after the

founding of Virginia to halt the Anglo-American

occupation of Indian lands, with the possible exception of

the Yamassee War of 1715 in South Carolina. Powhatan

had died in 1618, on the eve of the period of accelerated

English colonization.

His kinsman and successor

Opechancanough watched the inpouring of immigrants –

more in the next four years than had come during the four

decades of Powhatan’s time. Yet the Indian guests who

had accompanied the ill-fated Pocahontas to England had

found the natives too numerous to count.

Opechancanough saw them come and die like fish out of

water; yet in greater numbers than ever they came, in ships

carried by the winds. Tobacco had made them mad. They

had guns and they took the land.

We cannot, of course, know the terms in which the

discussion was carried  on that united  thirty-two  tribes,
42
but clearly there was much discussion of
[T]he  dayly  feare  that  posseste  them  that  in  time  (the  English)
by  …  growing  continually  upon  them,  would  dispossess  them  of  this
Country, as they had been formerly of the West Indies by the Spaniards.
43
As  Powhatan  had  succeeded  in  doing  at  Roanoke  forty
years before, and as O’Donnell and O’Neill had tried to
do in the Tyrone War (1594–1603), Opechancanough and
the  Powhatan  allies  would  strike  to  root  out  the  English
plantation.
The  strategy  against  this  enemy  armed  with  guns  and
with  cannon-bearing  ships  was  to  be  that  of  the  single
massive blow and subsequent attrition. The English would
later  congratulate  themselves  on  the  partiality  of  their
Divine Providence  which, they  said, stayed  the hands  of
the Indian attackers;
44
 but limited success may simply have
been  the  most that  Opechancanough  or  any  other  general
could  have  achieved  in  the  circumstances.  Even  his
enemies’  historians  would  concede  that  the  attack  was
“planned  by  a  master  mind.”
45
  To  hold  together  the
alliance of thirty-two tribes for a long war against English
firepower and the barrage of cheap commodities
46
 was an
improbable  prospect.  On  the  other  hand,  the  obvious
ineptitude  of  the  English  colonists  gave  reasonable
grounds  to  expect  that  from  the  single  catastrophe  they

might be moved to abandon the colony
47
 and merge with
the people of the country, as those of Roanoke had done,
and  a  number  of  frequent  defectors  had  done  since  the
founding of the colony.
48
The  blow  would  be  aimed  at  the  colony’s  most
vulnerable  point,  its  food  supply.  It  was  the  time  for
planting  corn,  not  harvesting  it.  Even  when  they  had
planted  corn,  the  colonists  had  begrudged  each  acre  and
day taken from “their darling tobacco.”
49
 Close observers
perhaps saw the corn shortage as a particular, rather than a
general,  one,  with  the  haves  exploiting  the  have-nots  by
virtue of the haves’ access to corn among the Indians.
50
 If
so, the situation presented an opportunity to take advantage
of  class  divisions  within  the  colony.  Finally,  the  day
chosen  for  the  attack  was,  as  English  preachers  and
defectors had informed them, the most solemn moment of
the  Christian  calendar,  when  perhaps  their  mountainous
guilts would sit most heavily on their English souls – the
day they called Good Friday.
Viewed  from  history’s  elevated  ground,  the  strategy
seems to have been foredoomed as far as the achievement
of  its  maximum  objective  was  concerned,  even  had  the
English  not  (as  they  claimed)  received  a  last-minute
warning  from  a Christianized  Indian.
51
  The  difference  in
the level of development of productive forces would give
the  English the ultimate, fundamental advantage. It seems

probable, too, that Opechancanough underestimated the

persistence of the English promoters of colonization, who

scrupled not at a 25 percent death rate if a 25 percent

profit could be made in the process.

Whatever may have

been the possibilities of strategic victory, the attack dealt

the death blow to the Virginia Company, although the

Company’s charter was not formally revoked until 1624.

More important was the fact that the attack struck to the

very foundation of the life of the colony. It intensified to an

extreme degree the uncertainties of existence that resulted

from economic dislocation, epidemic disease, the heavy

assignments of watching and warding, the dependence

upon trans-ocean supplies, and the vulnerability of

property and production relations.

Four hundred English colonists died on that day, one-

third of the total population.

All but a few of the

settlements were abandoned, a major portion of the

livestock was lost, and there was little prospect of

growing corn in the colony during the remainder of the

year. Only one-third of the survivors were men fit for

work, and a large part of that potential labor was diverted

to “watching and warding.” The colony authorities

forbade the planting of corn near dwellings on the grounds

that it provided a lurking place for hostile Indians. They

added that, even if corn were planted, it was liable to be

cut down or harvested by Indians.

A similar problem

was cited as a reason for forbidding individual colonists

to hunt wild game in the woods; the hunter, it was claimed,

would risk death or capture by Indians.

However, the

colony officials were equally concerned with preventing

hungry and overworked English laborers from fleeing the

colony to join the Indians. In March 1623, George Sandys

reported on a group of eleven Company tenants for whom

the Company had no provisions. Seven were sold or

relocated. Of the disposition of the other four, Sandys

wrote: “two of these … ran away (I am afraide to the

Indians) and no doubt the other two would have consorted

with their companions if sickness had not fettered them.”

Without food supplies from the outside, the colony would

famish.

Widespread undernourishment rendered many

colonists especially susceptible to the diseases brought

from England by the eight hundred immigrants who came

to Virginia in the year following the attack of 22 March

1622. According to the Company, six hundred of the

emigrants themselves died in Virginia before the year was

out.

The dependence upon English supplies was made even

more critical under these deprived circumstances. The

record is filled with urgent, even anguished, appeals,

public and private, for food to be sent from the Mother

country. In their first letter to England after the Indian

attack, the Virginia Governor and Colony Council asked

for enough grain to sustain the colony for a year.

Lady

Wyatt, wife of the Governor, despite her favored position

was not above writing to her sister in England requesting a

bit of butter, bacon, cheese and malt, explaining that

“since we & the Indians fell out we dare not send a

hunting but with so many men as it is not worth their

labour.”

We may assume that the means and opportunity for

writing letters to England describing the sufferings of the

colonists, and appealing for assistance, were inversely

proportional to the actual privations of the individual

letter writers, and directly proportional to their prospects

for special assistance from England. Letters by members

of the laboring population of the colony are much more

rare in the record than those written by members of the

owning classes. The great majority of the laboring people

could not write; and even if they could have written and

had the means and opportunity to do so, they had no

friends of substance in England to whom they might have

appealed. Laboring people whose letters have been

preserved seem to have been persons of “respectable”

backgrounds, with significant connections in the middle

class of the home country. Yet it is to these latter that we

are indebted for what we have of an “inside” picture of

the conditions of life as they pressed down on the laboring

people of the colony. Frequent citations from these letters

have given their authors a sort of immortality, which they

doubtless would have traded for a little cheese had the

choice been offered.

If the frequency of these letters in the record is

indicative, the spring of 1623 was especially hard for the

working people of the colony. Richard Frethorne was one

of a group of men who arrived as laborers in Virginia

about Christmas 1622.

Young Frethorne had been sent

under an arrangement concluded between his father and

Robert Bateman, London merchant, member of Parliament,

and prominent member of the Virginia Company.

What Richard Frethorne wished for more than anything

else was just about what Opechancanough wanted for him

– a swift return to England. Even an utterly incapacitated

person, begging from door to door, was better off in

England, said Frethorne, than a plantation laborer in

Virginia. And this, he wrote, was the feeling of all his

fellow workers. What with the Indians’ hostility, the

pervasive despondency, the scurvy and the “bloody fluxe,”

the population of Martin’s Hundred, he said, had been

reduced from 140 to only 22 in the past year. The

surviving laborers were subsisting on one-third of a pint

of meal per day.

It was only ten weeks after his arrival

in Virginia, and he was writing to Bateman asking to “be

freed out of this Egypt.” Frethorne seemed to sense that his

“right worshipfull” merchant sponsor might be unable to

find it in his purse simply to pay for his immediate release

from Virginia service and return passage to England. He

sought, therefore, to appeal to Bateman’s business

instincts. In lieu of immediate deliverance, Frethorne

would be satisfied, he said, if Bateman could send him

some beef, cheese, butter or other victuals, which

Frethorne could sell for a profit. Frethorne would send all

the profit back to Bateman to cover the costs of

termination of his contract and his return home. Frethorne

suggested further that the people of his parish in England

might be willing to contribute toward the cost.

In his letter to Bateman, the young plantation worker

discreetly refrained from complaints about the oppressive

conditions of labor. But to his mother and father he spoke

more freely. He had eaten more in a day in England than

he had in Virginia in a week, he said. There were wild

fowl in the woods, he wrote, but “We are not allowed to

goe and get it, but must Worke hard both earlie and late for

a messe of water gruell, and a mouthfull of bread and

biefe.” A part of his time was spent in hauling the

employer’s goods from ships anchored at Jamestown, ten

miles from Martin’s Hundred. On those occasions, he had

to work until midnight, loading, rowing and unloading. He

had had to sleep in an open boat, even on rainy nights,

when on this duty, until a gunsmith named Jackson

befriended him and built a cabin in which Richard could

shelter when in Jamestown at night. There was only three

weeks’ supply of meal remaining on their plantation.

Frethorne speculated with dread on the approaching day

when: “My Master … is not able to keepe us all, then wee

shalbe turned up to the land and eat barkes of trees, or

mouldes of the Ground.” Richard Frethorne’s last

recorded words have become familiar by quotation: “I

thought no head had been able to hold so much water as

hath and doth dailie flow from my eyes.”

Another laboring man, Henry Brigg, wrote to his

brother, a merchant at the Customs House in London, in

that April of 1623, “to lett you understand how I live it is

very miserable, for here we have but a wyne quart of

Corne for a day and nothing else but Water, and worke

hard from Sun rising to Sun sett at felling of Trees and we

have not victuall not past xx [20] dayes.”

He asked the

London brother to send him provisions for a year, and a

gun with ammunition “for I goe in danger of my life every

day for lack of one.”

Brigg also had a business proposition to make. If his

brother would care to invest in a stock of trade goods,

Henry would undertake to secure for him a clear profit of

100 percent. The list of items he thought might move well

is especially interesting as evidence of the degree of

dependence of the colonists upon English manufactured

and processed supplies. Understandably, it was made up

mainly of food and apparel: oatmeal, peas, butter, cheese,
oil, vinegar, aquavita, linen or woolen cloth or apparel for
men  or  women,  shoes,  stockings,  metal-tipped  laces,
gloves, and garters. Knives and other metal utensils were
also recommended.
68
Thomas Nicolls wrote to England in March and April,
saying  that  each  laborer  should  be  allowed  “a  pound  of
butter and a pound of cheese weekly, as there was no food
in sickness or health but oatmeal and pease, and bread and
water.” Nineteen men had been captured by the Indians, he
said,  and  conflict,  disease  and  starvation  had  in  the  last
eighteen  months  reduced  the  complement  of  men  on  one
plantation from fifty-six to fourteen, and from ninety-seven
to twenty on another.
69
Perhaps  nothing  symbolized  more  clearly  the  colony’s
extreme  dependence  upon  supplies  of  English
commodities than did the waiting for the Seaflower in the
spring and early summer of 1623. A ship of 140 tons,
70
 the
Seaflower  left  England  around  1  January  that  year,
Virginia-bound, with a cargo of meal and other provisions
valued at £500 sterling,
71
 to relieve the famine there, at the
usual  rate  of  25  percent  profit  for  the  investors  in  the
voyage.
72
Governor Wyatt and  chief councillor George Yeardley
told the colonists “that except the Seaflower come in,” or
they  could  get  corn  from  the  Indians,  more  than  half  the

colony  would  starve to  death.
73
  The  people  watched  the
sea,  and  wrote  those  letters;  Colony  Treasurer George
Sandys, Colony Secretary Christopher Davison, plantation
servant  Richard  Frethorne  all  prayed  with  small  planter
and silk-raiser Peter Arundell for “the speedie arrivall of
the Seaflower.”
74
 Even as they prayed, the Seaflower lay
at  the  bottom of a Bermuda  harbor,  sunk en route  by  the
explosion of its powder magazine.
75
 Two ships did come
into  Jamestown  in April,  but  they  lacked  even  adequate
provisions  for  the  people  they  brought  with  them.
76
  It
would  be  five months before  the Company’s next supply
would  arrive  on  the  ninety-ton Bonnie  Bess  in
September.
77
The Seaflower sank, and the colonists starved, sickened
and  died.  In  self-defense  against  Company  censure,
George  Sandys  begged  for  understanding  in  England:
“[W]ho  is  ignorant,”  he  asked,  “how  the  heavie  hand  of
God hath suppressed us? The lyveying being hardlie able
to bury the dead.”
78
 The annual March census was not sent
to  England,  or,  if  sent,  was  concealed  from  public
disclosure.
79
Captain Nathaniel Butler had come from Bermuda and
made an investigation of the conditions in Virginia in the
winter of 1622–23. At the king’s request, Butler wrote a
report  which  came  to  be  known  popularly  as  “The
Unmasking of Virginia.”
80
 The dominion of death was so

established in Virginia, he reported, that people “are not
onely  seen  dying  under  hedges  and  in  the  woods,  but
beinge dead ly some  of them  for many dayes unregarded
and unburied.”
81
 Not  until  1625  would  the population  of
the  colony  regain  the  level  it  had  attained  in  March
1622.
82
The  difference  in  the  suffering  of  the  owning  and  the
laboring classes apparent in Virginia at this time was, to a
degree, normal for a society based on class exploitation.
The same phenomenon was observable in England. But the
special  conditions  of  colony  life  presented  unusual
opportunities for profiteering by the merchant and planter
bourgeoisie.
As  I  have  noted,  the  Virginia  Company  of  London
expected investors to make a 25 percent profit on the food
that  was  sent  to  the  starving  colony.  Because  of  the
continuing  decline  in  the  price  of  the  overproduced
tobacco,
83
  this  profit  margin  was  a  constant  point  of
contention  between  the  colony  buyers  and  the  Company,
and  in  turn  between  the  Company  and  the  king  in  the
tobacco  contract  negotiations.  English  colony  tobacco,
which had sold in England at from 3 to 4½ shillings, and
more, the pound in 1619, was selling for 18 to 20 pence in
March 1622/3.
84
 A year later, it had fallen further to 18 d.
or less per pound.
85
 In April 1624, a  group representing
“the poore Planters in Virginia” petitioned for a reduction

of the combined 12d. per pound royal impost and import
custom on tobacco. The price of tobacco in England was
at  that  time  so  low,  it  was  said,  that  such  charges  left
insufficient  return  to  continue  production.
86
  In  January
1626,  the  Virginia  Colony  authorities  reported  that  their
efforts to maintain tobacco at 18d. had failed, and that it
was  then  selling  at  less  than  12d.  per  pound  in  the
colony.
87
Profit-making pressure on the colonists was intensified
by  the  presence  of  the  trading  ships  that  anchored  at
Jamestown.  They  were  laden  with cargoes  of  delectable
English  commodities  and  they  conducted  their  offshore
business with colonists  able and willing to give tobacco
for  wines,  liquors,  cider,  salad  oil,  vinegar,  butter,
candies,  cheese  and  Canadian  fish.
88
  Trading  was  so
heavy,  it  was  said,  that  almost  the  entire  60,000-pound
crop of Virginia tobacco produced in 1622 was taken by
these  private  traders.
89
  Business  was  brisk  despite  the
increasingly  “excessive  and  unconscionable”  rates  of
profit extorted by the merchants.
90
The  customers  were  people  who  had  some  tobacco
above  what  they might have needed for  purchasing  corn.
Undoubtedly,  they  were  in  the  main  the  poor  but  free
planters,  such  as  constituted  something  less  than  half  the
population  of  the  colony.
91
  This  aspect  of  profiteering
must have impoverished many small planters and reduced

some to proletarians. Certainly, after dealing with the

trading ships they had little tobacco left for shipment to

England for their own accounts. As the Company stated in

March 1623:

[C]oncerning the poor Planters … the quantitie of Tobacco brought home in

right of their proprietie is for the most part verie smale it beinge expended in

the Plantacons amongst the Marchantes trading thither with their several

necessarie Commodities.”

Profiteering, official and otherwise, was coupled with

outright expropriation, legal and illegal, on a grand scale,

without any color of exchange. Given the special

circumstances of colony existence, and given the

continuing supply of laborers from England, this

profiteering and expropriation were basic factors in the

reduction of colony plantation laborers to chattels.

As the remark of Wyatt and Yeardley had indicated, the

rulers of the colony had only one active policy for feeding

the colony, namely to get corn from the Indians. Two

general methods were employed to implement this policy.

One was to make war against Opechancanough and his

allies. The other was that of peaceful trade with the more

distant, friendly Indians on the eastern shore of

Chesapeake Bay.

But the main method seems to have

been the former; when in doubt, or perhaps merely low on

English trade goods,

the English would allege

“treachery”  against  the  Indians  and  attack  them,  taking
corn without payment and destroying the growing corn of
the Indians, a method of warfare that some of the English
officers  in  Virginia  had  practiced  under  Mountjoy  in
Ireland.
95
As  noted  above,  shortly  after  the  Indian  attack  of  22
March  1622  the  colony  authorities  ordered  drastic
restrictions on the planting of corn, as a safeguard against
lurking  Indian  enemies  it  was  said.
96
  Many  colonists
considered the “national defense” rationale for this policy
to be spurious, and complained bitterly about it. Later they
declared  that  if  they  had  been  allowed  to  plant  corn  as
they wished, they could have provided for their own needs
adequately,
97
 even though little food, or none at all, was
coming from England. The restriction on corn planting was
also challenged in the meetings of the Court of the Virginia
Company  of  London.
98
  Nevertheless,  the  policy  was
enforced,  although  the  temper  of  the  colonists  was  so
unruly  by April  1623  that  the  governor  asked  London  to
institute martial law, as he said to terrorize the people.
99
The  ban  on  hunting  for  food  in  the  forests,  and  the
abandonment of half the plantations and the withdrawal of
the  colony  into  a  restricted  perimeter,  compounded  the
food supply problem.
It was a recipe for famine; but it was also a recipe for
capitalist profiteering, by those equipped and opportunely

positioned to exploit the situation. Captain Nathaniel

Butler was only reporting, and in terms of understatement,

what was an open scandal, when in the spring of 1623,

regarding the hardship of the corn famines, he said:

howesoever itt lay heavy uppon the shoulders of the Generallytie itt may be

suspected not to be unaffected by some of the chiefe; for they onely

haveing the means in these extremeties to Trade for Corn w[i]th the Natives

doe hereby engrosse all into their hands and soe sell it att their owne prizes

[prices].

100

The means for trading for corn with the Indians were boats

and small ships. Those who possessed or could secure the

use of such vessels had a monopoly of the trade, since

there was absolutely no other way of bringing corn into the

colony from the Indians of the eastern shore of Chesapeake

Bay. Having made it practically impossible for the people

to trade simply and directly with their immediate Indian

neighbors, the Colony Council and the Governor in the

winter and spring of 1622–23 issued corn-trading licenses

to owners and operators of cargo-carrying capital

equipment. Not surprisingly, George Yeardley appears a

foremost actor in this group. On 3 January, Governor

Wyatt licensed Yeardley to send Captain William Tucker,

an experienced officer and trader, on a corn-getting

voyage, using “such shipps, pinnaces boates as hee the

s[ai]d Sir George shall thinke fitt to appoint unto him &

that  doe  in  any  way  belong  or  are  in  service  to  him  the
said George.”
101
Tucker was authorized, on Yeardley’s behalf, to “trade
or take by force of Armes” in order to secure the Indians’
corn.  He  was  instructed  to  deliver  the  corn  to Yeardley
“by him to be disposed as hee in his best discretion shall
thinke fitt.”
102
Seven  corn-getting  ventures  were  made  in  that  same
month,  by George  Sandys,  Colony  Secretary,  and  by  a
number  of  “Captains.”  Four  of  the  six  men  engaged  in
these  separate  voyages  in  the  privileged  trade  were
members  of  the  Colony  Council.
103
  Yeardley  was  the
largest  of  the  operators;  of  the  four  thousand  bushels  of
corn  brought  into  the  colony  by  20  March, Yeardley,  in
only one voyage, accounted for one-fourth of the total.
104
The  oft-quoted  old  planter  William  Capps  called
Yeardley “[a] worthie statesman for his owne profit,” who
was  willing  to  prolong  the  colony’s  distress  in  order  to
gain  by  it  personally.
105
  It  is  reasonable  to  infer,  and  it
was so implied by Nathaniel Rich, that corn profiteering
was  the  motive  of  the  merchants  in  the  Colony  Council
generally,  when  they  advised  the  London  authorities  in
January  1623  that  they  were  “Confident  there  wilbe  noe
cause  to  intreat  your  helpe  for  supplie  of  corne  or  any
other  provisions,”  provided  incoming  colonists  were
accompanied by adequate food.
106

Under ordinary conditions, the colony at its current size
needed  at  least  eleven  thousand  bushels  of  corn  to  get
through  to  the  next  harvest  from  planting  time.
107
  The
normal  price  of  corn  was  2½s.  per  bushel.
108
  Under
normal  conditions,  the  five  largest  possessors  of  corn  in
the colony held 12 percent of the total supply.
109
In  March  1623,  there  were  certainly  less  than  four
thousand bushels of corn on hand of that brought in during
the  previous  three  or  four  months.  Very  little  corn  had
been harvested in 1622; the same would be true of 1623.
At the same time a group of not more than a dozen of the
colony elite held practically the entire corn supply of the
colony. The supply was not distributed according to need;
rather  it  was  sold  for  the  highest  prices  that  could  be
extorted.  The  price  of  corn  had  risen  to  ten,  and  then
fifteen,  shillings  a  bushel  in  the  winter  of  1622.  By  the
spring of 1623, the price was octupled, at twenty shillings
per  bushel.
110
  And  within  a  month  after  the Seaflower
went down in Bermuda, Edward  Hill  was writing  to  his
brother in England  that the price of corn in  Virginia  had
reached  thirty  shillings,  and  that  the  land  faced  “the
greatest famine that ever was.”
111
 As the price of corn was
rising to eight times its normal level, the price of tobacco
was falling due to overproduction. We have already noted
that the commodity-trading ships were said to have taken
almost the  entire  sixty-thousand-pound  tobacco  crop  of

1622.

112

While that estimate may have been exaggerated

somewhat, the fact still contributed to the pressure of

indebtedness bearing down on the people as a result of

profiteering by the plantation bourgeois elite.

In 1623, the Governor and Colony Council sought to fix

the exchange rate of tobacco in Virginia at 18d. per pound

in order to discourage trade with the private ship-

merchants.

113

This was only half the three-shilling rate that

had been set before the crisis. If the price of corn rose

eight times and the price of tobacco fell by half, then the

four thousand pounds of corn secured in the winter of

1622–23 would, even at a price of fifteen shillings the

bushel, be equal in exchange-value to forty thousand

pounds of tobacco at 18d. per pound. If the total 1622

tobacco crop of sixty thousand pounds had nearly all been

spent with the commodity-trading ships (see this page),

then the indicated indebtedness to the corn elite must have

approached something like forty thousand pounds of

tobacco. The crushing weight of such debt was enough to

drive the tenants into long-term debt servitude. The same

pressure was felt, perhaps only slightly less forcefully, by

the freemen, the rank-and-file small landholders.

The uprooting of the inhabitants of many English

settlements, combined with the extremely high death rate,

simultaneously presented the plantation bourgeoisie with

opportunities for direct capitalist expropriation of land

and labor power in the furtherance of the alteration of

labor relations to that of chattel-servitude.

In the aftermath of the 22 March 1622 attack, the

boundaries of the colony were drawn back by deliberate

decision to Jamestown and Newport-News and points on

the north side of James River, and to a few plantation

above and opposite Jamestown. In its report to London at

the end of April, the Colony Council revealed that “halfe

the people” had been uprooted and “enforced … to unite

with” the other half, along with as much of their livestock

as could be salvaged, within the confines of an area less

than half that occupied by the colony before 22 March.

114

Two months later, the Colony Council advised London

that “[w]e have been forced to quitt most of our

habitations, so that many of our people are unsettled.”

115

One-third of the landholders had died in the attack of 22

March. Half of the surviving landholders were those who

were displaced from the outlying settlements; and half of

that number died within the ensuing year. Chaos in

property relations was the result, especially in the

common case in which there was no clearly entitled

Virginia-dwelling heir-apparent. Three years after the

attack, only twenty-eight of the seventy non-corporate

landholders were still living of those who had been

granted land patents in Charles City prior to 22 March

1622. Most revealing of the chaotic quality of the situation

is the fact that sixteen of the seventy are listed as

“probably” or “possibly” dead. It was difficult enough to

straighten out the lines and portions of inheritance when

the patent holder was known to be dead; it was impossible

to do so where it was not certain that the original holder

was dead. Still, the land “lived,” and would yield tobacco

for somebody, if “planted” with laborers. The corporate

group that operated under the name Southampton Hundred

was the holder of title to 100,000 acres in Charles City. In

1625, this land was still “virtually abandoned.” In

Henrico settlement, only nine of the pre-March 1622

patent holders remained alive in 1625; of these, only two

were living in Henrico.

116

It was a field rich with opportunity for land-

grabbing.

117

Immediately after the March 1622 attack, the

gentlemen of the Colony Council noted that in the

straitened circumstances it would be necessary for

colonists to be “contented with smale quantities of Land,”

and asked London for authority to assign planters “the

place and proportions of Land” that the Council in

Virginia should think proper.

118

Under cover of a

reference to the settling of new planters, the Colony

Council asked that the patent-granting authority be

transferred from the Virginia Company Court in London to

the Virginia Governor and Colony Council.

The Company’s reply indicated that, in any case of

divergence of interest among claimants, control should be
unambiguously  located  in  England.  The  Company
categorically  rejected  the  suggestion  of  the  Virginia
Colony  council,  immediately  established  a  special
committee  of  Londonders  to  receive  claims  of  Virginia
land  heirs  living  in  England,  and  enjoined  the  Virginia
authorities  to  process  these  claims  as  they  were
forwarded,  expeditiously  and  justly.
119
  In  November
1622,  the  Company’s  committee  on  Virginia  land  claims
declared as follows:
The Companie knoweth not what land is Due to men and every Day unjust
and false claimes are put up  especially upon pretences of beinge heires to
persons [in Virginia].
120
Aside  from  the  individually  held  lands,  around  thirty
thousand acres of Company lands reverted to the Crown in
1625,
121
 to be distributed in time on its terms.
In  consequence  of  this  double  process  of  death  and
displacement,  one-third,  at  least,
122
  of  the  surviving
tenants, laborers and apprentices in the entire colony were
left without employers or means of employing themselves.
The moment had come to put into execution the proposal
of Captain Nuce, which had been so ardently embraced by
the  Virginia  Governor,  Colony  Council  and  House  of
Burgesses  in  January  1622  –  to  “turn  the  tenants  into
pencons.”
123
 The optimum conditions were conjoined for

realizing the intention of the plantation bourgeoisie to

reduce the general condition of the plantation laboring

classes to that of unpaid bond-labor, working without

wages, for board and lodging only.

As of the spring of 1622, there were five officially

recognized social classes in Virginia Colony. Two of them

were the owning classes: gentlemen (the bourgeoisie) and

the freemen, small independent farmers and self-employed

artisans (the petty bourgeoisie). The other three were the

dependent laboring classes: the tenants-at-halves, the

hired servants, and the apprentices.

124

In the long crisis that followed the Indian attack of

March 1622, however, the significant distinctions of status

among the three laboring-class elements were deeply

eroded by pervasive hunger and sickness, by economic

dislocation, and by the general precariousness of

existence.

125

Theoretically, the average tenant could, under normal

conditions, raise some five hundred or more pounds of

tobacco in a year,

126

half of which was his, plus the corn,

of which his share would supply him and his family (if he

had a family in Virginia) for the year ahead. But the crisis

had confronted the tenants with a far different reality. They

were forced into debt by the restriction on tobacco

planting, coupled with a fixed rate of rent. Forbidden to

plant corn, they were compelled to pay extortionate prices

for it from the corn-profiteering elite, and to the shipboard

hucksters down at the river. Alderman Johnson, a critic of

the Sandys administration in the Virginia Company, said in

June 1623: “the planters, most of them being Tenants at

halves … for twelve moneths bread paye 2 years labor

and for cloths and tooles he hath not wherewith to furnish

himself.

127

Yet friends of the Sandys administration judged

the proportion of the tenants’ resources to be even less. In

January the Virginia Colony Council had said that tenants

could not feed themselves three months out of the year.

128

In March, Colony Secretary George Sandys would write

that most tenants-at-halves “die of Melancholye, the rest

running so farre in debt as keepes them still behind hand,”

and many too hungry to continue at their works or to wait

for the harvest were hunting wild game to keep from

starving.

129

And in April, those of Governor Wyatt’s

twenty-four tenants who still survived were sinking

hopelessly into debt merely for corn to get them through

the year, because their families would otherwise starve

waiting for the year-end division of the crop. Eight of

Wyatt’s tenants were obliged to submit to being “rented

out” to private planters, who paid Wyatt one hundred

pounds of tobacco and three barrels of corns for each.

130

In the case of the hired laborer, what did it matter that,

even at the reduced official rate of 18d. per pound, his

wage of a pound of tobacco per day was by the numbers

equal to three times as much as the wages of a laborer in
England? Corn, the basic food, cost four or five times as
much in Virginia as grain in England.
131
 Two-thirds of the
possible  employers  of  hired  labor  had  died  or  been
displaced  from  their  lands  in  the  space  of  a  year.  The
opportunities for being hired were thus cut in half, while
the number of hands available for hired labor was doubled
by the displacement of half the tenants from their holdings.
January  letters  from  Jamestown  described  the  laborer’s
situation in such terms as these:
by occasion of the last massacre … every man of meaner sort, who before
lived  well  by  their  labour  upon  their  owne  land,  being  forced  to  foresake
their houses (which were very farre scattered) & to join themselves to some
great mans plantation; where having spent what before they had gotten, they
are ready to perish for want of necessaries.
132
The tendency to concentration of land ownership has been
noted  above.  But  the  most  significant  index  of  wealth
concentration  in  Virginia  at  that  time  was in  numbers  of
laborers;  as  Secretary  Pory  had  said,  ’our  principal
wealth  …  consisteth  in  servants.
133
  Edmund  S.  Morgan
lists  the  fifteen  “winners”  in  the  servant  “sweepstakes,”
who by the winter of 1624–25 had accumulated a total of
302  “servants.”
134
  That  was  60  percent  of  all  those
categorized  as  “servants”  in  the  Colony.
135
  Some
significant portion of them had been forced by sheer want

“to join … great men’s plantations.” The individual

holding of the grandees ranged from ten to thirty-nine

“servants.” Morgan emphasizes the extreme degree of

concentration of this engrossment of the laborers in the

hands of the colony elite by noting that contemporary

Gloucestershire in England, with a labor force nearly forty

times as great as that of Virginia Colony, had only slightly

more employers of ten or more persons than Virginia’s

favored fifteen.

136

The concentration of “servants” in the

colony was guaranteed for the future by the headright

system of land acquisition and tenure; and the arrangement

of political power based on it was certain to intensify the

already apparent degree of concentration of land

ownership in Virginia.

Now completely in the labor market were such ex-

tenants as John Radish, one of the “rented-out” tenants-at-

halves, who found himself so destitute late in 1622 that he

was compelled by necessity to work for his master for

food and clothing only, or die of starvation.

137

Such being

the lot of the tenants-at-halves and the wage workers, what

but despair would come to the apprentices, lacking a

master, land and tools, unskilled in labor, possibly

displaced from lodging, and three thousand miles from

home? It need only be said that their situation was the most

precarious of all, and to note that in April 1622 Edwin

Sandys in England had come to the opinion that what

Virginia needed most was “multitude of apprentices.”

138

A time came, in June 1623, when in labor-scarce

Virginia food was proportionately even more scarce than

laborers. Writing to his brother Edward in London,

Virginia gentleman planter Robert Bennett acknowledged

recent receipt of a shipment of “19 buttes of excelent good

wyne, 700 jarse of oylle, 16 Barelles of Rysse, tooe halfe

hoghedes of Allmonds, 3 half hoghedes of wheate …, 18

hoghedes of Olives and some 5 ferkenes of butter and one

Chesse.”

139

Concerning general conditions in the colony,

he added in a postscript: “Vittiles being scarce in the

countrye noe man will tacke servantes.”

Laboring People’s Difficulty, Colony Elite’s

Opportunity

The extreme economic pressure on the laboring people

created an opportunity for the abuse of their rights that was

deliberately exploited by the official policy and actions of

the Virginia Colony Council and General Court. Men on

wages were sold after their employers died.

140

Poor

planter William Tyler declared that “neither the Governor

nor Counsell could or would doe any poor man right.”

Even if he were a man of means, Tyler said, he wouldn’t

be a member of the Colony Council, because as such he

could not do right as his conscience would dictate, adding
that the great men all hold together.
141
  Laborer Elizabeth
Abbot was whipped to death with 500 lashes, and Elyas
Hinton was beaten to death with a rake by his employer,
Mr  Procter.
142
  In  the  first  recorded  instance  of  the  un-
English practice of punishing a runaway laborer by adding
years  to  his  servitude,  John  Joyce  was  sentenced  by  the
General Court to thirty lashes and a total of five and a half
years’  extra  labor  service.
143
  Henry  Carman,  who  had
been  shipped  to  Virginia  as  one  of  the  “Duty  boys”  in
1619,  was  the  first  laborer  sentenced  to  an  added  time
(seven  years)  of  unpaid  labor  for  a  criminal  offense
(“fornication”).
144
  Company  tenants,  who  had  been
promised  promotion  to  landowner  upon  completion  of
their  contracts,  were  instead  merely  to  serve  again  as
tenants  of  the  colony  authorities  for  “terme  of  yeares.”
“Duty  boys”  who  in  1626  completed  their  seven-year
terms,  were  not  promoted  to  tenants-at-halves,  but  were
divided  up  among  the  Governor  and  members  of  the
Colony  Council,  with  whom  they  were  to  “make
composition,”  that  is,  negotiate  terms  from  their  utterly
dependent  position.
145
  Bruce’s  “explanation”  of  why  the
plantation  bourgeoisie  reneged  on  the  conditions  under
which  these  laboring  people  were  originally  brought  to
Virginia  seems  cold-bloodedly  true.  If  they  had  been
granted land, he says, “the ability of the planters who had

been their masters to secure laborers in place of them

would have been diminished to a serious extent.”

146

For the laboring classes, it was as if Virginia had been

visited with a combination of the plague of the fourteenth

century – but without the chance to walk away to higher-

paying employment – and the enclosures of the sixteenth

century – but without a Pilgrimage of Grace of powerful

allies, or their native Mousehold Heath to rally on. They

could not escape from Virginia. Rebellion was, at that

moment, practically impossible, even if the subjective

element for revolt had been prepared. They were

dependent upon the bourgeoisie for every peck of corn for

their starved bellies. They were thus compelled to submit

to the condition dictated by the plantation bourgeoisie: the

status of unpaid labor, that is, bond-laborers.

Yet the tenants’ desperate situation which had made it

possible for the employing class to reduce labor costs to

mere “vittles” would certainly end with new corn

harvests,

147

although the price of tobacco was bound in

shallows from which it would never return to its early

high levels. How then would it be possible for the

plantation bourgeoisie to make this momentary system of

unpaid labor permanent, instead of being forced to return

to “that absurd condition of tenants at halves,”

148

or to

paying wages higher than those paid in England?

149

Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but

No Intermediate Stratum

Bond-labor was not new; in surplus-producing societies,

in England and elsewhere, lifetime bondage had been the

common condition of labor prior to capitalism. But the

social structure of those times was based on production

relationships in which each person was socially,

occupationally and domestically fixed in place. Pre-

capitalist bond-labor was tied by a two-way bond: the

workers could not go away, but equally the master could

not send them away. However, this relationship, which

was essential to feudalism for instance, was inimical to

capitalism. The historical mission of the bourgeoisie was

to replace the two-way bondage of feudalism with the

two-way freedom of the capitalist relation of production.

The capitalist was free to fire the workers, and the

workers were free to quit the job. The political corollary

was that the bourgeoisie was the only propertied class

ever to find advantage in proclaiming freedom as a human

right.

Capitalism is a system whose normal operation is

necessarily predicated upon the continuing presence of a

mass of unattached labor-power of sufficient proportions

that each capitalist can have access to exploitable labor-

power, in season and out, in city or in countryside, and at

a minimum labor cost. In newly settled territories, such a

necessary reserve army of labor, though at first absent,

would eventually be created

in the normal process of

capitalist development, as a result of: immigration induced

by higher wages caused by the shortage of wage labor;

increased productivity of labor, resulting from the use of

improved techniques and instruments of labor; the normal

process of squeezing out the small or less efficient owners

and making wage laborers of them by force of

circumstance; and the natural increase of the dependent

laboring population.

But the situation in which the Anglo-American

plantation bourgeoisie found itself in the 1620s, seeking to

preserve its profitable tobacco monoculture in the face of

the declining price of tobacco, did not permit – so far as

its narrow class objectives were concerned – waiting for

longer-term solutions.

Since the freedom of the capitalist to fire the workers is

predicated on the freedom of the worker to leave the

employer, the plantation bourgeoisie created a peculiar

contradiction with respect to the free flow of capital

within its system by reducing plantation laborers to

bondage. The plantations, being capitalist enterprises,

were subject to the normal crises of overproduction. As

capitalist monocultural enterprises, they were furthermore

subject in an extraordinary degree to the vagaries of the

world market. Even in times of a generally satisfactory

market, natural calamities, wars, or inimical governmental

administration inevitably brought business failures and the

abandonment or dissolution of individual enterprises in

their wake. In the normal course of capitalist events,

individual reverses of fortune require liquidation of

enterprises, and the normal procedure in such

circumstances is to “let the workers go,” that is, to

discharge them. But the very purpose of bond-servitude is

to see to it that the workers are not “let go”; and a system

of laws, courts, prosecutions, constabulary, punishments,

etcetera, is instituted to enforce that principle. The

plantation bourgeoisie dealt with this contradiction by

establishing a one-way bondage, in which the laborer

could not end the tie to the capitalist simply by his own

volition; but the capitalist could end the tie with the

worker. In the solution imposed by the plantation

bourgeoisie, the unpaid aspect was designed to meet the

need to lower labor costs, the long-term bondage was the

surrogate for the nonexistent unemployed labor reserve,

and the chattel aspect of the new system of labor relations

made it operable by satisfying the functional necessity for

the free flow of capital.

An Ominous New Word Appears – “Assign”

In attempting to fix the point in time at which the

unambiguous commitment to chattelization began, it is

helpful to take note of the first appearance of the term

“assign” in relation to laborers. To “assign” means, in

law, “to make over to another; to transfer a claim, right or

property.” The appearance of this term in relation to the

change of a laborer from the service of one employer, or

master, to another betokens the chattel status of the

laborer. No longer is the contract for labor an agreement

entered into between the laborer and the employer; it is

rather a transacation between two employers, in which the

laborer transferred, “assigned,” has no more participation

than would be had by an ear-cropped hog, or a

hundredweight of tobacco, sold by one owner to another.

Between January and June 1622, the Virginia Company

established a standard patent form.

The form carried a

provision that the laborers transported under the patent

could not be appropriated by the colony authorities for any

purpose except the armed defense of the colony. What is

significant in the context of the present discussion is that

the Company guaranteed this protection not only to the

original patentee but to his “heires and Assigns.” Implicit

here, and as would become explicit within less than four

years, is the formal establishment of the legal right of

masters to “assign” laborers, or to bequeath them.

Already, of course, as early as 1616, a system had been

established under which any private investor was entitled

to fifty acres of Virginia land for himself for every worker

whose transportation costs the investor paid.

The case of Robert Coopy’s indenture, dated September

1619, is the first recorded instance of a worker being

obligated to work for a specified length of time without

wages in order to pay off the cost of his transportation to

Virginia.

Two years later, Miles Pricket, a skilled

English tradesman, while still in England agreed with the

Virginia Company to work at his salt-making trade in

Virginia for one year “without any reward at all, which is

here before paid him by his passage and apparell given

him.”

The one-year term was normal for England, but the

worker’s paying for his own passage was innovative.

Prickett did come to Virginia, and in March 1625 was the

holder of a 150-acre land patent in Elizabeth City.

Retrospectively, these early incidents appear as

preconditioning the reduction of laborers to chattels. But it

was not until 1622 and 1623 that this portentous custom

was established as the general condition for immigrant

workers, formalizing their status as chattels. An analysis

of a score of entries in the records of the time shows how

the chattel aspect of bond-servitude was designed to adapt

that contradictory form to capitalist categories of

commodity exchange and free flow of capital.

Saving harmless the creditors of decedent. William

Nuce, brother of Thomas Nuce and member of the Colony

Council, died in late 1623. His estate was encumbered

with debts, including one of £50 owed to George Sandys,

and another of £30 to William Capps. Both debts were

settled by the assignment of bond-laborers to the

creditors.

Disposal of unclaimed estate. William Nuce left eleven

destitute laborers who had been in his charge as company

employees, “some bound for 3 yeares, and few for 5, and

most upon wages.”

They were sold for two hundred

pounds of tobacco each (not counting those four with

whom George Sandys reported having such bad luck).

Avoidance of bankruptcy. Mr Atkins, in order to relieve

his straitened circumstances, sold all his bond-laborers.
11
Option  to  buy.  Thomas  Flower  was  assigned  to  Henry
Horner  for  three  years.  But  it  was  stipulated  by  the
Virginia General Court that if Horner decided to sell the
man, John Procter would have first refusal.
12
Capital  market  operations.  In  the  prelude  to  the  case
cited  immediately  above,  John  Procter  assured  Henry
Horner  that  he,  Procter,  would  procure  a  servant  for
Horner,  saying  that  “[H]ee [Procter]  had  daly  Choice  of
men  offered  him.”  (Procter  told  Horner  not  to  let  the
servant know he had been sold until they were embarked
from England.)
13
In  January  1625,  three  servants  of  William  Gauntlett
were sold to Captain Tucker. The sale was recorded in the
Minutes of the Virginia General Court.
14
Velocity  of  circulation . Abraham  Pelterre,  sixteen-year-
old  apprentice, arrived  in  Virginia  in  1624;  within  two
years he had been sold hand to hand four times.
15
Contract  for  delivery;  penalty  for  failure  to  perform.
Humphrey  Rastill,  merchant  of  London,  contracted  to
deliver  “one  boye  aged  about  fowerteene  yeers  …  To
serve [Captain] Basse [in Virginia] or his assignes seaven
Years,” and bound himself “in the penaltye of forfeiture of

five hundred pownd of Tobacco.” On 3 January 1626, six

weeks after the order had been due for delivery, on

Basse’s petition the Court ordered Rastill to make

delivery by 31 January or pay the forfeit.

Property loss: damages assessed. Thomas Savage, a

young servant, was drowned in consequence of negligence

on the part of a man who had use of him but was not his

owner. The culprit was ordered to pay the owner three

hundred pounds of tobacco as indemnity.

Exploiting sudden entrepreneurial opportunities. John

Robinson sailed from England in the winter of 1622–23,

bringing bond-laborers with him, to settle in Virginia. He

di ed en route. The ship’s captain seized Robinson’s

property, including the bond-laborers, with the intention of

selling all for his own account.

The Privy Council in England in 1623 confirmed the gift

to Governor Yeardley, of twenty tenants and twelve boys

that had been left by the Company at its liquidation.

Yeardley was authorized to “dispose of the said tenants

and boys to his best advantage and benefit.”

The Colony Council in January 1627 divided up former

Company tenants among the Council members themselves:

eighteen to Yeardley; three each to five others; two to

another; one to each of two others (including the Surveyor,

Mr Claiborne, who was given William Joyce and two

hundred pounds of tobacco).
20
Liquidation  of  an  estate.  George  Yeardley  died  in
November 1627; at the time he was one of the richest men
in  the  country,  if  not  the  very  richest.
21
  He  left  a  will
providing  that,  aside  from  his  house  and  its  contents,
which was to go to his wife as it stood,
the rest of my estate consisting of debts, servants [and African and African-
American bond-laborers], cattle, or any other thing or things, commodities or
profits  whatsoever  to  me  belonging  or  appertaining  …  together  with  my
plantation of one thousand acres of land at Warwicke River … all and every
part and parcell thereof [to be] sold to the best advantage for tobacco and
the same to be transported as soon as may be … into England, and there to
be sold or turned into money.
22
History’s False Apologetics for Chattel Bond-
servitude
The  bourgeoisie,  of  whom  the  investors  of  capital  in
colonial  schemes  were  a  representative  section,
23
  could
have  had  no  more  real  hope  of  imposing  in England  the
kind  of  chattel  bond-servitude  they  were  to  impose  on
English  workers  in  Virginia  than  they  had  of  finding  the
China Sea by sailing up the Potomac River.
24
 The matter
of labor relations was a settled question before the landing

at Jamestown. But the Anglo-American plantation

bourgeoisie seized on the devastation brought about by the

Powhatan attack of 22 March 1622 to execute a plan for

the chattelization of labor in Virginia Colony. There had

been dark prophecy, indeed, in the London Company’s

response to the news of the 22 March assault on the

colony. “[T]he shedding of this blood,” the Company said,

“wilbe the Seed of the Plantation,” and it pledged “for the

future … instead of Tenants[,] sending you servants.”

For from that seeding came the plantation of bondage, in

the form known to history as “indentured servitude.”

Early in Chapter 4, it was argued from authority that the

monstrous social mutation in English class relations

instituted in that tiny cell of Anglo-American society was

a precondition for the subsequent variation of hereditary

chattel bond-servitude imposed on African-Americans in

Virginia.

Historical interpretations of the institution of

“indentured servitude” in the Virginia Company period

generally anticipate Winthrop D. Jordan’s “unthinking

decision” theory of the origin of racial slavery.

The

initial imposition of chattel bond-servitude in continental

Anglo-America is justified by its apologists using three

propositions:

First proposition: There was a shortage of poor laborers

in Virginia, and an abundance of them in England, so that

between English laborers, who wanted employment, and

plantation investors, who wanted to get rid of

prohibitively costly tenantry and wage labor, a quid pro

quo was agreed, according to which the employer paid the

£6 cost of transportation from England and in exchange the

worker agreed to be a chattel bond-laborer for a term of

five years or so.

Second proposition: This form of labor relations was not

a sharp disjuncture, but was merely an unreflecting

adaptation of some pre-existing form of master-servant

relations prevailing in England.

Third proposition: Quid pro quo and English precedents

aside, the imposition of chattel bond-servitude was

“indispensable” for the “Colony’s progress,” a step

opposed only by the “delicate-minded.”

The “quid pro quo” rationale

The argument for shifting the cost of immigrant

transportation from the employer to the worker was in

some ways analogous to the rationale advanced by the

English ruling classes in the late fourteenth century.

Because of the plague-induced labor shortage, labor costs

rose, and the ruling feudal class and the nascent

bourgeoisie sought to recoup as much as possible of the

increased cost by introducing a poll tax and increasing

feudal dues exacted from the laboring people. Their

rationale was that laborers “will not serve unless they

receive excessive wages,” and that as a result “[t]he

wealth of the nation is in the hands of the workmen and

labourers.”

As rationales go, this was fully as valid as

that advanced for indebting the laborers themselves for the

cost of their delivery to Virginia. The English feudal lords

in the fourteenth century used similar “logic” in trying to

persuade “their people” of the impossibility of organizing

production if the serf were freed. The great difference in

the two cases was that the English laboring classes by the

Great Rebellion of 1381 showed that the “impossible

arrangement” was, after all, not impossible, while in

Virgina rebellion, when it came, would fail.

Given the state of English economic and social

development as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth

century, under the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers (5 Eliz.

4), the “inevitable” thing would have been to employ free

labor – tenants and wage laborers – in the continental

colonies, not chattel bond-servitude. If the “inevitable”

did not happen in Virginia Colony, it was because the

ruling class was favored in the seventeenth-century

Chesapeake tobacco colonies by a balance of class forces

enabling them to promote their interests in a way they

could not have done in England. And they could do so in

spite of, rather than because of, the shortage of labor in the

colonies. The “payment of passage” was simply a

convenient excuse for a policy aimed at reducing labor

costs and doing so in a way that was consistent with the

free flow of capital. Incidentally, as Abbot Smith

concluded, the “four or five years bondage was far more

than they [the laborers] justly owed for the privilege of

transport.”

Indeed, producing at the average rate of

around 712 pounds of tobacco a year, priced at 18d. per

pound, even if the laborer survived only one year, he or

she would have repaid more than seven times his or her £6

transportation cost.

The real consideration was therefore

not the recovery by the employer of the cost of the

laborer’s transportation, but rather the fastening of a multi-

year unpaid bondage on the worker by the fiction of the

“debt” for passage.

The contrast of labor-supply situations in Holland and

England has been discussed in Chapter 1. There appears

to be an instructive corresponding contrast in the Dutch

attitude toward binding immigrant workers to long periods

of unpaid servitude for the cost of their transportation. On

10 July 1638, Hans Hansen Norman and Andreis Hudde

entered into a partnership to raise tobacco “upon the

flatland of the Island of Manhates” in New Amsterdam.

Hudde was to return to Holland and from there to send to

Hudde in New Amsterdam “six or eight persons with

implements required” for their plantation. It was agreed

that  the  partners  would  share  the  expense  of
“transportation and engaging them” and of providing them
with dwellings and victuals.
34
 Dutch ship’s captain David
Pieterzoon  de  Vries,  who  was  engaged  in  the American
trade at that same time, despised the bond-labor trade of
the  English,  “a  villainous  people  …  [who]  would  sell
their own fathers for servants in the Islands.”
35
Bond-servitude was not an adaptation of English
practice
The imposition of chattel bondage cannot be regarded as
an  unreflecting  adaptation  of  English  precedents.  The
oppressiveness  of  the  social  and  legal  conditions  of  the
English  workers  was  outlined  in Chapter  2  of  this
volume.
36
  But  laborers  were  not  to  be  made  unpaid
chattels.  Except  for  vagabonds,  they  had  the  legal
presumption of liberty, a point they themselves had made
by rebellion. Except for apprentices and the parish poor,
workers  were presumed to be self-supporting  and bound
by yearly contracts,  with the provision for three  months’
notice  of  non-renewal.  The  contract  was  legally
enforceable by  civil  sanctions, including the requirement
of posting bond.
37
Under  the  bond-labor  system  of  Virginia  Colony,  the
worker was presumed to be non-self-supporting; if taken

up  outside  his  or  her  owner’s  plantation  without  the
owner’s permission, the laborer, already bound to four or
five years of unpaid bondage, was returned to that master
and subjected to a further extension of his or her servitude.
Above  all,  the  Virginia  labor  system  repudiated  the
English  master-servant  law  by  reducing  laborers  to
chattels.
Nor can the origin of plantation chattel  bond-servitude
be  explained  by  reference  to  English  apprenticeship.
38
Confirmation  on  this  point  is  to  be  found  in  a  opinion
(citing precedents) written in 1769 by George Mason as a
member of the Virginia General Court: “[W]herever there
was a trust it could not be transferred … [as in] the case
of an apprentice.”
39
 Under English law, “The binding was
to  the man, to learn his art, and serve him” and therefore
the apprentice was not assignable to a third party, not even
the executor of the will of a master who had died.
40
Rather  than  being  “a  natural  outgrowth”
41
  of  English
tradition,  chattel  bond-servitude  in  Virginia  Colony  was
as strange to the social order in England after the middle
of the sixteenth century as Nicotiniana tabacum was to the
soil  of  England  before  that  time;
42
  and  as  inimical  to
democratic development in continental Anglo-America as
smoking tobacco is to the healthy human organism.
Was it inevitable? Was it progress?

Just as historians of the eighteenth century have chosen to

see the hereditary chattel bondage of African-Americans

as a paradoxical requisite for the emergence of the United

States Constitutional liberties,

historians of seventeenth-

century Virginia almost unanimously, so far as I have

discovered, regard the “innovation” of “indentured

servitude” as an indispensable condition for the

progressive development of that first Anglo-American

colony. It is most remarkable that of the interpreters of

seventeenth-century Virginian history only one – Philip

Alexander Bruce – has ever undertaken a systematic

substantiation of that concept.

Here is a summary of Bruce’s argument:

The survival of the colony depended upon its being able to

supply exports for the English market of sufficient value to

pay for the colony’s needs for English goods. The

economy of the colony was necessarily shaped by its

immediate economic interests. Tobacco alone would

serve both of those purposes. Since maize – Indian corn –

was not then appealing to the European palate, wheat was

the nearest possible export rival to tobacco. But wheat

required more land for the employment of a given amount

of labor for the production of equal exchange-value in

tobacco, and much more labor for clearing of the forested

land for its profitable exploitation; furthermore, wheat in

storage was much more vulnerable to rat and other

infestation and required much larger ship tonnage for

delivery than did tobacco of equal value.

In order to make profitable use of land acquired by

multiple headrights or the equivalent by other means, the

owner had to employ more labor than that of his

immediate family. Tenantry was not adaptable for this

purpose because landowners were not eager to rent out

newly cleared land whose fertility would be exhausted in

three years, and tenants were not willing to lease land that

was already overworked when they could take out patents

on land of their own at a nominal quit-rent of two shillings

per hundred acres.

Labor being in short supply, wage

laborers commanded such high wages that they too would

have good prospects of acquiring land of their own, and

thus of ceasing to be available for proletarian service.

Chattel bondage as the basic general form of production

relations was therefore indispensable for the progress of

the colony of Virginia.

It seems reasonable to believe that Bruce was aware that

tenantry became a significant part of the agricultural

economy in eighteenth-century Chesapeake. Allan

Kulikoff’s study indicates that in southern Maryland and

the Northern Neck and Fairfax County in Virginia one-

third  to  half  of  the  land  was  occupied  by  tenants.
46
  In
Virginia, on new ground the first tenant was excused from
paying  rent  for  the  first  two  years  of  the  lease.  This
exemption  for  payment  of  fees  and  rent  was  “a  most
advantageous arrangement,” writes Willard Bliss, so that,
far  from  being  unfeasible,  “tenancy  was  a  logical
solution” to planters’ problems.
47
 The rise of tenancy that
began  in  Virginia  early  in  the  eighteenth  century,
particularly  in  the  Northern  Neck,  was  a  function  of
plantation  capitalism,  which  was  by  then  recruiting  its
main  productive  labor  from  African  and  African-
American  bond-laborers.
48
  The  most  directly  profitable
exploitation  of  their  labor  was  in  the  production  of
tobacco,  not  in  clearing  new  ground,  pulling  stumps,
ditching,  fencing,  etcetera.  For  that  work,  rent-paying
tenants were to be employed.
In Maryland, English and other European laborers who
survived their servitude were formally entitled to a fifty-
acre  headright,  but  to  acquire  the  promised  land  was
“simply impracticable.”
49
  They  generally  became tenants
of  landlords  who  needed  to  have  their  land  cleared  and
otherwise improved for use as tobacco plantation land, or
to  build  up  their  equity  for  speculative purposes.
50
  In
Prince  George’s  County  one-third  of  the  householders
were tenants by 1705.
51
These  facts  would  seem  to  cast  doubt  on  Bruce’s

argument that the clearing of land could not have been

done on the basis of tenancy. The key in both the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was neither technical

difficulty nor any economic impossibility of getting tenants

to clear the land, but the owners’ calculation of the rate of

profit. In the seventeenth century the cheapest way to clear

land was not by using tenants, but by using bond-laborers;

in the eighteenth century, the cheapest way to clear land

was not by using bond-laborers, but by using tenants. It

was the work of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,”

and, in

today’s popular phrase, the logic of the “bottom line.”

But what was the “bottom line” to the people on the

bottom, who were being degraded from tenants and wage

laborers to chattels? What good to them was an “invisible

hand” systematically dealing from the bottom of the deck

against the laboring class? Bruce answers with one word,

“progress”; yet even as he does so, he concedes that after

all bond-servitude was not inevitable, although he

contends the alternative would have been undesirable.

Without chattel bondage, he says:

[t]he surface of the colony would have been covered with a succession of

small estates, many of which would have fallen into a condition of absolute

neglect as soon as their fertility had disappeared, their owners having sued

out patents to virgin lands in other localities as likely to yield large returns to

the cultivator.… [The] Colony’s progress would have been slow. Virginia

without [chattel bond-] laborers from England and without slaves would

have  become  a  community  of  peasant  proprietors,  each  clearing  and
working  his  ground  with his own  hands and with the  aid  of  his immediate
family.
53
However  unpalatable  such  an  alternative  may  have
seemed to Bruce, there were others who showed by word
and  deed  over  a  span  of  two  and  a  half  centuries  in
Virginia  that  they  would  have  assessed  the  matter
differently, had they been given the choice between the life
of  peasant  proprietors  and  that  of  unpaid  chattel  bond-
laborers.
54
  In New  England  an  alternative  practice  was
followed, as will be discussed in Chapter 9.
Francis Bacon’s Alternative Vision: “Of
Plantations”
Bruce  takes  note  of  Sir  Francis  Bacon’s  essay  “Of
Plantations,” dated 1625, the year after the dissolution of
the Virginia Company;
55
 but while he does not attempt to
discuss  it  in  detail,  he  obviously  does  not  find  it
persuasive.
56
Planting of countries  is like planting of woods [wrote Sir  Francis]; for  you
must take into account to lose almost twenty years profit, and expect your
recompense in the end; for the principal thing that hath been the destruction
of most plantations, has been the hasty drawing of profit in the first years. It

is true, speedy profit is not to be neglected, as may stand with the good of

the plantation, but not farther.

To this end, it was essential, Bacon said, to keep control

out of the hands of the merchants, the most typical form of

bourgeois life at that time, “for they look ever to the

present gain.”

The labor of the colonists should be first

turned to the cultivation of native plants (among other

things, Bacon mentions maize) in order to assure the

colony’s food supply. Bacon further advised, “Let the

main part of the ground employed to gardens or corn be a

common stock; and to be laid in and stored up, and then

delivered out in proportions.” Next, native products

should be developed as commodities to be exchanged for

goods that must be imported by the colony – but not,

Bacon warned, “to the untimely prejudice of the main

business; as it hath fared with tobacco in Virginia.”

Bacon’s thesis seems to have anticipated Bruce’s

argument, and to refute in advance any attempt to justify

the dominance of “immediate needs” and the plantation

monocultural base of colonial development.

The record itself – the public and private

correspondence, the Company and colony policy

statements, laws and regulations, the court proceedings

and decrees – presents much evidence of contradictory

views within the ruling councils during the Company

period. The Company and colony officials inveigh against

the inordinate attention given to tobacco growing, while

presiding over the ineradicable establishment of the

tobacco monoculture, using tobacco for money, squabbling

over its exchange-value, staking all on the “tobacco

contract.” The Company expresses concern over the abuse

of the rights of servants while pressing helpless young

people in England for service in the plantation. The

Company in London continues to send boatloads of

emigrants to Virginia without the proper complement of

supplies to tide them over till their first crops can be

harvested, while the Colony Council in Virginia demands

that settlers not be sent without provisions. The colony

officials complain that too many ill-provisioned laborers

are being sent, and yet at the same time, they deplore the

scarcity of “servants … our principal wealth,” and the

high wages due to that scarcity.

In puzzling out such apparent antinomies of sentiment,

one must make due allowance for the effect of partisan

conflicts within the Virginia Company. But as Craven

points out, indictments of the treatment of laborers and

tenants, or criticism of the tobacco contract with the

king,

may have been to some extent inspired by factional

interests, but that does not invalidate them.

When the

dust had settled, the transformation of production relations

by “changing tenants to servants” had developed from a

proposal by the Virginia Colony Council into the

prevailing policy of the Anglo-American plantation

bourgeoisie as a whole, London “adventurers” as well as

Virginia “planters.” In all the documents involved in the

transfer of the affairs of the colony to royal control, no

trace remains of the urgent concern with registration of

contracts, abuse of servants, etcetera, ideas that the

worried friends and kindred of those gone to Virginia had

pressed on the Company Court.

Some Knew It Was Wrong

Nevertheless, the substantial opposition within the

Company to the chattelization of labor provides strong

evidence that the options for monoculture and bond-

servitude were not “unthinking decisions.” The “quid pro

quo” rationale for chattel bond-servitude was denounced

as repugnant to English constitutional liberties and

common law,

and to the explicit terms of the Royal

Charter for the Virginia colony.

This concern was

reflected in the “exceeding discontent and griefe [of]

divers persons coming daylie from the farthest partes of

England to enquire of friends and Kindred gonn to

Virginia.”

In October 1622, the Virginia Company

established a Committee on Petitions, one of whose tasks

was to consider wrongs done to “servants” sent to

Virginia,

It beinge observed here that divers old Planters and others did allure and

beguile divers younge persons and others (ignorant and unskillfull in such

matters) to serve them upon intollerable and unchristianlike conditions upon

promises of such rewardes and recompense, as they were in no wayes able

to performe nor ever meant.

First among the “abuses in Carriing over of Servants

into Virginia” was the following:

divers ungodly people that have onely respect of their owne profitt do allure

and entice younge and simple people to be at the whole charge of

transportinge themselves and yet for divers years to binde themselves

Servants to them …

The remedy was not to be found at that time by strict

regulation and control of emigration to Virginia, with a

written contract for every worker of which a copy would

be kept in Company files.

If, in those famine years,

1622–23, laborers had come to Virginia with a contract

sealed with seven seals, they would still have surely

starved if they could not pay twenty shillings for a bushel

of corn, unless they were able to find a master who would

let them work for mere corn diet and, perhaps, a place to

sleep.

It was not the way it was supposed to be. Even those who

had never heard of the Statute of Artificers knew as much.

“Sold … like a damd slave!” raged Thomas Best, cursing

his lot.

Henry Brigg had come to Virginia having Mr

Atkins’s promise that Brigg would never serve any other

master. But now, in the spring of 1623, he wrote his

brother, who had been witness to the promise, “my Master

Atkins hath sold me & the rest of my Fellowes.”

Young Abraham Pelterre was favored to have a mother

in England with some influence with her aldermen. They

protested with some effect when they learned that

Abraham was being sold from hand to hand in Virginia

contrary to the proper conditions of apprenticeship.

They

knew it was wrong.

Jane Dickinson knew that it was not a thing that could

happen in England, and she asked the General Court to see

it her way. She had come to Virginia in 1620 with her

husband Ralph, a seven-year tenant-at-halves for Nicholas

Hide. Her husband was killed in the attack of 22 March

1622, and she was taken captive by the Indians. After ten

months, she and a number of other captives were released

for small ransoms. Jane’s master had died in the

meantime. Dr John Pott, who paid her ransom, two pounds

of glass beads, demanded that she serve him as a bond-

laborer for the unexpired time of her husband’s

engagement, saying that she was doubly bound to his

service by the two pounds of glass laid out for her ransom.

The only alternative, he told her, was to buy herself from

him with 150 pounds of tobacco

(at the prevailing price

of 18d. per pound, this would have been worth nearly

twice the £6 cost of her transportation from England).

John Loyde knew that in England if a master died his

apprentice was freed, or, perhaps, remained bound to the

master’s widow. After paying his master £30 to be taken

on as an apprentice, and receiving his copy of the

appropriate papers for the arrangement, Loyde embarked

for Virginia with his master, taking with him the terms of

his apprenticeship in writing. His master died en route,

but the ship’s captain had taken his papers that would have

established his free status. Without them, Loyde was

subject to being sold by the ship’s captain into chattel

bondage. Loyde sued in court to recover the papers.

William Weston knew it was wrong. In November

1625, he was fined 250 pounds of good merchantable

tobacco for failing to bring a servant into Virginia for

Robert Thresher. The next month Weston was before the

General Court again, and it was testified that, when again

asked to bring servants to Virginia

Mr Weston replied he would bring none, if he would give him a hundred

pownde. Mr Newman [who wanted to place an order] asked him why. And

Mr Weston replied that … servants were sold here upp and down like

horses, and therefore he held it not lawfull to carry any.

John Joyce, bond-laborer, knew in his aching bones that

it was not right; and in August 1626 he sought to

reestablish by direct action the capitalist principle of two-

way freedom of labor relations. He did not take his case to

the General Court, however, preferring the mercy of the

wilderness. (Captured by the colony authorities, as noted

in Chapter 5, he had the distinction of being the first such

fugitive bond-laborer who is recorded as being sentenced

to an extension of his servitude time as punishment for his

offense. He had six months added to his term with his

master, and at the completion of that extended term he was

to serve five years more as bond-servant to the colony

authorities. It was all to begin with a brutal lashing of

thirty stripes.)

And so it came to pass that seventy-five years after the

institution of the labor relations principles of the Statute of

Artificers, when the good ship Tristram and Jane arrived

in Virginia in 1637, all but two of its seventy-six

passengers were bond-laborers to be offered for sale.

The following year, Colony Secretary Richard Kemp

reported to the English government, “Of hundreds of

people who arrive in the colony yearly, scarce any but are

brought in as merchandize for sale.”

The Problem of Social Control Enters a New

Context

There was another side to the coin of the option by the

tobacco bourgeoisie for the anomalous system of bond-

servitude as the basis of capitalist production in Virginia

Colony. In the sixteenth century, as has been discussed, the

English governing classes made a deliberate decision to

preserve a section of the peasantry from dispossession by

enclosures, in order to maintain the yeomanry as a major

element in the intermediate social control stratum essential

to a society without an expensive large standing army.

The military regime that the Virginia Company first

installed under governors Gates and Dale, for all its

severity, proved ultimately ineffective. That particular

variant of social control had to be superseded because of

defiance of the limitations on tobacco cultivation by

laboring-class tenants – Rolfe’s “Farmors” – who

represented the potential yeoman-like recruits for an

intermediate social control stratum for the colony.

Following their instinct for “present profit,” the

plantation bourgeoisie on the Tobacco Coast forgot or

disregarded the lesson taught by the history of the reign of

Henry VII and the deliberate decision to preserve a forty-

shilling freehold yeomanry.

Instead, convinced that the

tenant class was an “absurdity”

from the standpoint of

profit making in a declining tobacco market, the

Adventurers and Planters decided to destroy the tenantry

as a luxury they could not afford.

Perhaps there was special significance in the fact that it

was a son of the yeoman class, Captain John Smith, who

sounded the warning for those who were forsaking the

wisdom of insuring the existence of an adequate yeomanry.

Condemning the traders in bond-labor, he said, “it were

better they were made such merchandize themselves,

[than] suffered any longer to use that trade.” That practice,

said Smith prophetically, was a defect “sufficient to bring

a well setled Common-wealth to misery, much more

Virginia.”

Figure 1 Map of the Chesapeake region, circa 1700

This map of Virginia and Maryland was graciously copied for me by the Map

Division of the New York 1629). This engraving of the map by Francis Lamb,

although not dated, would seem to represent an “up-abbreviated as “C.”).

Virginia was not divided into counties (first called “shires”) until 1634. The

New York formed in 1669, and does not mention any of the next three

counties, which were formed in 1691, it seems parallel to the lines of almost all

of the printed text), it shows details with great clarity. The Atlantic Ocean

came to the Chesapeake by sailing north from the West Indies. I myself have

labeled West Point, the region slavery” in 1676 (see Chapter 11).

Public Library Research Libraries, whose map catalog identifies the

cartographer as John Speed (1542-dated” version of Speed’s work, to judge,

for instance, from its identification of counties (“County” being Public Library

catalog tentatively assigns “1666?” to this version. But since it includes

Middlesex County, that this map should be dated sometime in the 1669–91

period. Despite its orientation (the North arrow is is here called “The North

Sea,” the designation presumably given to these waters by the English who

first in which “four hundred English and Negroes in Armes” joined in the

demand for “freedom from their

Figure 2 List of governors of Colonial Virginia

An attempt has been made to give as nearly as possible the

dates of actual service of each of the men who acted as

colonial governor in Virginia. The date of commission is

usually much earlier.

President of the Council in Virginia

Edward-Maria Wingfield, May 14–September 10, 1607.

John Ratcliffe, September 10, 1607–September 10?, 1608.

John Smith, September 10, 1608–September 10?, 1609.

George Percy, September 10?, 1609–May 23, 1610.

The Virginia Company

Thomas West, Third Lord De La Warr, Governor.

February 28, 1610–June 7, 1618.

Sir Thomas Gates, Lieutenant-Governor. May 23–June 10,

1610.

Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, Governor. June 10,

1610–March 28, 1611.

George Percy, Deputy-Governor. March 28–May 19,

1611.

Sir Thomas Dale, Deputy-Governor. May 19–August 2?,

1611.

Sir Thomas Gates, Lieutenant-Governor. August 2?, 1611–

c. March 1, 1614.

Sir Thomas Dale, Deputy-Governor, c. March 1, 1614–

April?, 1616.

George Yeardley, Deputy-Governor. April?, 1616–May

15, 1617.

Samuel Argall, Present Governor. May 15, 1617–c. April

10, 1619.

Nathaniel Powell, Deputy-Governor. c. April 10–18,

1619.

Sir George Yeardley, Governor. April 18, 1619–

November 18, 1621.

Sir Francis Wyatt, Governor. November 18, 1621–c. May

17, 1626.

Royal Province

Sir George Yeardley. May?, 1626–November 13, 1627.

Francis West. November 14, 1627–c. March, 1629.

Doctor John Pott. March 5, 1629–March?, 1630.

Sir John Harvey. March?, 1630–April 28, 1635.

John West. May 7, 1635–January 18, 1637.

Sir John Harvey. January 18, 1637–November?, 1639.

Sir Francis Wyatt. November?, 1639–February, 1642.

Sir William Berkeley. February, 1642–March 12, 1652.

(Richard Kemp, Deputy-Governor. June, 1644–June 7,

1645.)

The Commonwealth

Richard Bennett. April 30, 1652–March 31, 1655.

Edward Digges. March 31, 1655–December, 1656.

Samuel Mathews. December, 1656–January, 1660.

Sir William Berkeley. March, 1660.

Royal Province

Sir William Berkeley. March, 1660–April 27, 1677.

(Francis Moryson, Deputy-Governor. April 30, 1661–

November or December, 1662.)

Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, Lieutenant-Governor. April 27,

1677–December 17, 1678.

Thomas Lord Culpeper, Governor. July 20, 1677–August,

1683.

(Sir Henry Chicheley, Deputy-Governor. December 30,

1678–May 10, 1680; August 11, 1680–December 1,

1682.)

(Nicholas Spencer, Deputy-Governor. May 22, 1683–

February 21, 1684.)

Francis, Lord Howard, Fifth Baron of Effingham,

Governor. February 21, 1684–March 1, 1692.

(Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., Deputy-Governor. June 19–c.

September, 1684; July 1,–c. September 1, 1687;

February 27?, 1689-June 3, 1690.)

Francis Nicholson, Lieutenant-Governor. June 3, 1690–

September 20, 1692.

Sir Edmund Andros, Governor. September 20, 1692–

December 9?, 1698.

(Ralph Wormeley, Deputy-Governor. September 25–c.

October 6, 1693.)

Francis Nicholson, Governor. December 9, 1698–August

15, 1705.

(William Byrd, Deputy-Governor. September 4–October

24, 1700; April 26–June, 1703; August 9–September

12–28, 1704.)

Lord George Hamilton, Earl of Orkney, Governor. 1704–

January 29, 1737.

Edward Nott, Lieutenant-Governor. August 15, 1705–

August 23, 1706.

(Edmund Jenings, Deputy-Governor. August 27, 1706–

June 23, 1710.)

(Robert Hunter was made Lieutenant-Governor April 22,

1707, but never took his office.)

Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor. June 23,

1710–September 25?, 1722.

Hugh Drysdale, Lieutenant-Governor. September 25,

1722–July 22, 1726.

(Robert Carter, Deputy-Governor. July, 1726–September

11, 1727.)

William Gooch, Lieutenant-Governor. September 11,

1727–June 20, 1749.

(Reverend James Blair, Deputy-Governor. October 15,

1740–July?, 1741.)

William Anne Keppel, Second Earl of Albemarle,

Governor. October 6, 1737–December 22, 1754.

(John Robinson, Sr., Deputy-Governor. June 20–

September 5, 1749.)

(Thomas Lee, Deputy-Governor. September 5, 1749–

November 14, 1750.)

(Lewis Burwell, Deputy-Governor. November 14, 1750–

November 21, 1751.)

Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant-Governor. November 21,

1751–January 2–12, 1758.

(John Blair, Deputy-Governor. January–June 7, 1758.)

John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, Governor. March

8, 1756–December 30, 1757.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Governor. September 25, 1759–

1768.

Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant-Governor. June 7, 1758–

March 3, 1768.

(John Blair, Acting-Governor. March 4–October 26,

1768.)

Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt, Governor.

October 26, 1768–October 15, 1770.

(William Nelson, Acting-Governor. October 15, 1770–

September 25, 1771.)

John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, Governor.

September 25, 1771–May 6, 1776.

The State

Patrick Henry. July 5, 1776–June 1, 1779.

Thomas Jefferson. June 1, 1779–June 12, 1781.

Thomas Nelson. June 12, 1781–November 30, 1781.

Benjamin Harrison. November 30, 1781–November 30,

1784.

Source: William W. Abbot, A Virginia Chronology, 1585–1783, Richmond,

1957, this page–this page

Figure 3 Virginia counties, and dates of their formation

Source: Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew: Virginia Counties, Richmond,

1957, this page–this page

PART THREE

Road to Rebellion

Bond-labor: Enduring …

Together with the insubstantiality of the intermediate

stratum, the oppressive conditions of the bond-laborers

and their resistance to those conditions constitute the most

significant social factors that contributed to that pivotal

historic event called Bacon’s Rebellion. That resistance

was a challenge to the very economic basis of the society:

the chattel bond-labor form of master-servant relations.

Equally significant from the standpoint of the study of the

origin of racial slavery is the fact that the record of this

period of labor history shows no “white worker”

component.

The “Servant Trade”: a New Branch of Free

Enterprise

The  “servant trade,”  as  it  came  to  be  called, that  is,  the
export  of  chattel  laborers  from  Europe,  sprang  up  as  a
response  to  the  profit-making  needs  of  the  tobacco
business,  and  it  soon  became  a  special  branch  of
commerce;  these  bond-laborers  “provided  a  convenient
cargo  for ships going  to  the plantations to fetch tobacco,
sugar, and the other raw products available,’ writes A. E.
Smith:  “[T]he  real  stimulus  to  emigration  was  not  the
desire  of  servants  to  go  to  America,  but  the  desire  of
merchants to secure them as cargo.”
1
 Investors  found the
trade  attractive.  In  England,  votaries  of  what  today  is
euphemized as “market principles” sold English men and
women for £2 per head (or even less, sometimes) if they
had  them  already in  captivity  as  convicts
2
  or  workhouse
inmates.
3
In all, some 92,000 European immigrants were brought
to  Virginia  and  Maryland  between  1607  and  1682,  the
great  majority  being  sent  to  Virginia.  More  than  three-
quarters  of  them  were  chattel  bond-laborers,  the  great
majority  of  them  English.
4
  In  1676,  it  was  Governor
Berkeley’s  estimate  that  about  1,500  European  chattel
bond-laborers were then arriving in Virginia yearly, “the
majority  English,  with  a  few  Scots  and  fewer  Irish.”
5
Others were brought to the Chesapeake after the defeat of
the  Catholic  cause  in  1689,  and  they  were  for  a  time
especially  worrisome  to  the  colonial  authorities  for  fear

that they might “confederate with the Negroes,” as Francis
Nicholson warned when he was Governor of Maryland.
6
Volunteer  emigrant  bond-laborers  were  those  who
boarded  ship  for  America  of  their  own  conscious  will,
although  in  most  cases  that  will  was  shaped  by  extreme
hardship and defeat at home, or by self-delusion about the
prospect  of  prospering  in  the  new  land.  Of  those  who
came  thus  voluntarily  in  the  seventeenth  century,  some
arrived with written contracts, called “indentures,” setting
forth  the  names  of  their  owners,  the  duration  of  their
periods  of  servitude,  and  perhaps  some  “consideration,”
or  “freedom  dues,”  that  their  owners  were  to  give  the
laborers upon the completion of their terms. In some cases
the  indenture  was  between the  worker and  the particular
plantation  owner  whom  he  or  she  was  to  serve  in  the
colony. More frequently, the indenture was arranged with
a merchant, ship’s captain, or other middleman, who sold
the laborer to the highest bidder and then signed over the
indenture to the new owner.
7
 As early as 1635 a standard
indenture form was in use with blank spaces to be filled in
with the names of the parties and witnesses.
8
The  involuntary  immigrant  bond-laborers  who  came
from  Europe  may  also  be  considered  in  two  categories.
There were those who came under sentence as convicted
felons and political prisoners, including captives taken in
civil war or rebellion in England, Scotland
9
 and Ireland.
10

In 1664 a committee on plantation labor supply problems

urged the Council for Trade and Plantations (subsequently

to be known by various names, and ultimately as the Board

of Trade) to have more systematic resort to this and other

forms of recruitment of plantation bond-labor. Convicts

should be sent to serve seven or fourteen years, said the

Committee, according to the seriousness of their offenses.

“Sturdy Beggers and Gipsies and other Wanderers” who

could not be forced into a settled way of life should “be

sent to the plantations for five years under the conditions

of Servants.” From among the unemployed poor of the

towns, villages and parishes of England, some should be

“invited or compelled” to emigrate to serve as unpaid

bond-laborers “in Jamaica.”

The involuntary shipment of still others to the Anglo-

Americans colonies, lacking even the color of law,

depended on crimps and “Spirits” (so called because they

“spirited” their victims away from their native places)

who obtained their unwitting victims either by kidnapping

or by gross and deliberate deception.

The latter and

more common method was noted in an English pamphlet

published in 1649:

The usual way of getting servants, hath been by a sort of men nick-named

Spirits, who take up all the idle, lazie, simple people they can intice … who

are persuaded by these Spirits, they shall goe into a place where food shall

drop into their mouthes.… The servants are taken up … and by them [the

Spirits]  put  in  Cookes  houses  about  Saint  Katherines,  where  being  once
entered, [they] are kept as Prisoners until a Master fetches them off.
13
The Council for Trade and Plantations report to which
reference  is  made  above  acknowledged  the  leading  part
played by the “Spirits,” who “receive a reward from the
persons who employed them.”
14
 Like the beaver and deer
skin trade that was proving so profitable in the colonies,
the  English  bond-labor supply  system  in  the  seventeenth
century  had  its  subdivisions.  William  Haverland  was  a
hunter and trapper, and was accounted a most aggressive
one.
15
 His role was that of initial seducer and captor of the
laborer. Thomas Stone,  one of  Haverland’s  prey, told of
the  experience. One day late in November 1670, he was
accosted in a London street by Haverland whom he did not
know,  but  who  represented  himself  to  be  a  native  of
Stone’s own county. By deceit  coupled with brute  force,
Haverland  delivered  the  besotted  Thomas  to  a  ship’s
captain  to  be  taken  and  sold  as  a  plantation  laborer  in
America.
16
John  Steward  and  William  Thiew,  on  the  other  hand,
were  traders.  Since  the  late  1650s  Steward  had  been
buying from such men as  Haverland such  kidnap victims
as Stone, at a price of twenty-five shillings a head. Thiew,
another  of  Haverland’s  customers  during  this  period,  in
just one year “spirited away” 840 persons.
17

Besides  the  acquisition  costs,  there  were  other
expenses,  for  storage,  maintenance  and  transportation,
which  had  to  be  borne  by  the  entrepreneurs  at  various
stages  of  the  supply  process.  The  cost  of  holding  and
maintaining  a  person  for  five  or  six  weeks  pending
shipment  came  to  £3.
18
  Clothes  provided  for  the
prospective  bond-laborer  might  cost  £4,  or  possibly  a
little more.
19
 But in 1649 this item was reckoned at £3 7s.
10d.;
20
 and in 1631 the Essex overseers of the Poor “layd
out in parill for two boys that were sent to Virginia, four
pownde seven shillings three pence,” which averages only
£2  2s.  9½d.  each.
21
  In  cases  where  the  merchant  and
shipowner  were  one,  the  cost  of  transporting  a  bond-
laborer  came  to  about  £3;  otherwise,  the  owner  of  the
laborer paid £5 or £6 for each worker’s passage.
22
The price per head of bond-labor delivered live in the
plantation  colonies  varied  considerably  in  response  to
fluctuations  of  supply  and  demand,  but  merchants  could
generally count on a profit of from 50 to 200 percent on
the transaction.
23
 Until 1683, captains of ships delivering
European  bond-laborers  received  an  additional  bonus,  a
fifty-acre head-right on each one, a claim that the shippers
almost  invariably  sold  rather  than  entering  into  the
cultivation  of  tobacco  themselves.
24
  After  that,  the
Virginia  practice  was  followed,  limiting  such  awards  to
those who used the bond-laborers to improve the land for

which they had received patents within a limited period of

time.

Besides those regularly engaged in the servant trade,

persons of means traveling to the colonies for any reason

might be advised to take a few bond-laborers with them

for use or sale, according to best advantage. The parents

of young Thomas Verney, whom they were dispatching to

Virginia, were assured by a supplier that such highly

saleable human chattels could easily be secured. “If I

were to send forty servants,” he boasted, “I could have

them here at a dayes warning.” (Was he perhaps connected

with such suppliers as the Essex Overseer of the Poor?)

The cost would be £12 per head, presumably including the

agent’s own fee. If Verney decided not to stay in Virginia

and use the head-rights to start up as a “planter,” he could

dispose of these chattels at a good profit to be applied

against his own expenses.

The shipment of convicts, as “His Majesty’s

passengers,” to be plantation bond-laborers was an

especially profitable branch of the trade since it was

subsidized by the authorities in England. Although this

practice proceeded systematically on a national scale

under a law passed by Parliament in 1717, convicts were

sent to the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth century.

Those convicts who survived the voyage were sold by the

ship’s captain for his own or his employer’s account.

James Revel arrived in Virginia some time before 1680 at

eighteen years of age, having been sentenced to fourteen

years’ bond-servitude. He later wrote recollections of his

experiences, which began with the dockside marketing

process. After a seven-week trip, the convicts were put

ashore, where they were cleaned up to be made

presentable to the prospective customers. The men and

women were displayed separately, for “Examening like

Horses.”

Some view’d our teeth, to see if they were good,

Or fit to chew our hard and homely Food.

If any like our look, our limbs, our trade,

the Captain then good advantage made.

As was sure to happen, the workings of “the invisible

hand” of market forces led to the idea of further

specialization. In 1683, Virginia capitalist William

Fitzhugh proposed the establishment of a Virginia

wholesale enterprise dealing in retailing ships’ cargoes as

a way of saving English shippers the loss of time and the

expense of selling cargoes in the colony. Writing to

business associates in London, Fitzhugh stressed the

importance of the rate of turnover of capital in the

formation of the annual rate of profit, saying, “a certain &

sure Market, and easie charge & a quick Dispatch … is

the life and profit of every trade.”

Domestic Sources of Bond-labor
Throughout  the  colonial  period  the  maintenance  of  the
plantation  bond-labor  supply  was  supplemented  from
domestic sources. For reasons already examined, the early
notions  of  basing  English  colonial  development  on  the
labor of the Indians was short-lived.
29
 Nevertheless, some
Indians  were  employed  on  seventeenth-century  tobacco
plantations. In the early decades the Indian bond-laborers
were  mainly  children,  employed  under  rather  strict
limitations  involving  parental  consent.
30
  But  beginning
about  1660,  Indian  bond-laborers  were  drawn  from  the
general  population,  although  the  Virginia  Assembly
decreed that they were not to serve “for  any longer time
than English of like ages should serve.”
31
 Their condition
was worsened under a law passed in 1670 which required
Indian bond-laborers to serve for twelve years, more than
twice  the  term  of  English  bond-laborers,  and  which
required the Indian children to be bound until they reached
the  age  of  thirty,  that  is,  six  years  longer  than  the  usual
servitude  of  underage  English  bond-laborers.
32
  Early  in
the  period  of  Bacon’s  Rebellion,  in  June  1676,  the
Virginia Assembly authorized that “enemy Indians taken in
war  be  held  and  accounted  slaves  dureing  life.”
33
  This
policy was renewed the following year, after the defeat of
the  rebellion,  in  order,  it  was  said,  to  give  the  colonial

soldiers  “better  encouragement  to  such  service.”
34
  Six
years later, planters were authorized to hold as slaves for
life Indians purchased from Indian tribes.
35
For  a  brief  period,  Indian  bond-laborers  played  “a
considerable  role”  in  the  economy  of  the  tobacco
colonies, but this was a phenomenon limited to the eighth
and  ninth  decades  of  the  seventeenth  century.
36
  In  1691,
the  Virginia  Assembly  passed  a  law  that  from  that  time
forward “there be a free and open trade for all persons at
all times and at all places with all Indians whatsoever.”
37
This  same  law  was  re-enacted  in  1705  and  again  in
1733.
38
  But  it  was  only  after  more  than  a  century  of
hereditary  bondage  of  the  descendants  of  Indian  women
bond-laborers  that  Virginia  courts  suddenly  discovered
that this law, which made no distinction between friendly
and  hostile  Indians,  as  previous  laws  had  always  done,
and  which  made  no  exception  as  to  social  rank,  was  a
formal legal bar to enslavement of Indians in Virginia.
39
Virginia-born African-Americans as a source of bond-
labor
The main domestic source of bond-labor in the plantation
colonies was by way of the imposition of hereditary bond-
servitude on African-Americans under the system of racial
slavery and white supremacy. Well before the end of the

colonial period the great majority of the bond-laborers in
the  plantation  colonies  were  American-born.  In  1790,
there  were  more  than  twice  as  many  African-American
bond-laborers in the continental plantation colonies as had
come there from overseas in the entire colonial period.
40
The  plantation  bourgeoisie  had  not  achieved  this
condition, however, in the seventeenth century; at that time
most  of  the  plantation  laborers  were limited-term  bond-
laborers,  a  category  composed  in  its  great  majority  of
European-American  immigrants. As  far  as  the  difference
between limited-term and lifetime bondage is concerned,
that  is  a  question  that  would  have  had  no  practical
significance in the early decades, when most of the bond-
laborers did not survive even their first year in Virginia.
41
Furthermore, the maintenance of what some historians see
fit  to  call  a  “dual  [that  is,  black/white]  labor  market,”
42
assuming  it could  have  been  done,  would  not have  been
(as  the  phrase  is)  “cost-effective”  in  the  early  decades.
One thing is certain: in the census of 1624/25, taken at the
end of the Company period, the colony’s total population
of some 1,218 adults listed  507  “servants,” of whom 23
were “Negroes.”
43
Nevertheless,  even  before  the  yearning  was  made
explicit in laws of the early 1660s,
44
 there was evidence
of a desire on the part of some employers to develop this
source of added unpaid labor time by subjecting African-

Americans  to  lifetime  hereditary  bond-servitude.  There
were  also  early  instances  of  legislative  and  judicial
inclinations in this direction.
45
 After  1662 under Virginia
law  and  after  1664  under  Maryland  law,  the  plantation
bourgeoisie could begin to realize profits on the sale and
exploitation of laborers born in the tobacco colonies.
46
The  production  of  a  tobacco  crop  was  a  most  labor-
intensive  process.  Draft  animals were  not in general use
during  the  seventeenth  century.
47
  At  mid-seventeenth
century,  when  the  number  of  productive  workers  in
Virginia  was  approaching  7,000,
48
  there  were  no  more
than 150 plows in the colony.
49
 The implements were the
human hand
50
 for sowing the seedbed and covering it, and
for transplanting the seedling to the “hills,” spaced at four-
foot intervals, and dug with a long-bladed hilling hoe; the
wide,  sharp  weeding  hoe  for  keeping  clear  the  ground
between the plants; the tobacco knife for cutting off the top
of  the  plant  when  the  desired  number  of  leaves  had  put
forth; the human hand for pulling the horn worms from the
plant, and for breaking the small shoots from the stalk to
conserve the plant’s energy and food uptake for the nine or
so leaves that would mature; the tobacco knife for cutting
the  stalk  at the appropriate time; the human back to  bear
the cut stalks to the tobacco barn; a knife to cut the pegs
driven by hand-held tools into the stalks, before the stalks
were hung aloft to allow the leaves to cure in the air for

five or six weeks; the human hand again for stripping the

cured leaves from the stalks, and removing the stems of the

leaves, which had to be delicately handled to preserve

their marketability; hand tools and the cooper’s skill for

the making of hogsheads to specifications to be fit to

withstand the stresses of being rolled by workers down to

the dock for shipment. The process began with seeding the

beds in, say, mid-January, whence they were transplanted

to the tobacco field early in May. Continuous attentive

labor was required to bring the plant to perfection; in

August the stalks were cut down. During the intervals

between seeding and transplanting, during the five or six

weeks of air curing, and in the months of November and

December, there were other sometimes more laborious

tasks to be done, such as clearing new fields, cutting down

trees and pulling the stumps, burning brush, etcetera.

Due

to the primitive technique of the process, in the fifty years

between the dissolution of the Virginia Company and

Bacon’s Rebellion the capitalist plantation owners relied

almost totally upon increased exertion by the laborers to

more than double the annual tobacco output per laborer,

from 712 to 1,653 pounds.

Main Forms of the Oppression of Plantation

Bond-laborers

The characteristic dependency of the proletarian under

capitalism took the most extreme form in chattel bond-

servitude. The ancient principle that “A man’s home is his

castle” had no meaning for the bond-laborers. The woman

was denied whatever protection she might otherwise have

had as a “feme covert.” The limited-term bond-laborers

were forbidden the comfort and release of sexual

relationships, under heavy penalty. The owner was not

only their employer, but their landlord and victualer as

well. The extreme rural isolation of their situation, in

colonies devoid of the civilizing influences of village and

urban centers, limited to an extraordinary degree their

ability to appeal their grievances to public conscience and

legal remedy.

Edmund S. Morgan’s study of colonial Virginia found

little basis for the “kindly master” thesis. Nor is he so

ready to place the blame for the bond-laborers’ bad

conditions on objective factors of climate and frontier, as

some historians have done. Morgan largely blames

capitalist cupidity for the hardships of bond-laborers’

lives.

This impression is confirmed by the exhaustive

studies of the record presented by Richard B. Morris’s

Government and Labor in Early America, and in the

Archives of Maryland under the illustrious successive

editorships of W. H. Browne, C. C. Hall, B. C. Steiner, J.

H. Pleasants and Aubrey C. Land.

Most of the evidence of abuse of bond-laborers by their

owners is taken from court proceedings wherein certain

individual owners of bond-laborers are shown to have

carried matters beyond what would seem to be the bounds

of sound proprietorship. At the same time the depositions

taken, decisions rendered, and orders issued in such cases

also serve to illuminate the day-to-day life of the bond-

laborers. That which in itself may have constituted a

seemingly self-defeating excess of rigor in particular

instances, served the general capitalist interest of

stimulating the bond-laborers to be more diligent at their

tasks, and to stifle their grievances. Such was the declared

intention of Captain Bradnox, himself a Kent County

Commissioner, who beat bond-laborer Sarah Taylor with

extreme force, then reviewed the lesson, saying, “Now

spoyle me a batch of bread again!’

Courts and

legislatures occasionally found it expedient and proper to

order some amelioration. Regardless of the degree to

which the courts may have been moved by feelings of

humanity in such instances, however, it seems certain that

they had in mind the overriding interests of the plantation

bourgeoisie as a whole in discouraging the wanton

destruction of the labor force, and in minimizing the

reductions in the labor supply resulting when accounts

reached England of brutal treatment of bond-laborers.

The following brief sampling from the court records is

not intended to improve on Professor Morris’s

presentation or to substitute for a reading in the Archives

of Maryland, but merely to document the theme of social

tension in the tobacco colonies arising out of the bond-

labor relation of production.

Increasing the length of servitude

Given an adequate supply of labor power, the maximizing

of capitalist profit, then as now, depended on raising the

productivity of labor per unit of labor cost. In the tobacco

colonies the owners did this by (1) extending the labor

time of each worker, and (2) intensifying the effort of each

worker.

A small minority of the bond-laborers arrived in the

tobacco colonies with written indentures specifying the

duration of their servitude. By far the greater number who

arrived in Virginia in the seventeenth century came

without indentures; the duration of their bondage was

specified by law under the rubric “custom of the country.”

At first the custom of the country was set at four years for

adult bond-laborers arriving in Virginia and Maryland;

then, in 1661 and 1666, respectively, the colony

Assemblies increased the custom of the country from four

to five years, and made it applicable to all “christian”

bond-laborers.

The Maryland Assembly in 1666

justified its action by criticizing the former law for

providing but foure yeares service in which tyme itt is considered the Master

and owners of such Servants cannot receive that reasonable satisfaction for

the charges trouble & greate hazard which all masters and Owners of

Servants are and must of necessity be att with their Servants.

In that same year, the Virginia Assembly acted to eliminate

what it saw as an “inequality” in the law, doing so in a

way that turned the owner’s possible loss into a gain.

Under the old law, if a bond-laborer was under sixteen he

or she was bound to serve until the age of twenty-four; but

if sixteen or over, the term was to be five years. The

Assembly, happily from the employers’ point of view,

raised the critical age to nineteen. Since all those under

nineteen were now to serve until they were twenty-four,

the masters by this law had claim to from one to three

more years of unpaid bond-labor than before from those in

the sixteen-to-eighteen-year range, while still retaining the

service until twenty-four of those “never so little under

sixteene” for whom they expressed such concern.

Special opportunities for securing extra servitude

Besides such steps toward the general extension of the

laborers’ terms of servitude, the bond-labor relation of

production afforded a number of legal opportunities for

securing extended service in particular cases, in the form
of penalties for a variety of infractions of the principles of
the system. These were special opportunities available to
the  plantation  bourgeoisie,  which  were  not  open  to
capitalists operating in England. There, under that normal
capitalist labor system, the laborer who violated his or her
contract  could  not  be  compelled  to  a  specific
performance, but could only be held liable for “pecuniary
damages  as  in  the  case  of  a  breach  of  any  other
contract.”
58
As already noted, the Virginia General Court, as early
as  1626,  imposed  an  extension  of  the  term  of  bond-
servitude  upon  a  recaptured  runaway  bond-laborer.
59
Courts continued to apply this principle on a case-by-case
basis
60
 until it was given the form of legislative enactment
that proportioned the extension of servitude to the length of
the laborer’s absence. In Virginia, the penalty was fixed at
two days for every one day of absence.
61
 For a repetition
of  the  offense  the  runaway  was  to  be  branded  on  the
shoulder with a hot-iron R. In Maryland in 1641, the death
penalty was provided, but mercy and profit considerations
coinciding,  this  penalty  was  made  commutable  to  seven
years’  added  servitude.
62
  In  1649,  the  Maryland  penalty
was set at two days for each day of absence, but with the
additional  penalty  of payment for all costs and damages,
for  which  the  employer  might  be  compensated  by  a

deduction from the freedom dues, and by a further

extension of the time of servitude, or by a combination of

the two.

In 1666, Maryland set the penalty at ten days’

extension of servitude for each day of absence.

It is

somehow not surprising that, with such an incentive,

masters frequently sought to extend the period of servitude

by alleging that the bond-laborer had been illegally asbent

from service, a charge that the laborer was in a weak

position to dispute before magistrates who were

themselves actual or potential beneficiaries of that same

law.

Three cases from the record will illustrate how the

employers were able to make such laws serve capital

accumulation or, as the modern term has it, “economic

growth.”

George Beckwith owned Henry Everitt, who had been

delivered to Maryland in 1666 at the age of thirteen.

Everitt, because of his age, was legally bound to serve

nine years, that is, until he was twenty-two. The young

worker proved to be a valuable piece of property, despite

having at various times “failed to serve” for a total of six

weeks. Beckwith, understandably reluctant to part with

such an experienced laborer, made timely application to

the Provincial Court, on the eve of what was to have been

Everitt’s last year of servitude, and secured an extension

of Everitt’s time by ten times six weeks beyond the end of

the ninth year. The labor gained would bring Beckwith

sufficient return to pay the freedom dues of three bond-

laborers (who might perhaps prove more faithful than

Everitt), or enough to pay three-fourths the cost of

purchasing another thirteen-year-old bond-laborer.

In April 1673, David Driver brought into court two men

he owned, James Cade and Timothy Hummerstone,

alleging that they had run away for thirty-six days. The

court awarded Driver a year of the life and labor of each

of the bond-laborers in compensation for the five weeks

lost. For Driver this meant a net gain of almost one-fifth of

the total labor time originally due him.

On St Valentine’s Day 1679, the court showed where its

affections lay as between Thomas Doxey and Katherine

Canneday:

Came Thomas Doxey of St Maryes County & made Oath that his servant

Katherine Canneday rann away & and unlawfully absented herselfe from

his service att severall tymes One hundred and seven dayes, whereupon itt

is ordered that shee the said Katherine serve the said Thomas for running

away from him as aforesaid, tenn dayes for every one dayes absence

according to Act of Assembly in that case made and provided, which

amounts to One thousand and seventy dayes.

The costs of recapture, prosecution and corporal

punishment

Such  proceedings  involved  costs,  of  course,  as  did
subsequent execution of court judgments on bond-laborers.
Among such costs were the fees paid to the “takers-up” of
runaways.
70
 Under a Maryland law of 1676, a payment of
a  matchcoat  or  the  value  thereof  was  provided  for  “any
Indian  or  Indians  which shall  seize  or  take  up  any
Runaway Servant & bring him before some magistrate of
any County within this Province.”
71
 In the middle decades
of the seventeenth century the legally established Virginia
schedule of fees for sheriff and clerk services included the
following items: for sheriffs, twenty pounds of tobacco for
each  arrest,  pillorying  and  whipping;
72
  for  clerks,  eight
pounds  of  tobacco  for  writing  or  copying  a  court  order;
and for secretaries, fifteen pounds of tobacco for the same
services.
73
 In Maryland, sheriffs were paid fifty pounds of
tobacco for whippings, and twenty pounds for each day a
prisoner was held in jail. In both Maryland and Virginia
such charges were at first paid by the county treasury, but
in 1662 and 1670 respectively, the provincial assemblies
acted  to  end  the  discerned  gross  inequities  in  such  an
arrangement. Not only did it make the public bear the costs
of  supporting  criminals,  said  the  lawmakers,  it  actually
was “an encouragement to offendors”  by rewarding their
misdeeds  with  idleness  and  free  room  and  board.
74
Whether such costs occasioned by the capture and public
prosecution  of  bond-laborers  were  borne  by  the  public

treasury or by the individual owners, they were by law

recoverable at the expense of the limited-term bond-

laborer in terms of additional servitude.

Denial of family life; women exposed to special

oppression

For the purposes of quick capital turnover, the importation

of unmarried laborers of working age was preferable: it

provided the immediate prospect of full utilization of the

maximum labor power of the workers; it was simpler in

distribution than family-group bond-labor; and, in

production, it maximized the employer’s access to the

laborer’s time, unimpeded by the involvement of laborers

in family connections and obligations. In short: marriage

was fundamentally incompatible with chattel status.

In normal English capitalist conditions, the right to

marry was exercised by persons regardless of social

class, except that apprentices needed the permission of

their masters. The family was the standard form of

maintaining, perpetuating and reproducing the laboring

classes in proportion to the requirements of capitalist

commodity production at the lowest cost and with the

highest returns for investors. The expenses of working-

class weddings, births, child-rearing and funerals were

provided in the wage costs of the employing classes no

less essentially than the costs of the day-to-day

maintenance of the economically productive population or

of the instruments of production. In the seventeenth-century

plantation colonies, however, the peculiar chattel bond-

labor relation of production carried with it different

implications for the lives of the bond-laborers. For almost

the entire duration of the seventeenth century, the

plantation bourgeoisie was able to secure a steady supply

of bond-labor for which it was obliged to pay only the

day-to-day subsistence and “operating” costs. All other

charges were subsumed in the purchase price, which the

laborer was bound to repay (many times over) by long

periods of unpaid labor.

Since bond-laborers were wageless and propertyless

(except for the few who brought personal items to

America, which in the nature of the case would have been

of little exchange-value), and since they had no rightful

claim to any portion of the day’s time for themselves,

parenthood on the part of bond-laborers entailed direct

and indirect deductions from capitalist revenues, for

child-bearing and child-rearing, costs that the employers

regarded as economically unjustifiable. The employing

class, as a matter of sound business practice, outlawed

family life among limited-term bond-laborers.

They

were forbidden to marry without the express permission of

their owners,

since, consistent with the principle of

coverture,  a  woman  was  subject  only  to  the  husband.
78
Still,  bond-laborers  were granted no  exemption  from the
laws against fornication.
79
  While  nominally  laws against
“bastardy”  made  human  reproduction  outside  of  legal
wedlock a crime for free women, for them – in contrast to
bond-laborers  –  marriage  was  an  automatic  defense
against  that  charge;
80
  “fornication”  and  “adulterie”  were
punishable  by  a  fine  for  those  who  could  pay  it,  or
whipping or two or three months’ imprisonment.
81
In  providing  penalties for bond-laborers who  violated
the  law  in  these  respects,  the  bourgeoisie  was  typically
underscoring  its  concern  for  the  maintenance  of  social
mores  conforming  to  its  own  particular  class  character.
But  the  peculiar  nature  of  the  chattel  bondage  form  of
labor relations permitted the plantation bourgeoisie to turn
that  concern  to  cash  account  in  very  specific  and
immediate  ways,  ways  not  available  to  employers  in
England.
When,  in  1643,  Virginia  bond-laborers  were  first
forbidden  by  law  to  marry,  it  was  provided  that  the
offending wife’s term of servitude should be extended to
double the time for which she was bound. The husband’s
term was to be prolonged only twelve months,
82
 it being
assumed  that  the  anticipated  distractions  of  child  care
would  divert  a  minimum  of  his  time  from  serving  his
employer. The makers of this law, however, did not find it

necessary  to  mitigate  the  woman’s  punishment  in  cases
where no child was born during her period of servitude.
Twenty  years  later,  the  woman’s  legal  punishment  was
made  the  same  as  the  man’s,  one  year  of  extended
servitude  just  for  marriage,  childbirth  and  child-rearing
penalties being separately provided.
83
 At the same time, it
was made a crime for a minister to perform the marriage
of  a  bond-laborer  without  the  owner’s  prior  approval.
Violators were subject to a fine of ten thousand pounds of
tobacco,  the  equivalent  of  about  five  months  of  a
minister’s salary.
84
 An important consequence of this new
feature of the law was to make children of such marriages
“illegitimate,” as they would have been if no marriage had
taken place.
85
 Under the Virginia law of 1662, a free man
marrying  a  woman  bond-laborer  without  her  owner’s
permission was obliged to pay a fine of 1,500 pounds of
tobacco, or to serve as a bond-laborer for one year to the
woman’s owner.
86
Under  English  law,  fornication  was  punishable,
certainly in the most commonly prosecuted cases, those in
which  pregnancy  resulted.
87
  In  the  plantation  colonies,
early  laws  were  enacted to  the same  purpose,  providing
the penalty of a whipping or payment of a fine, as in this
1639 Maryland statute:
88
the offender or offenders shall be publicly whipped, or otherwise pay such
fines to some publique use as the lieutenant general shall impose.

Free  persons  were  subject  to  these  laws  no  less  than
bond-laborers,
89
  and  “women  and  men  were  whipped
indiscriminately,  women  on  the  bare  back  apparently  as
frequently as men.”
90
 In due course, laws were made that
specified the number of lashes to be administered and the
amount  of  the  fine.  Although  the  whipping  and  the  fine
were equally available forms of punishment under the law,
the whipping was actually inflicted only in cases of non-
payment of the fine.
91
 But limited-term bond-laborers, as
proletarians  owning  nothing  of  the  goods  their  labor
produced,  were  unable  to  pay  fines.  Owners  were  thus
presented  with  an  opportunity,  which  they  routinely
exercised,  of  establishing  a  claim  to  additional  unpaid
labor  time  by  paying  the  bond-laborer’s  fine.  The  usual
ratio was six  months’  extra service for the  payment of a
fine of five hundred pounds of tobacco.
92
How “bastardy” laws compounded gender and class
oppression
Under the English common law principle of “coverture,”
the husband was the legal father of children of his wife.
93
Coverture, as already noted, had no application to women
bond-laborers,  who  by  law  were  not  allowed  to  have
husbands; their children were by definition “bastards.” In
England  the  first  specific  mention  of  “illegitimate”

children  came  in  1575–76,  and  it  constituted  the  basic
English “bastardy” law for at least three centuries. It fixed
responsibility upon the parents for reimbursing the parish
for  the  charges  of  keeping  the  child,  by  weekly  or  other
periodic  payments,  on  pain  of  being  sent  to  jail  for
default.
94
In  the  Anglo-American  colonies,  however,  the
employers  were  made  direct  beneficiaries  of  the
“bastardy” laws as they applied to bond-laborers, with the
labor of the mother accounting for the major share of those
benefits. In  both Virginia  and  Maryland in  the middle  of
the  seventeenth  century,  the  mother  was  subject  to
extended  servitude  for  the  owner’s  “loss  of  service”  on
account  of  the  distractions  resulting  from  child-bearing
and child-rearing. In 1662 the Virginia Assembly fixed the
added  period  of  unpaid  labor  at  two  years.
95
  The
Maryland  Assembly  enacted  a  similar  law  in  the  same
year.
96
  In  addition  to  the  obligation  for  “lost  time,”  the
mother  was  subject  to  be  publicly  whipped  on  her  bare
back.  The  Virginia  statute  of  1662  specified  that  the
lashing  continue  only  until  the  blood  flowed,
97
  but  a
Maryland court in 1658 called for it to be continued until
the count reached thirty.
98
If the owner felt it was not to his advantage to risk the
incapacitation  of  his  bond-laborer  that  might  result  from
such  punishment,  he  would  typically  pay  the  fine.
99
  An

equally,  or  even  more,  compelling  motive  to  this
humanitarian  gesture  was  the  reward  it  brought  to  the
owner,  as  it  did  for  example  to  the owner  of  Katherine
Higgins,  whose  case  was  typical  of  hundreds.  On  26
January 1685, Higgins was found guilty of having become
a mother, and was sentenced to an added two and a half
years of servitude to her owner, half a year for the fine that
her owner paid to save her from whipping, and two years
for  his  trouble  and  expense  in  saving  the  parish  any
expense for care of the newborn child.
100
 Employers were
thus able to  turn an  anticipated  “loss  of  services” into  a
net profit.
101
Examination  of  surviving  seventeenth-century  Virginia
county court records
102
 reveals some three hundred cases
of such “bastardy” judgments against limited-term women
bond-laborers. At a rate  of 1,500 pounds  of tobacco per
year  per  worker,  such  of  these  women  as  worked  in  the
field during their added 30 months’ servitude would have
produced tobacco worth more than three times the cost of
their  transportation  to  the  colony,
103
  that  cost  being  the
supposed debt for which they were relegated to a social
status wherein they were denied the right to marry.
104
Occasionally an employer was also able to gain some
extra labor time from the father. If, as happened in a small
number of cases, the identity of the father was established,
he would be obliged to provide security to save the parish

harmless, that is, to provide a guarantee that the cost of

support of the infant would be repaid to the parish. If the

father were a bond-laborer, the church wardens took

charge of the child, paying the charges of the child’s

upkeep until it became of working age, or selling the child

to a private individual as a bond-laborer-to-be. At the

completion of the father’s original term of servitude, he

was obligated to make recompense for any charges

outstanding for the cost of the child’s early care. If he

could not pay, he could be taken up by the sheriff to satisfy

the debt by a period of bond-servitude.

105

But, unlike the

mother, the father could not be made to serve extra time

for the “loss of services” directly due to the pregnancy.

In a certain number of cases the owner himself was the

father, suggesting the grossest form of sexual exploitation.

The notorious Henry Smith of Accomack County fathered

children by two of his bond-laborers in the late 1660s.

Not long before November 1699, John Waugh of Stafford

County sold Catherine Hambleton away across

Chesapeake Bay, pregnant with his own child. The same

sort of sale of his own progeny had been made by

Nicholas Chapman of Norfolk County, in or shortly before

1677.

106

But unproven accusations were severely

penalized. When, in March 1650, a “search of her body”

led the court to disbelieve Sara Reinold’s accusation that

her owner had made her pregnant, she was sentenced to

“thirty-five Lashes on the bare back.”

107

In Maryland, Lucy Stratton, bond-laborer, was brought

before the Charles County, Maryland, Court in November

1671, charged with having borne a child. Stratton said that

her owner was the father, but the court credited the denial

of the owner, a wealthy planter named Turner. On the

grounds of having made a false accusation against her

owner, the woman was sentenced to and received thirty

lashes at the public whipping post. But Turner was indeed

the father, as he admitted shortly thereafter in offering to

“make satisfaction by marrying” Stratton. Although it

might mean an extended term of servitude to refuse,

Stratton spurned the blessings of such a “coverture,”

calling her owner a “lustful man” whom she “could not

love … much less make him her husband,” adding that she

“had suffered enough by him.”

108

The Charles County,

Maryland, Court, upon her petition, ordered Turner either

to pay child maintenance or to take the child and raise it as

his own. But on appeal to a higher court, Stratton’s suit

against Turner for support for the child was denied

because she had refused the marriage offer.

109

The social conscience of the plantation bourgeoisie –

that is to say, the sense of the general interests of the ruling

class as a whole – did exert some influence, even if it

might possibly run counter to the desires and interests of

some individual planters.

110

The supply of laborers was

not so plentiful in the seventeenth-century plantation

colonies, nor the number of women so great, nor social

control so secure, that men of the owning classes could be

allowed unrestricted indulgence of their sexual appetites

at the expense of women bond-laborers, even if these

owners might thereby gain a bonus of unpaid labor as a

result. In their respective sixth decades, therefore,

Virginia and Maryland adopted laws attempting to serve

the general interests of the owning class, while

safeguarding the individual owner against deprivation of

his rights. In Virginia a woman in such a case was, by a

law of 1662, obliged to complete her term of servitude,

thus protecting the owner’s right-by-purchase. On the other

hand, it was provided that the owner should not have the

benefit of the extra servitude which was to be imposed on

the bond-laborer for her misconduct. Still, the lawmakers

felt, it would be courting trouble to excuse the woman

from punishment, as that might tempt others in a similar

condition to make false allegations of paternity against

their masters as a means of escaping their due in legal

penalties. The Assembly found justice in a middle course

by providing that upon completion of the mother’s original

term, she should be taken to the church wardens and sold

to some new owner for a term of servitude. The purchase

price went to the parish revenues, minus the costs of food

and clothing for the child until the child was old enough to

become a net producer for a private employer.

111

In the context of these arrangements, occasional losses

had to be accepted as a normal, indeed essential, part of

the process as illuminators of possible operational limits

of the system. Such appears to have been the case of

Isabella Yansley, of Ann Arundell County, Maryland.

112

On 3 March 1671, as it was later charged, Yansley hid

herself away, “without the company of any other women,”

gave birth to a boy, and caused him to die. The Provincial

Court found her guilty of murder, and by its sentence she

was hanged on 17 April. In England a woman facing

motherhood unwed might have resorted to the same

desperate course, and suffered the same fate for it. But, in

a tobacco colony, where the child of a bond-laborer was

to be a bond-laborer of the mother’s owner until the child

was over twenty years of age, such an outcome

represented a loss of investment and possible future profit,

negating the benefit of the special “fornication” and

“illegitimacy” laws applied against bond-laborers.

The procedure for disposing of the potential and actual

labor-power of the children of bond-servants in Anglo-

America closely followed the pattern that had been

established for dealing with indigent children in Tudor

England. That system evolved under a series of laws

beginning in 1536 and culminating in the fundamental

English Poor Law of 1601.

113

First among the stated

purposes of the 1601 law was that of “setting to work the

children … whose parents shall not be thought able to

keep and maintain them.”

114

In seventeenth-century

Virginia and Maryland, under-age Europeans arriving

without indentures were bound to serve according to the

law. In 1666 in Virginia if they were under nineteen years

of age, they were to serve until they were twenty-four. The

Maryland law made a more particular differentiation of

age levels, but merely to assure that children would serve

at least seven years; those arriving at age twenty-two

years old or older were bound for five years.

115

But the peculiar character of the bond-labor relation of

production gave these laws a greater practical scope than

laws regarding “indigent” children in England. Since

bond-laborers were by definition propertyless and unpaid,

as parents they were, under 1666 laws, obliged to serve

added time as recompense to the owner or the parish for

the cost of maintenance of the child.

116

While the labor of

indigent children was programmed for exploitation in both

England and in the colonies, the profit to be gained

therefrom by the exploiters was of relatively greater

importance in the labor-scarce Chesapeake than in

England. Perhaps it is significant that in 1632, when the

per capita production of tobacco was some 700 pounds

per year, two women bond-laborers who became pregnant

on the voyage to Virginia were forthwith shipped back

again;
117
 but four decades later, by which time the output
per  worker  had  more  than  doubled,
118
  the  arrival  of  a
woman in this predicament was more likely to be regarded
as an opportunity to profit not only from the extension of
the  women’s  servitude,  but  also  from  the  option  on  the
labor  of  her  child  under  the  provisions  of  the  1662  law
against “fornication.”
119
Nevertheless,  despite  the  various  expedients  adopted
for  recapturing  the  owner’s  or  the  parish’s  expenses  for
support  of  the  children  of  limited-term  bond-laborers,
those measures provided a relatively unprofitable way of
recruiting  plantation  labor  power  in  the  seventeenth-
century  tobacco  colonies.
120
  The  prospective  period  of
unpaid  bond-servitude  to  be  had  from  such  children,
whether  by  their  original  owners  or  by  other  persons  to
whom  they  were  assigned,  was  limited.  The  child  might
not survive until he reached the workable (tithable) age of
sixteen.
121
  The  bond-laborer  father,  once  his  term  was
completed,  could  take  possession  of  the  child,  making
settlement  with  the  parish  or  the  owner  for  the  care  and
maintenance of the child up until that time.
122
  “Bastards”
who  remained  with  the  mother’s  owner  were  bound  to
serve only until they were twenty-one if boys, or eighteen
if  girls.  Bastards  of  European-American  parents  were
bound out by their parents to other men, but they became
free  at  the  age  of  twenty-four  if  boys,  at  eighteen,  if

girls.

123

If, however, the period of bastards’ unpaid servitude

could be increased sufficiently, the mating of bond-

laborers might be made into a paying proposition for the

owners. That was the principle behind the persistent

pressure from the side of the plantation bourgeoisie to

impose lifetime hereditary bondage on African-

Americans. In 1662, the Virginia Assembly discarded

English common law of descent through the father, and

instituted the principle of partus sequitur ventrem,

whereunder the child was declared “bond or free

according to the condition of the mother.”

124

That law was

specifically aimed at giving the plantation bourgeoisie a

predefined supply of self-perpetuating unpaid labor. Once

the owners had this advantage, the courts no longer

concerned themselves with prosecuting African-American

bond-laborers for “fornication” or “bastardy.”

Supplementary sources of unpaid labor were tapped under

a Virginia law passed in 1681, requiring a child of a

European-American mother and an African-American

father to serve until the age of thirty.

125

That was six years

of extra unpaid labor beyond what would have been

served by a child of two European-American bond-

laborers. That extra labor should have yielded the owner

9,000 pounds of tobacco, more than enough to buy another

limited-term bond-laborer.

Under a Maryland law in effect from 1664 to 1692, any

“freeborne” woman who married an African-American

lifetime bond-laborer was bound to serve “the master of

such slave during the life or her husband.” Presented with

such an opportunity, many Maryland owners deliberately

fostered marriages of European-American women and

African-American men bond-laborers in order to get the

benefit of the added unpaid labor time of their

descendants.

126

The ruling class understood that the bond-

laborers’ sex drives were “as irresistible and ardent as

those of others … [and therefore t]here is no danger that

the considering of their progeny’s condition will stop

propagation.”

127

In 1692, the Maryland penalty was modified to seven

years’ bond servitude. If the woman were a bond-laborer,

the added seven years were to begin only after the

completion of her original term.

128

The penalty for

“fornication” and “bastardy” was especially severe (a

double fine in Virginia in 1662) when an African-

American/European-American couple was involved.

129

When the double penalty of the 1662 law proved generally

ineffective, the Virginia Assembly in 1691 passed another,

making any English woman in this circumstance, free or

bond, subject to public sale by the churchwardens of the

parish into bond-servitude for five years. For those who

were bond-laborers, this added servitude was to be

postponed  until  the  completion  of  her  current  period  of
bondage.
130
Why? That was the question implicit in the petition of
European-American  lifetime  bond-laborer  Mary  Peters,
who  petitioned  for  manumission  having  already  served
eight  years  beyond  the  time  she  should  otherwise  have
served  if  she  had  not  “been  drawn  by  her  master  and
mistress  into  marrying  a  negro,  and so  being reckoned  a
slave.”
131
  Why,  wondered  Ann  Wall,  a  free  European-
American  woman  who  had  borne  two  children  of  an
African-American  father, when she was sentenced by the
Elizabeth  County  Court  to  five  years’  bond-servitude
under  “Mr  Peter  Hobson  or  his  assigns”  in  Norfolk
County,  and  forbidden  ever  to  return  to  Elizabeth  City
County  on  pain  of  banishment  to  Barbados.
132
  It  was  a
matter that European-American bond-laborer Jane Salman
could not understand; she fled from the jurisdiction of the
Accomack County Court that had ordered her to be taken
for sale by the church warden to another seven-year term
of servitude.
133
Why, indeed? An attempt will be made in Chapter 13 to
suggest an answer to that question.
Exploiting the presumption of bondage
Enterprising  employers  frequently  found  it  possible  to

retain laborers in bondage even though by law they were

entitled to be free. As far as propertyless persons were

concerned the presumption was bondage, as evidenced by

the enactment of pass laws, in Virginia in 1643 and in

1663, and in Maryland in 1671.

134

In general, these laws

made a laboring person subject to arrest as a fugitive,

unless he or she had a pass signed by an owner or other

officially designated authority.

Thus a laborer who had completed the full period of

servitude still bore the burden of proof of his or her

liberty. Without a certificate of freedom issued by the

county court, the time-expired laborer was subject to

arrest as a fugitive, and thereafter to additional servitude

under laws provided in such cases. In order to secure the

certificate of freedom, the laborer had to appear before the

county court with the owner, or with a written deposition

supplied by the owner, to establish the fact of the

completion of the term of servitude.

135

If, instead of

cooperating, the employer chose to attempt to keep the

laborer in bondage, the laborer might well face a daunting

prospect.

136

Aside from the many difficulties the laborer

confronted in getting a petition for freedom before the

court, there were commonly other problems. The bond-

laborer who had come to Virginia or Maryland with a

formal indenture obligating him or her to serve for a time

less than that provided under the “custom of the country”

had to produce in court the original paper to prove his or

her case. To preserve such a document against destruction,

loss or theft through several years of bond-labor was not

always easy.

137

Yet without it the laborer would have to

remain in bondage according to the “custom of the

country.” William Rogers came to Virginia under a three-

year indenture to Anthony Gosse, who sold Rogers to John

Stith, transmitting his half of the indenture paper to Stith.

Stith, learning that Rogers had somehow left his half of the

indenture contract in England, destroyed the paper Gosse

had given him, and claimed Rogers for five years

according to the custom of the country.

138

The ordinary custom-of-the-country bond-laborers

would perhaps be even more vulnerable to employers’

attempts to extend their servitude beyond the legal limit.

139

If the laborer sought redress from the court, pending the

court’s decision he or she would remain under the

absolute power of the owner, on a plantation from which it

was a crime to depart without the owner’s permission, a

plantation moreover equipped with a whipping post or the

equivalent for the administration of “moderate correction”

by the master or his agent.

140

The owner thus had strong

forces of persuasion at his disposal for inducing the bond-

laborer to submit to an extension of unpaid servitude. The

employer’s chances of gains of this sort were perhaps

enhanced where the bond-laborer had been sold from one

employer to another, if the frequency of such cases in the

court records is any indication.

141

Even if, as in the cases

to be cited, the employer were not fully successful, he lost

little by trying; he even stood to gain incidental benefits.

The Joseph Griphen and Daniel Ralston cases illustrate

the denial of their right to a presumption of liberty in

Maryland. In 1659, Joseph Griphen was bought by two

Maryland merchants who shortly thereafter sold him to

John Hatch. In November 1666, at the end of seven years

of servitude, Griphen asserted his freedom by rowing

downriver in a canoe. Hatch had him hunted by hue and

cry, and brought back, alleging that Griphen had been

bought for ten years, not seven.

142

Daniel Ralston came to

Maryland in 1663 with a written indenture according to

which he was bound for four years, at the end of which

time he was to receive £10 sterling, plus a good suit and

other clothes, and two hoes and an axe. Three years had

passed when he ran away from his owner, Henry

Robertson. After several weeks Ralston was recaptured

and returned to his owner, and then he was sold again to

another owner, David Johnson. After Ralston’s indentured

term was ended in July 1667, his new owner claimed

added service at the rate of ten-to-one for every day that

Ralston had run away from his former owner. Since

Ralston took action in court before his new owner did, the

owner’s claim was not allowed, although the principle of

the assignability of penalty time was not questioned.

Though the decision of the jury favored the bond-laborer’s

claim, the owner was allowed to keep Ralston in

servitude pending disposition of the appeal to the

Provinical Court, and the freedom dues allowance was

reduced to either £10 or the goods but not both, contrary to

the terms of the original indenture.

143

In June 1678, John

Hickes[?], identified in the record as a “Dutchman,” was

taken up as a runaway bond-laborer. Even though there

was no “positive proof” of the charge, the court in the

Virginia Eastern Shore county of Northampton ordered

him to “goe along with Capt. Foxcroft” for thirty days

while the court sent for information across the bay

regarding Hickes’s status. If during that time the man

“absent[ed] himselfe” from Foxcroft, he was to be hunted

“by Hue and Cry as a Runaway Servant.”

144

The removal of the owner from the scene might

complicate the laborer’s bondage predicament, as it did in

the case that came before the Virginia Colony Council in

1675 on the petition of Phillip Corven, an African-

American.

145

Originally, Corven had been an under-age

bond-laborer of widow Annie Beazeley of James City

County. When Mrs Beazeley died in 1664, she left a will

assigning Corven to her cousin, Humphrey Stafford, for a

term of eight years, until 1672, at which time Corven

“should enjoy his freedom & be paid three barrels of corn

and as sute of clothes.” Long before that day could dawn,

however, Stafford had sold Corven’s time to Charles

Lucas of Warwick County. In his petition for freedom,

Corven charged that he had been forced to accompany

Lucas to the Warwick County court and there to

acknowledge a formal “agreement” to remain a bond-

laborer to Lucas, his heirs and assigns for twenty years.

Three years of this extra bond-servitude – beyond the

original eight years – were actually secured by Lucas in

this way before Corven brought his petition before the

Colony Council. Corven’s petition asked for his freedom

dues, and for compensation for the previous three years of

unpaid labor. The record of the final disposition of the

case has not been preserved. But even if Lucas lost on

every point, he would still have been the gainer in all

probability, despite the very low price of tobacco in those

years, if, as seems likely, Corven was employed in

tobacco and producing over 1,500 pounds of it per year;

also to be taken into account is the interest gained by

Lucas by the delay of any freedom dues.

It was no more than a normal risk of doing business that

such aggressive methods should occasionally miscarry, as

in the case of William Whittacre.

146

Whittacre bought an

African-American bond-laborer named Manuel from

Thomas Bushrod, who himself had previously purchased

the laborer from Colonel William Smith. Somewhere

along the line, whether by self or others deceived,

Whittacre came to believe that Manuel was a lifetime

bond-laborer. Thus believing, Whittacre paid £25 for the

worker, twice what he would have paid for a male

limited-term bond-laborer. To Whittacre’s utter dismay,

the Virginia Assembly subsequently adjudged Manuel to

be “no slave but to serve as other Christian servants do,”

and he was freed in September 1665. Whittacre

maintained his innocence in the affair and asked to be

exempted from taxation to compensate him for his loss.

But the Assembly, “not knowing any reason why the

Public should be answerable for the inadvertency of the

Buyer for a Judgment given when justly grounded as that

Order was,” rejected Whittacre’s petition.

Cutting labor costs when no wages were paid

Although the employers of bond-laborers could not hope

to increase profits by reducing wages, they did have labor

costs that they were always eager to reduce – the cost of

acquisition of the laborer (the purchase price); the cost of

maintenance during the period of servitude; and, finally,

the cost of the freedom dues to be paid to workers who

survived to the end of their terms. The first of these

aspects, reduction of acquisition costs, has been

discussed. The owners were just as diligent in their efforts

to reduce the costs of maintenance and freedom dues.

In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonies no law

was ever enacted to provide a minimum level of food,

clothing, drink, bedding, housing, or other necessities.

147

The burden of legal remedy was entirely on the laborer.

She or he had to find the courage and means to present a

magistrate (who himself was certain to be an owner of

bond-laborers) with a bill of particulars against her or his

own master, citing evidence of insufficient diet, clothing,

or shelter. Ordinarily, the worst that the owner might have

to expect from such a proceeding was to be ordered to

provide “sufficiently” for the laborer in the future. There

was also the chance that the laborer might be sentenced to

a lashing at the whipping post if the complaint were

judged lacking in merit, as happened to William Evans for

“saying that Mrs Stone starved her servants to death,” and

to Thomas Barnes who was judged to have “complained

causelessly against his Master Mihill Ricketts.”

148

From

the standpoint of the employers, this manner of dealing

with the question of the maintenance of laborers was

preferable to any arrangement involving statutory

“mandated expenditures” by legislation.

As for the day-to-day costs of maintenance of their

workers, the employers of bond-labor were able to reduce

that factor to zero. The cost of clothing and housing the

bond-laborers was more than compensated by the

accumulation of interest on the freedom dues, or even the

avoidance of the payment of this terminal allowance in an

assured percentage of cases.

149

But the most attractive part

of the labor maintenance picture, as viewed by the

employer, was the fact that the workers produced their

own food. Of course, a portion of the laborers’ time had to

be given to the work, but that could not be considered a

loss of labor, any more than waiting for a wet day to

replant seedlings or for stripping the stalks could be

considered a loss of tobacco. They were all necessary

natural processes occurring in the cycle of reproduction

and expansion of the owner’s capital.

It was in the owner’s interest, however, to reduce such

“waiting time,” and the expenses and risks incidental to it.

This was done by forcing the laborers to subsist on Indian

corn, even though the laborers desired the regular

inclusion of meat and milk products in their diet.

150

The

corn diet was cheaper. The same basic labor-training and

the same hand implements were usable in cultivating corn

as in cultivating tobacco. Corn was relatively easily

stored, and it could be prepared and eaten in several

forms.

151

The labor of producing and processing corn was

easier to supervise than, for instance, that of rounding up

cattle and hogs in the woods and thickets where they

ranged, free as the bond-laborer wished to be. Finally,

corn was not then a profitable export crop, whilst Virginia

meats became increasingly so.
152
 In England the prices of
consumables  rose  generally  throughout  the  seventeenth
century;
153
  but  from  the  1640s  onward,  food  products  in
Virginia  steadily  declined  in  price.
154
  As  a  result
Virginia’s exporters were able to secure a part of the trade
to the sugar colonies in the West Indies. As early as 1657,
oxen  worth  only  £5  in  Virginia  were  being  exported  to
Barbados at a price of £25.
155
 For all these reasons, the
owners  in  the  tobacco  colonies  found  it  sound  business
practice  to  feed  their  bond-laborers  on  corn,  and
correspondingly  to  reduce  the  amount  of  meat  in  the
workers’ diet.
156
 By 1676, it was officially reported that
in Virginia  “the ordinary sort of people” had  beef to eat
only in the summer, and then only once or twice a week; in
the winter they received “only the corn of the country, beat
in a mortar and boiled … [and] the bread [that] is made of
the  same  corne,  but  with  difficulty  by  reason  of  the
scarcity of mills.”
157
 In 1679,  two  Dutch travelers in  the
northern  Chesapeake  tobacco  country  observed  that  “for
their usual food, the servants have nothing but maize bread
to eat and water to drink.”
158
Under normal capitalist conditions the employer makes
payments to the employee daily, weekly, or semi-monthly.
Under the system of limited-term bond-servitude, the only
payment the employer was expected (it was not required
by statute) to make to the laborer was in the form of the

freedom dues paid upon satisfactory completion of the

term of servitude, which usually lasted five years. This

gave the employer of bond-labor a special advantage over

the employer of wage labor. First, the wage-laborer has to

advance his/her labor to the capitalist on credit, so to

speak, for only a day, or at most a couple of weeks. But

the bond-laborer was compelled to advance his/her labor

to the capitalist for five years. The employer of wage

labor has to pay out wages six or eight times before he

gets his money (plus profit) back from the sale of the

laborer’s product. The employer of the limited-term bond-

laborer, by contrast, was able to turn over his capital five

times before the first penny of freedom dues had to be paid

out. The original price paid to purchase the laborer was

probably less than £12.

159

By the end of five years the

bond-laborer could be expected to have brought the

employer an income of nearly £40,

160

while the interest on

the deferred freedom dues payment would cover the

freedom dues cost, worth no more than £6.

Even at the minimum rate of a five-year return of £40 on

the worker’s labor, the owner would have recouped his

purchase price perhaps within a year and a half. Since the

£6 cost of freedom dues was equivalent to the product of

about nine months’ bond-labor, the last nine months of a

bond-laborer’s scheduled term might be one of

diminishing returns for the employer. Ordinarily the

owners were most vigilant to frustrate runaway attempts

by their bond-laborers, but in this critical nine-month

period it might actually be to the employer’s advantage if

the bond-laborer ran away, or died, since in such cases no

freedom dues would have to be paid. At that point,

masters possessing initiative and drive might seek to

manage matters to that end, in a sort of timely

“downsizing,” as it might be called today. This practice

was noted in the report submitted by George Larkin to the

home government in 1701:

When their time expired, according to custom they [the bond-laborers] are

to have a certain allowance of corn and clothes, which in Maryland I think is

to the value of £6, but in Virginia not so much, to save which a Planter about

three months before the expiration of a servant’s time will use him

barbarously, and to gain a month’s freedom the poor servant gladly quits his

pretensions to that allowance.

161

There is a normal rate of labor that can be continued by

the laborer on a regular schedule without shortening his or

her life span to less than what could be expected by an

economically secure person in a non-competitive

situation. However, historical experience has shown that

capitalist employers tend not to be satisfied by such a

performance rate on the part of their workers. The wage-

labor relation is specially adaptable to the needs of

capital because it links wages to production; and it

induces competition among the workers in performance of

their tasks. To the extent that improved instruments of

production are introduced into the labor process, the

intensity of labor is more imposed than elicited because

the rate of operations is removed from the workers’

control. Under the bond-labor system, however, where the

normal incentives to competition among workers was

lacking, and where the implements of labor were limited

to the human hand and the tools it held, the employers

necessarily relied solely on close and constant

supervision to secure higher labor productivity.

162

That

was so whatever the crop, but such supervision was

especially critical in making tobacco. Due to “the

complete absence of machine processes, in the

transplanting, topping, cutting, curing and sorting [of

tobacco] … care must be supplied by detailed oversight,”

wrote Ulrich B. Phillips.

163

Joseph Clarke Robert, in his

history of the North American tobacco industry, notes that

“The best quality of tobacco was the fruit of only the most

diligent supervision. To send to market a profitable

‘parcel’ required a sober crop master who kept a critical

eye on the usual laborer.”

164

In addressing his own

question, “Why did productivity per worker increase?,”

Russell Menard concludes from his study of the colonial

records that “the weight of the evidence suggests that the

increased yield per worker was entirely due to the rise in

the number of plants one man could handle.”

165

George

Fitzhugh was merely recording a bit of ancient bourgeois

wisdom in noting that tobacco’s profitability depended on

the maintenance of a high ratio of supervisory force to

laborers employed. “Six hands often make double as much

money at tobacco as at cotton or sugar,” he wrote, “but a

crop of tobacco that employes sixty hands, always brings

the farmer in debt.”

166

The monocultural economy added further importance to

intense supervision. There was only one money, and its

name was tobacco – the sole measure of value, standard of

price, medium of exchange, and basis of credit. The one

customary money function that tobacco, in consequence of

its perishability, was unable to perform, was to serve as a

means of hoarding.

167

Bruce cites a letter of William

Fitzhugh, written in June 1690, complaining “that he had a

large number of hogsheads [of tobacco] which it was

impossible for him to export in consequence of the

scarcity of shipping, their contents undergoing great

damage by the delay, and in some cases falling into

ruin.”

168

Although the bond-labor system held no positive

incentives for increased effort on the part of the workers,

it was peculiarly suitable for exerting “negative

incentives.” For a failure to perform satisfactorily, the

laborer faced the threat of corporal punishment by the

owner. To resist “correction” or to flee and be caught

might entail even more severe treatment. While the bond-

labor form inhibited the development of improved

instruments of labor, still, the employer had at his disposal

the entire twenty-four hours of the laborer’s day, except on

Sunday. The owner’s power in the exercise of this

authority was reinforced by the fact that he was not only

the employer but also the laborer’s landlord and victualer.

The laborers’ “victuals” consisted mainly of hominy,

which was prepared in a very laborious way. Shelled corn

was placed in a mortar formed by hollowing out the end of

a hardwood log cut to a suitable length. Then a laborer

wielded a sizable stick, formed as a pestle, to pound the

grains into hominy. The pestle might be attached to a low-

hanging flexible tree branch by a cord, to even out the

stress of the upward and downward motions of the

pounder’s arm. The pounded corn was then sometimes

sifted through a cloth to free it of the inedible husks.

169

This was the one major aspect of plantation labor that

perhaps presented the laborers with a positive incentive to

produce, for whatever their corn allowance they were

able to consume it only if the heavy chore of “pounding at

the mortar” were regularly done. Having this incentive at

his disposal, the owner of the bond-laborers found it the

part of efficient management to reserve this task for the

periphery of the work schedule, assigning it as a task to be

performed after the day’s work in the field or woods was

done, or perhaps on Sunday, nominally the laborers’ day

of rest.

The owners’ brutal pursuit of higher output per worker

Evidence of the earnestness with which the employers

were able to press their advantage in order to raise output

per worker is found throughout the colonial records.

Frequently cited instances have by repetition come to

constitute a body of esoteric lore among students of this

aspect of American history.

Spurred on by the all-or-nothing nature of a

monocultural economy, and subject to the vagaries of a

generally glutted market, Virginia employers pushed

matters to the limit to secure the highest possible return on

their investment in laborers.

170

According to a mid-

seventeenth-century account:

the months of June, July, and August, being the very height of the Summer,

the poore Servant goes daily through the rowes of Tobacco to worm it, and

being overheated, he is struck with a Calenture or Fever and so

perisheth.

171

Henry Smith of Accomack County Virginia strove to get

the maximum effort from his bond-laborers; he tasked his

workers heavily and punished them brutally for

deficiencies in their performance. He was not disposed to

make any allowances just because a worker was a woman

fed on a meatless diet. Some of Smith’s strongest men had

weeded as many as three hundred and fifty cornhills in a

day. Jane (at first mention the name is “Annie”) Powell

had been worked in the snow barefoot, and had got by on

hominy and salt ever since coming to Virginia. But Henry

Smith, perfectionist that he was, could not be moved by

such considerations; one day in 1668, when Powell had

weeded three hundred cornhills, Smith beat her severely

with his whip fashioned from a bull’s penis (“pizzle”), for

the deficiency of her work performance.

172

Increased labor intensity required greater time for rest

if the laborer’s physical condition were not to deteriorate.

But nothing was to be permitted to interfere with the

timely completion of the annual tobacco crop. According

to the record, the owners often found it a profitable option

to work their bond-laborers during time supposedly

allowed for rest, even at the risk of some attrition of the

labor force. Dankers and Sluyter, whose report on their

visit to the northern Chesapeake in 1678–80 has been

mentioned, found that the bond-laborers, though poorly

maintained, were “compelled to work hard” with too little

rest. Both African and European laborers, they wrote,

after they have worn themselves down the whole day, and gone home to

rest, have yet to grind the grain … For their masters and all their families as

well as themselves.

173

When in 1657 bond-laborer William Ireland sought relief

from being required to beat at the mortar at night after

working all day in the field for his owner Captain Philip

Morgan, the Maryland Provincial Court sided with the

owner, although it said that such extra duty should be

exacted only “at a Seasonable time in the yeare or in the

case of Necessity.”

174

The interpretation of these

limitations, for practical purposes, was left to the owner.

But when it was a matter of limiting bond-laborers’

resting time, the law was specific. Despite the inclination

of kind-hearted masters and English rural custom the

government twenty years earlier had resolved that,

“touching the resting of servants on Satturdaies in the

afternoon … no such custom [is] to be allowed.”

175

Some employers had strong reservations as well about

the value of “resting servants,” even on Sundays, seeming

to think that it was necessary and proper to keep the

Sabbath day wholly occupied with bond-labor tasks. Such

was the recollection of one disgruntled and literate former

employee:

We and the negroes both alike did fare,

Of work and food we had an equal share;

But in a piece of ground we called our own,

The food we eat first by ourselves were sown.

No other time to us they would allow,

But on a Sunday we the same must do:

Six days we slave for our master’s good,

The seventh day is to produce our food.

176

The trials to which an employer might be put in attempting

to raise per capita production may be seen in the case of

John Little of Maryland. In the spring of 1657, no doubt a

“Seasonable time” full of “necessity,” Little commanded

one of his bond-laborers, Henry Billsberry, to pound at the

mortar on a Sunday. In close company with an Indian

comrade, Billsberry fled out of bondage to Indian country.

Possibly the youthful laborers were reacting to what they

may have regarded as a compounding of injustice and

hypocrisy by their owner. For, when sent for in their

refuge, they returned reply that “they had rather live with

the Pagans.”

177

Illness among bond-laborers was a frequent problem

for employers in their constant pursuit of higher output per

laborer. Besides the production loss, the cost of medical

treatment for the laborer was likely to be too high, at least

so high that, according to Bruce, “masters were tempted to

suffer a servant to perish for want of proper advice and

medicines rather than to submit to their [the physicians’]

exactions.”

178

Owners might be reluctant to excuse

laborers from work on account of illness, as a former

bond-laborer recalled:

At length, it pleased God I sick did fall

But I no favor could receive at all,

For I was forced to work while I could stand,

Or hold the hoe within my feeble hands.

179

The temptation of masters to which Bruce referred was

hard to resist, judging from the high death rate among

bond-laborers in the Chesapeake in the seventeenth

century.

180

One Maryland employer surrendered to it with

such flawless ledger logic that diarists made special

mention of it:

a master having a sick servant … and observing from his declining condition,

he would finally die, and that there was no probability of his enjoying any

more service from him, made him, sick and languishing as he was, dig his

own grave, in which he was laid a few days afterwards, the others being too

busy to dig it, having their hands full attending to the tobacco.

181

It must be kept in mind that practically all the cases of

physical abuse of bond-laborers by their owners are

known to us only because the laborer risked bringing the

matter to a magistrate, who as we have noted himself was

necessarily an owner of many acres and numbers of bond-

laborers. Benedict Talbot and William Walworth charged

in court that their owner, Captain Hillary Stringer, had

“occasioned the death” of their fellow bond-laborer

Ellinor Conner. The Accomack County court finding the

petition to be worse than groundless, a malicious

concoction, ordered Talbot and Walworth to make

satisfaction to their owner (presumably by added time of

servitude) for all the expenses to which he had been put as

a result of their accusation.

182

There were instances of

courts ordering that a bond-laborer be sold away from an

abusive master. But even on those extremely rare

occasions, the owners were not penalized other than by

being fined a relatively small amount of tobacco.

183

There is no way of knowing how many bond-laborers

died as a result of starvation, or overwork, or by physical

abuse by their owners or on their owners’ orders in

seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. Morris

catalogued descriptively half a dozen murders of bond-

laborers by their owners.

184

The law passed by the

Virginia Assembly in 1662 forbidding secret burials is

clear evidence that such occurrences, glossed with suspect

allegations of soul-damning “suicide,” or other variations

of blaming the victim, were of such frequency that they

might interfere with the general overriding interest in

maintaining the labor supply from the mother country. The

law remarked that

[T]he private burial of servants & others give[s] occasion of much scandall

against diverse persons, and sometimes not undeservedly so … [and]

servants are fearful to make discovery if murther were committed … [all

ending in] that barbarous custom of exposing the corps of the dead (by

makeing their graves in comon and unfenced places) to the prey of hoggs

and other vermine.

185

Occasionally an owner’s zeal for increased

productivity verged on counterproductive pathology.

186

Northampton County, Virginia, in the summer of 1640,

Thomas Wood was whipped by two men with rope ends

for objecting to being forced to beat at the mortar, an

onerous chore from which he claimed his indenture

exempted him. The next day he was found dead.

187

Early

summer “was not the time of yeare for to be sick,” said

John Mutton to his bond-laborer Francis Burton, a

“seasoned hand” who was complaining of a headache.

Accusing Burton of “dissembling,” Mutton struck and

kicked Burton, who died within a few hours.

188

In May 1657, John Dandy, a large planter, a smith, and

owner of a water mill in Maryland, fractured the skull of

his young lame bond-laborer Henry Gouge with an axe for

reasons not given in the record. Gouge survived, although

the wound did not heal. Dandy angrily rejected his wife’s

suggestion that he “look after” the matter. One day two

months later, Dandy went to check on Gouge’s

performance of a task he had been assigned, and was

disappointed at how little Gouge had accomplished.

Fellow laborers nearby then heard Gouge cry out in pain

as if he were being beaten. He was never seen alive again,

but his body was recovered from Cole Kill a month later.

Though Dandy denied guilt, the history of the life-

threatening abuse he had dealt to Gouge, the two auditory

witnesses, the record of his death sentence for killing a

young Indian bond-laborer some ten years before (which

had been commuted to seven years’ service as the

executioner of all corporal correction sentences handed

down by the provincial courts), his attempt to flee to

Virginia because he said Maryland authorities had treated

him severely in the past, but above all the accusing blood

from the corpse when he touched it – doomed him. He was

convicted of murder and hanged.

189

Late in August 1664, Ann Arundel County, Maryland,

employer Joseph Fincher sought to secure a higher per

capita output by increasing the size of the load of tobacco

plants to be carried by a bond-laborer. When one of the

bearers, Joseph Haggman, protested that the load was too

great, Fincher tried to encourage him by threatening him

with a beating worse than ever a dog was given. Haggman

took up the burden, but he staggered under the weight of it.

Fincher, apparently provoked beyond endurance, reacted

by striking and kicking Haggman, perhaps by way of

making an example of him for the edification of other

bond-laborers. As it happened, Haggman died of this

treatment. Fincher was found guilty of murder on 22

December 1664 and hanged for it.

190

On 20 January 1665/6 Francis Carpenter, finding his

bond-laborer Samuell Yeoungman to be dilatory about

fetching firewood, broke a stick over the back of the

worker’s head as he bent to his task. Unable to recover,

Yeoungman died three weeks later. At trial, the jury found

Carpenter guilty of manslaughter but granted him benefit of

clergy.

191

Henry Smith, whose brutality has already been noted,

treated all his many bond-laborers with severity, but

especially so John Butt, sixty years old and feeble. “Ould

John,” as Butt was known to all, could never seem to do

his work to Smith’s satisfaction, nor was he constituted to

withstand the beatings that Smith regularly used in order to

urge his workers on, even as he was starving them for

food. Butt’s condition steadily deteriorated, but he was

forced to work, eventually in chains. Still somehow his

performance could never come up to Smith’s standard, and

Smith would accuse Butt of shirking and call him a

“dissembling rogue.” As fellow bond-laborers testified,

Smith “would very often Grievously beat the aforesaid

Ould John with a Bulls pizzle because he being aged was

unable to work.” Finally bone weary, utterly broken in

body and spirit, John Butt was left in isolation in the

winter-idle tobacco house. It was then that he told his

fellow bond-laborer Richard Chambers that “the blowes

given by his master would be his death,” and so they were;

Butt died, cold and alone, on the floor of the tobacco

house on 25 November 1666.

192

In the absence of further

record it appears that Smith was never brought to court for

this fatal mistreatment of bond-laborer Butt.

February was a time for clearing woodland that would

soon be needed for new tobacco ground. Much of the work

involved carrying logs. One Wednesday early in February

1681, James Lewis went to extreme lengths to impress

upon his bond-laborers his determination to have the

maximum individual effort from them. He became angered

when certain of his laborers volunteered to help Joseph

Robinson to carry a log which was too heavy for him to

manage, even though, as was later revealed, he had

nourished himself on a bit of meat stolen from the

employer’s closet. According to testimony presented to the

Maryland Provincial Court, Lewis seized the feeble bond-

laborer, “threw him down and Trampled Upon his Throat

with such Violence that within Two hours the said Joseph

dyed.” Then Lewis threatened Mary Naines, another bond-

laborer, “to serve her the Same and Swore Dam him he

cared not a straw” for the consequences. The employer’s

careless attitude was not disappointed in the event; though

eventually convicted of the murder, he was merely to be

“burnt in the hand,” a penalty that was more often a cold

formality than an actual hot-branding of the fleshy base of

the thumb.

193

In a number of other horrifying cases the record does

not link the brutality to supervisory concerns. In three

cases now to be briefly noted, it seems that perhaps pure

sadistic pleasure may have been the basic motive of the

perpetrators. In the summer of 1660, bond-laborer

Margarett Redfearne died after a severe beating by her

mistress, Anne Nevell. Nevell was found “not Guylty”

despite testimony of witnesses to the abuse, and

Redfearne’s deathbed accusation of Nevell.

194

That same

year, bond-laborer Catherine Lake fell down and died

within an hour of being kicked by her owner, Thomas

Mertine (or Martine). After considering the evidence,

including the failure of the corpse to exude blood when

touched by the accused, in those times regarded as an

accusation of the killer, the jury of twelve men exonerated

Mertine.

195

The Maryland Provincial Court record of 27

October 1663 provides the graphic details of the

merciless beatings administered by Pope Alvey to his

bond-laborer Alice Sandford, which resulted in her death.

Alvey was convicted of murder, but by pleading “benefit

of clergy” he escaped punishment except for the ritualistic

cold-iron “burning” of the flesh of his thumb.

196

Some scholars who have examined the same documents

that I have been citing in this chapter justify the chattel

bond-labor system – despite occasional abuses by the

owners – as a rational and on the whole benign adaptation

to the colonial environment.

197

They are naturally appalled

and horrified by the record left by Henry Smith, Pope

Alvey, Joseph Fincher and their like. But they seem to

ignore the essential relationship between the system of

chattel bond-servitude and the documented brutality and

hardship to which the chattels were subjected, whether in

the extreme cases of murder and rape or in the routine

cases of illicit extension of servitude and deprivation of

food and clothing.

Psychopathic cruelty can be found in every historical

era, and in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake court

records there are occasional references to the mentally

incompetent.

198

But in no case of murder or rape or other

unspeakable brutality by owners of bond-laborers was it

even suggested that the owner was acting irrationally. If

Smith, Fincher, Alvey were psychopaths, which is the

most generous allowance that may be made for them, one

must ask why that defense was never invoked in such

cases. The record does not tell us; perhaps it would have

struck too closely to the irrationality of the same system

that in England a century before had been rejected because

of its “extremity.”

199

For, psychopaths aside, the records show that the

employers of bond-labor were no more charitable toward

their workers than were the “spirits”, trepanners, “soul

drivers”, and run-of-the-mill merchants and ship captains

in the “servant trade.” Were not the “planters” driven by

the same compulsion of their social character as

accumulators of capital?

200

Who, then would be more

likely to succeed in the tobacco-raising business: the

owner who, whatever the climate, made lighter demands

upon the “unadaptable” laborer, or the master who made

heavier demands? And who could have been more

vulnerable to those demands than the chattel bond-

laborer?

Finally, of the general historians of the seventeenth-

century Chesapeake whom I have encountered, with the

exception of Allan Kulikoff, none give due attention to the

special oppression of women bond-laborers. These

workers were routinely sentenced to two and a half years’

additional bond-servitude for becoming mothers. Then as

now, patriarchy and male supremacism were in the

ascendant. But the denial of the right to marriage and

family, a unique feature of the Anglo-American bond-

labor system, in the context of the plantation bond-labor

system was not a social aberration; it was an

indispensable condition for the preservation of that

particular form of capitalist production and accumulation.

The chattel bond-labor system of the continental Anglo-

American plantation colonies was incompatible with the

status of “coverture” because “coverture” was an

insurmountable barrier to the imposition of chattel status

on the laborers. At the same time, by nullifying the “a-

man’s-home-is-his-castle” principle, it denied the

plantation bourgeoisie the benefit of the patriarchy as a

system of social control over the laboring people.

This is a matter of more than general humanitarian

consideration. The family-barring oppression endured by

the chattel bond-laborers contributed in a doubly

fundamental way to the social tensions that finally rent the

social fabric asunder in Bacon’s Rebellion. Not only did

it directly sharpen the class antagonism of proletariat and

bourgeoisie; the very nature of the chattel bond-labor

system made impossible the development of a buffer

social control stratum normal to English society.

… and Resisting

W. E. B. DuBois, in his 1909 address to the American

Historical Association on post-Civil War Reconstruction

in the South, broke the silence regarding the role of bond-

laborers as a self-activating social and political force in

American history.

In time, thanks largely to the single-

minded efforts of Carter G. Woodson, together with his

associates in the publication of the Journal of Negro Life

and History, and then later the studies of revolts of

African-American bond-laborers, especially developed

by Herbert Aptheker, the attention of a number of other

scholars was directed to this aspect of our history. As a

result of the consciousness-raising effects of the war

against Nazism, and of the civil rights struggles of the

1950s and 1960s, there was an upsurge in interest in the

study of the seventeenth-century origin of racial slavery,

centering on issues that are noted in the Introduction in

Volume One of the present work. That interest has focused

on the colonial Chesapeake. But discussion of the bond-

laborers as a self-activating social and political force has

been almost completely neglected, with the exception of

the excellent article by Timothy H. Breen, “A Changing

Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia 1660–1710.”

Breen’s argument is especially distinguished by its

correction of the general tendency of historians to rely

“too heavily upon statute law as opposed to social

practice” in interpreting seventeenth-century Virginia

history.

Breen was also exemplary in the consistency

with which he noted the class character of the struggle of

the African-American bond-laborers in the eighteenth

century, and the overwhelming disadvantage to their cause

“without the support of poorer whites and indentured

servants.”

The present chapter documents instances of self-

activation of bond-laborers as molders of their own fate.

In keeping with the basic concern of this work, emphasis

will be given to evidence of readiness of European-

American bond-laborers to join with African-American

bond-laborers in actions and plots of actions against their

bondage, and to the readiness of free persons to support

the struggles of the bond-laborers, both of which were

inconsistent with racial slavery. It is to be hoped that this

material will prepare the reader to appreciate the

historical significance of the role of bond-laborers in the

event called Bacon’s Rebellion, and the relation of that

event to the invention of the white race.

Where There Is Oppression, There Is

Resistance

Where there is oppression, there is resistance, insufficient

though it may be. When resistance is enough it becomes

rebellion. Where the intermediate buffer social control

stratum becomes dysfunctional, rebellion breaks through.

So at least the records of the Anglo-American plantation

colonies seem to show, particularly those of seventeenth-

century Virginia.

Denied a livable life, bond-laborers would commit

suicide, hazarding hell’s fire; alternatively, they might

assault their owners. Starve them and they would steal

from their owners, or kill hogs, wild or marked, for

clandestine feasts, or on occasion they would rise in

defiant mutiny. Bloody their backs with lashes “well laid

on,” add months or years to their servitude for “stealth of

oneself,” and they still would run away, singly or “in

troops.”

Double the penalty for European-Americans who

ran away with African-Americans; they would do so

anyway. Deny them the right to marry and the shield of

coverture, lash women’s backs; they would seek solace in

“fornication,” and be damned to ye! Double the penalty for

European-American women who mated with African-

American men; they would do so anyway. Attenuate the

intermediate social control stratum; and at an opportune

moment, they would join en masse in armed rebellion.

Suicide and assault

One day late in October 1656, a chattel bond-laborer

known to the record only as “Thomas, an Irishman” and

owned by John Custis, shortened his term of servitude by

slashing his own throat and then throwing himself down a

well.

There is no record of any note left or any notice he

may have given for his last decision. Had he been an

object in “the Irish slave trade” that thrived in the wake of

the English conquest of his country?

Or was he perhaps

brooding on news, conveyed by his owner, of the “custom-

of-the-country” law requiring Irish bond-laborers to serve

a year longer than English bond-laborers?

At the height of the 1661 tobacco crop season, a bond-

laborer, nameless in the record, “willfully Cast himselfe

away” in a creek near his owner’s Westmoreland County

plantation. That was a year when tobacco prices were

falling to their lowest level yet, so that each laborer would

have to be made to produce twice as much as he/she had

produced a couple of years before, just so the owner might

stay even. Perhaps this circumstance added chagrin to the

moral outrage of the court’s order that this unfaithful

worker be “buried at the next cross path … with a stake

driven through the middle of him.”

That same year, in

York County, where tobacco prices were no higher,

Walter Catford with spiteful disregard for the interests of

his owner and “for want of Grace tooke a Grind stone and

a Roape and tyed it around his Middle and Crosse his

thighs and most barbarously went and drowned himselfe

contrary to the Laws of the King and this Country.”

Bond-laborers of different temperament were disposed

to turn their anger outward. They were likely to disappoint

ruling-class expectations by individual displays of

violence against owners or overseers, and by destruction

of their owners’ property, despite the whippings and

extended bondage that the magistrates were certain to

impose when such cases came before them, or even the

death sentence that could be imposed by the General

Court.

Around the end of 1658, Huntington Ayres, wielding a

“lathing hammer,” murdered his owner and his owner’s

wife as they slept.

No suggestion as to the particular

motive for the murder is recorded; it seems to have been

considered simply the extreme denouement of the general

master-servant conflict. On 16 January  1671,  on an  Elke
River,  Maryland,  plantation,  owner  John  Hawkins  was
slain  by  axes  wielded  by  a  group  of  three  of  his  bond-
laborers  –  two  European-Americans  and  one  African-
American  –  and  one  European-American  former  bond-
laborer. As servants  killing  a  master,  they  were charged
with  “petty  treason,”  as  if  the  motive  were  thereby
sufficiently implied.
13
The more common form of individual struggle was, in
the  words  of  a  law  passed  by  the  Virginia Assembly  in
March 1662, “the audacious unruliness of many stubborne
and  incorridgible  servants  resisting  their  masters  and
overseers.”
14
  That  law  prescribed  an  extra  year  of
servitude  for  any  bond-laborer  who  should  “lay  violent
hands on his or her master, mistress or overseer.”
15
A  hoe  was  the  weapon  of  choice  for  Charles  Rogers,
Norfolk County bond-laborer, in his assault on his owner
one August  day  in  1666.
16
  It  was  the  hoe  too  for  bond-
laborer  William  Page  in  1671  in  Lancaster  County  in
September,  a  climactic  period  in  the  annual  round  of
“making  tobacco.”  Upon  some  disagreement  with  his
owner,  Page struck  at him  with  a  hoe  and defied  him to
attempt to correct him. “God damn him,” he was reported
as saying, “if his master strock him he would beat out his
braynes.”
17
A  year  later  in  Northampton  County,  Portuguese

Nicholas Silvio apparently was sometimes absent without

leave pursuing a love affair with Mary Gale, a bond-

laborer on a nearby plantation, with whom he would soon

have a child. When his owner, Captain John Savage,

sought to call him to account, Silvio declined to respond,

saying “hee was not intended to worke night & day too.”

Thereupon, Captain Savage made the mistake of kicking at

Silvio, who then “flew att his master and struck him 4

blowes” and tore the Master’s “good holland shirt very

much.”

Provoked on some account one day in June 1765, bond-

laborer Nicholas Paine (or Pane) threw “five or six bricks

or brick batts” at his owner, Colonel Thomas Swann of

Surry County, who saved himself by ducking behind a

gate. A fellow bond-laborer wondered how Paine dared

to do such a thing, and expressed awe at the sign of “the

depression of three bricks in the gate.” Paine’s only

comment was, “a plague take the damn gate[;] if it had not

bin for that [I] would have hit him.”

Although John Bradley had served as a bond-laborer

for eleven years – at a time when according to law no non-

indentured bond-laborer was supposed to serve more than

seven years

– the Norfolk County Court in November

1654 rejected Bradley’s petition for freedom. Perhaps as

a payback to the system for such abuse of his rights,

Bradley set fire to a cornfield three times in less than a

month.
21
  A  similar  flaming  farewell  was  tendered  by
bond-laborer John Parris before he ran away in the spring
of 1687.
22
Sometimes  several  bond-laborers  would  combine  to
confront  the  owner  or  overseer.  In  February  1648,  the
bond-laborers  owned  by  John  Wilkins  told  him  in  a
menacing  manner  and  in  rudest  terms  that  “they  [would]
not any longer bee his servants.”
23
In the matter of diet
In 1662 the penalty for hog-stealing was two years’ added
servitude for each hog, and a law passed in 1679 made the
third  offense  punishable  by  death.
24
 Yet  there  are  many,
many cases of bond-laborers, often acting in small groups,
stealing  and  killing  hogs  to  supplement  their  corn-and-
water  diet.
25
  Several  such  group  efforts  were  made  by
three European-Americans – John Fisher, Thomas Hartley,
and Roger Crotofte (variously spelled) – and two African-
American bond-laborers – Tony and one not named in the
record – all the property of John West, who owned more
bond-laborers  than  anyone  else  in  Accomack  County  in
that year, 1684. The five would more often than not dress
and cook the stolen meat and feast on it in “the swamp,” or
other  clandestine  rendezvous.  Usually  they  were  able  to
make the food last for several days. When a fellow worker

asked John Fisher about the possibility of being charged

by a court, Fisher replied that in that circumstance he

would run away and “send his master a very Loveing

Letter that his sheep, his hogg & turkeys were very fatt.”

In other instances bond-laborers sought to improve their

diet not by stealth, but by confrontation with the owning

class. One Thursday in March 1663 in Calvert County,

Maryland, Richard Preston’s eight bond-laborers

“peremptorily and positively refused to goe to their

ordinary labour,” saying that their diet of “Beanes and

Bread” had made them too weak to “performe the

imployments [Preston] putts us uppon.” Preston asked the

court’s help, for fear that from the example of this unruly

eight, “a worse evill … should ensue by encouraging other

servants to do the like.”

In 1670, bond-laborers owned

by a Widow Hale got some alimentary relief when, upon

their complaint, the Lancaster County Court ordered that

Hale provide a milk cow for the use of the bond-

laborers.

In 1661, bond-laborers owned by Major Thomas

Goodwin in York County had become “refractory” about

their work because of their “hard usage” and being fed

“nothing but Corne and water.”

When magistrate Thomas

Beale came to Goodwin’s plantation to remonstrate with

the workers there about their defiance of authority, he

found 24-year-old freeman William Clutton, who well

remembered his own sufferings as a bond-laborer. Indeed,

he had declined to be Major Beale’s overseer precisely

because Beale fed his workers so poorly. Clutton told

Beale in the presence of the aggrieved bond-laborers that

they ought to be provided with meat three times a week

and with cows for milking. The workers, taking

encouragement from Clutton but realizing that their first

idea, for sending a petition to the king in England, was not

practicable, resolved to do battle for themselves not just

for a better diet, but for an end to their bond-servitude.

They would

get a matter of Forty of them together & get Gunnes & … cry as they went

along who would be for liberty and free from bondage & that there would

be enough come to them & they would goe through the Countrey and Kill

those that made any opposition that they would be either free or dye for it.

The plot, frustrated by discovery, was investigated by

Magistrate Beale. Seeing in the event a tendency to the

“Disturbance of the peace of the Country & to the hazard

of men’s lives,” Beale ordered “the Magistrates and

Masters to looke into the practices & behaviour of their

Servants.” William Clutton was so widely respected that

after he promised to cease his agitation of the workers, his

good-behavior bond was returned to him.

Two years later the largest, most widespread

insurrectionary plot of bond-laborers was discovered in

Gloucester County, Virginia. Unfortunately, as a result of

the total destruction of Gloucester County records in two

fires, in 1821 and 1865, only a few scraps of the record

remain concerning this event.

The design was hatched by a number of Cromwellian

veterans who had been sentenced to be transported to

bond-servitude by the restored monarchy of Charles II. On

the first weekend in September the plotters gathered in the

house of Mr Knight (apparently a sympathetic free man) to

discuss “a designe for their freedom”; each and all were

pledged to secrecy on pain of death. The revolt was to be

launched from their rendezvous at Poplar Spring at

midnight on the following Sunday, 14 September. The core

group, bringing with them “what Company, armes, and

ammunicion [they] could gett,” would assemble at Poplar

Spring. Then, moving forth with the confidence of

veterans, they would seize arms, ammunition and a drum

from the militia’s store. They would “goe from house to

house to house” rallying bond-laborers to join in a grand

march to Governor William Berkeley and demand their

freedom. If the governor should refuse, they would “march

out of the Country.”

Their plan was betrayed to the authorities by a bond-

laborer named Berkenhead,

so that the militia authorities

were able to get to the Poplar Spring rendezvous ahead of

the rebels and arrest them as they arrived. But word

spread of the militia’s trap, and only a few of the rebels

were apprehended; of those, four were hanged.

The colony authorities were shaken by the revelation of

the insurrectionary threat to the rule of the plantation

bourgeoisie. The Virginia Assembly made the day of its

discovery, 13 September, an annual holy day, and granted

Berkenhead his immediate freedom and a reward of 5,000

pounds of tobacco.

Two other, more substantial,

measures were taken in reaction to this event. One was the

passage of a new law requiring owners of bond-laborers

t o prevent the workers from leaving the plantations to

which they belonged without explicit permission, “on

Sundayes or any other dayes.”

The other, which will be

further noted in Chapter 11 was a proposal to tax by

landholding rather than by poll, thus disfranchising the

landless poor.

While the record makes no mention of

African-Americans in connection with the 1663 plot, it is

of interest to the present study that there is no indication of

any exclusionary tendency on the part of the plotters;

rather, their depositions suggest that they intended to

recruit every last bond-laborer to their freedom march.

Flight and “fornication”

Of the various ways that the bond-laborers found for

defying and resisting their oppressors, the two most

common forms were:

(1) continual attempts to free

themselves by running away (a common theme of studies

of the life and status of laborers in that period); and (2)

sexual liaisons – criminalized under the term “fornication”

– conducted in defiance of the ruling-class denial of the

bond-laborer’s right to be married (an aspect that, so far

as I know, has not previously been even acknowledged as

resistance to the owning class, except by Warren M.

Billings and by Joseph Douglas Deal III).

Running away

The official records regarding runaway bond-laborers,

with few exceptions, concern cases in which recaptured

fugitives are being arraigned or are listed in claims being

made for payment to the “takers-up” of such fugitives.

Occasionally there are grounds for believing that some of

the runaways succeeded in avoiding recapture. Owners

might refrain from bringing such cases to official attention

because of the distance to be traveled to see the

magistrate, or the inconvenient timing of court days, or the

incidental fees that might have to be borne by the owner if

the runaways were not caught; undoubtedly these factors

together were responsible for many flights never being

noted in the record.

For the great runaway year 1676–77,

there is a general hiatus in the records in consequence of

Bacon’s Rebellion, which was fueled by the adherence to

it of great numbers of “runaway” bond-laborers.

In many instances bond-laborers sought to escape the

jurisdiction of Virginia authorities by fleeing to the

Indians, to Dutch colonial territory, to Pennsylvania, or to

the more newly formed neighboring Maryland and North

Carolina (known as Albemarle until 1691). Probably

fewer than half the runaways traveled alone. Many were in

groups of two or three, but there were instances of larger

undertakings. In Gloucester County (whose records, as

previously noted, have all been lost), the General

Assembly noted in 1661 that “servants and other idlers

[were] running away in troops.”

I have tabulated a total

of between 880 and 890 individual fugitives who were

subject to the attention of the county courts. In addition, an

indeterminate number were referred to by terms such as

“several” and “groups,” or simply as “servants” in the

plural without enumeration.

With regard to the central concern of this work – the

question of the origin of racial oppression – two facts of

transcendent significance are presented by the record of

runaways. First, considering the fact that no more than

about one out of every four or five bond-laborers was an

African-American even as late as the 1670s and 1680s,

there was a considerable degree of collaboration of

African-Americans and European-Americans in a common

endeavor to escape. In the records I have examined, such

collaboration was noted in fifteen separate instances

involving a total of some seventy or seventy-five

persons.

Second, there was a readiness of free persons

to assist bond-laborers in running away, as recorded in

fifteen instances involving fifty-eight people. In this

chapter, I accordingly cite principally instances that

represent these two aspects of the runaway phenomenon.

However, with respect to the subjective or ideological

element, these cases do not differ in the least from any of

the others; all represented a common front against the

chattel bond-labor system, free of any evidence of social

distinction or prejudice.

One form of resistance of women bond-laborers to their

double yoke of gender and class oppression was to run

away, usually in the company of men – bond-laborers or

free sympathizers – but in some cases without male

support. The generally greater vulnerability of women to

the perils faced in leaving the plantation in this new

strange country would seem obvious. Nevertheless,

despite the fact that they were a relatively minor

proportion in the population, among the runaways I have

noted from the records there were sixty-nine women,

including six African-Americans and two Indians.

By 1640, two years after Colony Secretary Kemp had

reported on the predominance of human merchandise

among Virginia immigrants, the Virginia General Court

was receiving daily complaints about “servants that run

away from their masters whereby much loss … doth ensue

to the masters.” The problem had reached such proportion

that the Colony Council made the recapture of runaway

bond-laborers a public concern, and ordered that the

expense of recovering fugitives be borne not by the owner,

but by the public treasury of the counties involved.

Early in June 1640, three Virginia bond-laborers,

“Victor, a dutchman … a Scotchman called James

Gregory … [and] a negro named John Punch,” escaped

together to Maryland. Unfortunately they were pursued

and, at the insistence of the Virginia Colony Council, they

were brought back to face the Virginia General Court.

That same month, the Virginia Colony Council and

General Court commissioned a Charles City County posse

to pursue “certain runaway negroes.” The provision that

the cost was to be shared by all the counties from which

they had run away suggests that the phenomenon was

extensive.

Since no further record seems to exist

regarding this particular undertaking, perhaps these

workers avoided recapture.

As if encouraged by such a possibility, seven bond-

laborers – Andrew Noxe, Richard Hill, Richard Cookson,

Christopher Miller, Peter Wilcocke (presumably English),

an African-American, Emanuel, and John Williams (“a

dutchman”) – set off one Saturday night a month later in a

stolen boat, with arms, powder and shot. They, however,

were taken up before they could reach open water.

In October of that same year, “a most dangerous

conspiracy” was entered into by three free men – John

Bradye, John Tomkinson, and Richard West – and six

bond-laborers – Margaret Beard, John Winchester,

William Wooton, William Drummer, Robert Rouse, and

Robert Moseley – “to run out of the country” to “the Dutch

plantation.”

The plan was discovered before it could be

executed. The punishments meted out by the authorities

appear to reflect an increasing alarm that such escapes

would reduce the pressure that employers might bring to

bear on laborers in the course of their routine

employments. In addition to the thirty-stripe whippings,

extended periods of servitude, and the working in shackles

imposed in the case of Noxe et al., a number of those

charged with extensive conspiracies in this case were to

be punished also by being branded on the cheek and the

shoulder.

In the fall of 1645, an African-American bond-laborer

Phillip, owned by Captain Phillip Hawley, helped

runaway European-American bond-laborer Sibble Ford

hide from her pursuers for twenty days in a cave on

Hawley’s plantation. His collaborator was European-

American Thomas Parks, who addressed the court

defiantly when he was arraigned for going about “to intice

and inveigle the mens Servants to runn away … out of

their masters service.”

Two large-scale efforts to escape were made in

Accomack County in the mid-1660s. In August 1663, some

ten bond-laborers ran away together from Eastern Shore

plantations. Making use of a horse named Tom Hall and a

“good boat,” they headed for points north – “the Dutch

plantation,” “the Manhatans,” “New England.” Although

John Bloxam and Robert Hodge were retaken within a

week, it was four years before Miles Grace was caught;

but Thomas Hedrington and Robin Parker, and possibly

others, were still free. John Tarr was captured, but as

soon as he could he again escaped with three others;

though Tarr was again caught, the others succeeded in

eluding their pursuers.

An elaborate plot was discovered in 1670 in Accomack

County. It began with a group of some half-dozen bond-

laborers inspired by the report of four others who had

succeeded in escaping from another Eastern shore

plantation at Pocomoke. A first attempt was made in

October, that time being chosen because men of the local

“power elite” would then be in Jamestown for a meeting

of the General Assembly. However, because of a strong

contrary northwest wind that blew on the night chosen for

the escape, the men decided to stow the sails prepared for

the escape craft and postpone the effort, although Mary

Warren protested that “shee never saw such fooles in her

life to loose such a opportunity.” A second attempt was to

be made, and on a grander scale. A score of bond-laborers

from several Eastern Shore plantations, along with three to

five free persons,

were eventually pledged to the

enterprise. They were resolved to make good their

purpose “by force against all that should oppose” them,

according to one of their number, 25-year-old bond-

laborer Renney Sadler. Depositions later given before the

magistrate revealed that the runaways had planned to tie

up one owner, Devorax Brown, and his wife,

disable the

horse from pursuing, and carry off a large gun for

installation on the small sailing vessel, a sloop, that would

carry them to freedom. The sloop was to be well stocked

with food prepared by a woman co-conspirator who had

access to the necessary provisions. Their aim was to sail

up Chesapeake Bay to “the dutch plantation” or “New

England,” with “black James,” reputed “the best pylot in

the land,” at the helm.

Perhaps because the plan involved

too many people and the preparation period was too long

for the preservation of the necessary secrecy, their

purpose was discovered in December and prevented.

In February 1672, European-American bond-laborer

William Richardson and an African-American bond-

laborer, not named in the record, ran away together. How

or why they became separated is not revealed, but only

Richardson was recaptured and arraigned eight and a half

years later; his partner was apparently never heard of

again in those parts.

In the summer of 1679, three

European-American bond-laborers, Mary Axton, Mary

West and William Siller, together with African-American

bond-laborer Thomas George, somehow managed to

escape from the James River plantation belonging to their

owner, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Milner, and row or

sail across Chesapeake Bay to Hog’s Neck on the Eastern

Shore.

Later that same summer in Lancaster County,

European-American bond-laborers William Adams,

Robert Bull and John Stookley and an African-American

bond-laborer, Tom, coordinated their efforts over three

different plantations to run away in a boat belonging to a

fourth plantation.

An African-American, whose name is

not supplied in the record, and his fellow bond-laborer

Hugh Callon in April 1683 collaborated in running away

from the plantation of their owner, Colonel Thomas

Brereton in Northumberland County.

European-

American Thomas Callen [or Caller] and his African-

American comrade William Powell “stole themselves”

away from their owner, Aron Spring of Elizabeth River.

They managed to get a boat in which they crossed

Chesapeake Bay and reached Maggoty Bay in

Northampton County; there they apparently became

separated. Powell was taken up in May 1687, but a year

later Callen still had not been recaptured.

Appropriating

a boat and two sheep, three laborers, Anthony Jackson and

Michael Connell, European-Americans, and Mingo, an

African-American, ran away from their owner, Charles

Egerton, some time before 5 August 1688.

While it is not possible from the record to fit all the

pieces together, there is no doubt that bond-laborers were

resolved on escaping from Mr Ralph Wormeley, Esquire,

their owner, of Middlesex County. In 1687 “John

Nickson … with divers other ill-disposed servants and

others” were charged with having plotted “to procure

Gunnes powder and Shott and other Armes and to

Assemble themselves together with Design to withstand

and Oppose all persons that should endeavour to Suppress

them … tending to the greate disturbance of his Majesties

Peace and the terrours of his liege people.”

Despite the

discovery of the scheme, it appears that after a delay of

some eighteen months the plotters succeeded to some

extent; having taken guns and ammunition, a number of the

rebels, including African-Americans Mingoe and

Lawrence, and European-American Richard Wilkins,

remained free for “a Considerable time,” in Wilkins’s

case some twenty-eight months.

The name of Richard Ayry’s African-American friend

is unknown to the court record; together they planned and,

“in the height of the  [1688] crop season,”  executed their
escape  from  Captain  Richard  Kenner’s  plantation  in
Northumberland  County.
63
  African-American  Thomas
Roberts  and  Portuguese  John  Sherry,  two  bond-laborers
belonging  to  William  Wise,  fled  from  York  County,
Virginia, on 18 August 1690 and stuck together all the way
to Philadelphia.
64
Free laboring people aid runaway bond-laborers
In  the  summer  of  1669,  the  Widow  Buckmaster  and  her
son Henry Crow refused to enlist in the hue and cry after a
runaway  bond-laborer  belonging  to John  Harris;  instead,
they  harbored  the  fugitive  in  their  own  house.
65
  Thomas
Stephens,  a  skilled  seaman,  was  arraigned  in  Lancaster
County  in  March  1675  on  the  charge  of  devoting  his
expertise  to  being  “the  chiefe  causer  promoter  and
instrumenter”  in  the  escape  of  three  bond-laborers  who
had not been heard of since.
66
 Late in 1675, freeman John
Fennell accompanied bond-laborers William Beverly and
his  wife  and  Jane  Getting  in  running  away  from  their
owner,  William  Carver.
67
  At  the  June  session  of  the
Accomack  County  Court,  freeman  Thomas  Lehay  was
found  guilty  of  habitually  assisting  bond-laborers  to  run
away. He was ordered to post £20 sterling for his future
“good behaviour.”
68

Freeman Emanuell Rodriggus, an African-American,

was brought before the February 1672 session of the

Northampton County Court for having “unlawfully

entertayned” two runaway European-American bond-

laborers owned by Captain John Custis of Northampton

County.

In mid-summer 1679, four African-Americans,

including one child too young to work, ran away in the

company of two free European-Americans, John Watkings

and Agness Clerk.

In November 1690, freeman Edward

Short was arraigned for “helping and assisting” European-

American Roger Crotuff [Crotofte] and African-American

bond-laborer John Johnson to break out of the Accomack

county prison.

After Ann Redman, an African-American,

took her child and ran away from the plantation of

European-American Thomas Loyd in February 1696, she

was sought by hue and cry. Some twenty months later

Redman was seized from the home of European-American

Edwin Thacker, where she had found refuge.

I n Henrico County early in 1696, two African-

Americans, Betty and a man described only as being a

“mulatto,” ran away and were sheltered in the home of

Henry Turner. Somehow constable Edward Tanner was

able to arrest Betty and to confine her in his house. Betty

broke out at night, however, and returned to Turner’s

place. Tanner, with two assistants, came to Turner’s house

and sought to seize and bind the African-American man

(the “mulatto”), who naturally resisted, Tanner called

upon Turner to help subdue the man, but Turner

not only refused to assist [Constable Tanner], but forewarned[?] every body

from meddling with the said malotto, and when [Tanner] with Edward Ward

[his buddy] had gott the said Malloto fellow down and were going to binde

him, Henry Turner caught hold of the Rope and plucket it from them, and

threw it out of Doors, and taking up a hoe helve said that the fellow

(meaning the mallatto that was seized) should not be tyed there for he

[Turner] would defend him; which words so Encouraged the mallatto That

he took up a pistoll that lay by him and Kockt it, but Tanner and [one of his

helpers] layed hold of him and wrested the piston out of his hands, and again

endeavoured to binde him; but Henry Turner catching hold of the pistoll that

then was in [Tanner’s helper’s] hand said he would lay him in the face if he

did not let goe; and the mallatto recovering his Gun and [standing] upon his

Guard [Tanner along with his two buddies] who endeavoured to

assist … [were] forced to desist & goe their ways; all which [Constable

Tanner] conceives to be a matter of Evill Consequence.

Defiant solace

Deny them the right to marry and the shield of coverture;

they would “fornicate” and be damned to ye. Double the

penalty for European-American women who mated with

African-American men; they would do so anyway.

As noted in Chapter 7, chattel bond-laborer status was

incompatible with marriage. Furthermore, despite the

various expedients adopted for recapturing the owner’s or

the parish’s expenses for support of the children of

limited-term bond-laborers, natural increase was a

relatively unprofitable way of recruiting plantation labor-

power in the seventeenth-century tobacco colonies. In

these circumstances, it was simply good “bottom line”

logic to outlaw sex by limited-term bond-laborers, calling

it “fornication,” for which cruel penalties were imposed.

(See Chapter 7 pages 128–9.)

Male supremacism was a fundamental premise of

Anglo-American colonial life as it was in England. The

seventeenth-century records present depressing

confirmation of that fact. Crimes against and abuse of

women by men of all classes sometimes became the

subject of judicial notice, in cases including uxoricide,

rape, denial of access to food, eviction, sexual abuse,

economic exploitation, and battery. Altogether I have

noted 367 court cases relating to gender oppression. As

has been argued in Chapter 7, chattel bond-servitude,

which was the condition of the overwhelming majority of

women arriving in the tobacco colonies, gave an added

dimension to male supremacism, a distinctive blend of

class and gender oppression that accounted for 304 of the

cases characterized in the record as “fornication” and

“bastardy.” These more than three hundred court cases, in

which the rigor of the law was visited upon women bond-

laborer “fornicators,” necessarily involved somewhere

around twice that number of persons. If the figure of 850

listed runaway bond-laborers is indicative of widespread

bond-laborer resistance to the system of chattel bond-

servitude, so must the persistent and pervasive assertion

by bond-laborers of the right to the solace of sexual

relations be regarded as rejection of the enforced sexual

abstinence imposed upon them as an essential

characteristic of that very system.

In 140 of those 304 cases, the identity of the male

partner is known.

In all, 17 were owners, 2 were

overseers. Of the remaining 121, 67, including 2 African-

Americans, were freemen, the great majority of whom had

been bond-laborers.

Some 54 were bond-laborers – 31

European-Americans, 22 African-Americans, and 1

American Indian.

Leaving aside the instances of sexual relations

involving owners and overseers, in which the feelings of

the bond-laborers hardly needed to be consulted, what do

the general statistics and the particular case records

suggest about the motivations of the bond-laborers in the

other cases? The sex instinct of a bond-laborer was a

power that the plantation bourgeoisie could only hope to

curb by fear of legal retribution, glossed by preachments

on the virtue of “abstinence.” Abstinence, however, was

one thing the bond-laborers had in plenty: “abstinence”

from decent food, clothing, and shelter, from possessions,

from receiving wages, from marriage and “coverture,”

from normal home life. At the same time, the record shows

what one might assume, namely that sexually exploitative

motives were common to persons of all social classes. In

the male-supremacist environment, such motives

accounted for the seduction, abandonment and sexual

exploitation of many women, particularly those most

vulnerable, the bond-laborers.

The predominance of freemen as partners in these cases

may be significant. Anne Collins’s interest in freeman

Robert Pierce was particularly based on the hope to

escape her bondage by alliance with him. “I should never

have yielded to his desyres but hee told me he would free

me from my Master, whatsoever it would cost him & that

hee had Stocke Cattle Servants & a plantation [and] that I

should ride his mare & then your [Collins’s] Mistress will

think much.”

Despite the risks such bond-laborers ran in

“yielding to the desyres” of freemen, it is reasonable to

assume that Anne Collins’s motivation was a common one

for women bond-laborers. In such cases each woman

bond-laborer was conducting her own individual strategy

for throwing off chattel bondage, even though to do so

risked subjection to a husband. Although liaisons between

male bond-laborers and free women were rare, perhaps

men in those cases were also motivated by a hope of

gaining their freedom through such a connection. Yet truly

felt and mutual love and sympathy in resistance to the

bond-labor system might still have motivated sexual

partners even in cases where those feelings were confused

with hope for an improved social status.

We have noted that Lucy Stratton was one who did not

invest herself in such confusion. In contrast to Anne

Collins, Stratton spurned her owner’s offer of marriage

because she did not love him, and because his interest in

her was mere lust.

In making the distinction between

mere sexual male exploitation and love, she showed the

normal desire to be truly loved and cherished, sexually

and otherwise.

Being by law denied the right to dispose of property, as

lovers bond-laborers

had little to offer each other but

comfort and emotional support.

In 86 of the 140 male-

partner-identified “fornication” cases brought against

women bond-laborers, the men were free men, and thus

property considerations and social mobility expectations

might have been factors. Yet there were 50 instances of

such charges against women bond-laborers where the man

was a bond-laborer.

One does not find many avowals of romantic love in

seventeenth-century court records; love letters written by

the bond-laborers and the free poor persons of that place

and time must be extremely rare, if indeed any exist at all.

But one can imagine the sense of love and fear, elation and

despair, the passionate avowals and practical concerns

they might have expressed regarding experiences

described in court records. What love note could more

adequately testify to their mutual devotion, for instance,

than the decision of two lovers to risk together the perils

and penalties of flight from chattel servitude?

What observations were exchanged on love and

bondage between Penelope Sandford and Adam

Robinson? In June 1666, for becoming parents, those two

bond-laborers were sentenced to added servitude of two

and a half years and two years respectively. Yet they

persisted in their relationship, and a year later they were

ordered to be whipped as “incorrigibble fornicators

whom no goodness Mercy & admonition can reforme.”

What might their diary have said about that day when they

first decided that being together was worth the risk?

As the seasons changed in 1685, how did runaway

bond-laborers William Lloyd and Mary Seymore cheer

and advise each other in those nearly ten months before

they were recaptured, still together?

What would the journal of African-American bond-

laborer Warner and Mrs Welch have told of adventures

they experienced as they fled from Accomack County to

Pennsylvania some time before September 1685? What

opinions did they offer to each other on husbands and

masters? Returned by order of a Pennsylvania justice of

the peace, they were put in James City jail, and again

escaped briefly, before they were retaken and assigned to

be tried by a member of the Virginia Colony Council.

What might they have recalled for each other in all that

time about their respective backgrounds, and of the

universal language of love?

In Essex County, bond-laborer Robert Hughes and free

woman Ellinor sought to sanctify their relationship by

marriage in 1703. To their dismay, they were prosecuted

under the law passed against bond-laborers marrying

without their owners’ prior consent.

Hughes was

sentenced to an added year of bondage; Ellinor was

ordered to pay Hughes’s owner 1,500 pounds of tobacco

or else she, too, would have to serve that owner for a full

year as a bond-laborer.

What might the diary of one or

the other disclose to us on the conquering power of love

over bondage, and on the importance of defying the

hypocrisy of the law?

Among the 54 identified male bond-laborer partners in

the “fornication” cases examined, 22 were African-

Americans involved with European-American women.

This was a much higher percentage than the proportion of

African-Americans in the bond-labor force. Although the

record does not afford a reason for this disproportion, it is

a fact that the plantation bourgeoisie came to regard the

mating of European-Americans with African-Americans

as a serious problem for themselves.

In any case, it

appears to have been in keeping with the readiness of

European-American and African-American bond-laborers

to make common cause in the other respects described in

this chapter.

No “White Race”

Through Acts of the General Assembly, the plantation

bourgeoisie early on expressed its disposition to deny

equal rights to African-Americans.

The evidence,

however, clearly indicates that this purpose of the ruling

class did not represent the desire or attitude of the

European-American bond-laborers as a whole, or indeed

of the common run of European-Americans in general. At

the same time, however, it is not surprising that the

explicitly anti-Negro tenor of these laws would find some

echo in the attitude of ruled-over European-Americans,

bond and free. I have found those instances to have been

extremely few, however, in comparison to the record of

solidarity of European-American and African-American

bond-laborers, and in comparison to the readiness of free

laboring-class European-Americans to make common

cause with African-American fugitives from bond-labor.

Here are the only such exceptional cases that I have turned
up.
The  General  Assembly  enacted  a  series  of  laws,
beginning in 1662,
89
 directed specifically against African-
American  women.  In  February  1669,  bond-laborer  Mary
Hughes,  appealing  in  vain  against  being  raped  by  her
owner, Henry Smith, said “he would make her worse than
a Negroe by whoreing her.”
90
 In 1694, a deposition in a
slander  case  told  of  mutual  accusations  between  two
European-American  women  of  sexual  misalliances  with
various  European-American  men,  and  claimed  that  one
had said that the other was “such a whore that she would
lye with a Negro.”
91
I n Accomack  County  one  day  in  1677,  when  tavern-
keeper  George  Boies  refused  credit  to  Indian  bond-
laborer James, James promptly invited Boies to “Kiss my
Arse.” Next, Boies and James exchanged the compliments
of  “Indian  Dog”  and  “English  Dogg.”  Boies  attacked
James; another patron, bond-laborer (or possibley former
bond-laborer)  Alexander  Dun  urged  James  to  return  the
blows against Boies, and James did so.
92
Some  time  prior  to  November  1681,  European-
American  bond-laborer  David  Griffin,  avowed  in  the
course  of  an  altercation  with  his  overseer,  an  Indian
named James Revell, that “it should never be said that he
did yeild to an Indian Dog.”
93

On 5 November 1681, Frank, the African-American

“servant” of Mr Vaulx, was sent by Vaulx to “speak with

John Machart [or Macarty] about business.” Machart and a

friend he was with rebuffed Frank, saying “they were no

company for Negroes.” The following day at the Vaulx

house, where some six or seven men were drinking,

fighting occurred between Frank’s friend Peter Wells and

Machart, and then between Frank and Machart. It began

with offense being taken by both Frank and Peter Wells at

Machart’s pretension of superiority. Just before the

fighting began, Wells said to Frank, “God damn them he

was as good a man as the best of them.”

In 1691, when Hannah Warwick was charged with

refusing to do her work, the General Court made

extenuation on the grounds that “she was overseen by a

negro overseer.”

By contrast, in none of the hundreds of cases of the

oppression of bond-laborers and the resistance by them

have I found any instance in which European-American

bond-laborers expressed a desire to dissociate their

sufferings and struggle from those of the African-American

bond-laborers, the case of Mary Hughes being the

exception, and perhaps that of Hannah Warwick. It is to be

noted that in three of these six exceptional incidents of

hostility directed by non-ruling-class European-Americans

at non-European-Americans, European-American

bystanders were present; in two cases out of the three, the

bystanders actively dissociated themselves from such

chauvinism.

In general, as this chapter has illustrated, despite the six

exceptions cited, the attitude of the laboring-class

European-Americans stood in sharp contrast to the

succession of enactments whereby the plantation

bourgeoisie pressed for the lifetime, hereditary bond-

servitude of African-American bond-laborers, and for the

circumscription of the rights, and the ultimate practical

proscription of free African-Americans.

Two fair conclusions would seem to follow: First, “the

white race” – supra-class unity of European-Americans in

opposition to African-Americans – did not and could not

have then existed. Second, the invention of the white race

at the beginning of the eighteenth century can in no part be

ascribed to demands by European-American laboring

people for privileges vis-à-vis African-Americans.

The Insubstantiality of the

Intermediate Stratum

Virginia Colony evolved under the direct rule of a tiny

elite which, in the fifteen years leading up to Bacon’s

Rebellion, included fewer than four hundred men,

probably numbering no more than two hundred at any one

time, owners of an average of 4,200 acres of land each.

The lowest-ranking members of this stratum were the

county

commissioners, deliberately limited by Act of

Assembly in 1661 to no more than eight per county,

who

acted collectively as the county court, and served

individually as magistrates, justices of the peace, in their

respective districts. The members of the county courts,

among whom the office of sheriff was rotated annually,

were appointed from time to time by the Colony Council

and  Governor,  upon  the  recommendation  of  the  sitting
members  of  the  particular  county  court.
4
  Next  came  the
members  of  the Virginia  House  of  Burgesses  who  were
invariably elected from among the members of the county
courts. Originally  the vote  was  exercised by all  freemen
but  as  the  ranks  of  propertyless  former  bond-laborers
increased,  in  1670  the  General  Assembly  deliberately
excluded  these  latter  from  the  right  to  vote.
5
  At  the  top
were  the  Governor  (appointed  by  Charles  II,  king  of
England  during  this  period)  and  the  Virginia  Colony
Council, made up of men appointed by the Governor with
the  formal  approval  of  the  General  Assembly,  the  term
used to describe the House  of Burgesses and the Colony
Council  together.  The  Governor  and  the  Colony  Council
constituted the General Court.
6
County  court  and  magistrate  orders  were  enforced  by
the county sheriffs and constables, and through pursuit by
hue and cry. But hue and cry after runaway bond-laborers
was  so  generally  neglected  that  in  1658  the  General
Assembly ordered the imposition of fines on householders
and  constables  for  such  lapses  in  civic  responsibility.
7
Two  years  later  the  General Assembly  again  faulted  the
constables  for  neglect  of  their  duty  to  hunt  down
runaways.
8
 In 1669, the General Assembly not only noted
the  plots  made  by  bond-laborers  to  escape  their  owners
but also charged that “some planters,” instead of arresting

the fugitives, “have given them assistance and directions

how to escape.”

The General Assembly then proceeded

to provide a reward, not only to encourage constables but

to enlist the general public in the capture of runaway

bond-laborers, by offering to any person one thousand

pounds of tobacco for each runaway recaptured. It was

intended that when bond-laborers became aware of “soe

many spies upon them,” they would “keep within the

bounds of their duty.”

The general subject of runaways

has been treated in Chapter 8; the point here is to

emphasize the absence of an effective social control

stratum.

Every man between the ages of sixteen and sixty was

subject to service in the militia. Its organizational structure

derived from the political structure of organization of the

colony, the militia of each county being officered by local

members of the colony elite. An establishing order issued

by Governor Francis Moryson in June 1661 required each

county to mobilize three militia companies, to be made up

of “freemen and Servants of undoubted fidelity.” Because

the population was so widely dispersed that the entire

county regiment could not be mobilized for sudden

emergencies, a special unit called the “settled trayned

band,” was to be formed of one-eighth of the entire

regiment and divided into three companies, selected

because of the members’ proximity to the plantation of the

regiment’s captain.

The Governor and Colony Council

were obliged to confess the incompetence of the militia

for sustained service, citing two factors: the impossibility

of storing sufficient corn to sustain the militia on extended

duty, because of the infestation of the grain by vermin; and

the strenuous objections of the men against being diverted

from making their tobacco crop.

In summary, I quote Professor Morgan:

There was no trained constabulary. The county commissioners, who

annually chose the constables in each county, usually rotated the job among

men of small means, who could not afford the fines for refusing to take it.

There was no army except the militia, composed of men who would be as

unlikely as the constables to make effective instruments for suppressing the

insubordination of their own kind.

There was, then, in Virginia no intermediate social control

stratum based on a secure yeoman class such as had been

preserved in England.

The Deference and Reverence Deficit

In well-ordered class societies, ancient traditions of pomp

and circumstance play a vital part in instructing the masses

in subservience to “their betters.” “[R]everence,” wrote

Francis Bacon, “is that wherewith princes are girt from

God.”

But the claim to authority of the seventeenth-

century planter elite rested on raw acquisitiveness,

expressed first of all in their possession of mainly English

bond-laborers, and in their large handholdings based not

on ancient titles but on headrights purchased by import of

human chattels.

There were no storied manors in

Virginia to which they could say they had been born.

Furthermore, the fact that the elite planters were

necessarily as involved as the poorest of their neighbors

in the cheek-by-jowl competition each for his share in the

tobacco market was not calculated to promote a

deferential attitude toward the same elite planters as the

ruling circle.

Auxiliary institutions, particularly those of established

religion, render indispensable service in preserving and

protecting the awe in which ruling classes need to be held.

But that great pillar of reverence for authority the

established Church of England did not travel well to

seventeenth-century Virginia, where it enjoyed the status

of a mere subdivision of the London bishopric. Whereas in

England the parish minister, upon recommendation of

some eminent person or of a university, was appointed

with life tenure, in Virginia, parish vestries made up of

rich local planters had the nomination of the minister who

was then formally chosen by the Governor rather than by a

clerical authority. The result was that ministers, being no

more than hired hands employed from year to year at the

pleasure of the vestries, often lapsed into demoralization.

In cataloguing the sad conditions prevailing in Virginia in

the middle of the seventeenth century, an English clerical

critic asserted that the colony’s ministers were “for the

most part, not only far short of those qualifications

required in Ministers … but men of opposite qualities and

tempers … by their loose lives, and un-Gospel becoming

conversation.”

Such a church “could not play its

traditional role of fostering obedient habits” among the

colonists.

The Anglican church was enfeebled, and neither was

the political climate favorable to Puritans. Quakers were

outlawed in the seventeenth century; official hostility

towards them did not slacken until early in the eighteenth

century.

In any case, ministers were so few and far

between that even if every one of them had been willing

and able to play the social buffer role, they would have

been an insufficient leaven for the colony’s lump of

irreverence. In a colony of forty or fifty thousand widely

scattered people, there were only thirty-five Anglican

priests in 1680.

What is one to conclude, then, about the state of ruling-

class social control in the decade before Bacon’s

Rebellion, when Colony Secretary Thomas Ludwell was

fain to confess that Virginia’s small landholders were

restrained from rebellion only by “faith in the mercy of

God, loyalty to the King, and affection for the

Governor”?

A Society Shaped by Monoculture

The basic cause of the failure of the plantation elite to

establish a viable system of social control in the

seventeenth century was, of course, the tobacco

monocultural economy itself. Rainbolt stated the case most

clearly:

A colony where most men pursued the same occupation of tobacco planter

seemed ill suited to the emergence of a heirarchical social system. A

Province where most men lived in relative isolation on scattered plantations

prevented that constant scrutiny of inferiors by their superiors deemed vital

to the order of a society.

After the margin of profit had been stabilized by the

institution of the new chattel bond-labor relation of

production in the 1620s, the farm price of Chesapeake

tobacco averaged about 4d. per pound in the 1630s.

the next two decades, however, the average price was

reduced by almost half, to 2.2d. It is impossible to fix the

year when the falling tendency of tobacco prices reached

the critical level in regard to ruling-class social control,

but the decline of tobacco to an average of 1.2d. per pound
for the entire decade and a half beginning in 1660 was a
basic  condition  for  the  eruption  in  1676  of  the  social
control crisis known to history as Bacon’s Rebellion.
23
Tobacco  planters  were  trapped  in  a  vicious  spiral:
efforts  by  each  planter  to  make  up  in  volume  for  the
declining price forced all to do as each; as this drove the
price even lower, the planters fell ever deeper into debt.
In  1664  the planters of Virginia  and  Maryland went into
debt of £50,000 on their shipments to England.
24
 But the
burden  did  not  fall  uniformly  on  the  planters;  indeed,  it
tended to enrich the planter elite.
Warren  M.  Billings  has  analyzed  the  year-to-year
changes  in  the  level  of  the  indebtedness  in  six  Virginia
counties  for  the  period  1660–75
25
  by  tabulating  the
amounts for which creditors sued for payment.
26
 The total
debt of all planters in cases decided in the courts of those
six  counties  averaged  3,243,000  pounds  of  tobacco  per
year. In those counties, with a total population of several
thousand,
27
 the thirty or so members of the plantation elite
accounted  for  35.6  percent  of  the  total  credit,  with  the
debts  owed to  members  of  the  elite  class  amounting  to
twice  as  much  as  the  amounts  owed by  them.
28
  Social
dissolution  was  especially  portended  by the fact that the
indebtedness gap between the elite and the general run of
planters tended to increase as time went on, by an average

of  375,000  pounds  of  tobacco  every  year  during  the
sixteen-year  period.
29
  The  records  suggest  that  the
deteriorating conditions of the  non-elite planters in these
six counties were typical of Virginia as a whole.
This  discrepancy  between  the  elite  and  non-elite  with
respect to the debt burden would seem to be a reflection of
a  marked  tendency  toward  concentration  of  land  in  the
hands  of  the  former  (see Table  9.1).  Morgan  finds  an
extreme degree of land engrossment by headright for other
counties: in 1658, thirty persons owned most of the land –
100,000 acres – on the south side of the Potomac; in 1664,
33,750  acres  of  headright  land  went  to  only  thirteen
persons  in Accomack  County,  and  15,050  acres  of
Rappahannock  land  was  claimed  by  only  six  persons.
These nineteen patents accounted for 30 percent of all the
headright  acres  patented  in  Virginia  in  that  year,  and
averaged  over  2,500  acres  each;  eight  patents  in
Accomack,  Isle  of  Wight  and  Rappahannock  counties,
averaging  more  than  4,300  acres  each,  accounted  for  23
percent  of  all  headright  land  patented  in  Virginia  in
1666.
30
  These  figures  from  various  counties  appear
consistent  with  and  confirm  the  trend  suggested  by  the
comparison of figures for 1626 and 1704 shown in Table
9.1.
31
The  most  significant  indicator  of  increasing
concentration  of  capital,  however,  is  the  number  of

laborers per plantation. Kevin P. Kelly’s study of the

records of Surry County, on the south side of the James

River, revealed that there, small households dominated

throughout the seventeenth century, although “there was a

growing divergence between the large planters controlling

more than ten laborers, and the small, independent

planter.”

Wertenbaker found that the Surry County ratio

of tithables to taxpayers in 1675 and 1685, considered

together, was 18 to 10, but by 1704 the comparable ratio,

of tithables to freeholders, was 39 to 10.

Edward

Randolph, Royal Inspector of Customs, reported to the

Lords of Trade and Plantations in 1696 that the “chief and

only reason” for the retarded development of Virginia

colony was that “Members of the Council and

others … have from time to time procured grants of very

large Tracts of Land.” By the use of headrights, he said,

many of this elite group held “twenty or thirty thousand

acres of land apiece” which were left unplanted yet

unavailable to prospective planters.

Table 9.1 Increase in concentration of landholdings in

Virginia, 1626–1704

Holdings 1626 1704

100 acres or less

(a) % of total acres 24.9% 4.9%

(b) % of all holdings 54.0% 24.0%

(d) acres 8,610 112,100

(e) average size 68 85

101 to 499 acres

(a) % of total acres 41.4% 32.7%

(b) % of all holdings 36.9% 54.3%

(d) acres 13,140 742,000

(e) average size 313 250

500 to 999 acres

(a) % of total acres 22.5% 22.3%

(b) % of all holdings 7.7% 13.5%

(d) acres 7,800 504,300

(e) average size 557 683

1,000 acres or more

(a) % of total acres 10.2% 40.1%

(b) % of all holdings 1.6% 8.4%

(d) acres 3,582 907,900

(e) average size 1,284 1,969

Sources: John C. Hotten, The Original Lists, this page–this page, patented

land in Virginia in 1626; 1704 Virginia Rent Rolls, printed in T. J.

Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922).

Reflecting the results of such egregious engrossment of

headright land by importation of bond-laborers by the

plantation bourgeoisie, 60 to 65 per cent of Virginia

landholders, according to Wertenbaker’s estimate, had no

bond-laborers at all in the closing two or two and a half

decades of the seventeenth century.

A corresponding

pattern of differentiation is apparent in Russell R.

Menard’s comparison of estate inventories on the lower

western Maryland shore of Chesapeake Bay, in the 1658–

70 and 1700–1705 periods.

The proportion having

bond-laborers declined by nearly one-tenth (49.4 to 45.2

percent). The proportion of the total bond-labor force

represented by estates having only one or two bond-

laborers was reduced by more than one-third (18.3 to 11.0

percent). At the other end of the scale, in 1700–1705 the

proportion of estates with 21 or more bond-laborers was

nearly six times what it had been in the 1658–70 period

(rising from 1.1 percent to 6.2 percent of all estates), and

their share of the total number of bond-laborers had

increased to almost five times what it was in the earlier

period (from 6.5 to 31.6 percent of all bond-laborers).

The Dutch Wars and Doubtful Loyalty

Threats of Dutch seaborne incursions during the Second

and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, in 1665–67 and 1672–74,

served to underscore the weakness of the elite’s social

control of the colony. In 1667, a Dutch warship succeeded

in entering the James River and capturing the Virginia

tobacco fleet of twenty ships. That same year, the Dutch

admiral de Ruyter audaciously sailed up the Thames and

the Medway, and detroyed or captured some of the finest

ships of the English navy. But there was a significant

difference in the two situations, so far as the ruling class

was concerned. England was in no danger of invasion and

occupation by Dutch forces aided by the rank and file of

the English people; in Virginia that prospect was

perceived as real.

On 11 July 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War,

another Dutch naval force of nine ships conducted a raid

up the James River, defeated the English in a three-hour

battle, and captured eleven merchant ships laden with

cargo.

Governor Berkeley and the Colony Council,

writing to the King and Privy Council in England, asked

that a large fort be constructed to command the entrance to

the James and the Chesapeake Bay, or else that the home

government provide regularly for a strong convoy for the

Virginia tobacco fleet, the expense to be recovered

through raised merchant freight charges. They based their

appeal on the non-functional state of the Virginia militia.

But the social control question, which is a central

concern of this work, is brought most starkly into focus by

the following passage of their letter, which describes

Virginia as

intersected by Soe many vast Rivers as makes more Miles to Defend, then

we have men of trust to Defend them, for by our neerest computacon wee

leave at our backs as many Servants (besides Negroes) as there are

freemen to defend the Shoare and on all our Frontiers the Indians. Both

which gives men fearfull apprehentions of the dainger they Leave their

Estates and Families in, Whilst they are drawne from their houses to defend

the Borders. Of which number also at least one third are single freemen

(whose labor Will hardly maintaine them), or men much in debt, both which

Wee may reasonably expect upon any small advantage the Enemy may

gaine upon us, would revolt to them in hopes of bettering their Condicon.

Fourteen such debt-ridden Surry County freemen attempted

the following December and January to organize a mutiny

against payment of the colony levy. Meeting first at

Lawnes Creek Church and next in Devil’s Field, they

declared their determination to stand together come what

might, “burn one, burn all.” Their effort was thwarted;

four were fined 1,000 pounds of tobacco, one 2,000

pounds, and all were put under bond for their future good

behavior.

Although the Lawnes Creek Mutiny was thwarted, it

was both a validation of the fears of Berkeley and the

Colony Council, and a portent of the general mutiny of

1676, Bacon’s Rebellion. Objective “social and economic

conditions” themselves “conspired against an effective

control of the citizenry by the provincial leadership.”

Facing the Problem

Three means were available to the plantation bourgeoisie

to combat the economic root of social instability: (1)

regulate the production and shipment of tobacco to relieve

the ruinous effect of the glut of the market; (2) diversify

production in order to escape the desperate dependency on

tobacco monoculture; or (3) find a way to lower the cost

of labor per unit of output.

It was to be expected that contradictions would develop

between English monarchy and mercantilism, on the one

hand, and the colonial plantation bourgeoisie, on the other.

These clashes of interest, which in time would find fullest

expression as part of the American War of Independence,

first emerged in the context of the long crisis of tobacco

overproduction and low prices that began at the moment of

the Stuart Restoration in 1660.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Anglo-

American plantation bourgeoisie preached the virtues of

diversification of the Chesapeake economy, while

reproducing decade after decade the economic morass of

tobacco monoculture. Warnings were sounded by Virginia

officials against basing Virginia’s economy on tobacco

alone; they urged that a variety of products be developed

to meet a variety of English market demands. The longest-

serving and most famous of Virginia colonial governors,

Sir William Berkeley, was himself the most articulate

denouncer of tobacco monoculture and the most

enthusiastic advocate of diversification. “Our Governors,”

said Berkeley, in a treatise of the early 1660s, “by the

corruption of the times they lived in, laid the Foundation

of our wealth and industry on the vices of

men … [particularly] this vicious habit of taking

Tobacco.”

But, with encouragement and instruction from

the home government, said Berkeley, Virginia within

seven years could supply England with all its needs for

“Silk, Flax, Hemp, Pitch, Tar, Iron, Masts, Timber and

Pot-ashes,” that were then of necessity being imported

from other countries at great expense.

Over the years, various suggestions were made for

reducing production – by limiting the number of leaves on

the plant, or the number of plants, or by limiting the time

allowed for transplanting seedlings – and for regulating

the time of shipping the crop in order to maximize

favorable seasonal factors. Repeated proposals were

advanced for co-ordinating with Maryland and North

Carolina in limiting tobacco production, but they came to

naught. Merchant shipowners opposed this last idea

because, as they said in 1662, it would seriously interfere

with the shipment of bond-laborers and thus cause a

burdensome increase in the number of unemployed in

England.

Other measures aimed at directly shoring up tobacco

planters’ profits by exemptions from export duties, by a

measure of relief from the provisions of the Navigation

Law, and by exempting Virginia-owned ships from export

duties on their cargoes.

Topographical factors, involving the heavy costs of

clearing away the ubiquitous forest, and the decentralizing

influence of geography (Virginia being a series of

peninsulas formed by navigable rivers), as well as clashes

of various economic interests, hampered programs aimed

at both diversification and the limiting of tobacco

production.

With regard to diversification, furthermore,

there was a lack of capital in Virginia for ventures into

other lines of production, since the Virginia bourgeoisie

was chronically in debt to English merchants. The three

Dutch wars used up English resources that might

theoretically have been available for investment in

Virginia; later, the same drain of capital accompanied the

first phase (1689–1713) of the Anglo-French wars of

colonial rivalry. After the Restoration in 1660, the Crown

itself was so desperate for funds that, far from wanting to

embark on diversification experiments, it was determined

to maximize the tobacco trade, which was its most

lucrative source of income; integral with that, there was

the interest of the English tax-and-customs “farmers,” who

contracted to collect the king’s customs on tobacco

imports. In 1671 the king’s share from import customs

collections on Virginia tobacco was estimated to be

£80,000 per year; in 1682 the royal share of tobacco

profits was calculated to be £7 per year for every

plantation bond-laborer.

English merchants, who did

have capital they might have invested, were not interested

in taking unnecessary risks with it; and they were

adamantly opposed to encouraging the rise of a set of

competitive industries in Virginia.

On general principles the English mercantilists were

increasingly wary of deviations from the primacy of

tobacco production, and especially of those deviations that

might lead to the development of competition with goods

produced in England and to the consequent economic

independence of colonies. In April 1705 the

Commissioners of Trade specifically instructed the

Governors of Virginia and Maryland to “take care not to

suffer the People employed in the making of Tobacco to be

Deverted therefrom.”

In the eyes of English

manufacturers, such a development “would be of very ill

consequence” to English woolen exports and tobacco

shipping and imports, and would jeopardize the relation of

dependence in which a colony should be kept.

In 1707

Governor John Seymour warned the Board of Trade that

credit-starved Maryland planters, rendered “almost starke

naked” for lack of English-made clothing, were turning to

making their own linen and woolen goods. He too worried

about the “ill consequence to the Revenue arising on

tobacco” if people in that colony generally laid aside

tobacco-making in order to manufacture such goods as

they customarily purchased from England.

Governor

Gooch was confident that wages were so high in Virginia

that Virginia-made linen would cost 20 percent more and

woolen cloth 50 percent more than English textiles and

therefore would be unable to compete with English-made

goods as exports. But since they might reduce the market

for British manufactures within the colony, such local

industry should be discouraged. Acting on Gooch’s

information, the Board of Trade in London resolved to

find a way to “divert their [the colonists’] thoughts from

Undertakings of this nature.”

Diversification efforts were not aimed at supplanting

the tobacco monoculture, but merely at protecting it. One

premise was common to all parties – the Virginia ruling

elite, the English Crown, English merchants, and rival

provincial governments in Maryland and North Carolina.

However much they differed over principles, such as

those of the mercantilist Navigation Laws, or details

regarding the regulation of production and shipment, or the

number and location of centralizing port cities, they all

held to one inviolable principle – the priority to be given

to the maintenance and enhancement of profit on tobacco.

Consequently, schemes for limiting directly the supply of

tobacco brought to the market were driven aground by the

prevailing winds of competitive pressure for the quickest

turnover of capital, coupled with the Crown’s

determination to resist any diminution of its tobacco

revenues, which were based on physical volume rather

than selling price.

But even if, by a sudden rush of enlightened self-interest

to the heads of all parties, some more than evanescent

scheme for “economic reform” could have been instituted,

it would have been foredoomed by the insubstantiality of

the requisite buffer social control stratum. Virginia’s

“labor- and capital-scarce economy demanded efficient

marshaling of effort and resources,” requiring social

discipline that could not be imposed by the plantation

elite, having “large goals but small capacity to command,”

and “lacking strong supporting social and religious

institutions.”

The Third Possibility: Reducing Labor Costs

The English bourgeoisie finally secured direct access to

African labor at the end of the Second Dutch War,

concluded in the Treaty of Breda in 1667.

Five years

later, with the establishment of the Royal African

Company, England embarked on a career that within less

than forty years made English merchants the preeminent

suppliers of African bond-labor to the Western

Hemisphere. A rise in the demand for labor in England,

and a corresponding rise in the wage level there (soon to

be coupled with the great demand for cannon fodder for

the far-flung battle lines of England’s contest with France

in Europe and in America), reduced the supply of persons

available for bond-labor in the plantation colonies.

As it had been when the source of supply had been in

Europe, the African labor trade was a self-motivating

capital interest. Virginia Governor Thomas Lord Culpeper

was urged by King Charles II “to give all due

encouragement and invitation to Merchants and

others … and in particular to the Royal African Company

of England.” Culpeper was further instructed to be on

guard against any “interlopers” in that trade, which was

intended to be a monopoly of the Royal African

Company.

Replying a year later, Culpeper asserted that

the king alone made at least £6 per year from the labor of

each Negro bond-laborer in Virginia.

Now, finally, the plantation bourgeoisie was brought

within reach of the realization of the vision foreshadowed

in a number of laws already enacted, of enrichment

through the imposition of lifetime, hereditary bond-

servitude of Africans and African-Americans. In

seventeenth-century Virginia the buyer paid an average of

£14 and £13 respectively for men and women five-year

bond-laborers. The investment in “seasoned” hands

depreciated, however, and at an increasing rate; at the end

of three years its value would be only £7 for males and £4

for females. The buyer of an adult lifetime bond-laborer

was making an average investment of £18 to £20, an

amount that depreciated over the remaining years of the

laborer’s life. Thus the retained value of the investment at

the end of three years would run in favor of the option for

lifetime bond-labor. If that lifetime lasted ten years, the

annual amortization on the investment would have been

less than £2, about 30 percent less than on two five-year

bond-laborers. There were ancillary benefits of

investment in lifetime bond-labor since there was no

outlay for freedom dues, and even at birth a child of a

lifetime bond-laborer was of some capital value.

The

anticipated reduction in labor costs would have been

desirable for the employing class at any time, but as the

end of the seventeenth century neared it appeared to offer

the bourgeoisie both a way of evading the unresolvable

contradictions between monoculture and diversity, and a

significant easing of the contention between English and

continental branches of the business with respect to profits

from low-priced tobacco. Culpeper stressed this latter

consideration in urging the Royal African Company to

moderate its prices for the sale of lifetime bond-laborers

in Virginia. “[I]n regard to the infinite profit that comes to

the King by every Black (far beyond any other

Plantation) … and that Blacks can make [tobacco] cheaper

than Whites, I conceive it is for his Majesty’s Interest full

as much as the Countrys, or rather much more, to have

Blacks as cheap as possible in Virginia.”

But if a lack of “capacity to command” had made it

impossible for the plantation bourgeoisie to impose the

necessary social discipline on free and middle-rank

tobacco farmers, what hope could there be for imposing

social control on a society when masses of kidnapped

Africans were added to the ranks of the disaffected bond-

laborers already at the bottom of the heap?

A Reflective Postscript

With that question, the narrative portion of this chapter is

complete, but a reflective postscript is in order. For the

reader’s indulgence, I appeal to the example of Philip

Alexander Bruce’s speculation on the possibility of an

alternative path of development for the Old Dominion.

Those historians who intend not only to record and

interpret history, but also in so doing to affect its future

course are impelled to offer judgments that for them seem

to light the path ahead,

even though sooner or later other

historians are sure to find the light misdirected or

insufficient in one or more respects. Having studied the

record of the travail of the common people of seventeenth-

century Virginia, “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” as

Professor Morgan has called it, I cannot but ponder if it

was possible for history to have followed a different,

happier course and, if so, what Virginia by such a course

would have become. It is a speculation, but I hope not an

idle one.

In 1625 Sir Francis Bacon cited Virginia as an example

to be avoided in establishing plantations, arguing that “the

base and hasty drawing of profit” from tobacco worked to

“the untimely prejudice of the main business.”

John

Smith, son of the English yeomanry, soon warned that to

base production on chattel bond-labor was a disastrous

course.

Received historiographical doctrine argues to the

contrary as follows. Virginia colony could only survive by

exports; tobacco was not only the most profitable prospect

for that role, but the only practicable one. Because of the

low price of tobacco and the high prevailing wages,

chattel bond-servitude was indispensable. The alternative

was “slow progress” as “a community of small peasant

properitors.” Such a course would (the thesis concludes)

have been “utopian”; Virginia, indeed, was by nature

designed to be “A commonwealth of tobacco

plantations.”

Who is right? If the question were merely a

historiographical one, it would be as well to let it rest

with the dead past. But the issue is not dead; it is as vital

today as it was those nearly four centuries ago. The

equating of economic growth with the most rapid

accumulation of capital, which led Virginia to misery just

as John Smith predicted, has continued to this day to guide

the ruling class of the USA, who subordinate to that

principle all other interests, heedless of the misery that it

may leave in its wake.

“Two roads diverged … And that made all the

difference”

As Virginia was first getting high on tobacco, the Pilgrims

landed at Plymouth Rock to begin in New England a form

of internal economic organization that largely embodied

the principles advanced by Francis Bacon in that

respect.

In an appraisal of the condition of Virginia at

the close of the seventeenth century, James Blair, the

founder of William and Mary College lamented the fact

that “No care was taken at the beginning to seat that

Country [Virginia] in Townshipps, as in New England.”

The result, he continued, was that Virginia was “deprived

of the great Company of Citizens and Tradesmen that are

in other Countryes.”

Although both colonies were products of bourgeois

England, four sets of contrasting factors would determine

their respective patterns of social development:

1. the domination of landholding by large plantations in Virginia versus the

predominance of small farms in New England;

2. the Virginia monoculture, with its utter dependence upon export markets,

versus the mainly non-market-centered, and definitely non-capitalist, basic

New England economy;

3. the chattel bond-labor force of the Virginia Plantation system versus the

non-bond-labor of the small New England farms;

4. the Virginia “family,” which included all the persons belonging to one

plantation even if most of them were not kin of each other, versus that

typical New England family of a mother and father and their children.

The character of seventeenth-century Virginia society in

these respects has been adequately described here;

however, a brief elaboration of the New England case is

in order. The statistics cited by Moller regarding

contrasting seventeenth-century sex ratios in Anglo-

American continental colonies

are explained in terms of

the contrasting labor bases:

While in the New England immigration males outnumbered females three to

two, the ratio was six to one in the Virginia immigration. The Puritans,

broadly speaking, arrived by families … The movement to Virginia, on the

contrary, consisted predominantly of male workers [i.e., chattel bond-

laborers].

As we have seen, for every person brought into Virginia

in the seventeenth century, a patent on fifty acres of land

was bestowed on whomever had paid the cost of the

immigrant’s transportation. This custom, supplemented by

special land grants to favored individuals, was the basis

of the high degree of concentration of landownership in

that colony. In the very earliest days in New England, the

headright form of land grant was observed, but over the

colonial period as a whole “by far the greater part of the

land disposed of was granted to communities of

settlers.”

Thus was formed in New England the very

“township” form of settlement whose absence in Virginia

was so much lamented by Commissary Blair. Under the

New England system of settlement by families, “Great

pains were taken to guard against excessive grants and

accumulation of large estates,” writes Egleston. “Land,

however abundant, was to be given by the community

authorities  to  those  who  could  use  it.”
69
  New  England
settlement  was  in  the form of  communities  initiated  by  a
group of families securing, usually from the colony general
court, an allotment of land not occupied by other settlers.
These “proprietors” then distributed the land to colonists
by  plots  of  ground,  proportioned  to  their  payment  for
expenses of surveying, and other incidentals.
70
 A tendency
toward concentration of land ownership did occur in New
England “[t]hrough purchase, marriage, inheritance, [and]
proprietary rights … with the result that later distributions
of  land,  particularly  those  of  the  eighteenth  century,
showed  more  inequality;”
71
  but  it  was  relatively
insignificant as compared to that in plantation Virginia.
72
Schemes  and  hopes  of  diversification  of  the  Virginia
economy were frustrated, as has been noted, by a shortage
of  capital  for  investment.  Caught  as  the  planters  were
between a low-ranging elasticity of tobacco prices and the
inelasticity  of  royal  customs  and  shipping  charges,  they
could not escape the discipline of the next year’s indebted
crop. Seventeenth-century New England settlers were not
faced with that difficulty because “the household mode of
production  remained  the  dominant  form  of  existence.”
73
By the middle of the eighteenth century, when a degree of
market  development  had  occurred,
74
  the  New  England
farmer might profit from a cash crop, perhaps wheat. But
where  does  a  self-employed  person,  propertyless  except

for an ax, possibily a plow, two or three animals, and

enough grain to get the family through to his first harvest –

where, without credit resources, does such a self-

employed person get the capital for clearing land, building

shelter for the family and the animals, and storage sheds or

barns, and cutting new road?

[Such a] farmer may be compared to a business corporation which pursues

a conservative dividend policy. Instead of paying out all of current income to

stockholders, it puts a large share back into the business, thus increasing the

value of his capital … [thus] literally ploughing in his profits.

Such farmers made up the “communities of peasant

proprietors” that Bruce argued were necessarily excluded

from the march of “progress” in Virginia. Yet in New

England they proved from their seventeenth-century

beginnings to be perfectly viable and capable of eventual

evolution from natural (subsistence) production to simple

commodity production (the commodity beginning as the

property of the producer) to capitalist production (wherein

the product is never the property of the producer, but of

the capitalist employer).

Colonial Virginia has been assessed as “dynamic” and

New England as the “least dynamic” of the continental

colonies. By the eighteenth century, when Virginia and

New England were about equal in population size,

Virginia’s exports and imports were six to ten times as

large as New England’s.

It is obvious that New

England’s climate and soil characteristics made the

general employment of bond-labor impracticable, even if

the land distribution system had formed plantations of a

size suitable for profitable capitalist operation, and some

staple had been struck upon that would not offend

competitors in Old England. But it does not follow that

Virginia’s climate and soil could not have been settled on

the basis of communities of small farmsteads. For New

England it was not a matter of choice; for Virginia it was.

So it was that New England, more than anywhere else in

North America, re-created rural England, while the

Virginia plantation bourgeoisie “cast away restraining

ideologies and institutions [and] developed a labor

process unknown in England.”

It was a conscious decision, not an unthinking one. In

opting for the “dynamics” of monoculture and chattel

bond-labor, the members of the Virginia plantation

bourgeoisie knew they were rejecting the counsel of

perhaps the most illustrious member of the Virginia

Company. “It is true,” Bacon had said, “speedy profit is

not to be neglected as far as it may stand with the good of

the plantation, but no further.”

It was simply what

preacher Lionel Gatford warned them against in 1657 –

the triumph of “Private Interest” over “Publick Good.”

Now fifty years after the fateful option was made, having

ignored Sir Francis’s precept and New England’s

example, the Virginia ruling elite found itself three

thousand miles from home with no yeoman buffer between

it and a people of whom “six parts of seaven at least, are

Poore, Endebted, Discontented and Armed.”

The Status of African-Americans

For more than a century now, scholars have studied the

records regarding the status of African-Americans in

Virginia and Maryland in the seventeenth century.

Although I in turn have made my own independent study of

these materials, persons familiar with the field will

recognize the majority of my references to the records.

What they and other readers will be challenged to do is to

test my interpretation of the facts. Therefore, it seems

appropriate at this point to review the basic definition of

racial oppression and to enumerate the particular forms of

that oppression as they were set forth in Volume One of

this work.

The hallmark of racial oppression in its

colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent

historical contexts is the reduction of all members of the

oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, a

status  beneath  that  of  any  member  of  any  social  class
within the oppressor group.
3
 It is a system of rule designed
to  deny,  disregard,  delegitimate  previous  or  potential
social distinctions that may have existed or that might tend
to emerge in the normal course of development of a class
society.
I n Chapter  8  and  again  in Chapter  9,  I  have  argued
inferentially  that  “the  white  race,”  and  thus  a  system  of
racial oppression, did not exist and could not have existed
in the seventeenth-century tobacco colonies. In Chapter 8
that conclusion was based on evidence of class solidarity
of  laboring-class  European-Americans  with  African-
Americans,  and  the  consequent  absence  of  an  all-class
coalition  of  European-Americans  directed  against
African-Americans.  In Chapter  9  the  thesis  was  linked
with  the  lack  of  a  substantial  intermediate  buffer  social
control  stratum.  In  the  present  chapter  a  third  ply  of  the
argument  is  to  be  developed  primarily from  the  Virginia
records,  directly  bearing  on  the  actual  social  status  of
African-Americans  in  those  decades.  Since,  so  far  as  I
know,  this  analytical  approach  to  the  study  of  racial
oppression is different from that taken by other historians,
I offer the following brief elaboration in justification of it.
Some scholars concerned with the problem of the origin
of  racial  slavery  have  emphasized  that  the  status  of  the
African-Americans in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake

cannot be fully determined because of a deficiency in the

records for the early decades.

Others, by reference to

Virginia statutes, assert that the differentiation of the status

of African-Americans and European-Americans can be

determined as beginning only about 1660.

I would

propose to dissolve this aspect of the debate over the

origin of racial slavery by recognizing that the historical

records of seventeenth-century Virginia compel the

conclusion that the relative social status of African-

Americans and European-Americans in that “Volatile

Society” can be determined to have been indeterminate. It

was indeterminate because it was being fought out:

fought

out in the context of the great social stresses of high

mortality, the vicissitudes of a monocultural economy,

impoverishment, and an extremely high sex ratio – all of

which were based on or derived from the abnormal system

of chattel bond-servitude. The critical moment of that

social struggle arrived with Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676

which posed the question of who should rule. The answer,

which would be contrived over the next several decades,

would not only determine the status of African-Americans

but would install the monorail of Anglo-American

historical development, white supremacy.

The reduction of the almost totally English labor force

from tenants and wage-laborers to chattel bond-servitude

in Virginia in the 1620s was indeed a negation of

previously existing laws and customs, but it was imposed
by one set of colonists on another set of colonists. It was
not,  therefore,  an  act of racial  oppression  (no  more  than
was  the  1547  slave  law  in  England
7
),  but  merely  an
extremely  reactionary  sort  of  class  oppression.  As  for
seeking to establish two distinct categories of servitude –
limited-term and lifetime servitude – the death rate was so
high for several decades
8
 that there would  have been no
practical advantage for employers in such a distinction.
9
In  1640,  however,  just  such  a  distinction  was
anticipated when the Virginia General Court, in a singular
instance, imposed lifetime bond-servitude on John Punch.
Punch, an African-American, and two European-American
fellow  bond-laborers  were  arraigned  for  having  run
away.
10
  But  why  did  the  appetite  for  profit  not  lead  the
court  to  sentence  John  Punch’s  European-American
comrades to lifetime servitude also?
11
Winthrop  D.  Jordan  directs  particular  attention  to this
decree,  and  cites  it  as  evidence  for  his  belief  that  the
enslavement  of  Negroes  was the result of  an  “unthinking
decision,” arising out of a prejudice against Negroes.
12
 It
may be true  that the court  in this case was motivated by
such feelings, although any such conclusion rests totally on
inference;  it  is  not a  fact  of the record.  Other inferences
are  possible.  Under  English  common  law,  Christians
could  not  be  enslaved  by  Christians;  presumably,  Scots

and Dutchmen were Christians; but Africans were not. As

a practical matter, England’s relations with Scotland and

Holland were critical to English interests, so that there

might well have been a reluctance to offend those

countries to whom English concerns were in hostage,

whereas no such complication was likely to arise from

imposing lifetime bondage on an African or African-

American. The court members in all probability were

aware of the project then under way to establish an

English plantation colony, using African lifetime bond-

laborers, on Providence Island;

and they surely knew

that some Africans were already being exploited

elsewhere in the Americas on the same terms. They might

have been influenced by such examples to pursue the same

purpose in Virginia. They were also aware that the

African-American bond-laborers arriving in Virginia from

the West Indies (or Brazil via Dutch colonies to the north

of Maryland

) did not come with English-style, term-

limiting indentures; the members of the General Court may

thus have felt encouraged to impose the ultimate term, a

lifetime, in such cases. Whether the decision in this

instance was a “thinking” or an “unthinking” one, the court

by citing John Punch’s “being a negro” in justification of

his life sentence was resorting to mere bench law, devoid

of reference to English or Virginia precedent.

What the

record of this case does show, so far as the ideas in

people’s heads are concerned, is a disposition on the part

of some, at least, of the plantation bourgeoisie to reduce

African-Americans to lifetime servitude.

As the proportion of bond-laborers who were surviving

their terms increased, some employers began to see an

appeal in extending the bond-laborers’ terms generally.

The “custom of the country” for English bond-laborers in

Virginia, which had been set at four years in 1658, was

increased to five in 1662.

With the flourishing of the

Irish slave trade in the wake of the Cromwellian

conquest,

laws were enacted to make Irish bond-

laborers (and, after 1658, “all aliens” in that status) serve

six years.

That provision was eliminated, however, by

the post-Cromwell law of 1660, in the interest of

“peopling the country.”

The 1660 law equalized at five years the length of “the

custom of the country” without distinction of “aliens,” but

that same law for the first time restricted term-limiting to

those “of what christian nation soever” (the Anglican

Church having been established in Ireland, Ireland now

qualified as a “christian country”). Since the only

“christian nations” were in Europe, this clause was most

particularly, though not exclusively, aimed at persons of

African origin or descent. This exclusion of African-

Americans from the limitation on the length of servitude

imposed on bond-laborers reflected and was intended to

further the efforts made by some elements of the plantation

bourgeoisie to reduce African-American bond-laborers to

lifetime servitude. But even that, in and of itself, would

have been no more than a form of class oppression of

bond-laborers by owners, somewhat like the slavery of

Scots miners and saltpan workers from the end of the

sixteenth century to the eve of the nineteenth century, a

form distinguished however by its categoric denial of

social mobility to those in bondage.

This was a long way from the establishment of a system

of racial oppression; but its implicit denial to African-

Americans of even the lowest range of social mobility,

from bond-labor to freedom, contained a seed of a system

of racial oppression, although that seed could not be fully

developed without a strong intermediate social control

stratum.

There are two sides to the coin of the General Court’s

order relating to John Punch; his sentence to lifetime

servitude is equally proof that he was not a lifetime bond-

laborer when he ran away. Indeed, by that act he was

demonstrating his unwillingness to submit to even limited-

term bond-servitude. The John Punch case thus epitomized

the status of African-Americans in seventeenth-century

Virginia. On the one hand, it showed the readiness of at

least some of the plantation elite to equate “being a negro”

with being a lifetime bond-laborer. On the other hand,

development of social policy along this line was

obstructed by several factors. First, there was what might

be called institutional inertia presented by English

common law, by the historic retreat from the slavery

gambit of 1547 in the wake of Ket’s Rebellion, and by the

deep-rooted principles of Christian fellowship. Second, of

course, there was the opposition of African-Americans,

both bond-laborers and non-bond-laborers, with the

general support – certainly without the concerted

opposition – of European-American bond-laborers and

other free but poor laboring people, determined by a sense

of common class interest.

For the period before 1676, the Virginia and Maryland

records, particularly those of Virginia, are rich with

examples of how the historically evolved legal,

institutional and ideological superstructure of English

society presented a countervailing logic to the General

Court’s equation regarding John Punch – examples of a

recognition of normal social standing and mobility for

African-Americans that was and is absolutely inconsistent

with a system of racial oppression. Illustrative cases are

found most frequently, though not exclusively, in the

Northampton and Accomack county records.

In 1624, the

Virginia Colony Court had occasion to consider an

admiralty-type case, in the routine course of which the

court considered the testimony of John Phillip, a mariner,

identified as “a negro Christened in England 12 yeares

since.”

In a separate instance, a Negro named Brase and

two companions, a Frenchman and a “Portugall,” were

brought of their own volition to Jamestown on 11 July

1625. Two months later, Brase was assigned to work for

“Lady Yardley” for forty pounds of good merchantable

tobacco “monthly for his wages for his service so long as

he remayneth with her.” In October, Brase was assigned to

Governor Francis Wyatt as a “servant”; no particulars are

recorded as to his terms of employment with his new

employer. There was no suggesting that, “being a Negro,”

he was to be a lifetime bond-laborer.

African-Americans who were not bond-laborers made

contracts for work or for credit, and engaged in

commercial as well as land transactions, with European-

Americans, and in the related court proceedings they stood

on the same footing as European-Americans. At the

December 1663 sitting of the Accomack County Court,

Richard Johnson and Mihill Bucklands disputed over the

amount to be paid to Johnson for building a house for

Bucklands. With the consent of both parties the issue was

referred to two arbitrators.

The Northampton County

Court gave conditional assent to the suit of John Gusall,

but allowed debtor Gales Judd until the next court to make

contrary proof, or pay Gusall “the summe & grant of fore

hundred powndes of tobacco due per speciality with court

charges.”
26
  Emannuel  Rodriggus
27
  arrived  in  Virginia
before  1647,  presumably  without  significant  material
assets,  and  was enlisted  as  a  plantation  bond-laborer.
28
Rodriggus  became  a  dealer  in  livestock  on  the  Eastern
Shore (as the trans-Chesapeake Bay eastern peninsula of
Virginia came to be known). As early as January 1652/3
there  was  recorded  a  bill  of  sale  signed  with  his  mark,
assigning to merchant John Cornelys “one Cowe collered
Blacke,  aged  about  fowre  yeares  …  being  my  owne
breed.”
29
  Thereafter,  Rodriggus  and  other  African-
Americans  frequently  appear  as  buyers  and  sellers,  and
sometimes  as  donors,  of  livestock  in  court  records  that
reflect the assumption of the right of African-Americans to
accumulate and dispose of property, and that also assume
the legal parity of buyer and seller.
30
The Indian king Debeada of the Mussaugs gave to Jone,
daughter  of  Anthony  Johnson,  100  acres  of  land  on  the
south side of Pungoteague Creek on 27 September 1657.
31
In  1657  Emannuell  Cambow,  “Negro,”  was  granted
ownership of fifty acres of land in James City County, part
of  a  tract  that  had  been  escheated  from  the  former
grantee.
32
 In 1669, Robert Jones (or Johns), a York County
tailor, acting with the agreement of  his wife Marah, “for
divers  good  causes  and  considerations  him  thereunto
moveing … bargained & sold unto John Harris Negro all
the estate rite [right] title & Inheritance … in fiftie Acres

of Land … in New Kent County.”

A series of land

transactions – lease, sub-lease, and re-lease – was

conducted by Manuell Rodriggus with three separate

individuals over a ten-year period from June 1662.

Marriage and Social Mobility

In the colonial Chesapeake in the seventeenth century,

marriage might be a significant factor for social mobility.

The prevailing high death rate and the high sex ratio

resulted in a relative frequency of remarriages of widows

in the records.

Whatever a widow might own generally

became the property of the new husband. Phillip Mongum,

though only recently free, had begun an ascent in the social

scale that would eventually result in his becoming a

relatively prosperous tenant farmer and livestock dealer

(in 1672, he was a partner of two European-Americans in

a joint lease of a plantation of three hundred acres

When Mary Morris, a widow with children, and Phillip

Mongum were contemplating marriage early in 1651, they

entered into a prenuptial agreement regarding the property

she then owned. Mongum agreed in writing that her

property was not to be sold by him but was to remain the

joint heritage of Mary and the children from her previous

marriage(s): “one Cowe with a calfe by her side & all her

increase that shall issue ever after of the said Cowe or

calfe[,] moreover Towe featherbeds & what belongs unto

them, one Iron Pott, one Kettle, one fryeing pan & towe

gunnes & three breeding sowes with their increase.”

Mongum signed the agreement and bound himself to see to

its faithful performance.

Francis Payne’s second wife Amy was a European-

American. When Payne died late in the summer of 1673,

his will made Amy his executrix and the sole heir of his

“whole Estate real & personal moveables and

immoveables.”

Within two years Amy married William

Gray, a European-American, whose interest was to stop

his own downward social mobility by looting Amy’s

inheritance from Francis Payne. In August 1675, Amy

charged in court that Gray had not only beaten and

otherwise abused her but had also “made away almost all

her estate” and intended to complete the process and

reduce her to being a public charge. The court did not

attempt to challenge Gray’s disposal of her inherited

estate to satisfy his debts; but it did keep him in jail for a

month until he satisfied the court that he would return a

mare belonging to Amy and promised to support her

enough to prevent her being thrown on the charity of the

parish.

Some time in 1672, an African-American woman

named Cocore married Francis Skipper (or Cooper),

owner of a 200-acre plantation in Norfolk County. She had

been lashed with thirty strokes the year before on the order

of the court for having borne a child “out of wedlock.”

Perhaps there was a social mobility factor in her marrying

Skipper. But they apparently lived together amiably for

some five years until his death, an event which she

survived by less than a year.

Historical Significance of African-American

Landholding

Landholding by African-Americans in the seventeenth

century was significant both for the extent of it and

because much of it, possibly the greater portion, was

secured by headright. This particular fact establishes

perhaps more forcefully than any other circumstance the

normal social status accorded to African-Americans, a

status that was practically as well as theoretically

incompatible with a system of racial oppression. For the

reader coming for the first time to the raw evidence in the

Virginia Land Patent Books, or to the abstracts of them

done by Nell Nugent, or to the digested accounts presented

by historians of our own post-Montgomery boycott era –

for such first-time readers the stories carry a stunning

impact. Thanks particularly to the brief – but penetrating –

emphasis on the subject by Lerone Bennett,

and to the

special studies made by Deal and by Breen and Innes, the

story of the Anthony Johnson family is readily available.

Another African-American in this category, Benjamin

Dole of Surry County, may yet find biographers. It is

especially noteworthy that the persons for whose

importation these particular patents were granted were

mainly, if not all, bond-laborers brought from Europe.

Since considerable attention has been devoted to these

African-Americans in the works referred to above, I will

simply list them:

• Land patent granted to Anthony Johnson, on 250 acres

for transport of five persons: Tho. Benrose, Peter

Bughby, Antho. Cripps, John Gessorol[?], Richard

Johnson (Virginia Land Patent Book No. 2, p. 326, 24

July 1651).

• Patent granted to John Johnson, son of Anthony

Johnson, on 500 acres, on Great Nassawattocks Creek,

adjacent to land granted to Anthony Johnson, for the

transportation of eleven persons: John Edwards, Wm.

Routh, Thos. Yowell, Fran. Maland, Wm. Price, John

Owe, Dorothy Reely, Rich Hamstead, Law[rence]

Barnes (Virginia Land Patent Book No. 3, p. 101, 10

May 1652).

• Patent on 100 acres bounded by lands owned by

Anthony, Richard’s father, and by brother John

Johnson, granted by Governor Richard Bennett to

Richard Johnson, “Negro,” for the transportation of

two bond-laborers: William Ames and William

Vincent (Virginia Land Patent Book No. 3, p. 21,

November 1654).

• Land patent dated 17 December 1656 granted to

Benjamin Dole, “Negro,” 300 acres in Surry County

for the importation of six persons (Virginia Land Patent

Book No. 4, p. 71, 17 December 1656).

It has been pointed out that headrights could be sold by the

original importers to other persons, and that such a patent

might therefore be granted to persons other than the

original owners of the bond-laborers. There is no way of

knowing whether the Johnsons and Benjamin Dole ever

were in possession of the bond-laborers whose headrights

they exercised, or whether they bought the headright from

other persons. In any case, the point being made here is not

affected. There was no suggestion that African-Americans

were barred from the privilege of importing bond-

laborers. Indeed, the enactment of such a ban in 1670

clearly implied that it was an accepted practice prior to

that time.

There is a case which for all of its uniqueness still

sheds light on the question of the social mobility of

African-Americans in seventeenth-century Virginia.

Anthony Johnson acquired, presumably by purchase, a

Negro bond-laborer named Casar. Casar stubbornly

claimed he was entitled to be free, that he had come to

Virginia around 1638, indentured for seven or eight years,

but that Johnson was attempting to hold him as a lifetime

bond-laborer. Under the threat of a lawsuit for unjustly

detaining Casar, and persuaded by members of his family,

in November 1653 Anthony Johnson agreed to abandon his

claim and set Casar free. Four months later, in March

1654, Johnson, having thought more deeply, secured a

court order returning Casar “into the service of his said

master Anthony Johnson.” Twenty years later the family

had moved to Somerset County, Maryland, and Anthony

Johnson had died there, but Casar was still living as a

“servant” of Anthony’s widow Mary.

A Demonstrative Statistical Excursion

We know from the studies made by John H. Russell,

Carter G. Woodson, Luther Porter Jackson and others that

free Negroes in Virginia in the nineteenth century could

acquire land by inheritance, gift, or purchase, and that they

had the corresponding rights to dispose of it, although they

lived under a system of racial oppression. Seventeenth-

century data are not comprehensive.

The seventeenth-

century Virginia Land Patent Books are available for the

colony as a whole, but the preserved court records for

Northampton and Accomack are more nearly

comprehensive than those of the rest of the counties, and

richer in detail than the records of the Virginia Colony

Council and the House of Burgesses. The population of

these two counties appears to have constituted between 7

and 8 percent of the population of the entire colony during

the last third of the century.

These counties may not have

been typical of the colony as a whole in respect to the

prominence of African-Americans in matters that rose to

the level of attention in the public records.

However,

there is no evidence to indicate that other county courts or

the central organs of government regarded proceedings in

Accomack and Northampton counties as worthy of special

notice. Nor have the works dealing with the Eastern Shore

suggested that the attitudes of official society and the

common run of European-Americans there differed

qualitatively from those held in the rest of the colony.

The contrast in the ratios of landholding between

African-Americans and European-Americans in

Northampton County in 1666, and in Virginia as a whole

in 1860, documents the difference between normal social

class differentiation and a system of racial oppression. In

Northampton County in 1666, 10.9 percent of the African-

Americans and 17.6 percent of European-Americans were

landholders. This disparity is no more than normal

considering that 53.4 percent of the European-American

landholders, but none of the African-Americans, came as

free persons. The concentration of ownership is also

normal, indeed an irresistible tendency of capitalist

production. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the

ratio of farm ownership among European-Americans was

46 percent less in 1860 than was landholding in 1665. But

the fact that the proportion of the African landholding

population was 95 percent less in 1860 than it was in

1666 was the result not of normal capitalist economic

development but of racial oppression. Let it be noted in

passing that the proportion of European-Americans

owning land in Virginia in 1860 was less than the

proportion of African-American landowners in 1666. (See

Table 10.1.)

If the proportion of landholding among African-

Americans had declined, but only as much as the ratio of

landholding among European-Americans, an indicated

30,000 landholdings would have been in the hands of the

53,000 free rural Virginia African-Americans in 1860.

That would have represented an African-American

landholding ratio nearly six times the actual ratio of

European-American landholding in that year. The facts are

even more dramatic when put in terms of family units,

which averaged 5.6 persons per family in 1860. The

operation of 30,000 African-American farms by some

5,400 families would have required a considerable degree

of employment of European-American tenants and wage

laborers. That would have been incompatible with the

anomalies of social class relationships characteristic of a

system of social control based on racial oppression.

Table 10.1 African-American and European-American

landholding in the entire state of Virginia in 1860 and in

Northampton County in 1666

1666 1860

Landholders as percentage of:

African-American rural population 10.93% 0.54%

European-American rural population

(tenants not included)

17.55% 9.53%

Ratio of the frequency of landholding

among

African-Americans to that among

European-

Americans (tenants not included) 62.23% 5.6%

a. Virginia’s population in 1860 was 1,595,906; African-Americans 548,607

(490,565 bond; 58,042 free); and 1,047,299 European-Americans. US

Census Office, Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census, 1860

[Washington, 1862], this page–this page. The state’s population in 1860 was

91.5 percent rural. (Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United

States, 1940, Vol. I [Washington, 1942], Table 8, p. 23.) The rural/urban

ratio is here assumed to be the same for the African-American and

European-American populations. This assumption may tend to exaggerate

the degree of landholding among African-Americans, since the rural

proportion of the African-American population was higher than that of the

European-American population. (See Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities

[New York, 1964], this page–this page.) A closer approximation, however,

would only add force to the point that landholding by African-Americans

was minimal in Virginia in 1860.

b. There were 92,605 farms in Virginia in 1860, of which 1,300 were owned by

African-Americans. (Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United

States, 1870. Statistics of Wealth and Industry, Vol. 3 [Washington,

1872], p. 340. Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property

Holding in Virginia in 1860 [New York, 1942], p.134.) The assumption is

made here that each owned farm had a separate owner. Since multiple

ownership was less frequent among African-Americans than among

European-Americans, a stricter count, if it could be made, would lower the

proportion of landholding among African-Americans less than it would the

landholding ratio among European-Americans. However, the alteration could

not significantly affect the argument of this table regarding the difference

between the 1666 and 1860 ratios of landholding.

c. In Northampton County in 1666, seven of the 64 African-Americans were

landholders, as were 145 of the 826 European-Americans. There were 422

tithables (54 African-Americans and 368 European-Americans), of whom

152 (7 African-Americans and 145 European-Americans) were landholders.

(See the Northampton list of tithables for 1666, in Jennings Cropper Wise,

The Kingdom of Accawmacke, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the

Seventeenth Century [Richmond, 1911; Baltimore reprint, 1967], this

page–this page. Edmund S. Morgan’s figures vary slightly – 158 households,

434 tithables, and the African-American proportion of the total population a

suggested 13.2 percent [American Slavery, American Freedom, New

York, 1975, pp. 420, 425.])

My estimate of the total population (all rural, of course) of Northampton

County in 1666 is based on the following assumptions: Children under sixteen

years of age, the untithable portion of the African-American population,

constituted 15 percent of all African-Americans, thus among African-

Americans the ratio of total population to tithables would be 1.18. (Morgan

uses this 15 percent figure, though he calls it a ‘generous’ estimate [pp. 421,

and 422 n. 46.]. If this is indeed an overestimate of the untithable proportion of

the African-American population, it will be on the safe, conservative, side of

the argument being presented here concerning the greater dispersion of

landholding in 1666 as compared to 1860.) The figure of 2.11 for the ratio of

total population to tithables for Virginia is assumed to be true for Northampton

County. This figure is an extrapolation based on Morgan’s assumed linear rise

in the ratio from 1.65 in 1640 to 2.69 in 1699; in 1666, the ratio would be 2.11

to 1. The statistical analysis is as follows: total population (2.11 x 422) 890;

total African-American population (1.18 x 54) 64. The figures for the

European-American population 368 tithable (men) multiplied by 2.11 makes a

total of 826.

The same point can be made in terms of social mobility,

expressed as the ratio between the number of European-

American tithables and those landholders who were

former bond-laborers (identifiable through a search of the

abstracts of land patents in Nugent’s Cavaliers and

Pioneers). Of the total 145 European-American

landholders in Northampton in 1666, 58 are identifiable in

these patents. Of these, 27, i.e., 47 percent, had come as

bond-laborers. If this ratio is assumed to have been the

same for the entire roster of 145 European-American

landholders, then 68 were in that category. Since there

were 209 European-American (tithable) bond-laborers,

the social mobility ratio was 69 to 209, or 32.5 percent;

for the African-American tithables the ratio was 7 to 44,

or 15.9 percent.

The disparity of the two ratios seems understandable in

terms of two main factors. Some of the European-

American bond-laborers had family or other personal ties

on one side of the Atlantic or the other that afforded them

some support in getting started after the end of their terms

of servitude. Such ties were less likely to be available to

African-Americans, except possibly to those who came to

the colony from England. Second, the disposition on the

part of plantation owners to extend the bond-laborers’

terms of servitude operated to extend the terms of limited-

term African-American bond-laborers for periods longer

than set by the custom of the country, thus reducing the

relative number of African-Americans who survived to

become socially mobile.

Yet even this relatively diminished rate of African-

American social mobility of 1666 was such as would have

been incompatible with a system of racial oppression. In

1860, the African-American proletarian population fifteen

years of age and over in Virginia numbered around

330,000. The social mobility rate of 15.9 percent on that

base would imply the existence of a class of African-

American Virginia landholders of 52,740, a number nearly

equal to the total number of free African-Americans

(58,000) in Virginia in 1860. That would have meant a

rate of landholding among free African-Americans nine or

ten times the landholding ratio prevailing among

European-Americans, a situation incompatible with the

character of racial oppression and hence of racial slavery

as a form of it. It may be concluded that the social mobility

rate among African-Americans in Northampton County,

Virginia, in 1666 was inconsistent with racial oppression.

African-American Owners of European-

American Bond-laborers

In some cases, African-Americans became owners, buyers

and sellers, of European-American bond-laborers. Francis

Payne, when still a bond-laborer, was owned by Mrs Jane

Eltonhead in right of her children from a previous

marriage. In May 1649 the two signed an agreement in

their own hands, according to which Payne was to have

the usufruct of the land he was working for her for two

crops, and then be free. The conditions were that Payne

was to pay 1,500 pounds of tobacco and six barrels of

corn out of the proceeds of the current crop.

Out of the

second crop he was to supply Eltonhead with “three

sufficient men servants between the age of fifteen &

twenty fower & they shall serve for sixe yeares or seaven

att the least.” Mr Eltonhead made the search for the bond-

laborers on behalf of Payne, and in March 1649/50 struck

a bargain with “Mr Peter Walker merchant for Towe men

Servants which is for the use of Francis Payne Negro

towards his free-dome.” In April, 1651, Eltonhead

acknowledged receipt from “Francis Payne Negro the

quantity of sixteen hundred & fifty pownds of Tobacco &

two Servants (according Unto the Condition betwixt him

& his mistris) also a Bill taken in of his mistris which she

passed unto Mr. Edward Davis for a mayd servant

Jeany.”

In November 1656, Mrs Eltonhead, then living

in Maryland presumably widowed a second time,

acknowledged the receipt of 3,800 pounds of tobacco

from Payne, and formally freed Payne and his wife and

children “from all hindrance of servitude.”

On 28 April 1653 the Northampton County Court

ordered John Gussall, “Negro,” according to the terms of

his contract with Montroze Evellyn, to pay 1,000 pounds

of tobacco and “one sufficient able woman servant for

four yeares time.” If the woman bond-laborers were to die

“in seasoning the first yeare,” Gussal was to recompense

Evellyn with 1,200 pounds of tobacco.

Continuing Bourgeois Pressure for Unpaid

Labor Time

All the while the pressure continued to reduce African-

American bond-laborers to lifetime servitude. A law

passed in March 1661 specifying punishment for runaway

bond-laborers referred to “any negroes who are incapable

of makeing satisfaction by addition of time.”

September 1668, free African-American women were

declared tithable on the explicit grounds that “though

permitted to enjoy their freedome … [they] ought not in all

respects be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions

and impunities of the English.”

In October 1669, owners

who killed their Negro or Indian lifetime bond-laborers

under “correction” were “acquit from molestation” on the

grounds that it would not be reasonable that an owner

would destroy his own property with malice

aforethought.
53
  Three  years  later  this  immunity  from
prosecution was extended to any person who killed “any
negroe,  molatto,  Indian  slave,  or  servant  for  life”  who
became the object of hue and cry as a runaway.
54
 All the
laws  were  especially  oppressive  in  their  intentions
regarding  African-Americans,  of  course.  Insofar  as  they
made  reference  to  African-Americans  as  lifetime  bond-
laborers, they were a denial of the possibility of achieving
either any social distinction or the enjoyment of the legal
rights of marriage and family formation. But it is the 1668
law  directed  at free African-American  women  that  most
explicitly anticipates racial oppression.
Contracts  and  last  wills  increasingly  contemplated
raising  the  number  of African-Americans  in  the  category
of  lifetime  bond-laborers.  As  early  as  1649,  eleven
African-American  bond-laborers  from  Barbados  were
sold to Argoll Yardley “to have hold possess and quietly
enjoy  …  [by]  him  his  heirs,  or assigns  for  ever.”
55
  In
1653, Yardley  contracted  to  provide  John  Machell  “one
Negro girle named Dennis Aged 12 yeares next November
to serve him … his heyres or Assignes for her lifetime.”
56
In  his  will,  dated  February  1656,  Rowland  Burnham
bequeathed  his  English  bond-laborers  to  members  of  his
family for the limited terms they had been bought to serve;
the  African-American  bond-laborers  were  to  serve
“forever” those to whom they were willed.
57

At the same time there was a growing desire among

owners of bond-laborers to make African-American

servitude hereditary, an impulse that found expression in a

depraved adaptation of the customary reference to

property in animal stock. In September 1647, Stephen

Charlton made a gift of a Mare colt, three Cows, and “A

Negro girle named Sisley aged about fowre or five

years … them and their increase both male and female

Forever.”

The settlement of the estate of Edmund

Scarburgh in 1656 assigned to Charles Scarburgh “one

Negro man called Tom & Masunke his wife with all their

issue.”

In his will dated 12 February 1656, Rowland

Burnham distributed some seventeen bond-laborers to

various beneficiaries, the ten English ones “for the full

terms of tyme they have to serve”; “the negroes forever.”

Among the African-Americans given to his sons was a

“woman called Joane with what Children she shall bear

from this date to them and their heirs forever.”

December 1657 Captain Francis Pott sold Ann Driggus,

nine or ten years old, “with all her increase forever” to

John Panell.

African-Americans Challenge Hereditary

Bondage

As noted in Chapter 8, African-American bond-laborers

joined in direct action with other bond-laborers in

resisting their bondage by running away. They also were

aware of the need to challenge aspects of the bond-

servitude system that were or might be directly aimed

against them in particular.

Phillip and Mingo, two African-American bond-

laborers whom John Foster bought from Captain William

Hawley in January 1649, were trouble from the moment

the purchase was made. Concerned about the “fine print”

of the Hawley-Foster contract, the workers engaged in

what today would be called a “slow-down strike,” making

Foster “fearfull that [they] would run awaye from him”

altogether. Upon their insistence, Captain Hawley was

brought into the discussion. Acting as mediator, Hawley

“went downe to the seaboard side, And made a wrighting

to the Negros,” specifying that at the end of four years,

“they shalbe free from their servitude & bee free men; &

labor for themselves.” At some subsequent point the two

workers were to pay Hawley 1,700 pounds of tobacco, or

“one Man servant.”

Resistance might sometimes take the form of the buy-

out. In May 1645, Emanuell Dregus (Rodrigues) arranged

to purchase from his employer, Captain Francis Pott, the

freedom of two children whom he had adopted, eight-

year-old Elizabeth and one-year-old Jane, who were

bound until the age of twenty-one and thirty respectively.

Rogrigues may well have been aware of the sentiment

expressed by the General Court in the John Punch case,

and of the disposition of some owners to keep Negroes in

perpetual servitude, and he might, judging from his name,

have had memories of such a regime in some Dutch or

Portuguese colony. Although Pott appears to have been

personally sympathetic to him, Rodrigues nevertheless

preferred to have his children at his own disposal. Indeed,

as noted above, the time would come when Pott himself

would adopt the notion of hereditary bondage.

Perhaps the most frequent form of challenges to

discriminatory terms of servitude in the court records

were petitions for freedom presented by African-

Americans. Some were submitted by persons who had

come into Virginia as limited-term indentured bond-

laborers, others were based on promises made by

deceased owners’ wills or otherwise. The story of the

struggle of John Baptista, “a moore of Barbary,”

began

in 1649, when he was sold by a Dutch merchant, Simon

Overzee, to Major Thomas Lambert of Norfolk County,

Virginia. But for how long? That was the matter that

concerned John Baptista. There came a point at which

Baptista refused to continue in servitude saying that “he

would serve but fowre yeares” and that he intended to take

the matter to the Governor. He did so and in March 1653/4

the General Court ruled that he had not been sold for his

lifetime and ordered that Baptista serve Lambert for two

more years and then be free. Alternatively Baptista was to

buy back the two years by paying Lambert 2,000 pounds of

tobacco. Baptista was free of Lambert in less than a year

and had departed for Maryland with Overzee.

Dego took his owner, Minor Doodes, to court in

Lancaster County in March 1655/6. Apparently Doodes

was intending to leave the area and wanted to sell Dego as

a lifetime bond-laborer. A paper was presented signed by

Doodes, providing that if he sold Dego, it was to be for no

more than ten years.

African-American John (or Jack) Kecotan arrived in

Virginia as a bond-laborer in about 1635. Eighteen years

later his owner, Rice Hoe Senior, promised Kecotan that

if he lived a morally irreproachable life, he would be

given his freedom – at the end of another eleven years!

Sadly, Hoe Senior passed away before the time had

elapsed, and the court ordered Kecotan to continue in

servitude with Hoe’s widow until her death. That

mournful event occurred sometime before 10 November

1665, leaving Rice Hoe Junior in possession of the estate,

including, he assumed, John Kecotan. But it being then

thirty years since Kecotan had started his servitude under

the elder Hoe, Kecotan petitioned the court for his

freedom. When Junior Hoe opposed the petition on the

grounds that some time during the elder Hoe’s lifetime

Kecotan had had child-producing liaisons with two or

more English women, thus violating the good-conduct

condition of the original promise of freedom, the Virginia

General Court ordered that Kecotan be freed, unless Hoe

could prove his charges at the next County Court. There

five men, apparently all European-Americans, supported

Jack Kecotan’s petition with a signed testimonial to his

character. Hoe produced two other witnesses for his side.

Apparently Jack Kecotan at some point secured his

freedom, at least enough that he and his co-defendant,

Robert Short, won a jury verdict in their favor in a suit

brought against them by Richard Smith.

In 1654 Anthony Longo was a hard-working farmer

living in Northampton County with his wife Mary, two

daughters and a son. He had long before demonstrated his

mistrust of the intentions of European-American owners of

bond-labor regarding the freedom of African-Americans.

“For certain considerations” Longo had achieved freedom

from his owner in 1635. Suddenly, five years later, in

August 1640, two months after the General Court in the

John Punch case sought to equate “being a negro” with

lifetime bondage, Longo induced his former owner,

Commander Nathaniel Littleton, to affirm Longo’s

freedom in the Northampton County Court record.

Longo

had a contempt for government interference; and when he

was served a warrant to appear in court to answer charges

of obstructing a road by building a fence across it, he said

he’d go to court when he had got his corn crop in and not

before. He called the warrant server an “idle Rascall”

adding, dismissively, “shitt of your warrant.”

When, as

mentioned above, in September 1668 the General

Assembly made free African-American women liable to

taxes, the Longo family was not one to submit quietly.

Longo took his grievance directly to Governor Berkeley,

petitioning “to be eased of his great charge of children.”

As the eventual disposition of the petition shows, Longo’s

purpose was not to have his children taken away but to

protest the discriminatory tax on African-American

women such as those in his family. The County Court, in

apparent retaliation for Longo’s having “by his petition

complained to the Honorable Governor,” charged Longo

with being a bad parent, and accordingly sought to deprive

him of the children, cynically adding that Longo would be

“discharged of publike taxes.” The children were ordered

bound out to two of Longo’s richer neighbors until the

children reached the age of twenty-four, the girls to learn

“housewifery, knitting and such like;” the boy

shoemaking.

Longo petitioned the court to be allowed to

keep his children, and the order relating to the elder of the

daughters was rescinded.

Andrew Moore arrived in Virginia to serve as a

limited-term bond-laborer. In October 1673 he petitioned

the General Court for his freedom, contending that his

owner, Mr George Light, was keeping him in bondage

well past his proper time of service. He won a decision

ordering Light to free him with the customary allowance of

“Corn and Clothes,” and to pay Moore 700 pounds of

tobacco for his overtime.

Thomas Hagleton, like Moore, came from England.

He arrived in Maryland in 1671 with signed indenture

papers to serve for four years. In 1676, Hagleton

petitioned the Maryland Provincial Court complaining that

his owner, Major Thomas Truman, detained him from his

freedom. The court, citing the presence of witnesses

prepared to testify on Hagleton’s behalf, granted

Hagleton’s request for a trial of the issue.

European-American Nathaniel Bradford had become

wary of such challenges. In April 1676 he purchased an

African-American woman bond-laborer from Matthew

Scarburgh for 3,000 pounds of tobacco, to be paid in two

annual installments, presumably from the product of two

years’ labor. But the purchase agreement carried a

protective clause requiring Scarburgh to post bond “to

save [Bradford] harmless from … any claime … that she

hath liv’d in England or Barbados” as a basis for suing for

her freedom.

Evangelical Questions and Objections

The obstructive effect of the institutional inertia of

common-law principles and Christian religious scruples

with respect to racial oppression found both implicit and

explicit expression among the owning classes.

Three

who explicitly addressed the issue were English ministers,

Morgan Godwyn (fl. 1685), Richard Baxter (1615–91),

a n d George Fox (1641–91). Godwyn, author of The

Negro’s and Indians Advocate and other works of the

same tenor, was an Anglican minister who served in

Virginia in Marston parish in the late 1660s.

Fox, the

first Quaker, wrote and spoke on the subject of the

treatment of African-Americans by Anglo-Americans, both

before and after his journey to the British West Indies and

the Chesapeake in 1671–74.

Richard Baxter, also a

Puritan, wrote a scathing denunciation of the commerce in

human commodities.

As they observed the extreme

brutality and callousness of the actual practice of

enslavement, their core theme of Christian equalitarianism

led them to challenge aspects of slavery, the slave trade,

the inhumanity of the treatment of the slaves, even to

advocate replacing perpetual servitude by limited-term

servitude.

The well-known authority Thomas E. Drake has said

that these seventeenth-century preachers “sought the

liberation of Negroes’ souls, not their bodies.”
81
 They did
not demand immediate general emancipation;  rather, they
preached  to  the  slaves  the  sanctity  of  submissiveness.
Nevertheless,  the  doctrine  of  a  common  humanity  as
children  of  God,  and  of  Christ’s  blood  as  the  universal
solvent  of  sin,  as  well  as  the  jubilee  tradition  of  the
people  of  the  Book,  limiting the time  that even  strangers
might be held in bondage – all that was an obstacle that the
plantation bourgeoisie knew it could not ignore.
82
Such an ideology was unsuited to the superstructure of a
colony  founded  on  lifetime  hereditary  bond-servitude.
“[W]e  cannot  serve  Christ  and  Trade,”  said Godwyn,  in
warning  to  those  who sought  enrichment  through  denying
the humanity of the plantation bond-laborers.
83
 “From this
fundamental  idea  of  the  brotherhood  of  men  through  the
sacrifice of Christ,” writes Drake, “Fox reasoned that the
servitude of Negroes should end in freedom just as it did
for whites”
84
; accordingly Fox urged Barbados Quakers to
“deal mildly and gently with their negroes … and that after
certain years of servitude they would make them free.”
85
These  ideas  if  put  into  practice  would  negate  the  very
purpose  of  lifelong  bondage  by  shortening  the  period  of
servitude. Furthermore, such a practice would reduce the
supply of bond-labor in two ways. First, it would deprive
the  owners  to  some  degree  of  property  in  newborn
children. Second, the reduced profitability of  bond-labor

resulting from shortening the period of servitude, coupled

with the moral crusade against the slave trade as “the

worst kind of thievery” as Richard Baxter put it, would

have reduced the profitability of that branch of free

enterprise.

Furthermore, these equalitarian implications were

absolutely incompatible with racial oppression, which in

Anglo-America would take the form of “white

supremacy.” Morgan Godwyn, for all his assurances about

not prejudicing the interests of the owners of lifetime

bond-laborers, justified his campaign for Christianizing

African and African-American bond-laborers in terms that

had quite different implications. Godwyn denounced

plantation owners who opposed the admission of African-

American bond-laborers to Christian fellowship by

pretending “That the Negro’s, though in their figure they

carry some resemblance of Manhood, yet are indeed no

Men.” In terms of pure economic determinism, Godwyn

ascribed this denial of the humanity of Africans and

African-Americans to “the inducement and instigation of

our Planters[‘] chief Diety, Profit.”

Calling such ideas

“strange to the People in England,” Godwyn argued the

case for a common humanity:

How should they [Africans and African-Americans] otherwise be capable

of Trades, and other no less Manly imployments, as also of Reading, and

Writing; or show so much Discretion in management of Business; eminent in

diverse of them; but wherein (we know) that many of our own People are

deficient.

The ruling elite in the plantation colonies found such

notions so threatening that, despite Quaker disavowal of

any intent to incite Negro insurrection, respective colony

legislatures enacted stern measures against the sect. In

Barbados, where Negroes were a majority of the

population by the end of the third quarter of the

seventeenth century, elaborate systems of repressive

measures were instituted. Laws providing severe penalties

were enacted against those who allowed the attendance of

Negroes at Quaker meetings and schools.

In the

Chesapeake, laws were enacted generally proscribing the

Quakers, but without making any specific reference to

African-Americans or bond-servitude.

Although

throughout the seventeenth century a majority of the bond-

laborers in the Chesapeake were European-Americans, the

spread of such doctrines as Quakerism might threaten to

unravel bond-servitude altogether, especially in light of

the fact that, from its inception in the 1620s, it represented

a violation of English master-servant principles. Of

course, the equalitarian implications of Christian doctrine

were not the invention of seventeenth-century

Puritanism.

The rebels on Mousehold Heath in 1549 had

based their argument against bondage on the grounds of an

appeal to Christian fellowship.

Later in that same

century, Thomas Smith had made the point in his

Republica Anglorum – that Christians might not hold

Christians in slavery, a principle drawn from ancient

Hebrew tribal law.

Elements of the Propertied Classes Oppose

Racial Oppression

In Virginia in the period before Bacon’s Rebellion,

actions taken by some of the plantation owners implied a

rejection on their part of the principle of racial

oppression, although explicit references to English

common law and Christian doctrine were omitted. Owners

of African-American bond-laborers frequently encouraged

them by allowing them to have livestock and small

cultivable plots, not just for their subsistence but for

disposal by sale. Such a practice was contrary to the

conditions of chattel bond-servitude in general, since it

implied the legal ability of the worker to make contracts

for purchase and sale.

Indeed in the instances cited

above of African-American cattle dealers, self-

purchasers, plantation owners, and tobacco sellers, those

persons first achieved social mobility through

encouragement by their European-American owners. In

other cases African-Americans were assured of places on

the first rung of social mobility by the expiration of their

limited terms of servitude, or under the terms of wills of

owners who died, which frequently provided them with

allowances of livestock. In order to resolve any doubts

about the ownership of certain “Cattle, Hoggs & poultrey,

with their increase” in the possession of African-

Americans Emanual Driggs and Bashawe Farnando, two

prominent planters, Francis Pott and Stephen Charlton,

attested that those animals had been “Lawfully gotten, &

purchased” from Pott when Driggs and Farnando were in

Pott’s employ, and that “they may freely dispose of them

either in their life tyme or att their death.”

Aside from other cases mentioned incidentally in other

parts of this chapter, here are half a dozen instances in

which European-American employers acted on the

assumption that African-American bond-laborers need not

serve for life, nor hereditarily, but only for limited terms.

On 2 December 1648, Stephen Charlton made a legal

record of his intention that “John Gemander his servant”

was to serve a limited term of ten years, and then “the said

Negro is to be a free man.” On the same day, Charlton

“assigned” Grace-Suzana, a “Negro childe,” to serve Mr

Richard Vaughan until the age of thirty and then “to be

freed from further servitude.”

On 16 April 1650 Richard

Vaughan made a court record of his intention that when

they reached the age of thirty, two Negro children owned

by him, three-year-old Temperance and two-year-old

James, should be free.

Stephen Charlton’s will, probated

on 29 January 1654/5, provided for freedom, on certain

conditions, for Jack in four years, and for Bridgett if she

paid his daughters 2,500 pounds of tobacco and cask, or

otherwise at the end of three more years.

When

Christopher Stafford died around the end of 1654 his will

provided that Mihill Gowen was to be free after serving

Stafford’s uncle four more years. The executrix of the

will, Stafford’s sister, Amy Barnhouse, “for divers good

causes” (and apparently a year ahead of time) freed

Gowen and his baptized infant son William.

Francis Pott

died before he had a chance to include in his will his

intention to free “his Negroe Bashore.” His widow and

executrix married William Kendall, member of the County

Court. On 30 May 1659 Kendall, in accordance with

Pott’s wishes, “set the said Bashore at Liberty and

proclaim[ed] him to be free … for Ever.”

100

In the spring of 1660, Thomas Whitehead died; he was

survived by two children, Mary Rogers, the elder, and

James Rogers. Although Mary was still under age,

Whitehead appointed her his chief heir and the executrix

of his will. In a further provision he set free his African-

American bond-laborer named John to “be his owne man

from any person or persons whatsoever,” and gave him a

cow and a heifer, the house John lived in, and “ground to

plant upon … and peaceably to injoy it his lifetime.’ He

also appointed John “to be Mary Rogers[’] Guardyan &

Overseer of hir & what I have given hir till she is of age.”

Finally, if Mary and his son James died before coming of

age, the entire estate, which at that time included an

unnamed boy bond-laborer with two years yet to serve,

“shall returne to my Negro [John].” Whitehead correctly

anticipated that the court might not accept John as Mary’s

guardian, and named one Andrew Rider to serve in John’s

stead. There are indications that Rider was negligent in the

execution of the will. In September 1660, possibly on

John’s petition, the County Court “ordered that John Negro

servant to Thomas Whitehead deceased be and hereby is

declared Free & that hee have his Cattle & other things

belonging to him delivered to him.”

101

One other will seems worth notice here, although it was

not left by a member of the propertied classes. English

seaman George Williams would never see home again. He

died in October 1667 in Virginia, where he had been

tended and comforted by Manuel Driggus in his last days.

Like Joe Hill, he had little to divide, but that little he

bequeathed to Driggus “for his care and trouble in

tendinge mee in my sickness,” namely, eleven months’

back wages due for his service on his ship, Loves

Increase, whatever tobacco he had laid by, his sea chest

and its contents, and all else he owned in Northampton

County. In keeping with the custom of the time, he made

Driggus, his largest creditor, the executor of his will.

102

The Case of Elizabeth Key

Elizabeth Key (the name is variously spelled) was born in

Virginia around 1631. She was the daughter of Thomas

Key, of Northumberland County, and of an African-

American woman, not named in the record, but who was a

bond-laborer owned by Key.

103

In 1636 the father,

intending to return to England to stay, sold his plantation to

Humphrey Higginson (the child’s godfather and a member

of the General Assembly), and bound Elizabeth to him for

a term of nine years. Under the terms of this assignment,

Higginson was “to use her more respectfully than a Comon

servant or slave.” Elizabeth was not to be sold to anyone

else. If Higginson survived and stayed in Virginia until the

end of the nine years, Elizabeth was then to be free. If

Higginson were to return to England before that time, he

was to take Elizabeth with him at his own expense and

return her to her father there. If Higginson died in Virginia

before the end of the nine years, Elizabeth was then to be

immediately free.

Thomas Key died before he could embark for England,

and Higginson, too, died some time before Elizabeth’s

nine-year term was completed. Instead of achieving her

freedom, however, she was held in servitude by the

administrator of the Higginson estate, a planter named

John Mottrom. Mottrom also died and in 1656 Elizabeth

Key, with the assistance of William Greenstead as her

attorney, brought suit for her freedom against those who

were now in possession of Mottrom’s estate. The grounds

taken by the defense imparted a far-reaching significance

to the case by claiming Key as a lifetime bond-laborer on

the grounds that such had been the condition of her mother.

In January 1656 a jury of twelve men found Elizabeth

Key to be rightfully entitled to her freedom. The overseers

of the Mottrom estate appealed the decision to the Virginia

General Court. The original record of the General Court

for that period was destroyed by fire in 1865. But a

transcript of it made prior to 1860 has the following entry

under the date of 12 March 1656: “Mulatto held to be a

slave and appeal taken.” Historians may be correct in

inferring that this is a reference to Elizabeth Key, and that

it indicates that the General Court reversed the decision of

t h e Northumberland County Court. That inference it

strengthened by the fact that a week later the General

Assembly, the normal court of appeal from General Court

decisions at that time, took the case under its

consideration. On 20 March a special committee of the

General Assembly, chosen to make a determination of the

matter, expressed the sense “of the Burgesses of the

present Assembly,” holding that Key was entitled to

freedom on two legal grounds that are of critical

importance for the present discussion of the origin of

racial slavery as a particular form of racial oppression in

continental Anglo-America. First, there was the ancient

common law principle of partus sequitur patrem,

according to which the condition of the child follows the

condition of the father. Since Elizabeth was the daughter

of John Key,

104

she should be free “by the Comon Law

[that] the Child of a Woman slave begotten by a freeman

ought to be free.” Second, Key should be free based on the

Christian principle against holding Christians as slaves.

Elizabeth Key “hath bin long since Christened, Colonel

Higginson being her God father.” The Assembly ordered

that the matter be returned for consideration, noting that

Key should be given not only freedom dues, but also

compensation “for the time shee hath served longer than

shee ought to have done.”

One of the Mottrom estate overseers, George

Colclough, who was later to come into possession of one-

third of the estate by marrying Mottrom’s widow,

appealed to Governor Berkeley. On 11 June the Governor

ordered a suspension of further proceedings pending a

rehearing of the case by the Fall term of the General Court.

There is no record, however, of the General Court ever

having taken further notice of the case. The last word in

the litigation was had by the Northumberland County

Court; in effect it ignored the Governor’s order and

instead implemented the sense of the General Assembly by

ordering that Key be freed and compensated. The fact that

the judgment of the General Assembly effectively

prevailed is incontestably indicated by the following

series of developments. The March sitting of the General

Court ruled that, if a woman bond-laborer married a free

man with the consent of her owner, she became free

thereby. Key and Greenstead had developed a personal as

well as a professional relationship. The banns of their

marriage were proclaimed in the church, and since no one

could “shew any Lawful cause whey they may not be

joyned together,” they were married. It is apparent that the

administrators of the Mottrom estate were tacitly

acknowledging that they had no legal grounds to prevent

the marriage. The certificate of the marriage was recorded

at the same July Northumberland Court that finally ordered

Key freed. Lastly, when the Mottrom estate was finally

divided the following January, it included one Irish, four

English, and three African-American bond-laborers, but

Elizabeth Key was not among them.

Lacking further legal recourse, the Mottromites finally

let Elizabeth Key go, without, however, conceding the

principle involved. Rather, they still asserted their right to

“assign and transfer unto William Greenstead a maid

servant formerly belonging to the estate of Col. Mottrom

commonly called Elizabeth Key being nowe Wife unto the

sad Greenstead.” Thus the advocates of hereditary

bondage covered their embarrassment with the principle

of “the feme couvert,” according to which the wife is not

at her own disposal but at that of her husband, and thus is

still not a free individual.

The Critical Importance of the Key Case

The case of Elizabeth Key presented a direct

confrontation, played out on a colony-wide scale, between

the desire among plantation owners to raise their rate of

profit by imposing lifetime hereditary servitude on

African-Americans, and an African-American’s right to

freedom on the basis of Christian principles and English

common law.

105

The jury that heard the case and the

General Assembly that reviewed it in 1656 acted on the

traditional English principle in finding that Elizabeth

Key’s Christian baptism and rearing barred her from being

held as a lifetime bond-laborer. At the same time, they

took their stand on the common-law principle that the

social status of the child followed that of the father.

If the principles affirmed in the findings of the

Northumberland County jury and the special committee of

the General Assembly had prevailed, the establishment of

racial slavery would have been prevented. If African-

Americans were to be reduced to lifetime hereditary

bond-servitude and kept in that status, it was essential for

the exploiters of bond-labor to establish the principle of

descent through the mother. For, as an owner claimed

when another woman sued for her freedom a century later:

“If, in a case of a dispute about the property of negroes, it

is not sufficient to prove the mother to be a slave, there

will soon be an end to that kind of property.”

106

What was

involved here was not a mere matter of ancestry; it

represented an attack on the patriarchy, though limited, of

course, to the Negro family. In principle it was akin to the

attack on the Catholic Irish family under the Penal Laws of

the eighteenth century.

107

And, as in the case of that aspect

of the Penal Laws, it was not associated with any

equalitarian impulse on the part of the ruling class.

It was equally important, for purposes of maximizing

profits by reducing labor costs, to cut the knot that tangled

Christian baptism with freedom. Already a decade and a

half earlier the organizers of the ill-fated English colony

on Providence Island had said that only Negroes not yet

converted to Christianity could be enslaved, but that those

who had been converted could not.

108

The early response

of Barbados planters to proposals to Christianize the

Negroes there was that it would be the end of their system,

because they could no longer be accounted as slaves.

109

Notice has been taken of the quick reactions of the

General Assembly to aspects of the runaway problem, and

to the servants’ plot of 1663, and of the timely changes in

the terms of bond-servitude to be imposed on Irish bond-

laborers, which reflected the alteration from the

ascendancy of the Puritan Commonwealth to the

restoration of the crypto-Catholic Stuarts in England. Each

of these cases also involved considerations of labor costs,

but they did not impinge on the sacred and constitutional

principles of patriarchy and religious conversion, deep-

running principles not to be disposed of quickly. It would

be six years before the Virginia General Assembly in

1662 resolved “doubts that [had] arisen” about the status

of children of English fathers and African-American

women, by enacting that “all children borne in this country

shalbe held bond or free according to the condition of the

mother,” establishing the principle of partus sequitur

ventrem, directly contrary to the English common law

principle of partus sequitur patrem, descent through the

father.

110

In 1667, eleven years after Elizabeth Key had

won her fight for freedom as a Christian, the General

Assembly again was able to receive “doubts that [had]

arisen” by decreeing that “the conferring of baptisme doth

not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage”;

thus, as it was said, “masters, freed from this doubt, may

more carefully endeavour the propagation of

christianity.”

111

A widened lens brings significant rough coincidences into

focus. In January 1663, the year after the Virginia General

Assembly enacted the legal principle of descent through

the mother in order to make African-Americans subject to

hereditary bond-servitude, the English government re-

chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa,

for the first time listing the trade in human chattels among

its purposes.

112

In October the English bourgeoisie threw

open a challenge to Dutch domination of that trade by

sending a naval force to carry out extensive raids on Dutch

posts on the coast of West Africa. The issue thus joined

was to eventuate in the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–

67); it ended with the Treaty of Breda which finally gave

the Anglo-American plantation colonies secure direct

access to African bond-laborers. In 1672, the Royal

Adventurers, who had been bankrupted by the long

struggle with the Dutch, were succeeded by the Royal

African Company, which was granted a monopoly as the

supplier of African laborers to Anglo-America.

The 1667 assurance given by the Virginia General

Assembly to the plantation bourgeoisie at large that they

need no longer fear the liberating effect of Christian

baptism coincided with the signing of the Treaty of Breda.

Three years later, in 1670, the General Assembly made it

illegal for African-American planters to buy “christian”

bond-laborers, limiting them to the purchase of persons

“of their owne nation.”

113

Although the reasoning that led

to this enactment is not recorded, except that the issue

“hath beene questioned,” it was not intended as a way of

promoting the sales of African bond-laborers. Rather, it

was designed to promote the principle of racial

oppression. The purchase price for Africans was half

again as much as that for Europeans,

114

prohibitively high

for poor planters such as African-American planters

generally were. This restriction therefore was an effective

bar to advancement to the employer class.

In 1672 the General Assembly enacted a law “for the

apprehension and suppression of runawayes, negroes and

slaves” because, it said,

many negroes have lately beene and now are out in rebellion in sundry parts

of this country, and … noe means have yet beene found for the

apprehension and suppression of them from whome many mischiefes of

very dangerous consequence may arise to the country if either other

negroes, Indians or servants should happen to fly forth and joyne with

them.

115

Into this Virginia in 1674 or 1675, some 250 bond-

laborers were brought directly from West Africa in ships

under contract to the Royal African Company.

116

The

tobacco bourgeoisie generally certainly hoped to solve the

problem of perennially low-priced tobacco by importing

Africans as lifetime hereditary bond-laborers. The

tobacco bourgeoisie was also strongly urged by the

highest circles in the English government to patronize the

African labor trade, “Blacks … being the principall and

most Usefull appurtenances of a plantation.”

117

But as the historian Bruce noted, “Those [bond-

laborers] snatched directly from a state of freedom in

Africa were doubtless in some measure difficult to

manage.”

118

If it came to that, who would do the

“managing”? If the hopes of the rich planters and of the

Royal African Company were to be realized in a rapid

increase of the labor supply directly from Africa, how

would the ruling elite cope with the attendant increase in

problems of social control, of “negroes out in rebellion?”

They could, of course, pass more stringent laws, but how

effective would they be? Leaving aside the demonstrated

moral and humane attitudes that ran counter to such denial

of English rights to African-Americans, there were

interests belonging to the field of political economy that

were directly or indirectly inconsistent with devoted

enforcement of repressive measures against African-

Americans. In the years 1672 to 1674, England was

engaged in the last of the three Anglo-Dutch wars. Even

some of the more prosperous Virginia planters, who might

have been able to afford to buy lifetime bond-laborers at

£18 to £20 each, were in a treasonous disposition, and

were “saying openly, that they are in the nature of slaves”

because they were being denied free trade with the Dutch.

Their disaffection was so great, it was said, that Virginia

was “in danger, with their consent, to fall into the enemy’s

hands.”

119

Of course that war would end, but the English

Navigation Acts directed against the Dutch trade would

remain; still, these more prosperous planters might be

expected to return to their allegiance and perhaps find

common interest in acquiring lifetime bond-laborers from

Royal African Company contractors. But, at the least, their

priorities diverged from those of their government to a

degree that was not for that moment propitious for

effective administration of laws. The poor majority of the

planters, and the landless freemen, could not afford to buy

lifetime bond-laborers, who would be forced to compete

with additional numbers of African lifetime bond-

laborers; they had better things to do than to help the rich

planters keep their newly arriving Africans. As for the

bond-labor majority of the producing classes, they were

so unreliable that of their number African-Americans and

all but a few of the European-Americans were denied the

right to bear arms even in face of the threat of a Dutch

invasion.

120

Given the English superstructural obstacles and the

already marked resistance of African-Americans to

lifetime hereditary bondage that have been described in

this chapter, a rapid and large addition of African bond-

laborers to the population would certainly tend to reduce

the effectiveness of the already weak social control

stratum in enforcing the laws for the “suppression of

rebellious negroes.” It might indeed lead to the

appearance of quilombos in the Blue Ridge or the

Allegheny Mountains rivaling in scope the Palmares

settlement that withstood the assaults of Portuguese and

Dutch colonialists for nearly a century.

121

PART FOUR

Rebellion and Reaction

Rebellion – and Its Aftermath

In 1624, Captain John Smith had warned that basing the

colony on chattel bond-servitude was bound to

“bring … [Virginia] to misery.”

A half-century later, a

revolt that had been brewing since about 1660, when the

long period of very low tobacco prices began, fulfilled

that prophecy.

No other event of Anglo-American colonial history has

received so much attention from historians as Bacon’s

Rebellion, which convulsed the Virginia colony for nearly

nine months beginning in May 1676.

Over a period of

nearly three centuries, they have produced three main lines

of interpretation of that event’s historic significance. At

first, Bacon’s Rebellion was regarded as a bad thing

because of its lawlessness; “rebel” was ipso facto a

pejorative term, although extenuations were found by

reference to errors of government policy, official

corruption, and abuse of power. In the “Nationalist”

period, between the American Revolution and the War

against Great Britain of 1812, a new look in the light of

new events led to a reinterpretation wherein Nathaniel

Bacon himself was seen as “the torchbearer of the

Revolution” and the rebellion was regarded as a dress

rehearsal for the American Revolution; issues raised

against George III by the Continental Congress were seen

to vindicate Bacon’s rebellion against Charles II’s

Governor, William Berkeley. One well-known variation

on this theme eschews such hero worship and glorification

of rebellion but nevertheless regards the events as the

beginning of the shift in the locus of power from the royal

provincial authorities to an aristocracy of the “county

families” with a sense of a new Virginia identity that a

century later they would assert by enlisting as “rebels.”

To the extent that Bacon’s Rebellion is seen as a reaction

against the effects of the Navigation Act and exorbitant

duties laid on tobacco sent to England, the parallel with

the American Revolution has validity. But that analogy

limps when it comes to Governor William Berkeley’s

role, for he, the villain of the piece, was the most

articulate critic of the Navigation Laws. A more

fundamental objection is that the comparison is limited to

the matter of throwing off English domination and the

establishment of an independent republic, and

consequently ignores the factor of the extremes of

economic inequality that resulted from the system of bond-

labor.

When World War Two and then the modern civil rights

movement brought the thesis of equal rights and anti-

racism to the fore, Bacon’s Rebellion was once again seen

as a bad thing, but not because to “rebel” was unjustified,

but because the rebellion was regarded as not a real

rebellion at all, but merely a dramatic early event in the

“frontier” phenomenon, whereby the path of white empire

took its westward way completely disregardful of the

rights of the American Indians. Wilcomb E. Washburn,

author of the standard presentation of this point of view,

concluded that the failure to take this “frontier

aggressiveness” into account was due, at least in part, to

“the white historian’s immersion in his racial bias.”

All these various approaches, as well as that of the

present work, share a common disregard of the admonition

of the widely respected historian Wesley Frank Craven to

avoid attempts to read any lasting significance into

Bacon’s Rebellion.

My concern with the origin of racial oppression in

continental Anglo-America stresses the class struggle

dimension of colonial history. At the same time, it is

consistently informed by an equalitarian motif.

I thus have

a transient foot in both the second and the third of the three

camps, but only in passing through to a still different

interpretation. By the light of a consciousness raised by

the modern civil rights movement, I have examined the

records of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,

with which scholars have long been familiar, and it is on

those records that my somewhat iconoclastic assessment

of the historical significance of Bacon’s Rebellion must

stand or fall.

Such being my focus, I have centered my attention on the

second, civil war phase of Bacon’s Rebellion – April

1676 to January 1677 – rather than the first, anti-Indian,

phase – September 1675 to April 1676. In more explicit

justification of this emphasis, I offer the following four

considerations.

The first of these is that the details of the anti-Indian

phase of the rebellion are all taken from accounts of the

English; the Pamunkey, the Susquehannocks and the

Occaneechee left no record of those events. Although the

English accounts do acknowledge particular English faults

in the conduct of the colony’s relations with the Indians,

they all presume that the English were licensed by divine

providence, and/or the right of conquest (thinly disguised

perhaps by “purchase” or “treaty”), to reduce them to

subject, tributary status, and sooner or later to expropriate

them.

Second, despite the policy of enslaving Indian war

captives, the basic Indian policy of the English ruling elite

was motivated not primarily by consideration of social

control over exploitable Indian bond-labor in Virginia, but

rather by a desire to exclude the Indians from English-

occupied territory. (To the English aggressors, the Indians

were regarded much as were the “wild Irish”, the “Irish

enemy” outside the English Pale – the small portion of

Ireland that was under English control – prior to the

seventeenth century.)

Third, “white-race” identity was not the principle for

which freemen were rallied for the anti-Indian phase of

Bacon’s Rebellion. The “not-white” and “redskin”

classification of the Indian in Anglo-America would be

the outcome of the invention of the white race, a

transmogrification of the European-American that had not

yet been accomplished in 1676.

The fourth and final consideration is that Bacon’s

Rebellion was not primarily an anti-Indian war,

although

that was the tenor of the first call to arms voiced by

frontier plantation owners such as Nathaniel Bacon and

William Byrd, capitalists recently arrived in Virginia.

An analogy is provided by the American Revolution

which was not primarily an anti-Indian war, although

Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian author of the Declaration

of Independence, did indict George III for having

“endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers,

the merciless Indian savages” etcetera, etcetera, and

Congress arranged for the “extinction” of Indian land

claims in order to grant 9,500,000 acres to Revolutionary

War veterans.

The “lesson of history” to be drawn from the anti-Indian

phase of Bacon’s Rebellion is clear and retains its

relevance today. The European occupation of Indian lands

shows that, from Columbus to Custer, the bourgeois eye

looks upon progress and genocide indifferently, as

incidental aspects of the process of the accumulation of

capital; the anti-Indian phase of Bacon’s Rebellion was

merely another example of that lesson. Its logic requires

that the United States government that brought the

American Indians to the verge of extinction make

restitution in some form that will at least end the legacy of

extreme poverty and discrimination that American white

supremacy has imposed on them. The struggle for justice

in this respect merges with the general struggle against

white-supremacist racial oppression.

Departing from the “Great Men”

Interpretation of the Rebellion

The civil war phase of Bacon’s Rebellion offers relevant

insights into the course of the history of Anglo-America in

its colonial and in its regenerate United States form. The

usual treatments of the rebellion describe it largely in

terms of the contest between the Governor, William

Berkeley, and the Rebel, Nathaniel Bacon, even though

their differences are seen to involve policy questions of

great interest to the free population generally. Bernard

Bailyn’s analysis avoids the heroic interpretation; he finds

the significance of the rebellion in the struggle within the

elite, but he ignores the bond-laborers and the poor

farmers as well, except for the latter’s opposition to unfair

taxation and corruption and abuse of power by the

Governor and his faction. I do not intend a narrative

presentation, but rather merely to center attention on those

elements of the rebellion that relate most meaningfully to

the origin of racial oppression in continental Anglo-

America.

Sir William Berkeley arrived in Virginia in 1642 as

Governor and served in that office until January 1677,

except for eight Cromwellian interregnum years, 1652 to

1659. To him, and to his appointed Colony Council, was

assigned the custody of the imperial interest, and he was

given great powers of patronage in establishing and

maintaining the provincial bureaucracy for carrying out the

appropriate official functions of that responsibility.

Beginning in the mid-1640s, in the time of the English

Revolution, and continuing during the first half-decade

after the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, a

number of wealthy and well-connected newcomers

reactivated claims descended from Company period

“Adventurers”. These claims, Bailyn says, were “the most

important of a variety of forms of capital that might

provide the basis for secure family fortunes.”

These new

planters became established as dominant families in the

various counties. The political implications of this

decentralization of power, through the ascendancy of the

“county families,” were at least potentially contradictory

to English imperial interests, as represented by the

Navigation Acts which required Virginia planters to ship

their tobacco in English ships to England, so that the

Crown and English merchants, respectively, could rake in

the profit from the royal import duty on tobacco or from

re-export sales from England mainly to continental

Europe.

This tension between the scattered county families and

the imperial interest accounts for the English government’s

proposals for the establishment of a limited number of port

towns as the sole authorized sites for shipping tobacco.

These would facilitate enforcement of the Navigation Act

and assure full collection of the 2s. export duty per

hogshead of tobacco that supplied the Governor’s salary

and unaudited expenditures involved in the operation of

the provincial government, including the work of

collecting the royal quit-rents of 2s. per hundred acres of

patented land. This divergence of interests was also

expressed in the establishment in about 1663 of the elected

House of Burgesses as a separate section of a bicameral

Assembly and in the fact that for more than a decade the

Governor did not call a single general election of

burgesses. The result was the development of a political

differentiation within the colony elite, between the county

magnates, on the one hand, and the royally privileged inner

circle around the Governor and the Colony Council that

came to be called “the Green Spring” faction.

In 1676,

that divergence would produce a breach in the ranks of the

ruling elite through which would erupt profound social

upheaval.

Bacon’s Rebellion began in that year, not as a new

bond-labor plot for flight or rebellion, nor as a mutiny of

poor disfranchised freemen sinking hopelessly into debt

and the regressive system of taxes by the poll,

but rather

as a dispute within the ranks of the colony elite over

“Indian policy”. More specifically it was a dispute

between Governor Berkeley and owners of “frontier”

plantations where, beginning in June 1675, war had flared

between settlers and mainly Susquehannock Indians.

Nathaniel Bacon (1647–76)

who had been appointed to

the Colony Council by Berkeley in March 1675, just a

year after Bacon’s arrival in Virginia, was chosen by the

“frontier” country planters the following April to lead

their aggressive anti-Indian cause.

The issue between Berkeley and Bacon was not

whether Indians were to be displaced by the advance of

English settlement – they were in fundamental agreement

on that – but merely the priority to be given to it at a given

time, and thus the rate at which it was to be done. There

are those historians who feel bound to euphemize

Berkeley’s “Indian policy,” and one of them presents

Berkeley as a “champion of the right of the American

Indians to hold undisturbed the land they occupied.”

But

such an assessment seems questionable in the light of the

record. In October 1648, “upon the humble representation

of the Burgesses to the Governour [Berkeley] and

Council,” it was enacted that, beginning in the following

September, English colonists were authorized by the

English colonial government to occupy land previously

guaranteed to the Indians under the treaty of 1646 “upon

the north side of Charles [later called the York] River and

Rappahannock river.” The justification for this

displacement of the native inhabitants was that English

planters needed those lands because their lands were

overworked and their cattle needed more range.

In June

1666, Berkeley urged the Rappahannock militia to

“destroy all those Northern Indians.” He was particularly

keen on the plan as being self-financing, because the

militiamen would be paid by capturing “women &

children.” But, he slyly suggested, if the Rappahannock

men did not think they could do the work alone, there were

plenty of others from other counties who would be willing

to serve in return for their “share of the Booty.” The

Rappahannock County court members (militia officers ex

officio) hastened to reassure the Governor that they could

do the job themselves, without outside help – that they

needed only the “Incouradgement [of] the spoyles of our

Enemies.”

At the end of June 1676, Bacon led an

onslaught on the friendly Pamunkey Indians, killed some of

them and took others as captives to be sold as slaves of

the English. According to a marginal note in one of the

official documents, “The Indian prisoners were some of

them sold by Bacon and the rest disposed of by Sir

William Berkeley.”

The tattered remnant of the

Pamunkey people fled from the land that the England had

assigned as their only legal place in the English scheme of

settlement.

When requested to return to that

“reservation,” the Queen of the Pamunkey (a descendant of

Opechancanough) replied that she and her people had fled

for their lives, and that they would willingly return to their

assigned place when the Governor could assure them of

protection from murderous assault by the frontiersmen

who made no distinction of friendly Indians. Berkeley’s

cold reply was that he was “resolved not to be soe

answered but to reduce her and the other Indians” as soon

as he had settled accounts with Bacon.

For historians who have no investment in defending

Berkeley’s reputation, this aspect of the Governor’s

behavior should pose no difficult threat; rather it appears

to be perfectly of a piece with his “Indian policy.” Among

the responsibilities of the Governor and the Colony

Council was the formulation and maintenance of an

“Indian policy” that would assure the minimum diversion

from making tobacco. The essence of that policy was to

maintain advantageous political and economic relations

with the friendly neighbouring tribes, the Doegs, the

Pamunkey, the Nottoway and the Meherrin, who were first

subdued and then reduced to dependency as “tributary”

subjects of the king of England. They were to serve as a

two-way buffer, shielding the English from enemy tribes,

and capturing and returning runaway bond-laborers who

fled from servitude.

One such arrangement was designed

to frustrate “all Loitering English as [blank in manuscript]

which throughs [throws] themselves amongst” the Indians

“for harbour or to be conveyed unto remote parts with

intent to defraud their masters of their Time of Service.”

The “King and great men” were to bring any such runaway

to the Rappahannock County magistrates and “be

immediately payed five armes lenths of Roanoake or the

value thereof.”

This agreement lends specificity to Governor

Berkeley’s general policy, which “alwayes and most

prudently Indeavored to p[re]serve [the neighbor Indians]

as being as necessarie for us as Doggs to hunt wolves.”

Furthermore, in exchange for English firearms, powder

and other goods, the tributary tribes supplied beaver and

other pelts that were an easy source of profit for the

plantation bourgeoisie, more particularly for those men

who were expressly licensed by the colonial authorities to

engage in the trade.

Both aspects of this policy found opposition among the

newer, “county family” types. Upon observing that much

of the best tidewater land was already patented to earlier

claimants, some of these new investors saw better

prospects for exploiting bond-labor in opening up new

areas to settlement. At the same time, the conduct of the fur

trade monopoly was regarded as another instance of the

use of provincial authority to line the pockets of the

Governor and his faction. However, as Bailyn says,

“These dissidents … represented neither the downtrodden

masses nor a principle of opposition to privilege as such.

Their discontent stemmed to a large extent from their own

exclusion from the privileges they sought.”

True, some planters were also only too eager to gain the

bond-labor of Indian war captives when that opportunity

presented itself.
31
 Some, “rather than bee Tennants, seate
upon the remote barren Land, whereby contentions arrise
between them and the Indians.”
32
 But the fact that one out
of  every  four  of  the  freemen  in  Virginia  were  landless
seems  to indicate that  the common run of the people did
not  see  moving  to  the  “frontier”  as  a  viable  option  for
achieving upward social mobility.
33
 They indeed “thought
it hard to be a Tennant on a Continent,”
34
 but they saw that
the most direct, preferable, sensible and the safest course
out  of  their  straitened  circumstances  lay  not  in  “Indian
policy”  but  in  a  change  in  Virginia  land  policy.
35
  The
remedy  was,  as  stated  in  the  proposal  of  James  City
County  to the  English  government  commissioners  sent  to
investigate  Bacon’s  Rebellion,  to  tax  land,  and  tax  it  so
heavily  that  the  tidewater-land  engrossers  would  find  it
prohibitively  expensive  to  hold  onto  idle  land,  which
would then become available to the land-hungry poor and
dispossessed.
36
  The  validity  of  their  view  would  be
acknowledged many times by those reporting to the home
government. William Sherwood deplored the activities of
the  “Land  lopers,  some  [of  whom]  take  up  2000  acres,
some 3000 Acres, others ten thousand Acres, nay many [of
whom]  have taken up thirty thousand Acres of Land, and
never cultivated any part of it.”
37
 Giles Bland, collector of
the  King’s  customs  in  Virginia,  noted  that  “A  poor  man
who  has  only  his  labour  to  maintain  himself  and  his

family, pays as much [taxes] as a man who has 20,000

acres.” Bland proposed that “the richest sort” be taxed as

a means of getting them to “lay down parte of their Land to

bee taken up by such as will Employ it.”

This proposal for a land-tax incentive to induce a

redistribution of the land represented the popular sense of

the unfairness of the tax system. In the name of reducing

costs of government, the Governor and Colony Council

were authorized to impose annual levies, without

consulting even the House of Burgesses.

The privilege of

trading with the Indians was by law restricted to a few

appointees of the Governor. In addition to the colony

taxes, each tithable was subject to county and parish

levies, and occasional additional levies for particular

purposes. In 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the

Governor and Colony Council imposed a targeted levy for

the construction of forts at points susceptible to Dutch

shipborne incursions. In 1675, the Governor and Colony

Council laid a special levy of 100 pounds of tobacco on

each tithable, to be collected in two annual installments, to

finance efforts to persuade King Charles to revoke two

grants, made in 1669 and 1673, whereby some eight of his

England-dwelling friends were endowed with the title to

all the remaining unpatented “public” lands in Virginia,

including the Eastern Shore.

The Governor and the

Colony Council perceived these grants as prejudicial to

their control over the acquisition of fee-simple land titles

(held directly from the Crown) via the head-right system,

or otherwise. The men sent to make the case before the

government in England noted that the laying of this levy

was intensifying the already existent “mutinous

discontents” among the planters.

The same class discrimination prevailed in relation to

the fur trade with the Indians. Except for a few of the elite

no colonists were allowed to have any interest in the fur

trade.

In 1675, Nathaniel Bacon and William Byrd I,

both of whom were Berkeley’s cousins by marriage and

members of the Colony Council, were given an exclusive

license by Governor Berkeley, under terms requiring them

to pay Governor Berkeley 800 beaver skins the first year

and 600 every year thereafter.

Yet popular resentment

over the fur monopoly was concentrated against Berkeley,

as being a protector of Indians “for the lucre of the Beaver

and otter trade &c.”

The generality of the planters were

excluded from this privilege; certainly the one-eighth or

more of the adult male population who were freedmen just

out of their time, and the half of the tithables who were

bond-laborers, knew that they could not expect to become

licensed in the fur trade. Richard Lee, a staunch supporter

of the Governor and member of the House of Burgesses,

was convinced that the zeal of the multitude in the

rebellion was due to “hopes of levelling, otherwise all his

[Bacon’s] specious pretenses would not have persuaded

them but that they believe to have equall advantages by

success of their design.”

Thomas Ludwell and Robert

Smith advised the king that “the present disorders have

their beginning … from the poverty and uneasyness” of

some of the “meanest” colonists.

The quarrel that erupted between factions of the

numerically small elite in 1676 over profit-making

opportunities did not lead to new conquests of Indian

territory for the expansion of English plantations.

Instead

“the challengers were themselves challenged”, says

Bailyn, by “ordinary settlers [angered] at the local

privileges of the same newly risen county magnates who

assailed the privileges of the Green Spring faction.”

The

result was a complete breakdown of ruling-class social

control, as the anti-Indian war was transformed into a

popular rebellion against the plantation bourgeoisie.

In May 1676, Giles Bland, administrator of his father’s

plantation interests in Virginia, and collector of the King’s

customs there, informed Secretary of State Joseph

Williamson in England that “Virginia is at this point of

time under the greatest Destractions that it hath felt since

the year 1622.” A war with the Indians was impending; a

force of five hundred volunteers had gone forth to war on

Indians in general in defiance of the orders of the

Governor; and tax collections were threatened with

disruption. The main declared grievances of the rebels,

however, were directed at unfair taxation and peculation

in high places. Most serious of all, unlike the Lawnes

Creek Parish mutiny of 1674, which had been “suppressed

by a Proclamation, and the advice of some discreet

persons,” the present uprising was led by “Nathaniel

Bacon lately sworne one of the Counsell and many other

Gentlemen of good Condition.” Bland worried that “the

enemie,” presumably some rival European power, would

“take advantage of these Disorders.”

A new House of Burgesses was elected (it was the first

election in fourteen years), a sort of official reconciliation

was staged with Bacon, and legislation was passed for

raising an anti-Indian army of 1,000 men and calling for

the Governor to commission Bacon as the “general and

commander-in-chief”. When Berkeley temporized about

signing the commission, several hundred armed men

formed in combat array before the Assembly meeting

house on 23 June, and by threatening the lives of the

members forced Berkeley to sign the commission.

Thus,

in effect, power had been conceded to the armed rebels,

and the militia function had passed out of the hands of the

nominal authorities, causing “the Indian design to recoil in

a Civil War upon the colony.”

This last fact was

emphasized in July by the abject failure of the Governor’s

attempt to rally the Gloucester County militia to go against

the  rebels.  Neither  Governor  nor  king  could  control  the
situation  sufficiently  to  prevent  this  extreme  crisis.
52
  So
far  from  being  in  control  was Colonel  Joseph  Brigder,
chief of the colony militia, that “he could not ride safely
on any road for fear of rebels,” even six months after the
supposed  end  of  the  rebellion.
53
  So  far  from  being  in
control was the Governor that from July 1676 to January
1677 “the only shelter for the Governor and his party” was
Accomack,  “separated  Seaven  Leagues  distance.”
54
Francis  Moryson,  one-time  lieutenant  governor  of  the
colony and one of Virginia’s representatives in England in
October  1676,  could  only  express  his  dismay  that
“Amongst  so  many  thousand  reputed honest  men,  there
should  not  be  one  thousand”  to  fight  against  the
rebellion.
55
  Later  Moryson  and  his  fellow  commissioner
John Berry declared positively that of the fifteen thousand
possible  combatants  in  Virginia  there  were  “not  above
five hundred persons untainted in this rebellion.”
56
The majority of the fifteen thousand were bond-laborers
–  six  thousand  European-Americans  and  two  thousand
African-Americans.
57
  In  view  of  the  seventeenth-century
Chesapeake record of  resistance  by  the bond-laborers to
the  unconstitutional  and  oppressive  conditions  of  their
lives,  how  has  it  happened  that,  even  in  the  course  of
invaluable  and  illuminating  research,  with  very  few
exceptions,
58
  historians  have  completely  ignored  this

section of the population as a significant, self-activating

shaper of history, and have instead relegated it to

monographs on “white servitude,”

or to treatment as a

mere economic category defined exclusively by market

choices of the owning class?

Call it the bourgeois

blindspot, that prevents them from seeing and accepting

the capacity for historic self-activation in “people of no

property.”

My placement of the bond-laborers and the bond-labor

relations of production at the center of the history of

Bacon’s Rebellion is not an exercise in self-indulgent

revolutionary romanticism; rather, it proceeds directly

from the record-based presentation of the history of

Virginia Colony in the preceding chapters. Without bond-

labor, there would have been no tobacco monoculture;

without tobacco monoculture the economy would not have

been dominated by an oligarchy of owners of large

plantations gained by headrights on imported chattel bond-

laborers.

Freedom for the bond-laborers would have

revolutionized colonial Virginia from a plantation

monoculture to a diversified smallholder economy.

The

demand of the smallholders for a more equitable

distribution of tidewater land if fully realized would have

resulted in a predominance of family-sized farms without

capital to import bond-laborers, and a more diversified

economy. But, as the king’s commissioners said in reply to

county grievances, the oligarchy would never agree to that

course of action. Indeed, that appears to have been the

basis of the divide-and-conquer strategy proposed to the

king by Virginia’s representatives in England. The

rebellion, they said, did not result from any desire of “the

better or more industrious sort of people,” and the best

hope for ending the insurrection lay in “a speedy

separation of the sound parts from the rabble.”

At the highest levels of government in Virginia and in

England, the great question to which all others were

secondary concerned the preservation of chattel bond-

servitude. Five days after the Governor, Council and

Burgesses capitulated to armed threat by Bacon’s

supporters and made him commander-in-chief of an army

to go against the Indians, Philip Ludwell, Assistant

Secretary of the colony and member of the Colony

Council, wrote to Secretary of State Williamson confiding

the possibility of a complete overthrow of the system

fashioned by the tobacco bourgeoisie. For fear of having

their throats cut by rebels, he said, the Assembly was

granting Bacon’s demands “as fast as they come.” Ludwell

also expressed concern about “the Indians on our

Borders.” But his greatest fear was “our servants at home,

who (if God prevent not their takeing hold of this Great

advantage), must carry on beyond Remedy to

destruc[ti]on.”
63
  That  was  the  great  danger  for,  in  the
words of Governor Berkeley himself, “The very being of
the  Collony  doth  consist  in  the  Care  and  faithfulness,  as
well as in the number of our servants.”
64
 For  those very
reasons,  it  was  the  striving  of  the  bond-laborers  for
freedom  from  chattel  servitude  that  held  the  key  to
liberation  of  the  colony  from  the  misery  that  proceeded
from oligarchic rule and a monocultural economy.
The  prospect  of  freedom  for  the  bond-laborers  was
more than a colonial concern; it bore heavily on domestic
English  politics.  Charles  II  was  in  financial  straits,  but
because he was at loggerheads with Parliament over other
issues, he was unwilling to risk calling it into session to
authorize  revenue-raising  measures.  The  collection  of
domestic  excise  taxes,  income  from  Crown  lands,  and
feudal dues, fell far short of the anticipated £1,200,000. In
1672,  the  government  had  been  forced  to  repudiate  its
outstanding debt despite the secret subsidy of £200,000 a
year supplied by Louis XIV of France.
65
 In short, Charles
found  himself  very  much  dependent  on  the  £100,000
annual  duties  he  collected  on  imports  of  tobacco  from
Virginia.
66
  The  losses  caused  by  the  Virginia  rebellion,
which  completely  disrupted  the  operation  of  the  tobacco
fleet  of  140  ships,  played  a  major  part  in  compelling
Charles  to  call  for  the  election  of  a  new  parliament  in
1678.
67
 This domestic crisis no doubt added to the anxiety

of the king and Privy Council as they prepared to send a

military expedition to quell the rebellion; they wanted to

know “[w]hether there be not more servants than Masters,

and whether Bacon has not nor will not proclaim freedom

to them?”

Throughout Virginia in 1676 the county courts, where

refractory bond-laborers were routinely sentenced to

extensions of their servitude and lashes well laid on, were

grossly disrupted by the rebellion. The same was true of

the parishes in many of their functions, including their role

in the execution of court orders regarding bond-laborers

and their children. In Charles City County “the Courts of

Justice [were] totally interrupted, hindered, and

neglected” from the spring of 1676 until some time in

1677.

Social services (visiting the sick, burying the

dead, performing marriages, caring for orphans and the

indigent) normally performed by the minister, clerk and

vestry of Middlesex County’s Christ Church parish were

suspended “by meanes and Armed Force of ill Desposed

persons then in Rebellion.”

Westmoreland County Court

was adjourned begining in May 1676, and did not conduct

business again until the following April or May.

The

very circumstances that completely broke down the social

control system also resulted in the main source of records

regarding the day-to-day sufferings and struggles of the

bond-laborers lapsing for much of 1676 and 1677. The

editor  of  the  colonial  Virginia  parish  records  concluded
that, “in those parishes directly and fundamentally affected
by  Bacon’s  Rebellion  it  was  found  advisable  the  year
following  the  Rebellion  to  destroy  the  existing  parish
records, or at least to render illegible some part of those
records.”
72
However, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that bond-
laborers  in  Charles  City  County  would  glory  in  the
relaxation  of  social  control.
73
  At  such  a  juncture  of
history,  would  not  a  person  like Ann  Berrey  have  been
glad  of  her  improved  chance  of  a  choice  in  the  matter
before being “gott with child” by her owner?
74
 Might not
one such as William Rogers have been tempted to validate
his purloined indenture papers by simply walking away to
seek  better  terms  of  employment,  leaving  half  of  his
owner’s  tobacco  seedlings  untransplanted?
75
  In  the
absence of a functioning Middlesex County Court to order
him  to  “return  to  his  Service,”  a  bond-laborer  would
surely  have  gloried  in  the  opportunity  to  defy  Major
Robert  Smith,  who  sought  to  keep  him  in  bondage  by
denying  the  validity  of  his  “printed  paper.”
76
  With  the
whole country in a state of social dissolution, who would
have been there to capture a “Mulatto runaway boy” and
return him to the parish minister who claimed him and on
whose  orders  he  was  whipped  to  death?
77
  There  would
have  been  no  General  Court  or  Charles  City  Council  to

order  the  pursuit  of  “certain  runaway  negroes,”  and  nor
would there have been any posse to carry that order out.
78
Perhaps  among  desperately  unhappy  bond-laborers  the
improved  prospects  for  the  outward  expression  of  anger
reduced the inclination to suicide.
79
 A few names survive
in the records of bond-laborers more disposed to turn their
aggression  outward.  The  Governor  himself  said  that  his
own  “servant,”  a  carpenter  named  Page,  had  joined  the
rebellion  and  “for  his  violence  used  against  the  Royal
Party [was] made a Colonel,” and that another “servant,”
named Digby, was a rebel captain.
80
 Bond-laborer James
Wilson was apparently a rank-and-filer, as were William
Baker, a “souldier … by his own voluntary act,” and John
Thomas,  who  served  in  the  rebellion  for  nearly  six
months.
81
  Bond-laborer  Mary  Fletcher  ran  away  to  the
rebel  garrison  that  had  taken  over  the  house  of  Arthur
Allen in Surry County.
82
More  significant  than  this  random  identification  of
individual  bond-laborers  is  the  fact  that  nameless-to-
history bond-laborers intervened en masse in the rebellion
for  their  own  particular  interest  –  freedom  from  chattel
servitude.  English  poet  and  Parliament  member Andrew
Marvell  reported  on  14  November  1676  that  a  ship  had
recently  arrived  from  Virginia  with  the  news  that  Bacon
had “proclam’d liberty to all Servants and Negro’s.”
83
 A
letter written from Virginia in October seemed to suggest

that a class differentiation had occurred among the rebels:
“Bacon’s  followers  having  deserted  him  he  had
proclaimed  liberty  to  the  servants  and  slaves  which
chiefly  formed  his  army  when  he  burnt  James  Town.”
84
According to another ship’s report, “most of the servants
flock  to  [Bacon],  and  he  makes  their  masters  pay  their
wages.”
85
  The  Virginia  Assembly  retrospectively
declared that “many evill disposed servants in these late
tymes of horrid rebellion taking advantage of the loosenes
of the tymes, did depart from their service, and followed
the  rebells  in  rebellion.”
86
  The  Royal  Commissioners
noted that “sundry servants and other persons of desperate
fortunes in Virginia during the late rebellion deserted from
their masters and ran into rebellion on the encouragement
of liberty.”
87
Among  the  captains  of  merchant  ships  whom  the  king
and  Berkeley recruited  for  service  against  the  rebellion,
perhaps  the  most  active,  and  certainly  the  most
noteworthy,  was Captain  Thomas Grantham of the thirty-
gun Concord.  Grantham  arrived  in  York  River  on  21
November.
88
  Governor  Berkeley  came  over  from
Accomack  and,  in  a  shipboard  conference,  agreed  on  a
strategy  whereby  Grantham  would  attempt  to  go  to  the
rebels and to persuade them to surrender and receive the
Governor’s pardon. The main concentration of some eight
hundred men was around West Point, where the Pamunkey

and the Mattaponi rivers meet to form the York. Laurence

Ingram, who had assumed the rebel command after the

death of Bacon on 26 October, was an old friend of

Grantham, on whose ship Ingram had first arrived in

Virginia.

Whatever the particulars of the conversation,

an agreement was reached under the terms of which three

hundred of the rebels marched with drums and colors

down to Tindall’s Point where the Governor was waiting

aboard a ship. Through Ingram and the other rebel officers

a ceasefire was agreed upon pending the arrival of “his

Majesties Shipps.” But such blind faith in the benevolence

of His Majesty was not to be expected from the rebel

rank-and-file; Ingram’s arrangement with the Governor

“was broke by the Rebells in three dayes time,” and it

became clear, in the words of one Virginia account, “the

name of Authority had but litle power to [w]ring the

Sword out of these Mad fellows hands.” Authority failing,

Grantham “resalved to acoste them with never to be

performed promises” of pardon for the freemen and

freedom for the bond-laborers, English and Negroes, such

as had constituted the rebel army from the time of the

burning of Jamestown.

After a secret conference between Berkeley and Ingram

and his lieutenant Gregory Walklett, three hundred of the

rebels with only small arms at West Point did accept the

terms.

But three miles further up the country, the chief

garrison and magazine remained intact at Colonel West’s

house, armed with “five hundred Musketts and fowling

pieces, and a Chest of Powder, and about a Thousand

Weight of Bulletts and shott, and three great Guns.” Not

only were these rebels heavily armed, they were furious at

Grantham for abusing the ceasefire to secure the absolute

surrender of West Point. Grantham himself described the

historic encounter:

I went to Colonel West’s house about three miles farther, which was their

Cheife Garrison and Magazine; I there mett about foure hundred English

and Negroes in Armes, who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the

Point,

saying I had betray’d them, and thereupon some were for shooting

mee, and others were for cutting mee in peeces: I told them I would willingly

surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from his Majestie, and did

ingage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed

from their Slavery: and with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I

pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand, that what I did

was by the Order of His Majestie and the Governor … Most of them I

persuaded to goe to their Homes … except about Eighty Negroes and

Twenty English which would not deliver their Armes.

Grantham’s testament has a significance that is beyond

exaggeration: in Virginia, 128 years before William Lloyd

Garrison was born, laboring-class African-Americans and

European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition

of slavery. In so doing they provided the supreme proof

that the white race did not then exist.

Virginia was not Ireland, the Atlantic was not the Irish

Sea. Reaction time from the burning of Jamestown to

knowledge of it in England to the arrival of the royal

expeditionary force in Virginia in late January and early

February was four and a half months. In the meantime, the

rebels having driven Berkeley into refuge on the Eastern

Shore, they moved quickly to crush him. They

commandeered a ship, installed cannon on it, and sent a

force with it to capture Berkeley. If the plan had

succeeded, the history of continental colonial America

might have taken a much different path. The English

expeditionary force of perhaps 1,350 soldiers, about one-

third of them raw recruits,

might not have been able to

win a timely victory. When interviewed by John Good

(like Bacon a Henrico plantation owner), Bacon argued

that “five hundred Virginians” could defeat 2,000

redcoats, by guerrilla strategy and tactics they had learned

from the native fighters, “we having the same advantages

against them that the Indians have against us.”

Are we not acquainted with the country, so that we can lay ambuscades?:

Can we not hide behind trees so render their discipline of no avail? Are we

not as good or better shots than they?

When John Good said that in the end the rebels would not

be able to withstand being cut off from the supplies of

necessities from the mother country, Bacon countered that

the French or the Dutch would be willing to fill the trade

vacuum. To Good’s doubts on that score, Bacon countered

with the prospect of extending the rebellion to North

Carolina and Maryland.

Bacon always had hope that if the king could be

apprised of the actual state of affairs in Virginia, he would

see justice in the rebel cause. Might not Charles II, mired

in a state deficit and heavily engaged in his struggle with

Parliament, have made a great effort to find some

accommodation with the propertied element aligned with

Bacon, so long as it could preserve the king’s tobacco

revenue? How would “Governor Bacon” have sounded,

with Berkeley being treated in the same way that Charles’s

father had dealt with his close friend and advisor,

Strafford?

Of course, Virginia’s fundamental problems

would have remained, but the rebel forces would have

been divided beyond repair. No such deal would have

been conceivable without the casting-off of the bond-

laborers and the poor freedmen; their demands were

incompatible with “all the principall Men in the Country,”

as Good termed them, and with the English Crown and

merchants as well.

The initiative that the rebels held at the time of the

Good interview was lost, however, with fatal

consequences, when the attempt to invade Accomack

miscarried and Bacon died of illness contracted by

exposure to the elements. The Governor then enlisted

armed merchantmen, whose strategy was based on the

principle that “in this plentiful watered Country, the water

commands the Land.” The rebels’ one bid for maritime

strength having failed, the initiative swung to the side of

the Governor and the king. By the middle of January, ten

days before the first English soldiers arrived, these

floating forts, by virtue of their mobility and the cannon

they carried, had been decisive in reducing the half-dozen

or more of the scattered garrisons.

The Royal

Commissioners reported, “About the 16th of January

[1676/7], the whole country had submitted to the

Governor”; a week later he called a meeting of the

General Assembly at his own house at Green Spring.

In the Aftermath of Rebellion

By sitting as judges in ordering the death sentences of nine

of the total of twenty-three rebels hanged,

the Royal

Commissioners, Governor-designate Colonel Herbert

Jeffreys, Major Francis Moryson,

100

and Captain Sir John

Berry, gave countenance to Berkeley’s defiance of the

King’s proclamation of 20 October 1676. That

proclamation granted amnesty to rebels who took the oath

of obedience within “the space of twenty days,” but

Berkeley dispatched these enemies without regard to the

amnesty.

101

The Royal Commissioners were also at one

with Berkeley with regard to repealing the measure,

enacted by the “Bacon Assembly” the previous year, that

had extended the vote to all freemen, propertied and

propertyless. The new General Assembly withdrew the

franchise from the propertyless “freemen.”

102

But with

regard to the most practical policy for capitalizing on their

victory, controversy dominated the relations between

Governor Berkeley and his most enthusiastic local

supporters, on the one hand, and the Royal

Commissioners, on the other.

103

Berkeley was not willing to make any allowances for

the rebellious disposition of the population of the colony,

even though he himself had noted it and related it to the

critical state of the tobacco monoculture economy. He

regarded the rebellion as an intolerable repudiation of his

stewardship, made the more infuriating by the king having

so cavalierly, so to speak, handed him his hat courtesy of

the meddling Royal Commissioners, and brought him home

under a cloud of suspicion to render account for the

breakdown of order in the colony. The Royal

Commissioners and the entire English government, on the

other hand, as Charles’s proclamation suggests were less

interested in vengeance than in the speediest revival of the

tobacco trade.

104

On 10 February 1676/7, commissioners Berry and

Moryson addressed a letter to James, Duke of York. They

were concerned to find that not one in thirty of the

colonists was innocent of involvement in the rebellion.

The populace was

sullen and obstinate and unless they receive timely reddress it is to be feared

that they will either abandon their plantations, discharging their servants and

disposing of their stock, and go away to other parts, or else most of them

will only make corn instead of tobacco, careless of their own estates and the

King’s customs.

They further warned that if the opportunity of a war

presented itself, the people of Virginia “might throw off

their yoke and subjugate themselves to a foreign

power.”

105

Fundamental Destabilizing Factors Persisted

The social instability noted by the Royal Commissioners

was rooted in five long-range fundamental factors.

1. The train of overproduction, mass impoverishment,

and indebtedness produced by the tobacco monoculture,
which continued to dominate the lives of the great
majority of the population
Experienced observers consulted by the Lords of Trade in
1681  concurred  in  urging  the  continued  presence  of
regular English troops in Virginia, noting that “Virginia is
at present poorer and more populous than ever,” and that
“extreme  poverty  may  cause  the  servants  to  plunder  the
stores and ships.”
106
  Colony  Secretary Nicholas  Spencer
ascribed that danger to “the low price of tobacco [having]
made them desperate,” and he was fearful that mere plant-
cutting  “will  not  satiate  their  rebellious  appetites.”
107
  In
another letter on those riots, Spencer specifically alluded
to the evil of monoculture: “Tobacco, the sole manufacture
of  the  Country,  [has]  grown  out  of  esteeme  by  its  over
great  quantities  yearely  made.”
108
  In  1687,  the  price  of
tobacco was so low that potential creditors were rejecting
it as collateral.
109
 The following year Governor Culpeper,
noting that everything else was being neglected in favor of
tobacco  growing,  feared  that “our  great  plenty  will  glutt
the market again.”
110
 In March 1689, during the War of the
League  of  Augsburg  (King  Billy’s  War)  against  the
French,  1689–97,  Spencer  ironically  suggested  that  “our
poverty is our best defence, for where ther’s noe Carcase,
the Eagles will not resort.”
111
 In 1710, during the War of
the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War), 1701–1713,

the price of tobacco was so low that in Virginia the people
were deeply in debt, yet there were few buyers for it.
112
 A
modern  scholar  declares  that  for  thirty-five  years,  from
1680  to  1715,  such  conditions  “recurred  with  appalling
regularity.”
113
2. The plantation bourgeoisie’s failure to diversify
production, a subject treated in Chapter 9
In  the  House  of  Commons  in  1671  it was  estimated  that
£80,000 of the annual Crown revenues came from Virginia
tobacco; ten years  later Governor Culpeper asserted  that
the King’s revenues from Virginia tobacco alone exceeded
all the revenues from all the other colonies combined.
114
In 1690, when the price paid for tobacco in Virginia was
less than a penny a pound, shipowners sold it in England
for 7d., of which 5d. was collected as the King’s share.
115
Every  additional  pound  sterling  of  royal  tobacco  import
revenue  was  an  argument  for  keeping  Virginia  engaged
exclusively  in  making  tobacco.  Opposition  to
diversification  was  constantly  voiced  by  English
capitalists, who (a) were enriched by trading in Virginia
tobacco and in bond-labor for the plantation colonies, and
(b) were jealous of any colonial productive enterprise that
might  reduce  colonial  dependence  on  English  export
supplies.  Finally  it  was  impossible  for  chronically

indebted Virginia to accumulate capital for the relatively
long-term  investment  needed  to  develop  new  lines  of
production.
116
3. The increase in the bond-labor population, eager as
ever for “an end to their Slavery”
The numbers of bond-laborers grew despite the reduction
of  the  exportable  labor  supply  in  England  that  resulted
from the demands for ship crews and cannon fodder in two
successive  wars  with  France  that  lasted  from  1689  to
1713 with only a four-year (1698–1702) interruption. It is
impossible to construct a statistical table of the numbers of
bond-laborers from year to year, but a reasonable estimate
can be made for the period.
117
As previously noted, three out of every four Europeans
who came to the Chesapeake in the colonial period were
imported as chattel bond-laborers.
118
 In 1671, 8,000 of the
15,000 tithables in Virginia were bond-laborers according
to  Governor  Berkeley,  who  put  the  total  population  of
Virginia at 40,000.
119
 Of the 30,000 Europeans who came
to the Chesapeake region between 1680 and 1699,
120
  we
may assume that 24,000 were bond-laborers. In a roughly
equivalent  period,  1674–1700,  around  6,000  African
bond-laborers  were  imported.
121
  In  that  same  period,
1674–1700,  the  total  number  of  Virginia  and  Maryland

tithables (taxables) rose from about 21,000 to about

34,000.

122

The rebellion was over, but the rebelliousness of bond-

laborers was not. In 1698, Francis Nicholas, then

Governor of Maryland, reported to the Board of Trade the

arrival of 326 “Negro” bond-laborers directly from

Africa, and 70 more from Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Pending an exact count soon to be made, he estimated that

another 600 or 700 bond-laborers had arrived from

Europe, “Chiefly Irish …, most if not all, papists.” If that

trend were to continue, he said, the two groups might join

forces in both Virginia and Maryland to make “great

disturbances, if not a rebellion.”

125

The following year,

1699, the Virginia House of Burgesses rejected the Board

of Trade’s idea of arming their “servants” against the

possibility of a French invasion should war be renewed.

With the signing of the Peace of Ryswick, a lull in the war

with France had begun, but a by-product of the peace was

that too many ungovernable Irish veterans were being

shipped as bond-laborers to the Chesapeake. “If they were

armed … we have just reason to fear they may rise upon

us,” said the Burgesses. Although of one mind with the

Board of Trade on the possibility of a French invasion, the

Burgesses feared the bond-laborers, “from the sake of

their freedom and the difference of the religion, a great

many of them (especially the Irish) and for other

reasons … would rather be our enemies than contribute to

our assistance.”

126

Apparently deciding to wait no longer for foreign

invasion, African-American bond-laborers in two

adjacent southside counties, Surry and James River,

plotted an Easter rebellion in 1710 which was discovered

just on the eve of R-Day.

127

In 1712, Virginia governor

Alexander Spotswood declared that “insurrections” by

African-American bond-laborers and invasion by Indians

were dangers as serious as that of attack by sea had been

during the height of the war with France.

128

At a new large

plantation near the head of James River, the African-

American bond-laborers looked not to rescue by sea, but

to escape into the interior. They “formed a design to

withdraw from their master and to fix themselves in the

fastnesses of the neighboring mountains.” They did indeed

succeed in establishing briefly a settlement and began

planting their crops, and defended it with arms against the

militia.

129

4. The continued lack of an effective intermediate buffer

social control stratum

Berkeley’s old Green Spring faction had been superseded

by the hegemony of the county families, on terms that

practically foreclosed the possibility of rebellion within

the ruling class and led to a growing consensus against

arbitrary administration by royal governors. But the

attenuated state of the presumptive buffer stratum was

demonstrated by the plant-cutting riots that occurred

between May and August 1682, starting in Gloucester and

then spreading to New Kent, Middlesex and York

counties.

Narratives of the event are familiar fare to students of

seventeenth-century Virginia history. The following brief

description first published in 1705 has been appropriately

cited by generations of historians:

130

… despairing of succeeding in any Agreement with the Neighbouring

Governments [to limit tobacco production, the rioters] resolved on a total

Destruction of the Tobacco in that Country [Gloucester, New Kent,

Middlesex, and York counties], especially of the Sweet-scented; because

that was planted no where else. In pursuance of which Design, they

contrived, that all Plants should be destroy’d while they were yet in their

Beds, after it was too late to sow more.

Accordingly the Ring-leaders in this Project began with, their own first,

and then went to cut up the Plants of such of their Neighbours as were not

willing to do it themselves.

The riots did succeed in reducing the glut of tobacco for

that year by ten thousand hogsheads.

131

This, however,

was not Bacon’s Rebellion revisited; it was a spontaneous

outburst of small planters

132

over a single issue, and rather

than being directed at altering the government, it was

merely a form of direct economic action for a season.

Since the action was limited to the area specializing in

sweet-scented tobacco, it did not become a colony-wide

phenomenon. In consequence of that circumstance, indeed,

the militias from remote areas were employed to suppress

the riots.

133

But this was no way to run a social control system in a

civil society. Edmund S. Morgan makes the point

concisely:

134

Although the plant-cutting rebellion had been successfully suppressed … [it]

is questionable how long Virginia could have continued on this course,

keeping men in servitude for years and then turning them free to be

frustrated by the engrossers of land, by the collectors of customs, by the

county courts, by the king himself.

It is unfortunate, at least in my opinion, that Professor

Morgan here introduces the idea that only desperate free

men might rebel, implying what he subsequently states

explicitly, namely that bond-laborers did not have

rebellion in them.

135

Virginia Governor Culpeper likened the tobacco-cutting

riots to the anti-enclosure riots in sixteenth-century

England.

136

Indeed, the high debts and the low price of

tobacco were to the laboring-class free people of Virginia

like the hedges and fences that had shut out the

copyholders from their ancestral lands in England. But this

“downsizing” of the poor planters in Virginia

contemplated no purposeful and controlled “thinning” of a

stand of social timber with the deliberate preservation of a

proportion of yeomanry out of social control

considerations.

137

The invisible hand of free market forces

in seventeenth-century Virginia operated without such

conscious allowances, and the devil take the hindmost.

The English copyholder was competing with sheep for

land; the laboring free poor in Virginia were forced to

compete with unpaid chattel bond-labor. Sheep, however,

do not rebel, bond-laborers did, and their freedom was a

common class interest of the poor and landless free

population such as had joined hands with bond-laborers in

1676.

138

5. The practical unfeasibility of maintaining a system of

social control in Virginia by means of the English army

First of all, there were the logistical problems. English

government preparations for sending troops to Virginia to

suppress Bacon’s Rebellion were under way by the first

week of October,

139

but the five companies of English

troops that were despatched did not sail from England

until around the end of November, and it was mid-

February 1677 before the last of the troop-carrying

merchant ships arrived at Jamestown,

140

a month after the

end of the rebellion.

From the beginning the costs were a dominating

consideration. The king was to bear the cost of the

transportation and of victuals for the first three months.

The colony government was supposed to provide quarters,

but because Jamestown was in ruins the troops could not

be disembarked promptly, and the king had to pay

“demurrage” for quartering them on board ship until they

could be put ashore. The troops were in the king’s pay, but

the colony had to pay for their victuals out of the quitrents

assigned to them and from a special tax on wines and

liquors enacted for that specific purpose.

Three months after the troops reached Virginia, the

Lords of Trade and Plantations ordered Governor Jeffreys

to send all but one hundred of them back to England as

soon as possible. The cost factor was the primary

consideration, as indicated by the proviso permitting those

who so desired to stay in Virginia as “planters or

servants.”

141

Although Governor Culpeper wanted three

200-man companies of the king’s troops to be kept in

Virginia, the Lords of Trade and Plantations decided in

August 1678 to allow him only two.

142

Three years later,

in October 1681, Culpeper asked that two companies be

kept permanently in Virginia, advancing the financial

consideration that the presence of such a force in 1676

might have prevented the rebellion that “cost and lost the
king above a hundred thousand pounds.”
143
 But the Privy
Council  ordered  that  the  two  remaining  companies  be
disbanded by Christmas 1681, unless the colony paid the
cost  of  maintaining  them.
144
  Subsequently  the  home
government  advanced  money  to  pay  the  soldiers  until
April  1682.  In  May  1682,  colony  officials  reported  to
England that the General Assembly, bitter because of the
unremedied glut of tobacco, refused to do the one thing it
was  asked  to  do,  namely  to  provide  money  for  further
maintenance  of  English  soldiers.  Because  of  the
irregularity  of  their  pay,  some  of  the  soldiers  were
reduced  to  selling  themselves  into  servitude  in  order  to
survive.  Consequently,  just  when  they  were  expected  to
put  down  the  plant-cutting  riots  in  Gloucester,  “the  only
time they [had] been needed since they came to Virginia,”
as Colony Secretary Spencer observed, they were “apter
to mutiny than serve His Majestie.”
145
 The soldiers were
finally  paid  off  and  disbanded  in  June  1682  even  as  the
plant-cutting riots were still spreading.
146
 In May 1683 the
Virginia  Colony  Council  unsuccessfully  asked  that  the
Crown  pay  for  the  maintenance  of  a  garrison  of  sixty
soldiers in Virginia.
147
 In October of that year, however,
the  Privy  Council  did  approve Governor  Effingham’s
request for the stationing of a man-of-war in Virginia, as a
guarantee to prevent “Disorder or Rebellion … to grow to

that head as it did in the year 1676,” and to “cure the

insolencies” of rioters in the future.

148

Whether such a

guard ship was ever sent and, if sent, what role it might

have played as a social control measure seems so far to be

a blank page of Virginia history.

In January 1677 the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland,

Thomas Notley, watching with understandable anxiety the

unfolding events in Virginia, had sounded a warning.

“There must be an alteration though not of the Government

yet in the Government[;] new men should be put in power.

The old men will never agree with the common people,

and if that not be done, His Majestie will never find a

well settled Government in that Colony.”

149

Four months

later, Notley again made the point in a letter to Lord

Baltimore. If a new leader came forward ready to risk his

life in the cause, he said, “the Commons of Virginia would

Emmire themselves as deep in Rebellion as ever they did

in Bacon’s time.” The plantation bourgeoisie must find a

new strategy for social control, for

if the ould Course be taken, and if Coll. Jeoffreys [Herbert Jeffreys,

Berkeley’s successor as Royal Governor of Virginia] build his proceedings

upon the ould foundation its neither him nor all his Majesties Souldiers in

Virginia will either satisfye or Rule those people.

150

But what sort of “alteration in the Government” could be

fashioned that would “agree with the common people”

enough that it could rule them?

The Abortion of the “White Race”

Social Control System in the Anglo-

Caribbean

The English plantation bourgeoisie in the continental

colonies and in the Caribbean opted to base their ventures

on chattel bond-labor, at first European but – sooner in the

Caribbean, later in the continental plantation colonies –

mainly African bond-labor. Then, in both cases – sooner

in the Caribbean, later in the continental plantation

colonies – the ruling class sought to establish social

control on the principle of racial oppression of non-

Europeans.

In the very beginning, it was theorized that the ranks of

European bond-laborers who survived their servitude

might furnish the Anglo-American equivalent of the Ulster

Scots or English-style yeomen as a middle class, with a

vested property interest (as fee-simple smallholders or as

secure tenants) and be the middle-class buffer between the

plantation bourgeoisie and the bond-labor force. But

circumstantial differences between the Ulster plantation

and those in English colonies in America produced

differences in the degree of dependence upon tenantry. In

Ireland the English bourgeoisie was faced with the fact of

the unassimilability of the Irish Catholic chieftains allied

with Spain and the fact that English land claims were

predicated on expropriation of those chieftains’ tribal

lands. In Anglo-America the plantation bourgeoisie was

practically immune from successful native challenge to its

continued possession of the land, and from an imminent

overthrow by African bond-laborers “broken from their

tribal stems.” The denial of any degree of social mobility

of Africans and African-Americans, the hallmark of racial

oppression, was an option not rooted in geo-political

considerations; rather it was driven simply and directly by

the greater rate of profit to be had by the employment of

lifetime hereditary bond-laborers – provided a cost-

effective system of social control could be established.

The result was to give the term “plantation” a new

meaning, implying monoculture and engrossment of the

land by capitalist owners of bond-laborers. This meant

that the early prospect for the establishment of an adequate

intermediate stratum of European (and European-

American), chiefly small freeholders or eviction-proof

leaseholders was not to be realized. Consequently,

different ways of maintaining ruling-class social control

would be required. The class struggle would produce

forms of social control in the Anglo-Caribbean colonies,

however, that diverged in historically significant ways

from that which was adopted in continental Anglo-

America.

The Social Control Problem in the British

West Indies

In 1627, the English made Barbados a colony, using a

labor force at first made up principally of bond-laborers

brought from England, Ireland and Scotland.

The English

also made efforts to reduce natives of the Caribbean to

plantation bond-servitude; there are references to such

workers in the record.

The class-undifferentiated

Caribbean Indian tribes were not dominated by “casiques”

possessing authority to deliver tribe members into

European servitude.

Because of the Indians’ warlike

resistance, the English plans in this regard were by and

large frustrated before they could be made operational. A

pivotal point was reached in the mid-1660s. An English

colony established on St Lucia in 1663 was wiped out by
the  native  Indians  by  1667.  After  retaking  the  island  in
March  1668,  the  English  concluded  an  agreement  with
these  Indians  under  which  they  were  to  be  English
subjects,  but  with  the  right  to  come  and  to  depart  at
pleasure in the English islands.
6
 “The Barbadians … held
Indian  slaves,”  writes Richard  S.  Dunn,  “but  never  very
many.”
7
Regardless  of  their  nativity,  bond-laborers  presented
the owning class with serious problems of social control.
When the Ark, bearing the first Maryland-bound colonists,
stopped at  Barbados  on 3 January  1634, this fact of  life
was starkly dramatized for the voyagers:
On the  very  day  we  arrived  there  we  found the  island  all  in arms,  to  the
number of eight hundred men. The servants on the island had plotted to kill
their masters and then handsomely take the first ship that came[,] and go to
sea.
8
After  first  being  used  primarily  in  tobacco  cultivation,
Barbados by the 1650s had been transformed into a sugar
colony.
9
  But  the  switch  to  sugar  had  done  nothing  to
sweeten the  disposition of the  workers.  On Barbados by
1648, when around one-fourth of the bond-laborers were
Africans,  it was  reported  that  “many  hundreds of  Rebell
negro slaves were in the woods.”
10
 The following year a
plot  was  formed  by  European  chattel  bond-laborers  to

massacre  their  owners  and  seize  control  of  the  island.
Some indication of the extent of the plot may perhaps be
inferred  from  the  fact  that,  after  it  was  betrayed  to  the
authorities,  eighteen  plotters  were  executed.
11
  In  1655,
Barbados  received  no  less  than  12,000  prisoners  of  the
War  of  the  Three  Kingdoms,  in  addition  to  felons  and
vagabonds.  Their  numbers,  combined  with  the  draining
away  of  artisans  from  Barbados  to  Jamaica,  caused  the
authorities to be fearful of imminent mass rebellion by the
bond-laborers.
12
 Between 1675 and 1701, there were four
major  revolt  plots  in  Barbados.  In  1686,  African  and
European rebel bond-laborers joined forces.
13
 In 1692, a
“Negro  conspiracy”  to  seize  the  English  fort  at
Bridgetown was discovered.
14
Historican  Richard S. Dunn  identifies  “seven  separate
slave  revolts  in  the English  islands  between  1640  and
1713,  in  which  blacks  and  whites  were  killed.”
15
“Rebellion,  or  the  threat of  it,  was  an  almost  permanent
feature  of  Jamaican  slave  society,”  writes  Orlando
Patterson;  he  concludes  that,  “[W]ith  the  possible
exception  of  Brazil,  no  other  slave  society  in  the  New
World experienced such continuous and intensive servile
revolts” as Jamaica. Aside from the Second Maroon War
(1795–96)  Patterson  mentions  large-scale  revolts,  or
discovered  plots,  in  1760,  1776,  1784,  1823  and  1824.
“The last and most ambitious of all the slave rebellions of

the island broke out two days after Christmas 1831,” he

writes; a roughly estimated 20,000 took part, with wide

support, and 207 were killed; over 500 more were

executed; 14 whites were killed, and property damage

mounted to over £1.1 million; over £161,000 was spent in

suppressing the revolt.

The Jamaica maroons

When the Spanish abandoned Jamaica in 1655, some

1,500 Negroes escaped to the mountains. They became the

Jamaica maroons who, from that time until 1796,

maintained a separate set of independent communities.

1656 the main part of the maroons, under the leadership of

Juan de Bolas, “surrendered to the English on terms of

pardon and freedom.” The others continued to be a thorn

in the side of the English colony, so much so that they

“intimidated the whites from venturing to any considerable

distance from the coast.” According to the account by the

English historian of the West Indies, Bryan Edwards, the

English governor offered, “full pardon, twenty acres of

land, and freedom from all manner of slavery, to each of

them who should surrender. But … they were better

pleased with the more ample range they possessed in the

woods, where there [their] hunting grounds were not yet

encroached upon by settlements.” In 1663 the English sent

a black regiment under Juan de Bolas, who was now their

colonel, but he was killed and the general effort was a

failure.

In this way they continued to distress the island for upwards of forty years,

during which time forty-four acts of Assembly were passed, and at least

240,000 1. expended for their suppression. In 1736, they were grown so

formidable, under a very able general named Cudjoe, that it was found

expedient to strengthen the colony against them by two regiments of regular

troops, which were afterwards formed unto independent companies, and

employed, with other hired parties, and the whole body of the militia, in their

reduction.

This struggle, known as the First Maroon War, 1725–40,

was concluded under terms of a treaty signed at

Trelawney Town on 1 March 1738/9. Under its terms, the

maroons were guaranteed freedom, and possession of a

region of 15,000 acres in which they might cultivate non-

sugar crops and raise livestock, and the right to licenses to

trade their products with people of the English colony.

The maroons, for their part, agreed “That if any negroes

shall hereafter run away from their masters or owners, and

fall into Captain Cudjoe’s hands, they shall immediately

be sent back to the chief magistrate of the next parish

where they are taken; and those that bring them are to be

satisfied for their trouble, as the legislature shall

appoint.”

This latter provision is similar to previously

mentioned agreements between the English colonial

authorities in Virginia, Maryland and Carolina and various

tributary Indian tribes, requiring the Indians to return

runaway bond-laborers.

Objective Factors that Shaped Social Control

Strategy

In relation to the question of social control and the

invention of the white race, the British West Indies

differed from the continental plantation colonies in five

significant ways.

First, because of the narrow absolute

limits of land area, and the relatively high capital costs of

sugar production, the West Indies was especially

inhospitable to non-capitalist farmers or tenants. Second,

in the West Indies the attempt to establish a “white race”

social control system was seriously and critically

complicated by the substantial Irish presence. Third, the

central role of the English military and naval forces

regularly stationed in the West Indies constituted the most

important guarantor of social control. Fourth, the

predominance of persons of African descent in the

population of the West Indies made it impossible to

exclude them altogether from the intermediate stratum.

Fifth, the reliance upon persons of African descent in the

skilled trades and in the conduct of the internal economy

of the West Indies colonies led to the emergence of the

“free colored” as the predominant element in the middle

class. The remainder of this chapter will be mainly an

elaboration of these points.

1. Land area limits, capital costs

The plantation system, wherever it existed, was

characterized by the engrossment of the land by the

bourgeoisie. But the effect of that engrossment on the

prospective formation of an intermediate social control

stratum was much greater in the island colonies than in

continental plantation colonies. In the British West Indies,

in addition to the typical economic and political

difficulties facing the smallholder in a monocultural

economy, the absolute limits of land area played a

decisive part. In continental plantation colonies the barrier

to the formation of a stable yeoman class was not an

absolute scarcity of land, but merely the economic and

political disadvantages of competing as non-capitalist

entrepreneurs in a monocultural capitalist economy based

on bond-labor. At the end of the seventeenth century, some

51,000 people, 88 percent of the total population of

Virginia, lived in the Tidewater region, an area of 11,000

miles, representing a population density of 4.6 per square

mile.
22
 Virginia at large, including the transmontane region
(not  including  Kentucky),  had  an  area  of  some  64,000
miles.  The  total  area  of  all  patented  land  in  Virginia  in
1704 was equal to less than 40 percent of the area of the
Tidewater region alone.
23
 Even in the most heavily settled
Tidewater area, the farms were so remote from each other
as to hinder mustering the militia, and to make it difficult
to  assure  effective  collection  of  import  and  export
duties.
24
Barbados,  the  second-largest  of  England’s  Caribbean
colonies, but with an area of only 166 square miles, was
inhabited by 70,000 people in 1694 and had a population
density  of  423  per  square  mile.
25
  By  1717,  all  but  6
percent  of  that  island’s  total  area  was  under  cultivation;
the  great  houses  of  the  planter  estates  were  not  remote
from  their  neighbors  but  were  “within  sight  of  each
other.”
26
Jamaica was the exception; its 7,400 square miles made
up more than half the land area of the British West Indies
and had a population density of only 6.5 per square mile in
1698. Most of Jamaica was unoccupied, even in the early
nineteenth century.
28
 Only half its land was under patent,
and only half of that was under cultivation.
29
 At least until
the  end  of  the  First  Maroon  War  in  1739,  the  colony’s
frontiers were “no longer any Sort of Security [and] must
be deserted.”
30
 But the main and sufficient reason for the

limited number of smallholders in Jamaica was one that

was common to the British West Indies generally – the

relatively capital-intensive technology of the principal

economic activity, the production of sugar and rum.

Excessive emigration of freemen

In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, most of the

limited-term bond-laborers never succeeded in completing

their terms and becoming landowners. Those who did so

needed only elementary individual hand-labor implements

to engage in the common tobacco economy, poor and

indebted though they most likely were destined to be. In

the West Indies, the capital requirement for becoming a

sugar planter – for buildings, mills, boiling pots, sugar

pots, stills and, above all, for bond-labor – were beyond

the means of the former bond-laborers.

The contrast in

estate values in the late seventeenth century in Jamaica and

Maryland is indicative. The average estate of the sugar

planters of Jamaica in the last quarter of the seventeenth

century was appraised at nearly £2,000, and the average

value of all estates was £531, of which two-thirds to

three-fourths might represent investment in bond-labor. In

Maryland in the same period there were no estates

appraised at as much as £2,000, and fewer than 4 percent

of the estates had a value of more than £500.

Separate

findings by highly regarded investigators suggest that in

the late seventeenth century the prospect of a bond-laborer

in Barbados surviving to become a landholder was only

one-half as great as that of a bond-laborer in Virginia.

From at least as early as the third quarter of the

seventeeth century, many of those who survived their

limited-term servitude in the English West Indies only to

be confronted by this unpromising prospect were opting to

leave their respective islands. Between 1660 and 1682,

some 16,000 or 17,000 people emgrated from Barbados,

most of them “landless freemen and small farmers.”

the last forty years of the seventeenth century the total

population of Barbados is estimated to have doubled, from

40,000 to 80,000, but emigration was so great that the

European population did not increase at all. Many of such

emigrants chose initially to pursue their careers in nearby

islands,

but it appears that nowhere in the British West

Indies did such European migration reverse the long-range

reduction of the European proportion of the population.

Richard S. Dunn’s table “Estimated Population of the

English Sugar Islands, 1669–1713” shows a steady

decade-to-decade decline in the European proportion of

the populations of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward

Islands.

Emigration became a major concern of the West Indies

colonial authorities, not on account of the loss of labor-

power it represented but because of the difficulty in

maintaining the militias for defense against rival colonial

powers, particularly the French, and for purposes of

social control of the bond-laborers. The European

population of Barbados in 1640 was around 25,000; of

these more than one-third were proprietors and 10,000

were “servants,” while the non-European bond-laborers,

including a few Amerindians, numbered 6,400. By 1680,

the total number of Europeans had fallen to 17,000, and

because of the cost of capital and land requirements for

sugar planting the number of “considerable proprietors”

was less than 500, and the number of European bond-

laborers in the island had shrunk to 2,000.

In the 1660s,

Barbados had a fighting force of only 7,000 men, of whom

only the large landholders were interested in the colony

enough to be ready to defend it; the rest were concerned

only with emigrating to find better prospects than they

could have in Barbados.

Harlow’s conclusion regarding

Barbados was generally applicable to the British West

Indies: it was “the concentration of land into large estates

which was gradually depriving Barbados of her ‘yeoman’

class, and which eventually put an end to her development

as a white community.”

Social control was aimed at bond-laborers, whether of

European or African descent. But the limited-term bond-

laborers who, in the West Indies, were exclusively

European, were prospective enlistees in the social control

system as members of the militia, provided they survived

their terms of servitude. This was a scheme for class

collaboration of Europeans that required a new term of

social distinction, namely “white,” that would include not

only laborer and capitalist but also bond-labor as well as

free labor.

The alternative or redundant term

“Christian,” was sometimes applied to European bond-

laborers, despite complications that arose regarding the

Christian conversion of African bond-laborers;

or from

the belief that some Europeans, namely the Irish, though

Europeans had yet to be made Christians.

It became

customary also to use the term “servants” for the European

bond-laborers, potential militiamen, as distinct from

African lifetime bond-laborers, called “slaves.”

A succession of proposals, schemes and laws were

proposed, some of them adopted, that were explicitly

aimed at increasing the proportion of the militia-producing

European population in the English West Indies, or at least

maintaining it. Compulsory measures were undertaken of

which the most general type imposed fines on plantation

owners who failed to keep in their employ a quota of one

European, bond or free, for every so many African bond-

laborers; these were the so-called “deficiency laws.” The

ratio varied from place to place and from time to time.

Whatever the particular ratio, the home government

constantly expressed its concern that it be met. In 1682 in
Jamaica, the quota was one white bond-laborer to the first
five  lifetime  bond-laborers,  “for  ten  slaves  two  whites,
and for every ten slaves over and above the said number
one white … on penalty of £5 for every servant that shall
be  wanting.”
43
  In  1699,  the  Governor  of  the  Leeward
Islands  was  instructed  “to  use  his  utmost  endeavor  that
each Planter keep such a number of white servants as the
law directed.”
44
 The Nevis Assembly in 1701 passed “An
Act for encouraging the Importation of white Servants, and
that all Persons shall be obliged to keep one white Servant
to every Twenty Negroes.”
45
 Other compulsory measures
were  designed to  limit  emigration.  For example,  English
prisoners who had been sentenced to ten years’ servitude
in  Barbados  for  the  1685  rebellion  led  by  the  Duke  of
Monmouth were ordered to be freed from bond-servitude,
but they were forbidden to leave the island without royal
permission.
46
In  the  1660s,  the  usual  term  of  servitude  in  Barbados
was  reduced  to  encourage  bond-laborers  to  come  to  the
island.
47
 In  order to  get  and keep European  craftsmen  in
Barbados,  the  island’s  Assembly  prohibited  the
employment of Africans and Afro-Barbadians as coopers,
smiths,  carpenters,  tailors,  or  boatmen.
48
  In  1695,
Governor  Russell  of  Barbados  remarked  on  the
deplorable  condition  of  the  European  former  bond-

laborers, who were “domineered over and used like

dogs.” Such treatment, he believed, would “drive away

the commonalty of the white people.” There were

hundreds of such unfortunates, he declared, that never

enjoyed fresh meat nor a dram of rum. That woeful lack

could be made up, he suggested, by reducing the property

qualification for voting at the annual elections in the

expectation that candidates for the Assembly “would

sometimes give the miserable creatures a little rum and

fresh provisions and such things as would be of

nourishment and make their lives more comfortable, in the

hopes of getting their votes.”

In 1709, a merchant trading

to Jamaica proposed to the Commissioners of Trade and

Plantations the settling of a colony of German Protestants

in that island, because the European militia was reduced

to 2,500 and there were 40,000 African bond-laborers to

be repressed. These settlers were to “be free so soon as

they set foot on shore in that island, and enjoy all

privileges;” they were to be granted five or six acres of

land in fee simple for every member of each family.

Six

years later, the Lords of Trade and Plantations proposed

that all Protestant European immigrants be extended those

privileges on arrival in Jamaica.

Suggestions were advanced that, voluntarily or

otherwise, the great plantation owners should surrender

title to a small portion of their lands to European ex-bond-

laborers; but that notion came to naught because of a lack

of sufficient support from the prospective donors.

Ultimately a compromise was reached; the land would

remain in the ownership of the capitalist owners, but they

would allow a few acres to be occupied by European

tenants without any rent or other obligation except that of

service in the militia. Properly called “military tenants,”

these men represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of

“whiteness”; their contribution to the economic life of the

colony was neglible to nonexistent, and there was no other

rationale for their existence except the political one of

serving as a ready reserve for social control over bond-

laborers. For especially meritorious service in the war

against external or internal enemies, some such men might

be given ownership of an African bond-laborer. The

result, however, was not an enhancement of their

participation in the economic activity of the colony, but

merely provided a means of making the “military tenants”

more comfortable in their shiftless existence.

In token of their acquired status as “whites,” even

European bond-laborers were by law protected against

“excessive correction” by their owners, but by and large

such encouragement failed to convince European laborers

to come to and remain in the West Indies in the numbers

that were necessary for the establishing of a civil regime

of racial oppression.

In time the propertyless majority of

the European population of the British West Indies would
be  assigned  to  a  special  category,  socially  and
economically marginalized as “poor whites.”
55
2. The Irish complication
The policy designed by the plantation bourgeoisie to enlist
laboring-class Europeans, as “whites,” in a social control
stratum  against  Africans  occasionally  encountered
manifestations  of  the  contrary  normal  tendency  of
European  and  African  bond-laborers  to  make  common
cause against their owners. Such events were a challenge
to  the  establishment  of  the  new  all-class,  all-European
“white” identity.
56
 It was the behavior of many of the Irish
bond-laborers  that  created  the  greatest  breach  in  that
concept.
57
The  Caribbean  was  a  cockpit  of  European  colonial
rivalry. Over a period of eighty years from 1667 to 1748,
the  region  was  involved  in  four  formal  wars,  in  which
England  was  aligned  against  one  or  more  Catholic
powers,  primarily  France,  but  also  Spain.
58
  This  period
coincided  with  much  of  the  tragic  English  conquest  of
Ireland  and  Ireland’s  subjection  under  the  most  extreme
period  of  the  racial  oppression  under  the  “anti-Popery”
Penal Laws.
59
 In this period, Catholic Irish bond-laborers,
who constituted a major proportion of the European bond-

laborers in the British West Indies, were often disposed to

ally their cause with any challenge to British authority,

whether that challenge were made by African bond-

laborers or by a rival colonial power.

In November 1655, following the Cromwellian

conquest, when the “Irish slave trade” was at its fullest,

the Barbados Colony Council was apprised that “there are

several Irish servants and Negroes out in Rebellion in the

Thicketts and thereabouts.”

Two years later, the

Barbados General Assembly warned that Irish men and

women were wandering about the island pretending to be

free, some of whom had “endeavoured to secure with

Armes: and others now forth in Rebellion.”

During the War of Devolution in which the French

captured and held St Kitts for two years, 1666–67,

decisive roles were played by “French Negroes,” who

burned six strong English forts on the island’s north coast,

and by the Irish on the island, who “rose against the

English planters and joined the French.”

In 1667,

Governor William Willoughby of Barbados wrote to King

Charles II that of a possible fighting force of 4,000, “what

with Blacks[,] Irish & servants, I cannot rely upon more

then between 2 and 3000 men.”

In March 1668, it was reported that Barbados had

contributed so many men to help retake the Leeward

Islands from the French that it was “in an ill Condition, in

regard to the multitude of Negros & Irish Servants, which
is  much  superior  to  the  rest  of  the  Planters  and
Inhabitants.”
64
Citing  five  entries  in  the  Great  Britain Calendar  of
State  Papers,  Colonial,  Gwynne  documents  Irish
insurrections  against  the  English  in  the  battles  for  the
Leeward Islands in 1689.
65
 Although the law enacted on
Nevis forbidding servants and slaves to “company” or to
drink together did not specifically mention the Irish,
66
 it is
reasonable to believe they were among the usual suspects.
In the 1692 plot to capture the Barbados fort, Irish bond-
laborers undertook a special tactical role: by guile or by
force, they were to open the doors of the fort to the Negro
rebels.
67
 Two laws were enacted by the Nevis Assembly
on  21  December  1701:  one  “to  prevent  Papists,  and
reputed  Papists,  from  Settling  in  the  Island,”  and  the
second  “for  encouraging  the  Importation  of  white
Servants.”
68
 As late as 1731, Governor Hunter of Jamaica
was contesting an act of conciliation of the Irish Catholics,
“of which our Servants and Lower Rank of People chiefly
consists.”
69
Just as an eventual rapprochement was begun in Ireland
between the Catholic bourgeoisie and the British rulers in
the middle of the eighteenth century, so in the West Indies
the  spirit  of  Protestant  Ascendancy  and  “anti-popery”
directed  against  the  Irish  abated.
70
  But  by  then  it  was

irrelevant to the solution of the problem of ruling-class

social control in the British West Indies. By the end of the

seventeenth century “the old system of defence by white

servants had broken down,” writes military historian John

W. Fortescue.

What he said with particular reference to

defense applies also to the failure of the attempt to

establish a system of social control in the Anglo-

Caribbean by an English-style yeoman militia of European

former bond-laborers.

3. “Sending an army to do it …” – English military and

naval enforcement of social control

Contemplating the way in which control over the massive

bond-labor population was achieved in the British West

Indies, one is reminded of Sir John Davies’s dictum that

the conquest cannot be regarded as complete “if the

jurisdiction of … ordinary Courts of justice doth not

extend” to all parts of the territory “… unlesse he send an

Army to do it.”

Because of the breakdown the system of

social control by European bond-laborers and former

bond-laborers, a new concept and composition for an

intermediate social control stratum that included persons

of African ancestry was contrived. Nevertheless, social

order depended on the constant presence of English

military and naval forces. “[I]t was customary,” writes our

historian,  “for  British  troops  to  police  the  slave
population,  in  addition  to  fighting  the  soldiers  of  other
colonial powers in the West Indies.”
73
In 1680, Port Royal, Jamaica, with four forts manned by
two  regular  English  army  companies,  was  the  most
strongly fortified place in all of colonial Anglo-America.
“Night  and  day,”  writes  Dunn,  “one  of  the  Port  Royal
companies  was  always  on  duty,  working  twelve-hour
shifts.” Of the fort’s 110 big guns, 16 were located to face
any  assault  by  land.
74
  Throughout  Queen  Anne’s  War,
1701–13, Jamaica was “a garrison colony.”
75
 For most of
the  eighteenth  century,  at  least  two  regular  English  army
regiments  were  stationed  in  Jamaica.
76
  During  the  First
Maroon  War  two  regiments  sent  from  Gibraltar  served
effectively  to  deter  bond-laborers  from  joining  the
revolt.
77
 On its frequent calls in Jamaica ports, the British
navy was counted on to assist in putting down revolts of
African  bond-laborers.
78
  Although  in  1788  the  Jamaica
militia of “whites” and “free Negroes and free persons of
color”  numbered  about  7,000  or  8,000,  2,000  regular
troops were maintained on the island – to assure control
over one-quarter million Negro  bond-laborers and 1,400
maroons.
79
  A  British  observer  writing  in  about  1774
believed that the inhabitants of Jamaica relied too much on
the protection of the king’s troops.”
80
 In the final Maroon
War, 1796–1797, the number of regular British troops was

increased to 3,000.
81
 In 1793, at the beginning of Britain’s
war  against  revolutionary  France,  the  dispatch  of  700
soldiers, more than half the Jamaica garrison, “drained the
island of troops that were to protect the inhabitants” just at
the moment when the alarming news came that the French
Assembly  had  proclaimed  freedom  for  all  slaves  in
French  colonies.
82
 At  that  time,  “no  fewer  than  nineteen
British battalions – out of a total strength of eighty-one –
were in the Caribbean or en route.”
83
A regiment of the king’s troops was sent from England
to  protect  St  Kitts  after  the  island’s  recapture  from  the
French  in  1697.
84
  The  President  of  the  Council  of
Barbados  in  1738  declared  that  the  emigration  from  the
island  had  been  so  great  that  that  island  would  have  to
have a naval force to protect it.
85
 There no doubt seemed
to be good imperial reason for the stationing of a 1,200-
man  regiment  on  tiny Antigua,  where  a  European
population of 5,000 (not half what it had been forty years
before), dwelt together with 45,000 “blacks, Mulattos, and
mestees.”
86
4. Afro-Caribbean majorities in the British West Indies
When  former  bond-laborers  in  Virginia  tried  to  start
farming  on  their  own,  or  small  planters  lost  out  to
creditors,  they  did  not  embark  for  another  country;  they

took their hoes and axes and headed for North Carolina or

Maryland, or to the Piedmont, or even farther westward.

Whatever the extent of migration may have been, the

European-American population of every continental

plantation colony, according to present best estimates,

grew absolutely decade by decade, from a combined total

of 71,847 in 1700 to 734,754 in 1780. Although the

European-American proportion of the population of the

plantation colonies declined from 84 percent to 59

percent, only in South Carolina had it been reduced to less

than half, to 46 percent.

In the British West Indies, on the other hand, Euro-

Caribbeans were a minority population before the end of

the seventeenth century. Barbados had a higher proportion

of European-descent inhabitants than any other colony in

British West Indies. Yet by 1713 in Barbados, and in the

Leeward Islands as well, Europeans made up only one-

fourth of the population; in Jamaica the ratio was only one

in nine.

In obvious acknowledgement of the absolute

impossibility that the militia-providing former bond-

laborers would ever become viable yeomen farmers,

various laws were enacted to preserve other petit

bourgeois opportunities for them, by excluding non-

Europeans from engaging in skilled occupations or

huckstering.

But in the end, the purpose of such

measures, which were absolutely essential to the meaning

of “white,” were nullified by the economic advantage of

the use of African bond-laborers in skilled and lower

supervisory occupations on the plantations,

and by the

valuable service to the internal market provided by

African bond-laborers, particularly the women.

In time, as a result of emancipation by self-purchase, by

testaments of free owner-fathers, and in reward for special

service, as well as by natural increase, a population of

free persons of some degree of African descent developed

throughout the West Indies. The same was true in the

continental colonies. There was a critical difference,

however, in the resulting proportion of the total free

population constituted by persons of some degree of

African ancestry. In the continental plantation colonies and

in the Upper South and Lower South states of the United

States in the period 1700–1860, free African-Americans

never constituted as much as 5 percent of the free

population. Their proportion reached its high point, 4.8

percent in 1830, but in the two ante-bellum decades it

declined appreciably, to 3.1 percent.

By contrast in

Jamaica, which had more than half the total population of

the British West Indies, and of the total free population as

well, free persons of color were 18 percent of all free

persons in 1768, 36 percent in 1789, and 72 percent in

1834.

The proportion in Barbados was 5 percent in

1786, 12 percent in 1801, and 34 percent in 1833–34.
94
 In
the  Leeward  Islands  toward  the  end  of  the  eighteenth
century,  one-fourth  of  the  free  population  was  of  some
degree of African ancestry.
95
By the late 1700s, freedmen throughout the West Indies
were working in artisan trades. In Barbados the freedman
usually  began  as  a  hired  unskilled  worker,  but  quickly
sought skilled work for which there was greater demand,
and  which  had  a  “higher  prestige  value.”
96
  Professor
Sheppard  notes  that  by  late  in  the  eighteenth  century,
European  freemen  in  that  colony  were  able  to  practice
their trades only to a decreasing extent, and as hucksters
“they faced severe competition, as in other spheres, from
the free coloreds.”
97
 In Jamaica in the first decades of the
nineteenth  century,  most  of  the  freedmen  were  in  skilled
trades,  as  “carpenters,  masons,  wheelwrights,  plumbers,
and  other  artisans,”
98
  while  the  freedwomen  in  Jamaica
usually  became  shopkeepers  and  sellers  of  “provisions,
millinery,  confectionery,  and  preserves.”  In  Barbados  in
1830,  writes  Professor  Handler,  “the  Sunday  market
was  …  an  institution  of  fundamental  importance  to  all
segments of Barbadian Society”; he cites the contemporary
observation  that  most  of  the  produce  sellers  were  free
colored people.
99
5. Afro-Caribbeans as the middle class of the British

West Indies

It seems to me that nothing could have prevented the

development of a normal class differentiation within the

African and Afro-Caribbean population of the British

West Indies as the freedmen came to constitute a

substantial proportion of the free population. That was not

the original intention when the sugar planters for reasons

of present profit began to recruit their skilled labor force

from the ranks of African bond-laborers and, by land

engrossment, made the flourishing of a European yeomanry

impossible. Although from time to time they made

legislative gestures toward reversing the trend, the need to

make the highest possible rate of profit emptied such

gestures of significance.

Just as the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, disfranchised and

barred from owning land, found entrepreneurial outlets for

their acquisitive compulsion by becoming graziers and

merchants,

100

so in the British West Indies freedman

enterprise – both petit bourgeois and capitalist – sprouted

through the cracks of “white” exclusionism despite the

dogged opposition of the “white” diehards who, like the

Orange Order in Britain, saw chaos in any concession to

the oppressed majority.

In the British West Indies generally, the free coloreds

included “shopkeepers, and … owners of land and

slaves.” In the trade in non-sugar commodities with the

North American colonies, many free colored merchants

traded directly with captains of cargo vessels. In

Barbados, the energy and initiative of freedmen hucksters

in meeting bond-laborers on the way to market and ships

just arriving in the harbor enabled them to control the

supply of produce and livestock to the general public.

They were likewise involved in supplying the sugar

estates with essentials that could not be got from England.

Indeed, this proved a route to sugar estate ownership by

occasional foreclosure on a bankrupt creditor.

101

Three

years after the repeal of the prohibition on freedmen acting

as pilots, they had nearly monopolized Jamaica’s coastal

shipping.

102

In 1721 the Jamaica Assembly took a positive view of

such trends as it turned its attention to the problem of

unsettled lands becoming “a receptacle for runaway and

rebellious negroes.” It occurred to them to establish a

buffer zone between coastal sugar plantation regions and

the mountainous (and maroon-infested) interior, by

offering free homesteads to laboring-class settlers and

their families. Among the beneficiaries were to be “every

free mulatto, Indian or negro” who would take up the offer

and remain on the land for seven years. Each was to have

twenty acres of land for himself, and five acres more for

each slave he brought with him.

103

Perhaps some of those

homesteaders served in the “companies of free Negroes

and mulattoes” who were employed effectively in the First

Maroon War, ended with the 1739 Treaty of Trelawney

Town binding the Maroons to capture and return runaway

bond-laborers.

104

By the early 1830s, “free blacks and

coloreds” owned 70,000 of the total of around 310,000

bond-laborers in Jamaica.

105

When the militia system based on the European former

bond-laborers proved a failure, the sugar bourgeoisie

relied on the British army and navy to guarantee their

control, while at the same time recruiting free persons,

black and white, into the militias as an auxiliary. In

Barbados, as in Jamaica, by the 1720s freedmen were

required to serve in the militia, even though they were

denied important civil rights.

106

The British army and

navy, however, were subject to many demands because of

the almost constant worldwide round of wars with France

that would last for 127 years, from 1688 to 1815. In the

decisive moment – the coming of the French Revolution

and the Haitian Revolution – when all hung in the balance,

more extreme measures were required, for then the British

in the West Indies were confronted with “blacks inspired

by the revolutionary doctrine of French republicanism”

and were “forced to conduct operations against large

numbers of rebellious slaves in the rugged and largely

unknown interiors of their own islands” of Grenada, St

Vincent and Jamaica.

107

The internal and external dangers were so critical that

the British supreme commander in the Caribbean was

forced to conclude that “the army of Great Britain is

inadequate to … defend these colonies” without an army

of black soldiers. Eight West India regiments were

formed, composed in small part by freedmen, and partly of

slaves purchased by the army from plantation owners; but

more were acquired directly from Africa.

108

However,

“[i]t was clear that the continued existence of the West

India Regiments depended upon establishing the black

soldier as a freedman”; indeed, in 1807 it was so declared

by act of the British Parliament: the bond-laborers who

entered the British army by that act became freedmen.

109

But the logic of the policy represented a major violation of

the principle of denial of social mobility of the oppressed

group.

110

Many of these soldiers when discharged settled

on plantations as free persons.

111

In the meantime, thoughtful observers had begun to

advocate the advantages to be had from a positive attitude

toward freedmen in general. Consider the advice put

forward by four authoritative English writers: Edmund

Burke, in 1758; Edward Long, in 1774; the Reverend

James Ramsay, in 1784, and George Pinckard in 1803.

Indubitably, [said Burke] the security … of every nation consists principally

in the number of low and middling men of a free condition, and that beautiful

gradation from the highest to the lowest, where the transitions all the way

are almost imperceptible … What if in our colonies we should go so far as

to find some medium between liberty and absolute slavery, in which we

might place all mulattoes … and such blacks, who … their

masters … should think proper in some degree to enfranchise. These might

have land allotted to them, or where that could not be spared, some sort of

fixed employment.… [T]he colony will be strengthened by the addition of so

many men, who will have an interest of their own to fight for.

112

[Mulattos, said Long,] ought to be held in some distinction [over the blacks].

They would then form the centre of connexion between the two extremes,

producing a regular establishment of three ranks of men. [If mulatto children

were obliged] to serve a regular apprenticeship to artificers and tradesmen

[,that] would make them orderly subjects and defenders of the country.

… But even if they were to set up for themselves, no disadvantage would

probably accrue to the publick, but the contrary: they would oblidge the

white artificers to work at more moderate rates.

113

Reverend Ramsay, too, limited his proposal to mulattos.

The girls should be declared free from their birth, or from

the time the mother became free. Male mulattos should be

placed out as apprentices “to such trade or business as

may best agree with their inclination and the demands of

the colony,” and should be freed at the age of thirty. He

was persuaded that, “By these means … a new rank of

citizens, placed between the Black and White races,

would be established.” They would be an intermediate

buffer social control stratum since “they would naturally

attach themselves to the White race … and so become a

barrier against the designs of the Black.”

114

George Pinckard had served several years as a surgeon

in the British expeditionary forces in the Caribbean, and

looked favorably on the prospect of gradual reform

leading to abolition of slavery in the West Indies. What

Pinckard suggested anticipated Charles James Fox’s

prescription for social control adaptation in Ireland from

racial oppression to national oppression: “Make the

besiegers part of the garrison.”

115

Pinckard argued for the

social promotion of a “considerable proportion of the

people of colour, between the whites and negroes.” The

installation of such a middle class “would save Britain a

great expenditure of life and treasure. This middle class

would soon become possessed of stores and estates; and

the garrison might be safely entrusted to them as the best

defenders of their own property.”

116

In 1803, John Alleyne Beckles, Anglo-Barbadian

member of the Barbados Council, denounced the

limitations on property rights of freedmen. Such property

ownership, he argued, “will keep them [the free colored]

at a greater distance from the slaves, and will keep up that

jealousy which seems naturally to exist between them and

the slaves …”

… it will tend to our security, for should the slaves at any time attempt a

revolt, the free-coloured persons for their own safety and the security of

their  property, must join the  whites  and  resist them.  But  if  we reduce  the
free coloured people to a level with the slaves, they must unite with them,
and will take every occasion of promoting and encouraging a revolt.
117
Such  ruling-class  insights  recognized  the  link  between
concessions  to  the  freedmen  and  the  maintenance  of
control  over  the  bond-laborers,  who  in  the  late  1770s
outnumbered  the  total  free  population  of  Barbados  by
nearly  three  and  a  half  times,  and  outnumbered  by  nine
times  that  of  Jamaica.
118
 As  members  of  the  militia  that
quelled  the  1816  bond-laborer  revolt  in  Barbados,  “the
free  coloureds  were  reckoned  to  have  conducted
themselves ‘slightly better’ than the whites.”
119
 In Jamaica
in  the  First  and  the  Second  Maroon  Wars,  the  mulatto
militia  justified  the  expectation  that  they  would  be  a
“powerful  counterpoise  …  of  men  dissimilar  from  [the
Maroons]  in  complexion  and  manners,  but  equal  in
hardiness and vigour,” capable of “scour[ing] the woods
on  all  occasions;  a  service  in  which  the  [British Army]
regulars are by no means equal to them.”
120
 As the struggle
to  end  slavery  entered  its  critical  stage,  there  were
freedmen  who  supported  the cause  of  the  bond-laborers,
but they were the exceptional few.
121
By  the  late  1770s,  in  Jamaica  36  percent  of  the  free
population  was  composed  of  persons  of  some  degree  of
African ancestry; on the eve of emancipation, in 1833, they

were a 72 percent majority. In Barbados in 1786, only 5

percent of free persons were persons of African ancestry;

in 1833 they were 34 percent.

122

Although this increase in

the freedmen population brought added forces to the

intermediate social control stratum against the bond-

laborers, it conversely became a major factor in the final

crisis of the system of chattel bond-servitude, coming as it

did in the larger context of the Haitian Revolution (in

which the role of the free colored had been decisive) and

the rise of the abolitionist movement in England. The

“increasing wealth and numbers of the coloreds as well as

their importance in the militia made it more difficult for

the Assembly to deny them their rights.”

123

Of some 5,200 slaveowners in Barbados in 1822,

around 3,600 owned no land; of these the majority were

freedmen.

124

But due to “deficiency law” restrictions, the

freedmen owners of bond-laborers for the most part

exploited their bond-laborers in non-agricultural

occupations. These same laws obstructed the employment

of freedmen wage workers. In 1830, two persons of color

were members of the Jamaican House of Assembly, but

they were still barred from giving testimony in court

unless they first produced proof of their baptism.

In 1816, a group of the “coloreds” petitioned for

admission of all freemen to the “rights and privileges of

white subjects.”

125

This demand was the fulcrum by which

the combined forces on the side of abolition of slavery –

the Haitian example, the example of the West India

regiments, the increasing rebelliousness of the plantation

bond-laborers (expressed in revolts in Barbados in 1816

and Jamaica in 1831), English religious humanitarianism,

and abolitionism – were able to leverage the abolition of

slavery by act of Parliament in 1833. At the heart of the

matter was the fact that every concession made to the

freedmen to strengthen social control over the bond-

laborers represented an erosion of the rationale of white

supremacy upon which the system of plantation bond-

servitude was based. Eventually, the essential politics of

the Haitian Revolution had its innings in Jamaica. The

plantocracy’s resistance to further concession to the “free

coloreds” brought probably a majority of the freedmen to

the support of abolition, especially when slaveowners

among them were assured of being compensated by the

British government for the loss of their human chattels.

126

In continental Anglo-America, only the rivalry between

the plantation bourgeoisie and the industrial bourgeoisie

for national hegemony provided the civil war possibility

of emancipation as a measure for preserving the Union.

Emancipation in the West Indies, on the other hand, was

forced by the struggle of the bond-laborers and by the

demands of the “free colored” bourgeoisie and petty

bourgeoisie for full citizenship rights in the wake of the

Haitian Revolution.

127

The course of their struggles

paralleled events that ended religio-racial oppression in

Ireland. A century elapsed from the first recruitment of

Irish Catholic soldiers for England’s wars with the French

for colonial primacy to the disestablishment of the

Anglican Church of Ireland in 1869.

128

As in Ireland, so in

the British West Indies, it was by no means a smooth

steady evolution, but a procession by vicissitudes: from

the recruitment of free Afro-Caribbeans into trades,

commerce and professions countered by schemes for

bestowing privileges on the “poor whites” to induce them

to come and stay; from laws explicitly denying Afro-

Caribbeans civil rights, and the obstruction of individual

petitions for full rights by members of the Afro-Caribbean

petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, to the enactment of the

“Brown Privilege Bill” in Barbados in 1831.

129

What

most distinguishes the story of both the Irish and the

Anglo-Caribbean histories, on the one hand, from that of

continental Anglo-America, on the other, is that Catholic

Emancipation in Ireland, and the admittance of “free

colored” to full citizenship rights in the British West

Indies were the culmination of the growing economic and

political strength of the Catholic bourgeoisie in Ireland, in

the one case, and of the “free colored” population of the

British West indies, in the other. In the United States, on

the other hand, free African-Americans were never

acknowledged as a legitimate part of the body politic;

quite the contrary, their very right to remain in the United

States was officially and unofficially questioned, as, for

instance, in the persistent demands for the forced

exclusion of free African-Americans from the United

States.

What is to explain the dramatic difference in the status

achieved by free persons of African descent in the Anglo-

Caribbean and in continental Anglo-America? And what

larger historical significance is implied in that variation?

That question brings us back to the Chesapeake and the

problem that faced the plantation bourgeoisie there in the

wake of Bacon’s Rebellion.

The Invention of the White Race – and

the Ordeal of America

What Virginia’s laboring-class people, free and bond,

were fighting for in Bacon’s Rebellion was not the

overthrow of capitalism as such, but an end to the version

of that system imposed by the plantation elite, based on

chattel bond-servitude and engrossment of the land. Their

idea regarding a proper social order was about the same

as that which would be expressed by Edmund Burke some

eighty years later: “the security … of every nation consists

principally in the number of low and middling men of a

free condition, and that beautiful gradation from the

highest to the lowest, where the transitions all the way are

almost imperceptible.”

If they had succeeded, the

outcome of their struggle would have improved

opportunities for social mobility within the colony. For the

bond-laborers that would have meant an end to unpaid

bond-servitude; for them and for the landless freemen,

victory would have meant improved opportunity to

become independent farmers. Most emphatically, they

were not content to be “Tenants to the first

Ingrossers, … to be a Tennant on a Continent.”

However, just as the overthrow of the tenantry in the

1620s had cleared the ground for the institution of chattel

bond-servitude, so the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion

cleared the way for the establishment of the system of

lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude. The relative

position of the plantation elite became more dominant than

ever not only because of the continuation of their large

landholdings, but also because of their advantage in

bidding for lifetime bond-labor.

Virginia’s mystic transition from the era of “the volatile

society,” most dramatically represented in Bacon’s

Rebellion, to “the Golden Age of the Chesapeake” in the

middle quarters of the eighteenth century is a much-studied

phenomenon. It was during that period that the ruling

plantocracy replaced “the ould foundation” that Governor

Notley had warned them of, in order to “build their

proceedings” on a new one. Central to this political

process was, as John C. Rainbolt described it, “The

Alteration in the Relationship between Leadership and

Constituents in Virginia, 1660–1720.”
In no other period or province did the relationship between rulers and ruled
and  the  role  of  government  alter  so  markedly  as  in  Virginia  between  the
departure  of Governor  William  Berkeley in 1676  and the  administration of
Alexander Spotswood from 1710 to 1722.
3
The “art of ruling” so manifestly deficient during Bacon’s
Rebellion  was  retrieved;  the  ruling  planter  elite  had
learned “to improvise a style of leadership appropriate to
the  peculiar  weakness  of  authority  and  the  undisciplined
and frustrated citizenry of Virginia.”
4
Edmund  S.  Morgan  discusses  the  transition  in  a
succession  of  chapters  beginning  “Toward”  –  “Toward
Slavery,”  “Toward  Racism,”  “Toward  Populism,”
“Toward  the  Republic”  –  and  concludes  that  the
subordination  of  class  by  “race”  at  the  beginning  of  the
eighteenth  century  is  the  key  to  the  emergence  of  the
republic  at  the  end  of  it.
5
  Commentary  directed
specifically  to  the  relationship  of  “race”  and  “class”  is
particularly relevant to the subject of the invention of the
white race.
6
 In a paper read before the Virginia Historical
Society  in  December  1894, Lyon  G.  Tyler,  son  of
President  John  Tyler,  and  seventeenth  president  of
William and Mary College and editor of The William and
Mary Quarterly, noted that “race, and not class, [was] the
distinction  in  social  life” in  eighteenth-century  Virginia.
7

The  modern  historian Gary B. Nash is more explicit: “In
the  late  seventeenth  century,”  he  writes,  “southern
colonizers were able  to  forge  a consensus among upper-
and  lower-class  whites.…  Race  became  the  primary
badge of status.”
8
Why  was  social  transformation  given  this  particular
form; and how was it brought about? It will not do to say
that this “race, not class” phenomenon was the result of the
shift to Africa as the main labor supply source.
9
 That same
shift  occurred  in  the  British  West  Indies  without  the
obliteration of class by “race”. It will not do to ascribe it
to  the  play  of  free  market  forces  fashioning  a “divided
labor  market”  of  skilled  European-Americans  and
unskilled  African-Americans.
10
  The  privileges  and
perquisites accorded to skilled workers do indeed express
“free  market  economy”  principles  but  “race”
discrimination,  in  the  form  of  the  “deficiency  laws”  and
prohibitions established in all English plantation colonies
in  the  Americas  against  employing  African  workers  in
skilled  occupations,  did  not.  It  will  not  do  to  say  that
persons arriving in the Americas already enchained were
not good candidates for  rebellion.
11
 Consider the history
of the maroons throughout the Americas, including British
Jamaica.
12
 Most important of all, it will not do to say that
the  “race,  not  class”  phenomenon  was  the result  of  the
reduction  of  African-Americans  to  lifetime  hereditary

bond-servitude.

One need only recall the solidarity of

“the English and Negroes in Armes” in Bacon’s

Rebellion, at a time when the great majority of African-

Americans were held as lifetime bond-laborers; or note

the fact that 23 percent of the African bond-laborers in

Jamaica on the eve of Emancipation were owned by

persons of one degree or other of African ancestry.

Rather it was only because “race” consciousness

superseded class-consciousness that the continental

plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve and maintain

the degree of social control necessary for proceeding with

capital accumulation on the basis of chattel bond-labor.

That the plantation bourgeoisie and those engaged in the

labor supply trade favored the imposition of perpetual

bondage on the plantation labor force can be seen as

simply prudent business practice designed, in terms of

current jargon, “to keep down inflationary labor costs in

order to promote economic growth and to make Anglo-

America competitive,” by utilizing opportunities in Africa

newly opened up by “the expanding global economy.” At

the same time, it was understood that, as always, success

depended on establishing and maintaining an intermediate

stratum for social control purposes. Why, then, were free

Negroes and “mulattos” to be excluded from that stratum

in the pattern-setting continental plantation colony of

Virginia?

In September 1723 an African-American wrote from

Virginia a letter of protest and appeal to Edmund Gibson,

the Bishop of London, whose see included Virginia. On

behalf of observant Christians of mixed Anglo-African

descent, who were nevertheless bound by “a Law or act

which keeps and makes them and there seed slaves

forever,” the letter asked for the bishop’s help and that of

the king “and the rest of the Rullers,” in ending their cruel

bondage.

Aspects of discrimination against African-Americans

also bothered British lawyer Richard West, the Attorney-

General, who had the responsibility of advising the Lords

of Trade and Plantations whether laws passed in colonial

legislatures merited approval, or should be rejected in

whole or in part as being prejudicial or contradictory to

the laws of England.

In due course, West had occasion to

examine a measure that was passed by the Virginia

Assembly in May 1723, entitled “An Act directing the trial

of Slaves, committing capital crimes; and for the more

effectual punishing conspiracies and insurrections of them;

and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and

Indians, bond or free.” Article 23 of that 24-article law

provided that:

… no free negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the

election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever.

The Attorney-General made the following categoric

objection:

I cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely

upon account of his complexion …; to vote at elections of officers, either for

a county, or parish, &c. is incident to every freeman, who is possessed of a

certain proportion of property, and, therefore, when several negroes have

merited their freedom, and obtained it, and by their industry, have acquired

that proportion of property, so that the above-mentioned incidental rights of

liberty are actually vested in them, for my own part, I am persuaded, that it

cannot be just, by a general law, without any allegation of crime, or other

demerit whatsoever, to strip all free persons, of a black complexion (some of

whom may, perhaps be of considerable substance,) from those rights, which

are so justly valuable to every freeman.

The Lords of Trade and Plantations “had Occasion to look

into the said Act, and as it carrie[d] an Appearance of

Hardship towards certain Freemen meerely upon Account

of their Complection, who would otherwise enjoy every

Priviledge belonging to Freemen [they wanted to know]

what were the Reasons which induced the Assembly to

pass this Act.”

Governor William Gooch, to whom the question was

ultimately referred, declared that the Virginia Assembly

had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order

“to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros &

Mulattos.”

Surely that was no “unthinking decision”!

Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation

bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious decision in the

process of establishing a system of racial oppression,

even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that

had existed in Virginia for more than a century.

But upon examination, Governor Gooch’s explanation

of the thinking that led to the decision seems grossly

disingenuous. His response to the criticism comprised four

points. (1) The immediate cause of the enactment of that

law, he said, had been the discovery of a revolt plot

among African-American bond-laborers in 1722,

“wherein the Free Negros & Mulattos were much

suspected to have been concerned (which will for ever be

the case) … though there could be no legal proof” of it.

(2) Another reason, said Gooch approvingly, had been “to

make the free Negros sensible that a distinction ought to be

made between their offspring and the descendants of an

Englishman.” As we might say today, Gooch felt

threatened by “the Pride of a manumitted slave, who looks

upon himself immediately on his acquiring his freedom to

be as good a man as the best.” (3) Gooch’s perturbation

was all the greater when the prideful offender was

“descended from a white Father or Mother,” these being

mostly, he said, “the worst of our imported Servants and

convicts.” The law in question, he argued, served as a

way of “discouraging that kind of copulation.” (4)

Anyway, he said, the number of persons disfranchised by

the law was “so inconsiderable, that ’tis scarce worth

while to take any notice of them in this particular.”

Although Gooch’s letter has been noticed before by our

historians, it has never been subject to analysis. However

that neglect is to be explained, let it end here: for such an

examination gets to the heart of the motives of the Anglo-

American continental plantation bourgeoisie in imposing

not just a system of lifetime bond-servitude only on

persons of African descent, but a system of racial

oppression, by denying recognition of, refusing to

acknowledge, delegitimizing, so far as African-Americans

were concerned, the normal social distinctions

characteristic of capitalist society. Consider the points of

the Gooch thesis in that light.

(1) As noted in Chapter 12, in the Anglo-Caribbean

societies the security of the social order based on lifetime

bond-servitude of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans was

deliberately linked to the making of such a social

distinction among persons of African ancestry. In the early

1720s, at the same time that the Virginia Assembly was

emphasizing the exclusion of free Negroes from any place

in the intermediate social control stratum, in Barbados

free Negroes and persons of color, like other free persons,

were required to serve in the colony militia, and in

Jamaica the Assembly offered free Negroes and persons

of color free homesteads. In both cases the policies were

calculated to promote and maintain social control and the

security of those colonies.

Far from undermining the

slave system, the policy in the West Indies proved over

and over again to be an effective counterweight to bond-

labor revolt. It was correctly feared that to refuse to

maintain such distinctions was to court disaster.

Virginia there had been free African-Americans living as

landowners, owners of bond-laborers, livestock breeders,

and hired laborers at least three-quarters of a century

before Gooch ever left England. Although they sometimes

helped bond-laborers to escape, that offense was more

often committed by European-American free persons. Yet

no proposal was made to reduce the latter to villeins by

taking away their franchise.

(2) If poor free persons in England or in Anglo-

America displayed delusions of social grandeur in such a

degree as to discomfit their neighbors, hot ridicule and

cold reality would likely soon disabuse them of the notion.

The preservation of a civil society would not require the

disfranchisement of a whole demographic category in

order to preserve good order in such cases. The system of

racial oppression is not characterized by the distinction

maintained between one of the common run of laboring

people and the “best of his neighbors,” i.e., the gentlefolk

of the leisure class. Rather, its hallmark is the insistence

on the social distinction between the poorest member of

the oppressor group and any member, however propertied,

of the oppressed group.

(3) It is to be noted that when Gooch expressed his

objection to sexual union between “whites” and African-

Americans, he referred only to instances in which the

former were “people of … mean condition.” He passed

over in silence the common practice of sexual exploitation

of African-American bond-laborers by their owners and

their owners’ sons.

Why this omission? There was a difference in the two

cases so far as the purposes of racial oppression were

concerned. In the second case, the mother being a lifetime

bond-laborer, the child would also be bound for life. The

father, as the owner or heir presumptive of the mother,

would not find it in his interest, and very rarely in his

heart, to acknowledge his child as his own. The mother

and the child were, by the laws forbidding their testimony,

incapable of making a claim against the owner. If the

owner did acknowledge paternity, he was subject to the

penalties for “fornication,” which were doubled in cases

of sexual congress between European-Americans and

African-Americans. If, out of an elementary sense of

human decency, he freed his own child, the child was

bound by law to leave Virginia within a certain time or to

be taken up and sold as a lifetime bond-laborer.

According to Gooch, the majority of the parents of

mulatto children were of the laboring class, and most were

bond-laborers. Although only those whose mothers were

African-Americans were to be bound for life, Gooch vents

his hostility towards all mulattos, whether bond or free,

whose mere presence presented a cognitive dissonance for

the system of racial oppression. But his emphasis is on the

laboring-class origin of those who, he says, made up the

majority of the mulattos. Was that because he saw in it the

seed of a revolutionary class solidarity such as had once

been enacted in Virginia by “English and Negroes in

Armes”? Whatever weight may be given to that

speculation, it is clear that Gooch regarded bonds of

mutual affection between African-Americans and

European-American laborers as an affront to the

“perpetual brand” of racial oppression.

(4) To dismiss the disfranchisement of African-

Americans on the grounds that they included few persons

who met the property qualifications was to reject the

premise set in Attorney-General West’s reference to the

rights of “every free man.” Furthermore, this argument

seems inconsistent with Gooch’s first point. If the number

of substantial African-American propertyholders was so

few that their disfranchisement was not worth noticing,

then concern over the prospect of their involvement in the

freedom-seeking exploits of bond-laborers would be

correspondingly diminished.

I have given such prominence to the Gooch letter

because it provides rare documentation of a discussion of

the issue of white supremacy among the ruling classes in

the eighteenth century in Virginia.

Although the Board of

Trade acknowledged Governor Gooch’s reply by saying

that it would let the matter rest,

historians of the origin of

racial oppression in Anglo-America should not be content.

I have sought to show that Gooch’s argument for “fixing a

brand” on the free African-American is illogical, even in

its own terms.

How, then, is this categoric rejection of the free Negro

to be explained? The difference between the English

plantation bourgeoisies in the British West Indies and in

the continental plantation colonies cannot be ascribed to a

difference of degrees of “white” consciousness. Down to

the last moment, and past it, the sugar plantocracy resisted

any attempt to undermine that consciousness, just as the

ruling class did in the continental plantation colonies. The

difference was rooted in the objective fact that in the West

Indies there were too few laboring-class Europeans to

embody an adequate petty bourgeoisie, while in the

continental colonies there were too many to be

accommodated in the ranks of that class.

The tobacco bourgeoisie assumed that bond-laborers

would resist in every way they could, including marronage

and revolt. Note has been made of the anxiety expressed in

1698 by Governor Francis Nicholson, then of Maryland,

over the prospect of “great disturbances” in which he

believed that the Irish bond-laborers would “confederate

with the negroes.”

In 1710 the Deputy Governor of

Virginia reported to the Board of Trade the discovery of

“an intended Insurrection of the negros which was to have

been put in Execution in Surry and James City Countys on

Easter Day.” Two of the freedom plotters were hanged in

the official hope that “their fate will strike such a Terror

in the other Negros, as will keep them from forming such

designs for the future.”

Alexander Spotswood arrived in

Virginia in 1710 to begin his ten-year tenure as Governor

in June of that same year shortly after the discovery of the

plot. Whatever reliance he intended to put upon terror,

experience had shown, he said, that “we are not to depend

on either their [the Negroes’] stupidity, or that babel of

languages among ’em; freedom wears a cap which can,

without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake

of[f] the fetters of slavery.”

Although the attempt of

African bond-laborers to establish a free settlement at the

head of James River in 1729 was defeated,

Governor

William Gooch feared that “a very small number of

negroes once settled in those parts, would very soon be

encreased by the accession of other runaways,” as had

happened with “the negroes in the mountains of

Jamaica.”

In 1736, William Byrd II, a member of the Virginia

Colony Council, wrote to the Earl of Egmont, president of

the Trustees of the Georgia colony which had been

founded four years earlier on the principle of exclusion of

slavery. Byrd expressed his approval of the new colony’s

policy, and his fear for Virginia’s future in view of the

rapidly increasing proportion of African-American bond-

laborers. He too had Jamaica on his mind, worrying “lest

they [the lifetime bond-laborers in Virginia] prove as

troublesome and dangerous … as they have been lately in

Jamaica. We have mountains, in Virginia, too, to which

they may retire safely, and do as much mischief as they do

in Jamaica.” Open revolt might occur; there were already

10,000 African-American men capable of bearing arms in

Virginia, he noted, and he warned that “in case there

should arise a Man amongst us, exasperated by a

desperate fortune he might with more advantage than

Cataline kindle a Servile War.”

In 1749, Virginia

Council members Thomas Lee and William Fairfax

favored discouraging the importation of English convicts

as bond-laborers. They cited former Governor

Spotswood’s allusion to freedom’s cap, and warned that

increasing the number of convict bond-laborers in

Virginia, “who are wicked enough to join our Slaves in

any Mischief … in all Probability will bring sure and

sudden Destruction on all His Majesty’s good subjects of

this colony.”

Nothing could have been more apparent

than that the small cohort of the ruling elite must have a

substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum to

stand between it and “great disturbances,” or even another

rebellion. Like the capitalist enclosers of the peasants’

land in sixteenth-century England, the men for whom the

plantation world was made needed an effective

intermediate yeoman-type social control stratum.

Whilst I have made no special effort to check for

occasions of the use of the term “yeoman” in the colonial

Virginia and Maryland records, I do not recall having seen

it there; nor have I seen it in citations from the records in

secondary works. Thomas J. Wertenbaker transplanted it

from the agrarian history of the mother country – where it

meant the laboring-class “forty-shilling freeholder” – even

though that designation had little practical significance to a

society where freehold farmers paid their debts and taxes

not in sterling money, but in pounds of tobacco.

Other

historians have followed Wertenbaker’s lead in

synonymizing “yeoman” with “middle class.” But that has

not been of much help in arriving at a functional definition

of either “yeoman” or “middle class.”

Various standards of measurement have been used to

draw the lines of class distinction in the colonial

Chesapeake, such as land ownership, bond-labor

ownership, the number of pounds of one’s annual tobacco

crop, tax lists, and estate inventories.

Even within one or

the other of these particular parameter systems, one

historian’s “yeoman” can be another’s “poor man.” In the

midst of the conceptual confusion, one does notice that the

yeoman band is wider in the eyes of those who, on the

whole, find that eighteenth-century Virginia was a

democracy and not an aristocracy; on the other hand, the

“yeoman” category tends to wash out in the studies of

those who tend to be more sensitive to the prevalence of

inequality in the Chesapeake tobacco colonies.

The present study is concerned with the question of

ruling-class social control and the choice of a system of

racial oppression in the Anglo-American plantation

colonies. The concept of “yeoman” or “middle class” in

this context is examined as an intermediate social control

category. For that reason, I take as the first criterion the

degree to which a “planter’s” interest was benefited by the

system of chattel bond-servitude. The lower boundary of

the middle class by this standard would lie between those

who owned lifetime bond-laborers (the number being

augmented by incidental functionaries of the system, such

as overseers, clerks, slave-traders), on the one hand, and

those who did not own bond-laborers, on the other.

In relation to the Chesapeake generally, Kulikoff states

that by the 1730s the social power structure was

dominated  by  the  gentry,  a  leisure  class  comprising  5
percent of the Anglo-American men.
38
 The “gentry” can be
regarded  as  the  ruling  class,  and  it  was  composed  of
persons  whose  wealth,  however  gained,  was  such  as  to
relieve  them  of  any  economic  need  to  work.  From  their
ranks  came  those  who  actually  occupied  the  posts  of
political authority.
39
 “About half the [European-American]
men,”  says  Kulikoff,  “were  yeomen,  and  many  of  them
owned  a  slave  or  two,  or  hoped  to  someday.”
40
  Being
dependent on the gentry for credit to tide them over rough
spots or to expand their holdings, the yeomen reciprocated
by going along with the system of rule by the gentry.
41
Aubrey  C.  Land  approached  the  study  of  class
differentiation  in  the  colonial  Chesapeake  by  way  of
analysis  of  Maryland  estate  inventories,
42
  which  he
grouped  by  a  scale  of  hundreds  of  pounds  sterling:
£0-£100,  £100-£200;  £200-£300,  etcetera.  In  the  period
1690  to  1699,  three-fourths  of  the  planters  were  in  the
£0-£100  category.  The  typical  annual  crop  of  such  a
planter  was  from  1,200  to  3,000  pounds  of  tobacco.
“Between investment and consumption he had no choice.
…  He  could  not  invest  from  savings  because  he  had
none.” For him to buy either a limited-term or a lifetime
bond-laborer  was  “very  difficult.”  Often,  because  of  his
debts,  the  heirs  of  such  a  person  were  left  penniless.
43
More than one-third of the planters in this category were

tenants on  twenty-one-year  or  three-lives  leases  on  wild
lands.
44
  It  is  interesting  to  note  the  contrast  between  the
Scots tenant in Ulster, who retained property claim to the
improvements  he  made  on  the  leasehold,
45
  and  the
Chesapeake  tenant,  who  was  obligated  to  clear  the  land
and  make  improvements,  the entire  value  of  which  was
claimed by the landlord for expansion of a soil-exhausting
monoculture based on bond-labor. Although the proportion
of planters in £0-£100 group had declined by 1740, they
still  made  up  more  than  half  the  total.
46
  Such  a  planter
“was  not  the  beneficiary  of  the  planting  society  of  the
Chesapeake … [and] it would stretch the usual meaning of
the term to call him a yeoman, particularly if he fell in the
lower half of his group.”
47
The  £100-£200  category  presents  a  dramatic  contrast,
in that 80 percent of these estates included bond-labor.
48
Taking this category together with the others up to £500,
representing  21.7  percent  of  all  estates  in  the  1690–99
period,  by  1740  their  proportion  had  increased  to  35.7
percent. Of this larger, £100-£500 band of estates, lifetime
bond-labor accounted for between half and two-thirds of
the  total  value  of  an  estate.  In  this  £100-£500  category,
farms without bond-labor had crops of only from 1,200 to
3,000 pounds of tobacco. But with bond-labor the output
increased in proportion to the number of laborers.
49
In  the  interest  of  completeness  of  coverage, Jackson

Turner Main based a study on the Virginia tax lists for

1787.

But by treating various regions, from east to west,

as representative of successive historical stages of

plantation development, as well as by drawing to some

extent on historical regional data, Main concluded that the

general tendency of social evolution in Virginia [within

the white population] was toward “a larger landless class

and a larger class, too, of those who had almost no

property.”

In conclusion, Main declared:

… it is evident in the first place that landowners were in a minority.

Excluding the Northern Neck, about 30 percent of the adult [white] males

were laborers with very little property. About one tenth of the men had no

land but had a fair amount of other property and had access to land owned

by relatives. About one eighth were tenants. A little over one third of the

men were small farmers with less than five hundred acres.

To summarize, then, somewhat less than 50 percent of

the total adult white male population were landowners. Of

the total number of landowners, one-fifth were large

landholders, those with 500 acres or more. Those with

from 100 to 500 acres constituted two-thirds of the total.

Of these, one-fourth worked their land without the

employment of bond-labor. The one-tenth of the

landowners having up to 100 acres were even more likely

to do their own work. Thus while at least seven out of

eight landowners were also owners of bond-laborers,

around 60 percent of the adult white male population were

not employers of bond-labor but, rather, were put in

competition with employers of bond-labor.

Jackson T.

Main’s study suggests the presence of a “yeoman” or

“middle” class in eighteenth-century Virginia of not more

than 40 percent of the adult white male population. That

seems compatible with Land’s conclusions regarding

Maryland estate evaluations.

Professor Kulikoff relates these relative class

proportions in the population to the central concern of the

present work, the question of ruling class social control,

by concluding that, “Once the gentry class gained the

assent of the yeomanry, it could safely ignore the rest of

white society.”

But, recalling the question raised by

Attorney-General West, why should African-Americans

“possessed of a certain proportion of property” have been

effectively barred from the ranks of this “yeomanry”? I

have great respect for Kulikoff’s work, from which I have

learned much, but I believe that this proscription of the

free African-American can be explained best precisely by

the fact that, despite its sway over the “yeomanry,” the

gentry could not “safely ignore the rest of white society”

because their bond-labor system was antithetical to the

interests not only of African-American bond-laborers, but

also of all the rest of the population that did not own bond-

laborers. In their solidarity with the African-American

bond-laborers in Bacon’s Rebellion, the laboring-class

European-American bond-laborers had demonstrated their

understanding of their interests, and bond-laborers had had

the sympathy of the laboring poor and propertyless free

population.

What was to be done? What was the “alteration in the

government, but not of the government”

that would

exorcise the ghost of Bacon’s Rebellion? How was

laboring-class solidarity to be undone? Back to first

principles, never better enunciated by an English

statesman than by Sir Francis Bacon.

“[I]t is a certain

sign of wise government,” Sir Francis advised, “… when

it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by

satisfaction.” And, with acknowledgment to Machiavelli,

Bacon advocated “dividing and breaking of all factions

and combinations that are adverse to the state, and setting

them at distance, or at least distrust among themselves.”

In the world the slaveholders made, however, “hope”

depended upon the prospect of social mobility into the

ranks of owners of bond-labor, and as we have seen there

was little opportunity for the non-owner of bond-labor to

make that transition to the “yeoman” class. The cost of

lifetime bond-laborers presented a threshold that few non-

owners of bond-labor could reach. The monoculture

tended to glut the market and leave the small producer

who had no bond-labor in debt so that accumulation of the

capital necessary for this path to “yeoman” status was

drained away.

Instead of social mobility, European-Americans who

did not own bond-laborers were to be asked to be

satisfied simply with the presumption of liberty, the

birthright of the poorest person in England; and with the

right of adult males who owned sufficient property to vote

for candidates for office who were almost invariably

owners of bond-laborers. The prospects for stability of a

system of capitalist agriculture based on lifetime

hereditary bond-servitude depended on the ability of the

ruling elite to induce the non-“yeoman” European-

Americans to settle for this counterfeit of social mobility.

The solution was to establish a new birthright not only for

Anglos but for every Euro-American, the “white” identity

that “set them at a distance,” to use Sir Francis’s phrase,

from the laboring-class African-Americans, and enlisted

them as active, or at least passive, supporters of lifetime

bondage of African-Americans. Edmund S. Morgan

introduces a catalogue of these white-skin privilege laws,

with the assertion that “The answer to the problem [of

preventing a replay of Bacon’s Rebellion] … was racism,

to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave

blacks by a screen of racial contempt.” In this way, he

emphasizes, “the [Virginia] assembly deliberately did

what it could to foster contempt of whites for blacks and

Indians.”

Bruce attests that “[t]oward the end of the

seventeenth century” there occurred “a marked tendency to

promote a pride of race among the members of every class

of white people; to be white gave the distinction of color

even to the agricultural [European-American bond-

]servants, whose condition, in some respects, was not

much removed from that of actual slavery; to be white and

also to be free, combined the distinction of liberty.”

Here, then, is the true answer to the issue raised by the

anonymous Virginian to the Bishop of London and by

Attorney-General Richard West and the Board of Trade to

Governor Gooch. The exclusion of free African-

Americans from the intermediate stratum was a corollary

of the establishment of “white” identity as a mark of social

status. If the mere presumption of liberty was to serve as a

mark of social status for masses of European-Americans

without real prospects of upward social mobility, and yet

induce them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy

and enlist them actively, or at least passively, in keeping

down the Negro bond-laborer with whom they had made

common cause in the course of Bacon’s Rebellion, the

presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African-

Americans.

H. M. Henry, though writing about South Carolina,

posed a question of general relevance.

The financial interests of the large planters are sufficient to explain why

they sought to perpetuate such a system of labor [racial slavery]. But why

should the non-slaveholders, who formed the majority of the white

population, have assisted in upholding and maintaining the slavery status of

the negro with its attendant inconveniences, such as patrol service, when

they must have been aware in some measure at least that as an economic

regime it was a hindrance to their progress?

The Virginia General Assembly showed how it was to be

done; it deliberately stuffed the “racial” distinction with

anomalous privileges to make it look like the real thing,

promotion to a higher social class. The distinction was

even emphasized for European-American chattel bond-

laborers, whose presumption of liberty was temporarily in

suspension.

Any owner of an African-American, practically without

hindrance, could legally use or abuse his African-

American bond-laborers, or dispose of him or her by gift,

bequest, sale, or rental as a matter of course, but by a law

enacted in 1691, he was forbidden to set them free.

Examples of emancipation of African-Americans by final

will and testament have been cited from the record in

Chapter 10; never had such a will been challenged. But

when in 1712, under the terms of the will of John Fulcher

of Norfolk County, sixteen African-American bond-

laborers were to be freed and given land in fee simple “to

live upon as long as they Shall live or any of there

Increase and not to be turned of[f] or not to be Disturbed,”

the Virginia Colony Council reacted by proposing to bar

even this door to freedom.

On the other hand, the revised Virginia code of 1705

took pains to specify unprecedented guarantees for the

European “christian white” limited-term bond-laborers.

Before, masters had merely been required not to “exceed

the bounds of moderation” in beating or whipping or

otherwise “correcting” the bond-laborer, it being

provided that the victim, if one could get to the Justice of

the Peace and then to the next county court, “shall have

remedy for his grievances.”

The new code forbade the

master to “whip a christian white servant naked, without

an order from the justice of the peace,” the offending

master to be fined forty shillings payable to the servant.

Upon a second offense by a master in treatment of

“servants (not being slaves),” the courts could order that

the servant be taken from that master and sold at outcry.

Freedom dues for limited-term bond-laborers had never

been specified in Virginia law, but were merely referred

to in court orders by the loose term “corn and clothes.”

The 1705 code, however, noting that “nothing in that

nature ever [had been] made certain,” enumerated them

with specificity: “to every male servant, ten bushels of

corn, thirty shillings in money (or the equivalent in goods),

a gun worth at least twenty shillings; and to every woman

servant,  fifteen  bushels  of  corn,  forty  shillings  in  money
(or  the  equivalent  in  goods).”
66
  Lifetime  bond-laborers
were  not  to  have  freedom  dues,  of  course,  but  they  had
been allowed to raise livestock on their own account, and
to have them marked as their own. But in 1692, and again
in  1705  with  greater  emphasis,  livestock  raised  by
African-American  bond-laborers  on  their  own  account
were ordered to be confiscated.
67
The  act  of  1723  that  was  the  subject  of  the
correspondence between Governor Gooch and the Board
of Trade was by no means the first evidence, in terms of
the law, of ruling-class desire not only to impose lifetime
hereditary  bond-servitude  on  African-Americans,  but  to
implement it by a system of racial oppression, expressed
in  laws  against free  African-Americans.  Such  were  the
laws  (several  of  which  have  been  previously  noted)
making  free  Negro  women  tithable;
68
  forbidding  non-
Europeans,  though  baptized  Christians,  to  be  owners  of
“christian,”  that  is,  European,  bond-laborers;
69
  denying
free  African-Americans  the  right  to  hold  any  office  of
public trust;
70
 barring any Negro from being a witness in
any  case  against  a  “white”  person;
71
  making  any  free
Negro subject to thirty lashes at the public whipping post
for  “lift[ing]  his  or  her  hand”  against  any  European-
American,  (thus  to  a  major  extent  denying  Negroes  the
elementary  right  of  self-defense);
72
  excluding  free

African-Americans  from  the  armed  militia;
73
  and
forbidding  free African-Americans  from  possessing  “any
gun,  powder,  shot,  or  any  club,  or  any  other  weapon
whatsoever, offensive or defensive.”
74
The denial of the right of self-defense would become a
factor in the development of the  peculiar American form
of  male  supremacy,  white-male  supremacy,  informed  by
the  principle  that  any  European-American  male  could
assume  familiarity  with  any  African-American  woman.
That principle came to have the sanction of law. We have
earlier  cited  the  Maryland  Provincial  Court  decision  of
1767 that “a slave had no recourse against the violator of
his bed.”
75
 “The law simply did not criminalize  the rape
of  slave  women,”  writes  Philip  Schwarz.  “No  Virginia
judge  heard  [such]  a  case.”
76
  Free  African-American
women had practically no legal protection in this respect,
in  view  of  the  general  exclusion  of  African-Americans,
free or bond, from giving testimony in court.
77
The ruling class  took special  pains  to be sure  that the
people  they  ruled  were  propagandized  in  the  moral  and
legal  ethos  of  white-supremacism.  Provisions  were
included  for  that  purpose  in  the  1705  “Act  concerning
Servants and Slaves” and in the Act of 1723 “directing the
trial of Slaves … and for the better government of Negros,
Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free.”
78
 For consciousness-
raising purposes (to prevent “pretense of ignorance”), the

laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, once

each spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should

read (“publish”) these laws in full to the congregants.

Sheriffs were ordered to have the same done at the

courthouse door at the June or July term of court. If we

presume, in the absence of any contrary record, that this

mandate was followed, we must conclude that the general

public was regularly and systematically subjected to

officiai white-supremacist agitation. It was to be drummed

into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free

African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand

against a “Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian”

(3:459); that African-American freeholders were no

longer to be allowed to vote (4:133–34); that the

provision of a previous enactment (3:87 [1691]) was

being reinforced against the mating of English and

Negroes as producing “abominable mixture” and

“spurious issue” (3:453–4); that, as provided in the 1723

law for preventing freedom plots by African-American

bond-laborers, “any white person … found in company

with any [illegally congregated] slaves” was to be fined

(along with free African-Americans or Indians so

offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to “receive,

on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense,

twenty lashes well laid on.” (4:129).

Thus was the “white race” invented as the social

control formation whose distinguishing characteristic was

not the participation of the slaveholding class, nor even of

other elements of the propertied classes; that alone would

have been merely a form of the “beautiful gradation” of

class differentiation prescribed by Edmund Burke. What

distinguished this system of social control, what made it

“the white race”, was the participation of the laboring

classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders,

tenants, and laborers. In time this “white race” social

control system begun in Virginia and Maryland would

serve as the model of social order to each succeeding

plantation region of settlement.

The effort bore fruit so far as danger from the

European-American bond-laborers was concerned. “[t]he

fear,” writes Winthrop D. Jordan, “of white servants and

Negroes uniting in servile rebellion, a prospect which

made some sense in the 1660s and 70s … vanished

completely during the following half-century.” He

continues with a corollary: “Significantly, the only

rebellions of white servants in the continental colonies

came before the entrenchment of slavery.”

But that is

only half the story: the poor and propertyless European-

Americans were the principal element in the day-to-day

enforcement of racial oppression not only in the

Chesapeake but wherever the plantation system was

established. After 1700, according to Wertenbaker,

“Every  white  man,  no  matter  how  degraded,  could  now
find pride in his race.… Moreover, the immediate control
of the negroes fell almost entirely into the hands of white
men  of  humble  means.”
81
  In  1727,  special  militia
detachments  known  as  “the patrol”  were  instituted  “for
dispersing  all  unusual  concourse  of  negroes,  or  other
slaves,  and  for  preventing  any  dangerous  combinations
which  may  be  made  among  them  at  such  meetings.”
82
  A
student  of  criminal  laws  in  Virginia  relating  to  bond-
laborers states that “Patrollers were the ultimate means of
preventing  insurrection.”
83
  Historians  who  analyzed  the
Virginia  militia  records  of  1757–58  have  reported  that
“the  muster  rolls  were  apt  to  be  filled  mostly  with  the
lower  class.”  Many,  they  say,  were  “former  indentured
servants.”
84
  In  colonial  South  Carolina,  even  the
European-American bond-laborers were recruited into the
militia  and  the  “slave  patrol,”  where  “[their]  role  in
defense  against  Negro  insurrection  was  more  important
than as a defense against the enemy from without.”
85
 At the
time  of  the  American  Revolution,  a  number  of  African-
American  bond-laborers  were  freed  by  their  South
Carolina Quaker owners. The law subsequently enacted to
prevent  further  emancipations  proved  ineffective  at  first
because  only  freeholders  were  authorized  to  collect
rewards  for  reporting  violations.  But  in  1788
effectiveness  was  achieved  by  extending  this  civic

function to “any freeman.” By this means, says our

historian, “the State secured the co-operation of the

landless whites who were usually strangely willing to

have a fling at the slaves and who, no doubt, were anxious

to get the reward offered for such information.”

In a mode often akin to modern-day “featherbedding,”

deficiency laws provided jobs for European-American

workers simply for being “white.” In 1712, the South

Carolina Assembly, for example, passed a law stipulating

that, at any plantation six miles or more remote from the

owner’s usual abode, for every “Six Negroes or other

Slaves” employed, a quota of “One or more White

Person” must be kept there. Ten years later the quota was

one to ten, but that applied to the home plantation as well

as to those far removed.

Job preference for “whites”

was to be further guaranteed under a proposal of a

committee of the South Carolina House of Assembly in

1750 “That no Handicrafts Man [other than the owner]

shall hereafter teach a Negro his Trade.”

Georgia colony, founded by its trustees in 1732 on the

no-slavery principle, was territory irresistible to the South

Carolina plantation bourgeoisie anxious as its members

were to “grow the economy,” as it might be put today.

They soon began to campaign for an end of this

government interference with free enterprise. In the course

of the controversy, a Savannah man objected that

abandonment  of  the  founding  principle  excluding  slavery
from Georgia “would take work from white men’s hands
and impoverish them, as in the case of Charleston [South
Carolina],  where  the  tradesmen  are  all  beggars  by  that
means.” The promoters of the slavery cause countered by
saying that “the negroes should not be allowed to work at
anything  but  producing  rice  …  and  in  felling  timber.
89
Accordingly, the 1750 act repealing the ban on slavery in
Georgia  included  a  “deficiency”  provision  requiring  the
employment  of  one  “white  man  Servant”  on  each
plantation  for  every  four  Negroes  employed.  It  further
barred  the  employment  of  Negroes  except  in  cultivation
and  coopering.
90
  Although  this  system  of  white-skin
privileges  had  not  been  initiated  by  the  European-
American  laboring  classes  but  by  the  plantation
bourgeoisie,  the  European-American  workers  were
claiming them by the middle of the eighteenth century.
91
 In
South  Carolina  white  workers  were  demanding  the
exclusion of Negroes from the skilled trades.
92
 Richard B.
Morris’s  monumental  study  of  labor  in  the  continental
Anglo-American  colonies  found  that  “the  effort  of  white
artisans to keep free Negroes and slaves from entering the
skilled  trades”  radiated  from  Charleston  to  “every
sizeable  town on  the Atlantic  coast.”
93
  In  1839,  “white”
mechanics  in  Culpeper  and  Petersburg,  Virginia,
demanded  that  Negroes  be  barred  from  apprenticeship,

and from any trade without a “white” overseer. A decade

later a similar petition from Norfolk showed a high degree

of political sophistication. Barring Negroes from

competing for employment, its sponsors said, would

guarantee against “jealousy between slaveholders and

non-slaveholders.”

Within two decades slaveholding

would end, but the appeal to “white race” solidarity

would remain the country’s most general form of class-

collaborationism.

The White Race and Theories of American

History

If the Virginia laws of 1705 represent ruling class

manipulation of the rank-and-file, the inescapable

implication seems to be that the social transformation that

they expressed – to the system of racial slavery, racial

oppression, white supremacy – must not have been in the

real interests of the majority of the people, the

smallholders, the tenants and laborers, those who did not

own bond-laborers.

There have been many historians who would not accept

this argument. Some would reject the premise, others the

conclusion; still others would reject both the premise and

the conclusion. There are those, the psycho-cultural cohort

in the debate over the origin of racial slavery in

continental Anglo-America, who see white supremacy as

having been genetically or culturally foreordained before

the English settlers sailed into James River.

Arguments

made by others – based on considerations of

demographics, blind market forces, Euro-Afro cultural

dissonance, and the fact that only persons of African

descent were held in lifetime servitude – along with my

brief counterpoints are specified earlier in this chapter at

page 240.

But a major theme shared by some who reject the

premise and some who accept it concerns not the origin of

racial oppression but the assessment of white-

supremacism in relation to the foundation of the United

States as a republic. That theme may properly be called

the “paradox thesis” of American history. The essential

element in this argument is that democracy and equality, as

represented in the Declaration of Independence and the

Constitution of 1789, were, by the logic of history, made

possible by racial oppression. The lineage of this thesis

goes back at least to 1758, when Edmund Burke argued

that “whites” in the southern continental colonies were

more “attached to liberty” than were colonists in the North

because in the South freedom was a racial privilege.

Virginia scholar Thomas Roderick Dew contended that

slavery made possible and actual “one common level” of

equality “in regard to whites.” “The menial and low

offices being all performed by the blacks,” he continued,

“there is at once taken away the greatest cause for

distinction and separation of the ranks of society.”

Special interest, however, attaches to Edmund S.

Morgan’s espousal of this rationale. His book American

Slavery, American Freedom appeared in 1975 in the

afterglow of the civil rights struggles, sacrifices and

victories of the 1960s. Furthermore, his socio-economic

approach to the origin of racial slavery supplied the most

substantial response that had yet appeared to the “natural

racism” thesis of Carl Degler and of Winthrop D. Jordan.

Historian H. M. Henry had asked: “why should the non-

slaveholders, who formed the majority of the white

population have assisted in upholding and maintaining the

slavery status of the negro …?” Sixty years later, Morgan

posed essentially the same question. “How could

patricians win in populist politics?” That question,

Morgan says, “leads to the paradox … the union of

freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.”

The essence of Morgan’s paradox, to the extent it is a

true paradox, is a renewal of the same euphemism of the

system of white-supremacism and lifetime hereditary

bond-servitude that characterized the opinions of Burke

and Dew. Unconsciously paraphrasing Edmund Burke,

Morgan says, “Virginians may have had a special

appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because

they saw every day what life without it could be.”

T. R.

Dew and others are recognized in Morgan’s approvingly

quoted observation of Sir Augustus John Foster, an

English diplomat who traveled in Virginia at the beginning

of the nineteenth century: “Owners of slaves among

themselves are all for keeping down every kind of

superiority.” It is pure Dew again when Morgan shares

Foster’s view that “whites” in Virginia, “can profess an

unbounded love of liberty and democracy … [because] the

mass of the people who in other countries might become

mobs [in Virginia are] nearly altogether composed of

their” African-American lifetime bond-laborers.

The argument rests on the assumption that early in the

eighteenth century “the mass of white Virginians were

becoming landowners” and the small planters began to

prosper, thus giving the large and small planters “a sense

of common identity based on common interests.”

100

This

feeling, says Morgan, was sufficient basis for the small

planters to put their trust in the ruling plantation

bourgeoisie and thus cease to be a danger to social

order.

101

Sources cited by me such as Jackson Turner

Main, Gloria Main, T. J. Wertenbaker, Aubrey C. Land,

Willard F. Bliss, Russell R. Menard, and Allan Kulikoff

show that the economic assumption made here by Morgan

is open to serious question. Morgan, in a passing reference

to the growth of tenancy, devotes a reference note to Bliss

and Jackson Main, but that is the limit of his concern with

such studies, although they cast great doubt on his facile

conclusion that of European-Americans “[t]here were too

few free poor to matter,”

102

a conclusion without which

his “paradox” unravels.

Morgan, in passages that I have previously cited with

approval, declared that the answer to the problem of

social control was a series of deliberate measures taken

by the ruling class to “separate dangerous free whites from

dangerous slave blacks.”

103

But if, as the country moved

“Toward the Republic” and after it got there, among

“whites” there were “too few free poor to matter,” why

did the social order not revert to the normal class

differentiation, Burke’s “beautiful gradation” from rich to

the less rich and so on through the scale, in which the free

Negroes could take their individual places according to

their social class? They could be expected, as James

Madison said, to function properly in that social station.

104

The “white race,” as a social control formation, would

have been a redundancy. Instead, there was a general

proscription of the free Negro, laws against emancipation,

even by last will and testament, and banishment for those

so freed. That, I submit, is unchallengeable evidence of the

continued presence of poor whites who had “little but

their complexion to console them for being born into a

higher caste,” yet served as an indispensable element of

the “white race,” the Peculiar Institution.

105

Morgan’s book was a trenchant contribution to the

socio-economic and “deliberate-choice” explanation of

the origin of racial slavery. In seeking to understand his

adoption of the “paradox” thesis, it seems helpful to

consider the following passage from his 1972 presidential

address to the Organization of American Historians:

The temptation is already apparent to argue that slavery and oppression

were the dominant features of American history and that efforts to advance

liberty and equality were the exception, indeed no more than a device to

divert the masses while their chains were being fastened. To dismiss the rise

of liberty and equality in American history as a mere sham is not only to

ignore hard facts, it is also to evade the problem presented by those facts.

The rise of liberty and equality in this country was accompanied by the rise

of slavery. That two such contradictory developments were taking place

simultaneously over a long period of our history, from the seventeenth

century to the nineteenth, is the central paradox of American history.

106

Morgan set out to meet the “challenge” of those who, in

his opinion, overemphasize slavery and oppression in

American history. Yet the effect of Morgan’s “paradox”

thesis seems no less an apology for white supremacy than

the “natural racism” argument. At the end of it all, he

writes, “Racism made it possible for white Virginians to

develop a devotion to … equality.… Racism became an

essential … ingredient of the republican ideology that

enabled Virginians to lead the nation.” Then, as if shying

at his own conclusion, Morgan suggests the speculation

that perhaps “the vision of a nation of equals [was] flawed

at the source by contempt for both the poor and the

black.”

107

But what flaw? If racism was a flaw, then “the

rise of liberty” would have been better off without it – a

line of reasoning that negates the paradox. On the other

hand, if racism made “the rise of liberty possible,” as the

paradox would have it, then racism was not a flaw of

American bourgeois democracy, but its very special

essence. Morgan’s “paradox” therefore contains in itself

the very challenge that he set out to refute. The “Ordeal of

Colonial Virginia” was extended as the Ordeal of

America, wherein racial oppression and white-

supremacism have indeed been the dominant feature, the

parametric constant, of United States history.

The white frontier

Being made to compete with unpaid bond-labor

“practically destroyed the Virginia yeomanry,” writes

Wertenbaker. “Some it drove into exile, either to the

remote frontiers or to other colonies; some it reduced to

extreme poverty; … some it caused to purchase slaves and

so at one step to enter the exclusive class of those who had

others to work for them.… The small freeholder was not

destroyed, as was his prototype of ancient Rome, but he

was subjected to a change which was by no means

fortunate or wholesome.”

108

The tendency toward concentration of capital

ownership is a prevailing attribute of capitalism. The

social impact of that tendency is illustrated in

Wertenbaker’s comment on the Virginia colonial economy

of the eighteenth century. But this was not the typical case

of increased concentration of capital based on the

introduction of new instruments of labor requiring

increasing relative investments in fixed capital. It was

caused by land engrossment in general, and by the

diminished supply of good lands in the older, Tidewater

area, but even more by the lower labor costs per unit of

output of those planters who had means to invest in the

high-priced lifetime bond-laborers. By the closing third of

the eighteenth century this process had produced a

situation in which at least 60 percent of the white adult

men in Virginia were non-owners of bond-labor.

109

Among that 60 percent were those encountered by the

Marquis de Chastellux as he travelled through Virginia in

spring 1782. For the first time in his three years in

America, “in the midst of those rich plantations,” he often

saw “miserable huts … inhabited by whites, whose wan

looks and ragged garments bespeak poverty.” It seemed

clear  to  him  that  the  cause  of  this  poverty  was  the
engrossment of land by the plantation bourgeoisie.
110
 The
impoverished  included  those  landless  European-
Americans  previously  noted  who  stayed  in  eastern
Virginia  but  with  “little  but  their  complexion  to  console
them.”
111
Wertenbaker asserts, however, that the number of such
very  poor  was  never  large,  because  anyone  with a  little
drive and  ambition  “could  move to  the  frontier  and start
life  on  more  equal  terms.”
112
  Among  those  who  moved
and moved  frequently  were  those  who  opted  for  being
tenants,
113
  some  on  leases  but,  says  Kulikoff,  more
typically as tenants-at-will, working on shares with tools,
buildings  and  marketing  facilities  furnished  by  the
landlord.  Share  tenants  moved  on  after  a  short  tenure.
Squatters  left  land  where  they  could  not  afford  the
surveying  and  patent  fees;  two-thirds  of  the  original
settlers  of  Amelia  County,  formed  in  1735  –  mostly
squatters  –  left  the  county  between  1736  and  1749.  In
Lunenberg  County,  formed  in  1746,  only  one-fifth  of  the
laborers were able to establish households, whilst two out
of five of the householders left the county  between 1750
and  1764.
114
  Others  moved  directly  to  “new”  territories
taking out patents as fee-simple owners.
The  result  was  an  increasing  number  of  would-be
planters moving to “the frontier,” wherever that meant at a

given time – the Piedmont, the south side of the James,

North Carolina, the Shenandoah Valley, or beyond the

Cumberland Gap – as tenants, as patentees of “new” land,

or as unpatented squatters. Though the squeezing out of

such a poor planter to the “frontier” negated the

assumption of a common interest with the gentry, he was

still “made to fold to his bosom the adder that stings him,”

the bondage of African-Americans.

115

Denied social

mobility, these would-be planters were to have the white-

skin privilege of lateral mobility – to the “frontier.” By the

same token they went as “whites”; resenting Negroes, not

their slavery, indeed hating the free Negro most of all;

ready now to take the land from the Indians in the name of

“a white man’s country.”

116

Turner’s frontier-as-social-safety-valve theory

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), one of

the giants of American historiography, presented a theory,

“a hypothesis,” of American historical development. He

likened it to the career of the ancient Greeks in the

Mediterranean world, “breaking the bond of custom,

offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and

activities.”

117

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history

of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land,

its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward

explain American development.

118

Turner ended that essay with a portentous epitaph: “[T]he

frontier is gone, and with its going has closed the first

period of American history.”

119

In 1910 he continued his

theme: “The solitary backwoodsman wielding his axe at

the edge of a measureless forest is replaced by companies

capitalized at millions, operating railroads, sawmills, and

all the enginery of modern machinery to harvest the

remaining trees.” He then formulated what came to be

called the “safety-valve corollary” of the “frontier” thesis.

“A new national development is before us,” he said,

“without the former safety valve of abundant resources

open to him who would take.” He delineated the

consequent sharpening of class struggle between capital

and anti-capital, between those who demand that there be

no governmental interference with “the exploitation and

the development of the country’s wealth” on the one hand,

and the reformers – from the Grangers to the Populists, to

Bryan to Debs and Theodore Roosevelt – who emphasized

“the need of governmental regulation … in the interest of

the common man; [and] the checking of the power of those

business Titans.”

120

It is not surprising,” he added later

that year, “that socialism shows noteworthy gains as

elections continue, that parties are forming on new lines.

… They are efforts to find substitutes for the former

safeguard of democracy, the disappearing lands. They are

the sequence of the disappearing frontier.”

121

It is now more than a century since the disappearance of

the “frontier”, to which Turner ascribed a sharpening

struggle between the “Titans” and “the common people.”

But his expectation of the emergence of a popular socialist

movement of sufficient proportions to “substitute” for the

end of the “free-land safety valve” was disappointed.

Turner died in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932.

Toward the end of his life, he felt “baffled by his

contemporary world and [he] had no satisfying answer to

the closed-frontier formula in which he found himself

involved.”

122

The Great Social Safety Valve of American history

The white laboring people’s prospect of lateral mobility

to “free land”, however unrealizable it was in actuality,

did serve in diverting them from struggles with the

bourgeoisie.

123

But that was merely one aspect of the

Great Safety Valve, the system of racial privileges

conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural

and urban, poor and exploited though they themselves

were. That has been the main historical guarantee of the

rule of the “Titans,” damping down anti-capitalist

pressures by making “race, and not class, the distinction in

social life.” This, more than any other factor, has shaped

the “contours of American history”

124

– from the

Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the Civil War, to the

overthrow of Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the

1890s, to the Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle

and “white backlash” of our own day. If Turner had taken

note of the Southern Homestead Act and its repeal, and the

heroic Negro Exodus of 1879, might he have given his

“frontier” theory an added dimension? Would he have then

taken into account the social safety-valve function of the

two other broad general forms of lateral mobility in the

nineteenth century – immigration into the United States and

farm-to-factory migration – which like “free land” were

also cast in the mold of “racial” preference for Europeans

and European-Americans, as “whites”?

125

The Civil Rights Legacy and the Impending

Crisis

Properly interpreted, Turner’s reference to the “safety

valve” potential in anti-capitalist “reform” movements of

his day had its innings in the Keynesian New Deal which

at least some of its supporters hoped might be a road to

“socialism,” and some of its reactionary enemies regarded

as the real thing. The limitations of that line of reform,

which had become evident by 1938, were masked by the

prosperity of the United States role as the “arsenal of

democracy” in World War Two, which ended with the

United States being the only industrial power left standing

and the possessor of three-fourths of the world’s gold

reserves. By 1953, other major powers had recovered to

pre-war levels; by 1957 the United States was beginning

to experience a chronic unfavorable balance of trade; in

1971 the United States formally abandoned the gold

standard for settlement of international balances of trade

and the “gold cover” for the domestic money supply.

Finally, even the party of the New Deal has cast all

Keynesian pretense to the winds, proclaiming that “the era

of big government is over,” and boasting of “ending

welfare” in any previously recognizable form.

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the social gap

between the Titans and the common people is at perhaps

its historic maximum, real wages have trended downward

for nearly two decades. “Entitlements” and “welfare,” as

they relate to students, the poor and the elderly, have

become obscenities in the lexicon of official society.

There is less of a “socialist” movement today in the

United States than there was in Turner’s day, and anti-

capitalist class-consciousness is hesitant even to call its

name. The bourgeoisie in one of its parts mockingly dons

“revolution” like a Halloween mask. “Class struggle” is

an epithet cast accusingly at the mildest defenders of

social welfare reforms, and the country is loud with the

sound of one class struggling.

Yet, there are unmistakable signs of a maturing social

conflict, such as that noted by Turner a century ago,

because of intensifying efforts to “balance the budget” at

the expense of the living standards of non-stockholders.

But there is a most significant variation. Unlike in

Turner’s time, the present-day United States bears the

indelible stamp of the African-American civil rights

struggle of the 1960s and after, a seal that the “white

backlash” has by no means been able to expunge from the

nation’s consciousness. Perhaps in the impending renewal

of the struggle of “the common people” and the “Titans,”

the Great Safety Valve of white-skin privileges may

finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class

European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries

has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests

vis-à-vis those of the ruling class.

Appendix II-A

(see Chapter 1, note 64)

“For more than four centuries, the communities formed

by … [African and African-American] runaways dotted

the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to the

southeastern United States, from Peru to the American

Southwest.” Their existence “struck directly at the

foundations of the plantation system, presenting military

and economic threats that often taxed the colonists to their

very limits.”

Maroon communities, from Jamaica to

Cuba, from Brazil to Mexico, were more successful where

located in mountainous terrain, and continental mainland

situations seem to have been of extra advantage, as in

Panama, Colombia and Brazil, as compared to the more

limited room of small insular colonies.

“The major concern of the colonial government of Cuba

was the persecution of maroons and the destruction of

palenques, even after the first half of the nineteenth

century.”

“Mexico experienced its first widespread wave of

slave insurrections in the period 1560–80.… By the

1560s … [T]he [Spanish colonial] bureaucracy and slave

owners, outnumbered by slaves in the mining regions,

were helpless in the face of such anarchy,” which found

Africans “allying with the Indians.”

The main maroon

settlement, in a mountain fastness located not far from

Vera Cruz, was led by Yanga, an African reputedly of

royal rank in his native Abrong kingdom. He was the first

Mexican maroon, having fled to the mountains in about

1580. An expedition sent against the maroons’ settlement

failed in its search-and-destroy mission. Instead, the

encounter resulted in a historically unique agreement,

“The only known example of a fully successful attempt by

slaves to secure their freedom en masse by revolt and

negotiation, and to have it sanctioned and guaranteed in

law.”

Another former African king, known to Cartagena (the

Caribbean coastal region of Colombia) as Domingo

Bioho, King Benkos, fled the Spanish plantations at the

head of thirty men and women comrades and established a

maroon settlement in a forest and marsh area of the

interior, where these original maroons were soon being

joined by individuals and small groups of runaways. After

standing off a posse of slaveholders that came after them,

the maroons finally established a palenque at a place to be
known  as  San  Basilio.  The  Spanish,  after  failing  in  two
military  expeditions  against  San  Basilio,  finally  made  a
pattern-setting peace with the maroons in 1619, based on
non-aggression principles.
5
In  the  mid-1560s  in  the  Darien  province  of Panama,
maroons  led  by  their  elected  king,  Bayano,  reputedly  a
former  African  king,  secured  a  peace  treaty  with  the
Spanish  colonial  government.
6
  These  or  such  as  these
were those who allied with Sir Francis Drake against the
Spanish as mentioned in The Invention of the White Race,
Volume One.
As  early  as  1575  there  was  a  maroon  settlement near
Bahia  in  Brazil;  by  1597  it  was  reported  that  “the
principal enemies” of the Portuguese colonists were such
mountain-based  groups  of  runaway  African  bond-
laborers.
7
 Hundreds of such settlements would come into
existence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
greatest of these settlements, or group of settlements, was
Palmares, founded some ninety miles from Pernambuco in
northern  Brazil,  by  Africans  escaping  from  plantation
slavery around the beginning of the  seventeenth century.
8
Palmares  was  not  merely  a  refuge,  a quilombo  (African
word)  from  which  to  raid  Portuguese  and  Dutch
plantations, but a Negro republic in Brazil, with  its own
agrarian  economy  and  elected  ruler.
9
  Despite  repeated

colonialist military assaults, Palmares grew until by the

mid-1670s, by Portuguese report, it embraced some

99,000 square miles, an area about the size of Wyoming or

Nevada, with a population of from 15,000 to 20,000 in ten

major settlements.

The elected king of Palmares, called

Ganga Zumba [Great Lord], and most of the ruling element

were native Africans, although among the leaders named

in a 1677 Portuguese report there was one, Arotirene,

presumed to have been an Amerindian.

The Ganga

Zumba in 1677 claimed to have been a king in Africa.

Having endured for almost a century, Palmares finally fell

to the colonialist forces in 1694, after a siege of six

weeks.

Appendix II-B

(see Chapter 2, note 6)

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, expansion of

agricultural production in England had led to a general

decline of agricultural prices. The landowning class then

sought advantage by demanding payment of rent in cash,

rather than in a share of the product of the free tenant. In

turn, these rent-paying tenants, if they wanted to expand

production, were obliged to pay their workers wages,

since the latter were under no feudal obligation to the

peasant proprietor or tenant. Thus capitalist relations of

production began to be introduced in English agriculture.

The bubonic plague that swept Europe between 1348

and 1351 struck England in August 1348, and within

sixteen months it had wiped out one-third to half of the

population.

Inconceivable horror though it was, the

plague created such a shortage of labor that it became

extremely difficult for landowners to continue to exact

feudal labor dues from the villein, or to dictate the wages

of labor: “The wages of labour were nearly doubled,”

writes Thorold Rogers, “and the profits of capitalist

agriculture sank from 20 per cent to nearly zero.”

The ruling classes sought to reverse this trend by

repressive measures, among the earliest of which was the

Statute of Laborers of 1350, designed to impose

compulsory labor at fixed wages under penalty of jail, hot

branding irons, and outlawry. The wage-laborers and

villeins struck back. The most common forms of resistance

were those of combining for mutual strength and simple

flight to other districts. Because this movement was so

widespread, and escape so generally successful,

repressive measures were insufficient remedy for the

landowners; they were forced to pay the higher wages and

to reduce rents if they were to prevent their crops from

rotting in the fields for lack of hands.

In 1381, the ruling classes sought to filch back part of

their higher labor costs by the imposition of a one-shilling

poll tax on every person above fifteen years of age (except

clerics and licensed beggars). It quickly became apparent

that they had misjudged the temper and mettle of the

people. The result was the Great Rebellion of 1381, more

popularly known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, in honor of its

leader.

The revolt was national in scope. It lasted only one

month, June, but in that time “half of England had been in

flame.”

The ranks of the rebels were composed about half

of peasants and half of proletarians – rural wage-laborers,

and journeymen and apprentices of London and other

towns. Most chroniclers estimate their number at from

forty to sixty thousand; but the only eyewitness account

states that at Blackheath one hundred and ten thousand

rebels assembled to confront the king with their demands.

They were a disciplined force, and armed; in their ranks

were thousands of longbow veterans of the Hundred

Years’ War, then in its forty-fifth year.

The lines of revolt converged on London, a metropolis

with a population of some 23,000 (males of fifteen years

of age and over). On 13 June a rebel army of ten thousand

entered London through gates opened by the welcoming

proletariat within; by that afternoon, “the rebels were in

possession of London, without having had to strike a

single blow.”

Combining xenophobia with anti-

feudalism, they killed a large number of the Flemish

community of weavers whom the former king had

imported and installed in London. Young King Richard II

took refuge in the Tower of London with his armed guard

and his advisers. His position was so desperate that “he

was prepared to grant anything” the rebels were

demanding.

Through the voices of John Ball, the radical priest, and

Wat Tyler, their commander-in-chief, the “commons of

England” made their demands known: for an end to

bondage of villeins and laborers, the revocation of the

poll tax, and no more “outlawry” for resistance to forced

labor. Tyler addressed the king as “Brother,” and in the

royal presence he declared, “there should be equality

among all people,” adding only courteously, “save the

king.”

Even as the king parleyed with the rebels and agreed to

their demands, he arranged for the assassination of Wat

Tyler.

But he did not dare to revoke the promises he had

made; not, that is, until the rebels had decamped from

London and dispersed to their homes. Then the king did

revoke his promises and sent forth his armed bands to

wreak vengeance on the deceived and demobilized rebels,

and to inaugurate a period of “pacification” and

punishment.

Some commentators seem disposed to disparage the

revolt as a factor in bringing feudalism to an end in

England. It is true that there were a number of factors

contributing to that end, but surely Wat Tyler’s Rebellion

was one of them. It barred the way to a raising of the rate

of profit by means of feudal dues on the peasantry. Even a

prime disparager conceded that in the following century

“tenants did not find it impossible to resist pressure from

their landlords.”

Shorter-range goals achieved included

the revocation of the attempt to force down wages to the

old levels under the provisions of the Statute of Laborers

of 1350. These ancient rebels would seem to merit the

enthusiasm expressed by Thorold Rogers five centuries

after their audacious rising: “The peasant of the fourteenth

century struck a blow for freedom … and he won.”

Appendix II-C

(see Chapter 5, note 46)

Perhaps the “cheap commodity” strategy for capitalist

conquest of foreign countries was never more clearly

outlined than by William Bullock in his Virginia

Impartially Examined, which was published in London in

1649. Expressing the view that the Indians were too

numerous and strong to be coerced, and too self-sufficient

to be won to easy trust and dependence in their relations

with the English, Bullock suggested a subtle strategy,

which he defined and discussed as follows:

First, by making them sensible of their nakedness.

Secondly, by taking them off from their confidence upon nature, whereby

they may take care for the future.

Thirdly, that they may desire commerce.

Fourthly, that they may be brought to depend. And for themselves, I shall

propose that we gently steal through their nature, till we can come to pull off

the scale from their eyes, that they may see their own nakednesse; which

must be done in manner following.

Either by making them ambitious of Honour, or by making them ambitious

of Riches …

First, I shall advise that slight Jewells be made at the publique charge of

thirty or fourty shillings price, and one better then [than] the rest, of some

such toyes as they shall most affect, which fitted with Ribands to weare

about their necks of their heads, as their custom amongst them is; shalbe

sent from the Governour of the Plantation in his own, and also in the name

of the People and the Governor to distinguish them by some pretty titles,

which should always after be observed; as also to make some of them

favourites, and to sollicite their preferement with their King, & this by

degrees will kindle the fire of Ambition, which once in a flame must be fed,

and then is the time to work.

For the second I shall advise, that their nature be observed what way it

most poynts at, and then to fit them with what they most desire, and if by

degrees you can bring some of them to weare slighte loose Garments in

Summer, or to keep them warmed in the Winter; which if you can effect,

the worke is halfe done …

The author acknowledged that his plan would entail

certain initial outlays by the English, but he assured his

readers that even this cost would be recompensed by

taking animal skins and provisions from the Indians in

barter. Once having got that far, the English “need not fear

the coming of the rest.”

The poore Indian being cloathed, his sight is cleared, he sees himselfe naked,

and you’le find him in the snare …

Bullock stressed that still the matter must be managed by

stages, because “you shall finde that for themselves they

will worke, but not for you.” Therefore as the English

bourgeoisie had done in their owne country, Bullock

proposed a sort of contracting system of work to be done

by the Indians in their own houses and villages. By steps

then they could be introduced as laborers within the

English colony. But they were not to be fully trusted “until

you see them be so sensible of their poverty, that they

come necessitated to worke.” (Virginia Impartially

Observed, [London, 1649], pp. 56–9.)

Appendix II-D

(see Chapter 7, note 197)

Some scholars are convinced that the bond-labor system,

despite acknowledged abuses, represented an

improvement for the laborers over the prospects they

would have had in Europe. Bruce

and Ballagh

believe

that, except for the axemen noted by Bruce, the work was

easier than that of the English wage-laborer. McCormac,

lowering his sights a few degrees, says merely that at any

rate the lot of the limited-term bond-laborer was “better

than languishing in a debtor’s cell in England.”

Attention is also given to the condition of the European-

American bond-laborers in the eighteenth century, when

African-Americans came to constitute the majority of the

plantation bond-labor force. Gray asserts that in the

eighteenth century the conditions of the European bond-

laborers were alleviated.

On the other hand, Richard B.

Morris found that the increased employment of Africans

did not bring “any material improvement in the treatment”

of immigrant European bond-laborers.

McCormac seems

to agree on this point with Morris, at least so far as

Maryland was concerned. There, he says, the life of the

European bond-laborer was better prior to the large-scale

arrival of African laborers beginning at the end of the

seventeenth century.

Despite the high mortality rate of the

first years, and although the burdens of the poor were

increased if they emigrated to the colonies as bond-

laborers, still, says A. E. Smith, both masters and bond-

laborers endured “the hardships of pioneer life,” and in

the end “America presented to the average man a far better

chance of attaining decent independence than did

Europe.”

If the bond-laborers’ plight was difficult, he

declares, the difficulties should not be ascribed to

bondage as such, nor to the evil disposition of the masters,

but to the general difficulties of the earliest colonial years

that made inevitable a harsh regime, in which little

allowance could be made for “shiftless or weak servants.”

Within such limits, he found that the degree of oppressive

treatment suffered by the bond-laborers depended largely

upon the luck of the draw in the matter of masters to whom

they were disposed. There were, Smith says, two basic

sources of the sufferings of limited-term bond-laborers,

and neither involved any disposition on the part of the

plantation bourgeoisie to take advantage of the chattel

bond-labor relation of production to exploit their workers

in ways which they could not have done free tenants and

wage laborers. These two fundamental causes of hardship

were, he says: (1) the climate of the plantation colonies;

and (2) the non-adaptability of non-farm laborers such as

constituted a large part, if not the majority, of the bond-

laborers drawn from England.

Russell R. Menard’s study

of early colonial Maryland led him to essentially the same

conclusion as that drawn by Smith regarding the general

state of master–servant relations. In the course of

challenging Edmund S. Morgan’s assertion that limited-

term bond-servitude prepared the way for the lifetime

bond-servitude eventually imposed on African-Americans,

Menard is at pains to contrast the two cases. “Indentured

servitude … was not degrading,” says Menard. True, their

mortality rate was shockingly high, “nor were all servants

well treated”; but Menard dismisses the notorious cases

such as those of Henry Smith, John Dandy, and other

monstrously cruel owners as “not typical.” Menard

stresses that “master–servant relationships were often

friendly and sometimes affectionate and that servitude

offered poor men a chance to gain entry into a society that

offered great opportunities for advancement.”

These apologies for the chattel bond-labor system have

not gone unchallenged. As for the contention that the life of

the bond-laborers was better than it would have been if

they had remained in England, that the work was not so

hard in the tobacco plantations as that performed by

agricultural laborers in England, there is more of

assumption than substance in it. Edmund S. Morgan, on the

basis of well-known English works on economic history,

effectively maintains that the relatively easy regime of the

farm worker in England utterly unsuited the English

laborer for the unremitting round of heavy toil on the

tobacco plantations.

Even McCormac’s extreme analogy

to the English debtors’ prison loses much of its force when

it is considered that the situation of the plantation bond-

laborers was like a debtors’ prison where the inmates of

any age were regarded as minors, so far as their rights

were concerned.

The more instructive comparison, that between the

laborers in New England and those in the tobacco

colonies in the seventeenth century, is almost totally

ignored by apologists for the chattel bond-labor system.

But the late Richard B. Morris, in his exhaustively

documented study Government and Labor in Early

America, found that the treatment of bond-laborers was

much more rigorous in the tobacco colonies than in New

England. The contrast of the all-or-nothing dependence on

the tobacco monoculture of the Chesapeake plantation

economy, and the small independent farms of the varied,

largely self-sufficient, New England economy was

fundamental to the difference in day-to-day social

relationships.

In the New England and Middle colonies,

said Morris, the limited-term bond-laborers, who were

relatively few in number, enjoyed close personal

relationships with their masters, relationships that were

normal to their occupations in crafts and household

service; but in the plantation colonies, where the bond-

laborers were “employed primarily in field work under

the supervision of exacting overseers,” master–servant

relations were harsh.

Without wanting to indict the entire planter class,

Morris concluded: “Maltreatment of servants was most

flagrant in the tobacco colonies.” Not only did a large

number of drunken and dissolute owners treat their bond-

laborers with sadistic brutality, members of the Colony

Council and county courts “set a poor example to their

own communities in ruling with a rod of iron.… Such

masters preferred to discipline their servants themselves

rather than to bring them into court,” says Morris. While

only the most serious cases of maltreatment came to court,

they serve to reveal the “fairly typical” life of the

plantation bond laborer.

My own study of the record affords more support to the

views of Morris and Morgan cited here than to the

apologists of the bond-labor system.

Appendix II-E

(see Chapter 9, note 54)

The population of England and Wales, which had grown

by one-third in the first half of the seventeenth century,

grew by only one-tenth in the second half.

In this last half

of the century, the expansion of industrial production was

based primarily on the increase in the mass of labor

employed rather than on improved technology.

consequence of the expansion of industrial employment,

the “surplussed” agricultural workers found employment

more easily than they had prior to the English Revolution.

The English military demand for manpower experienced

two great surges at the end of the seventeenth and the

beginning of the eighteenth centuries. England,

traditionally a land without a large standing army,

conscripted scores of thousands of men for military and

naval duty in the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–

97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13).

Between 1698 and 1708, for instance, the number of

English-speaking troops under arms was increased nearly

fourfold, and the naval forces were nearly tripled.

Thus

sectors of the population that had been a ready supply of

plantation bond-laborers in England were needed

elsewhere, as is made clear by Trevelyan’s description of

the methods employed to draft recruits for the continental

armies of the Duke of Marlborough in the earliest years of

the eighteenth century:

… armed raids of the press-gang [descended] on the folk of the port towns

and neighboring villages.… Criminal gangs were drafted wholesale; bounties

sometime amounting to four pounds for each recruit tempted the needy to

enlist.… [Since] the country was prosperous and work abundant … the

naval press was abused for the purposes of the land service.… Parish

constables were to be given ten shillings for every person suitable for the

press gang whom they produced before the authorities. Magistrates were

instructed to hand over to recruiting officers persons who could show no

means of supporting themselves.

Already in 1667, a member of the House of Commons, Mr

Garroway, had warned that emigration to Virginia would

“in time drain us of people and will endanger our ruin.”

In 1673, the author of The Grand Concern of England

Explained believed that the drain of emigrants from

England had been made even more critical by the “two

last great Plagues, the Civil War at Home, and the several

wars with Holland, Spain and France [which] have

destroyed several hundred thousands of men which lived

among us.”

Roger Coke argued that the drain of bond-

laborers and other emigrant workers to the American

plantations was seriously weakening England. His

treatise, published in 1671, warned, “… we have opened

a wide gap, and by all encouragement excited all the

growing youth and industry of England which might

preserve the trades we had herein, to betake them to those

of the Plantations.”

One of the most eminent voices

cautioning against too much emigration of English labor

was that of Sir William Petty. The “remote governments”

of the American plantation colonies, according to Petty,

“instead of being additions are really diminutions” of the

national wealth of England. Far from favoring increased

English emigration to America, Petty would have had the

New England Pilgrims come home. “[A]s for the People

of New England,” he wrote, “I can but wish they were

transplanted into Old England or Ireland.”

Appendix II-F

(see Chapter 13, note 26)

In April 1699, a joint committee of nine – three members

of the Colony Council and six members of the House of

Burgesses – was ordered to begin a complete revision of

the Virginia laws.

Seven years later in June 1706, the

new code was enacted into law on royal instruction. In the

book of laws, however, the code is ascribed to October

1705, the date on which it was first passed by the

Assembly.

It contains significant provisions relative to

the establishment of racial oppression and the “white

race,” that are further noted in Chapter 13.

The instructions of the Commissioners of Trade and

Plantations that first ordered the revision of the laws

required that “if there bee anything in them, either in the

matter or Stile which may bee fit to be retrenched or

altered, you are to represent the same unto us, with your

opinion touching the said Laws.”

Does a record of those

opinions exist today? It seems reasonable to believe much

light would be shed on that subject by the record of

discussions and exchanges of dispatches and enclosures –

the existence of which is a matter of record – that occurred

within the committee, and in meetings of the Governor and

Colony Council as well, and between the Virginia

authorities and the government in England – if such

records could be found. What was said by members of the

Virginia committee or in the meetings held by the

Commissioners of Trade and Plantations in England, or in

the correspondence regarding those deliberations – some

of which are specifically, but cryptically, alluded to in

records that do exist?

This entire present work has been a rejection of the

“unthinking decision” thesis coined by Winthrop D.

Jordan. But where are the “thoughts” in this “revisall of

the Lawes”? Somebody in the array of lawmakers and

critics must have proposed that, after forty years, it was

time to change the requirement that masters not “exceed

the bounds of moderation in correcting” servants, and that

if a servant were able to get to the justice of the peace and

then to the next county court, “the servant shall have

remedy for his grievances”; and, instead, to define

“moderate correction” to mean that the master was not to

“whip a christian white servant naked, without an order

from the justice of the peace,” the offending master to be

fined forty shillings payable to the servant.

Some

“reviser” must have thought it necessary to provide that

upon a second offense by a master in treatment of

“servants (not being slaves),” the courts could order that

the servant be taken from that master and sold at outcry.

Which member of the committee first took notice that in

regard to freedom dues, “nothing in that nature ever [had

been] made certain,” and urged that they be enumerated

specifically: “to every male servant, ten bushels of corn,

thirty shillings in money (or the equivalent in goods), a gun

worth at least twenty shillings; and to every woman

servant, fifteen bushels of corn, forty shillings in money

(or the equivalent in goods)”? In this case we do have

evidence that the revisal was not an exercise in

somnambulism. The Virginia Colony Council at the last

minute proposed to amend the draft law, by providing a

differentiation of the freedom dues to be paid to men and

women bond-laborers.

But to whom did it occur to raise

the question and by what argument? And, incidentally,

who was it who successfully moved to strike out the

words “at least” as proposed by the Colony Council,

before the specification of the freedom dues to be required

for women servants? What was the discussion that

preceded the decision to include a totally new provision

making any free Negro subject to a whipping of thirty

lashes if he or she raised a hand against any “white”

person?
7
I shall not intrude here the details of my search for such
substantive  records,  although  I  will  gladly  share  that
information  with any scholar  who might  wish  to  join  the
hunt.  A  number  of  documents  include  references  to
meetings  of  the Lords of Trade and Plantations convened
to consider the draft laws sent from Virginia for approval
or disapproval. They note, among other relevant matters,
the  attendance  of  Virginia  Colony  Secretary Edmund
Jennings, at their Lordships request, to explain and assist
in  the  review  of  those  proposed  laws.
8
  On  27  and  29
March 1704, Jennings did attend, and “presented to their
Lordships  his  observations  on  the  Collection  of  Laws.”
9
Sir  Sidney  Godolphin  (later  Earl)  Lord  High  Treasurer
advised  Virginia  governor  Nicholson  on  12  December
1704 that over a  period  of several months, Jennings  had
diligently worked with the Lords of Trade and Plantations
to complete the work of “Inspecting [and?] amending” the
proposed  revisions  of  the  Virginia  laws.
10
  Reference  is
also  found  to  communications  with  Virginia  governors
Andros,
11
 Nicholson and Nott, but there are no particulars
in those documents that might serve to reveal the thinking
processes that produced the new set of laws. Sir Edward
Northey  first  served  as  English  Attorney-General  from
July 1701 to October 1707. Where are the opinions, if they
exist  at  all,  rendered  by  him  regarding  the  proposed

revisal of the Virginia laws? A sizable number of

documents relating to the laws carry the notation “a Page

inserted in the file to indicate that [the particular

document]” had been “removed and filed elsewhere.”

Where is “elsewhere”? Finally, do answers to some of

these questions remain to be discovered in some family

papers that my search at the Library of Congress did not

turn up?

A collateral matter no less puzzling is this: Why has no

historian I have studied even taken notice of this apparent

gap in the records of that critical period of Virginia

history?

The argument made in the present work – that the

invention of the “white race” social control system was a

deliberate course taken by the ruling plantation

bourgeoisie – would, I suspect, be strengthened by the

discovery of such records regarding the process of

framing the new Virginia code. But the thesis does not

depend upon such discovery.

Editor’s Appendix G

A Guide to The Invention of the White

Race, Volume II

Theodore W. Allen divides the thirteen chapters of The

Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America into four

parts. Part One, “Labor Problems of the European

Colonizing Powers,” begins with an important chapter on

“The Labor Supply Problem,” in which Allen identifies

the two common challenges faced by the European

colonizing powers in the Americas on their path to what

they perceived as “success”: 1) securing an adequate

supply of labor, and 2) establishing a system of social

control. In both respects, the Anglo-American plantation

bourgeoisie differed from other colonizing powers in

ways that proved decisive for the invention of the “white

race” (this page). Spain and Portugal had no surplus

laboring population ready for export, but the population

density in Peru and Mexico afforded them an adequate

supply of labor. When Caribbean peoples were

exterminated and the enslavement of the Indians of Brazil

became problematic for the Spanish and the Portuguese,

they turned to Africa (this page–this page). Engagé labor

from France was used in St. Domingue as plantation labor

at a very early stage, but this was high-wage labor of

limited availability. Holland had no labor surplus for

export; its main role was to supply plantation labor from

Africa for existing plantation colonies. In contrast,

England had a surplus of “necessitous poor” for export to

the plantations that was cheaper than any alternative

source accessible to English plantation enterprise prior to

the 1670s (this page–this page).

Allen explains, “The conjunction of the matured

colonizing impulse, the momentarily favorable geo-

political constellation of powers, the English surplus of

unemployed and underemployed labor, coupled with the

particular native demographic and social factors as the

English found them in Virginia, and the lack of direct

English access to African labor sources, produced that

most portentous and distinctive factor of English

colonialism: Of all the European colonizing powers in

the Americas, only England used European workers as

basic plantation workers.” He also stresses that the

uniqueness of labor in the Anglo-American plantation

colonies came not from its chattel-labor form, nor from the

fact that the supply of lifetime, hereditary bond-laborers

was made up of non-Europeans – these were common

throughout the plantation Americas. Rather, the peculiarity

was in the way it was controlled. Specifically, in the

social control system in continental Anglo-America: “1)

all persons of any degree of non-European ancestry were

excluded from the buffer social-control stratum; and 2) a

major, indispensible, and decisive factor of the buffer

social-control stratum maintained against the unfree

proletarians was that it was made up of free proletarians

and semi-proletarians” (this page–this page).

I n Chapter 2, “English Background, with Anglo-

American Variations Noted,” Allen offers an instructive

overview of the economic, social, and technological

developments that propelled England toward colonization.

He reviews the transition to capitalist agriculture; the

economic slaughter of the leasehold and copyhold

peasantry, despite their militant resistance; the

transubstantiation of the laboring class from peasantry to

proletariat; and the growth of a surplus population, which

would become a cause for ruling-class concern and a

theme for would-be colonialists. He discusses how, in

England, a section of the freehold peasantry, the

“yeomanry,” was preserved to serve as the rank-and-file

of the social control stratum – a status that carried

privileges from which the propertyless, and poor people

in general, were excluded – and he contrasts this with

Anglo-America, where propertyless European-Americans

were included in the social-control stratum and endowed

with all its privileges (this page–this page).

In discussing “the labor question,” Allen reviews the

legislative attempt (1547–50) to reduce a portion of the

propertyless class to slavery and the reasons for its failure

including: 1) Ket’s rebels’ demand that “all bondmen be

made free”; 2) the common-law principle against holding

Christians in bondage; and 3) cost/benefit considerations,

particularly the potential expense of administration and

maintenance of a dual labor system in a period of labor

surplus and falling wages. The balance was struck with

the passage of the Statute of Artificers (1563), which

remained the basic English labor law for more than two

and a half centuries. The statute established that there

would be no slavery, laborers would be paid wages,

apprentices would be bound for seven years, and other

workers would be bound by contract for one year at wages

set by the magistrates. The problem presented by the

massive indigent population was addressed by the Poor

Law of 1601, which would remain in effect for more than

three centuries. Overseers of the poor had to provide

employment in parish workhouses for the “deserving”

poor at piecework wages. The system was supported by

the Poor Rate, a tax on persons of substance. The inmates
were free to leave the workhouses for better opportunities,
including  marriage. Allen  emphasizes  that,  harsh  as  they
were, the terms of these basic laws cannot be reconciled
with  the  system  of  multi-year,  unpaid  chattel  bondage
imposed  on  English  laborers  in  seventeenth-century
colonial Anglo-America (this page–this page).
Regarding  the oppression of women, Allen points  out,
“There  was  to  be  no  reformation  in  the  Reformation.”
Every man was still entitled to a subject wife, ruling-class
men  could  still  assume  sexual  privileges  in  relation  to
laboring-class  women,  women  of  the  propertied  classes
were  still  hostages  of  their property,  and  the  wages  of
working women were set at about half that of men. Allen
again  contrasts  this  with  England’s  seventeenth-century
Anglo-American plantation colonies where the mass of the
English  laboring  people  were  denied  even  the  right  to
marry  and  to  form  a  traditional  patriarchal  family,  and
where  one  sector  of  propertyless  men  was  accorded
sexual privileges over all women of another sector of the
propertyless population (this page–this page).
I n Chapter  3,  on  “Euro-Indian  Relations  and  the
Problem of Social Control,” Allen discusses various early
attempts  at  European  “social  control”  in  Haiti
(Hispaniola),  Cuba,  Puerto  Rico,  Mexico,  Peru,  and
Brazil,  before  turning  to  Virginia.  Of  all  the  Iberio-

American cases, Brazil most resembled the U.S., in that it

was a continental colony (not an insular one), it exhibited

little significant stratification, and it had a low population

density. Any attempt of the English plantation bourgeoisie

to subjugate the Indians would face the “Brazilian”

problem, and in the early years the English simply did not

have the preponderance of military force required for this

task. Allen writes, “With regard to establishing social

control, the Anglo-American continental bourgeoisie faced

the ‘Brazilian’ problem: a continental people without a

cacique class” (this page–this page).

He details how the Powhatan population living in the

vicinity of Jamestown were well provisioned and even

had enough supplies that they could share with starving

colonists in the early years of the Virginia Company. In the

first decade or two, the English in Jamestown also lacked

the force that the horse-riding conquistadors used in

Mexico and Peru “against the indigenous peoples upon

whom they made war.” Virginia, like Brazil, was

inhabited by a non-stratified society and presented similar

difficulties for the European colonizing power: the native

population could not be surrounded or exterminated (as in

the island colonies), and they could not be brought under

the degree of administrative control required for the

normal pursuit of labor exploitation. Some eight or nine

decades later, the English on the southern seaboard were

better armed and adequately supplied with horses and

trade goods. By then, however, other developments had

foreclosed that option: the commitment to the soil-

exhausting tobacco monoculture, which tended to

destabilize relations with Indian tribal society along the

colony’s expanding borders; the development of profitable

fur-trading relations with Indian tribes beyond the frontier;

and very importantly, the dependence upon neighboring

Indian tribes for the capture and return of runaway bond-

laborers (this page–this page).

Allen points out that despite their early difficulties, “the

English had a fundamental potential advantage over the

Indians from the beginning due to the discrepancy in the

development of productive forces and productivity of

labor” (this page). Regarding Native Americans, Allen

discusses three important aspects of relations in this

period: 1) resistance by the Indian bond-laborers,

principally by running away, a resistance which merged

sometimes with that of African and European bond-

laborers; 2) the necessity to maintain friendly, or “treaty,”

Indians in the buffer role, in the first instance between the

Anglo-American colonies and the more remote “hostile,”

or foreign-allied, tribes; and in the second instance,

against the escape of African-American bond-laborers

beyond the Anglo-American “frontier”; and 3) with the

institution of the “white race” system of social control, the

key  necessity  of  preserving  “white-skin”  privileges  of
laboring-class  European-Americans vis-à-vis  all  non-
European-Americans.”  (this  page)  After  the  historic
transformation  related  to  the  invention  of  the  white  race
and the plantation bourgeoisie’s drawing of the color line,
the  “fate  of  the  Indians  under  the  principle  of  racial
slavery  and  white  supremacy”  would  be  “controlled  by
twin  parameters:  non-enslavability  and  non-
assimilability” (this page).
In Part Two, “The Plantation of Bondage,” Allen opens
w i th Chapter  4,  “The  Fateful  Addiction  to  ‘Present
Profit,’ ” which discusses the “crucial significance” of the
Virginia Company to the eventual development of chattel
bond-servitude  and,  later,  to  racial  slavery.  He  reviews
the three periods of the Virginia Company, beginning with
its original charter, which affirmed that all colonists “shall
have  …  all  liberties,  franchises  and  immunities  of  free
denizens and natural subjects” of England (this  page–this
page).  He also discusses  the “starving time” (this  page);
the  non-existence  of  chattel  bond-servitude  in  the  early
years (this page); the turn to tobacco production, followed
by  the  crisis  of  overproduction  (this  page);  the  “first
alleged  instance  of  a  worker  being  treated  like  chattel”
(this page); intermediate forms of bond-servitude, as in the
case of convicts, apprentices, “maids-for-wives,” and the
“Duty boys,” in which neither the Company nor individual

entrepreneurs had to pay wages (this page–this page); sex
ratios  and  the  impact  of  the  chattelization  of  labor  on
family formation (this page–this page);  the higher  cost of
labor in Virginia as compared to England (this  page–this
page);  and  Captain  Thomas  Nuce’s  plan  “to chaunge  the
Conditione  of  Tenants  into  servants.” Allen  emphasizes,
“The typical form of labor in Virginia at the beginning of
1622 was that of the tenant,” most of whom were “Tenants
at  halves.”  But,  by  the  spring  of  1623,  conditions  had
changed  significantly  and  “Alderman  Johnson  would
declare that the Colony officers had all desired to reduce
their tenants to servants” (this page).
In Chapter  5,  “The  Massacre  of  the  Tenantry,”  Allen
begins by explaining the bourgeoisie’s interest in lowering
labor  costs  and  how  the  first  requisite  for  a  successful
offensive against the rights of the laboring classes was the
maintenance of social control (this page). He then analyzes
four special conditions that favored the aims of the colony
elite:  1)  the  appallingly  high  death  rate,  2)  the  Indians’
resistance  to  aggressive  English  encroachment  upon  the
land,  3)  intensified  economic  pressure  on  the  laboring
people  in  England  that  predisposed  more  workers  to
consider  emigration,  and  4)  the  “complete  and  utter
dependence of the colony upon England for supplies.” He
emphasizes that the dependence enhanced the power of the
bourgeoisie,  including  the  Governor  and  Council

members, the plantation owners, the Cape Merchant, and
the free-trading “magazine” captain (this page–this page).
In  discussing  the  emergence  of  the  colony  elite, Allen
explains  how  the  “headright”  principle,  which  promised
compensation (often with a patent on 50 acres) “per head”
for  transporting,  or  agreeing  to  transport,  people  to
Virginia, “tended to push the contradiction to the limit in
terms  of  maximum  profit  for  the  capitalist  and  minimum
provisions  for  the  laborer.”  Concentration  of  land
ownership  also  increased,  and  the  elite  used  their
positions in government for special advantage and to start
“renting out” tenants (this page–this page).
In  August  1619,  the  colony  authorities  exchanged
“twenty-odd” African men and women for provisions for
the  Dutch  ship  on  which  these  new  arrivals  had  come.
Their  status  was  indeterminate  as  to  conditions  of
employment.  Allen  points  out  that  this  was  “consistent
with  a  policy  of  reducing  labor  costs  by  inducing  an
oversupply of laborers relative to the amount of food that
would be available to them” (this page). He also notes that
it was only in September 1619 that a contract was signed
which would have required a laborer to repay the cost of
one’s transportation from England to Virginia by an unpaid
term of servitude and that person did not go (this page). By
November  1619,  the  Colony  Council  caused  more  than
fifty of the Company’s tenants-at-halves to be “rented out,”

in  violation  of  their  contracts  and  over  the  tenants’
objections (this page–this page).
Previously,  the  Governor  of  Virginia,  Samuel  Argall,
had been accused by the Virginia Company of a criminal
offense for “setting over” tenants to his own personal use
without  their  consent.  By  1621,  however,  the  Virginia
Colony Council endorsed and sent to London a proposal to
reduce  the  status  of  tenants  to  “servants.”  The  Company
signified  its  concurrence  with  the  proposal.  Edwin
Sandys,  Treasurer  and  Chief  Officer  of  the  Virginia
Company, called the tenants-at-halves status an absurdity
and  said  that  what  Virginia  needed  was  “a  multitude  of
apprentices” (this page–this page, 81–82, 95).
On  March  22,  1622,  the  Powhatan  Indians  under
Opechancanough,  fearing  that  the  English  “would
dispossess them of this Country,” mounted what was at the
time “the strongest effort ever made … to halt the Anglo-
American  occupation  of  Indian  lands.”  On  the  first  day
alone, one third of the Anglo population of North America
was  killed.  Within  the  next  year,  more  would  die  from
privation than died in the initial assault. Of the survivors,
two-thirds were not fit for work (this page–this page).
In  the  aftermath  of  the  attack,  and  concerned  about
additional  attacks,  the  Colony  authorities  forbade  game
hunting  and  the  planting  of  corn  near  dwellings.  The
settlement  perimeter  was  constricted,  inhabitants  were

uprooted, half the landholders were dead and could offer
no places for tenants to stay nor wages for day-laborers.
Corn supplies were limited and a monopoly on corn was
established. The  price of  corn went  up eight-fold  in  one
year,  while  the  price  of  tobacco,  the  colonists’  only
money, was cut in half. Tenants faced insupportable debt
and reportedly could not feed themselves three months out
of  the  year.  For  the  employed  wage-worker,  a  tobacco
wage in real terms was two-thirds what it was in England
(this page–this page).
The  situation  was  different,  however,  for  the  Colony
elite, particularly for those who had cornered the market
in corn. They were the debt-holders of the impoverished
tenants, and they embarked on a scheme whereby workers
in general were reduced to unpaid, long-term bond-labor.
The  laboring  classes were  dependent  on  the  bourgeoisie
for  corn,  so  they  were  “compelled  to  submit  to  the
condition dictated by the plantation bourgeoise: the status
of  …  bond-laborers.”  By  the  spring  of  1622,  servants’
contracts  began  to  appear  that  contained  a  new
unprecedented provision allowing the employer to dispose
of the servant to the employers’ “heirs and assigns,” and
by  1623,  efforts  to  reduce  tenants  to  servants  were
common (this page–this page).
In Chapter 6, “Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No
Intermediate  Stratum,”  Allen  makes  the  extremely

important point that “Pre-capitalist bond-labor was tied by

a two-way bond: the workers could not go away; but,

equally, the master could not send them away.” This two-

way bondage was a “relationship, which was essential to

feudalism” but “inimical to capitalism.” In general, the

bourgeoisie would seek “to replace the two-way bondage

of feudalism with the two-way freedom of the capitalist

relation of production” in which the “capitalist was free to

fire the workers, and the workers were free to quit the

job.” In Virginia, however, the plantation bourgeoisie

dealt with this contradiction by establishing a one-way

bondage, in which the laborer could not sever the tie to the

capitalist simply by his own volition, but the capitalist

could sever the tie with the worker (this page–this page).

Between January and June 1622, the Virginia Company

established a standard patent form regarding laborers

transported by the colony authorities that guaranteed

protection not only to the original patentee, but also to his

“heires and Assigns.” Within four years, the legal right of

masters to “assign” or bequeath their laborers would be

formally established. Allen discusses certain early

incidents that in retrospect “appear as preconditioning for

the reduction of laborers to chattels,” and he finds that in

1622 and 1623 it was “established as the general

condition for immigrant workers.” An analysis of a score

of entries in the records of that time shows how the chattel

aspect of bond-servitude was designed to adapt that

contradictory form to capitalist categories of commodity

exchange and free flow of capital. Overall, as Allen points

out earlier, “by far the greater number of European

immigrants arriving in the southern colonies came as

bond-laborers” (this page–this page).

Allen then describes how, despite the fact that “labor

relations was a settled question before the landing at

Jamestown,” the “Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie

seized on the devastation brought about by the Powhatan

attack of 22 March 1622, to execute a plan for the

chattelization of labor in Virginia Colony” and how “from

that seeding came the plantation of bondage” (this

page–this page).

Allen also offers rebuttals to arguments that he refers to

as “History’s False Apologetic for Chattel Bond-

Servitude,” including the “quid pro quo” rationale and the

“unreflecting adaptation” argument. The first position

suggests that there was a shortage of poor laborers in

Virginia and an abundance of them in England, so that

between English laborers who wanted employment and

plantation investors who wanted to replace costly tenants

and wage laborers a “quid pro quo was agreed, according

to which the employer paid the £6 cost of transportation

from England and in exchange the worker agreed to be a

chattel bond-laborer for a term of five years or so.” Allen

responds that the “payment of passage” was “a convenient

excuse for a policy aimed at reducing labor costs” in a

manner “consistent with the free flow of capital.” He cites

the work of Abbot E. Smith, a specialist in this field, who

concluded that the “four or five years bondage was far

more than they [the laborers] justly owed for the privilege

of transport,” and he cites his own finding (based on

available production rates and costs of tobacco) that a

laborer in one year, “would have repaid more than seven

times his or her £6 transportation cost.” In response to the

second position, that bond-servitude was an adaptation

and was not very different from pre-existing forms of

English labor relations such as apprenticeships, Allen

points out that it was qualitatively different because it was

a one-way bondage in which laborers were reduced to

chattels (this page–this page).

By 1638, Virginia Colony Secretary Richard Kemp

reported to London that “Of hundreds of people who

arrive in this colony yearly, scarce any but are brought in

as merchandize to make sale of” (this page).

In Part Three, “The Road to Rebellion,” Allen begins

Chapter 7, “Bond-labor: Enduring …” with a description

of the pre–Bacon’s Rebellion period and how “the

insubstantiality of the intermediate stratum, the oppressive

conditions of the bond-laborers and their resistance to

those conditions constitute the most significant social

factors that contributed to that pivotal historic event called

Bacon’s Rebellion.” The resistance challenged the

economic basis of society – “the chattel bond-labor form

of master-servant relations” – and, significantly, “the

record of this period of labor history shows no ‘white-

worker’ component” (this page).

Of the 92,000 European immigrants brought to Virginia

and Maryland between 1607 and 1682, more than three-

fourths were chattel bond-laborers, the great majority of

them English. In 1676, Governor William Berkeley

estimated about 1,500 European chattel bond-laborers

were arriving yearly, “the majority English, with a few

Scots and fewer Irish.” Allen discusses the coercive

nature of most transcontinental labor recruitment and that

few immigrants were whole-hearted volunteers, arriving

with written contracts for their services. Many were

kidnapped by a combination of deception and brute force,

some were ordinary convicts, and still others were

English, Irish, and Scots prisoners taken in rebellion and

exiled, under pain of death, by whatever authority

happened to rule in England at the time (this page–this

page).

Allen also explains that plantation bond-labor pool was

also supplemented from domestic sources. These

included, beginning about 1660, Indian bond laborers who

were drawn from the general population. For a brief time

in the 1670s and 1680s, Indian bond-laborers played “a

considerable role in the economy of the tobacco colonies”

(this page–this page). The main domestic source of bond-

labor in the plantation colonies was by the imposition of

hereditary bond-servitude on African-Americans under the

system of racial slavery and white supremacy.

However, in the seventeenth century, most of the

plantation laborers were limited-term bond-laborers, a

category composed mostly of European-American

immigrants. Life expectancy of bond-servants was low,

particularly in the early decades, when most didn’t

survive their first year. The census of 1624–25 showed a

total colony population of some 1,218, which included

507 “servants,” of whom 23 were “Negroes.” In the early

period, and increasingly so in the 1660s, there is evidence

of a desire of some employers to develop this source of

added unpaid labor time by subjecting African-Americans

to lifetime hereditary bond-servitude. Overall, Allen

points out that “the capitalist plantation owners relied

almost totally upon increased exertion by the laborers to

more than double the annual tobacco output” in the fifty

years from the dissolution of the Virginia Company to the

onset of Bacon’s Rebellion (this page–this page).

Allen then spends twenty pages documenting the main

forms of oppression of plantation bond-laborers. In this

section, utilizing his command of primary sources, he

draws special attention to the “hardship and brutality to

which the chattels were subjected” and to “the special

oppression of women bond-laborers.” He treats such

topics as: increasing the length of servitude; special

opportunities for securing extra servitude; the costs of

recapture, prosecution, and corporal punishment; denial of

family life and women’s exposure to special oppression;

how “bastardy” laws compounded gender and class

oppression; exploiting the presumption of bondage; cutting

labor costs when no wages were paid; and the owner’s

brutal pursuit of higher output per worker (this page–this

page). He also chastises historians who “justify the bond-

labor system” as an “on the whole benign adaptation to the

colonial environment” and calls attention to “the

documented brutality and hardship to which the chattels

were subjected” (this page).

I n Chapter 8, “. and Resisting,” Allen documents

“instances of self-activation of bond-laborers as molders

of their own fate.” Again, he relies on his extraordinary

familiarity with primary sources to discuss such forms of

resistance as suicide and assault, stealth and insurrection

in response to inadequate diet, and “defiant solace” in the

form of fornication. He also discusses how “chattel bond-

servitude, which was the condition of the overwhelming

majority of women arriving in the tobacco colonies, gave

an added dimension to male supremacism.” It was a

“distinctive blend of class and gender oppression.” Allen

takes note of 367 court cases related to gender oppression

and offers some analysis of the 304 cases he found that

involved “fornication” or “bastardy.” He also discusses

free laboring people assisting runaway bond-laborers. Of

profound importance is Allen’s finding that “there was a

considerable degree of collaboration of African-

Americans and European-Americans in a common

endeavor to escape” (esp. pp. 148, 154, 158).

Allen describes how, early on, the plantation

bourgeoisie expressed its disposition to deny equal rights

to African-Americans through Acts of the General

Assembly. Very importantly, however, he stresses, “The

evidence … clearly indicates that this purpose of the

ruling class did not represent the desire or attitude of the

European-American bond-laborers as a whole, nor indeed

of the common run of European-Americans in general.” At

the same time, however, he considers it “not surprising

that the explicitly anti-Negro tenor of these laws would

find some echo in the attitude of ruled-over European-

Americans, bond and free.” He found “those instances to

have been extremely few, however, in comparison to the

record of solidarity of European-American and African-

American bond-laborers, and in comparison to the

readiness of free laboring-class European-Americans to

make common cause with African-American fugitives

from bond-labor” (this page–this page).

Overall, Allen concludes that “the attitude of the

laboring-class European-Americans stood in sharp

contrast to the succession of enactments whereby the

plantation bourgeoisie pressed for the lifetime hereditary

bond-servitude of African-American bond-laborers; and

for the circumscription of the rights, and the ultimate

practical proscription of free African-Americans.” He

then draws two “fair” and extremely important

conclusions:

First, “the white race” – supra-class unity of European-Americans in

opposition to African-Americans – did not and could not have then existed.

Secondly, the invention of the white race at the beginning of the eighteenth

century can in no part be ascribed to demands by European-American

laboring people for privileges vis-à-vis African-Americans. (this page)

I n Chapter 9, “The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate

Stratum,” Allen begins by discussing the fact that the

Virginia colony evolved under the direct rule of a very

tiny elite. In the fifteen years leading up to Bacon’s

Rebellion, it was “less than four hundred men, probably

numbering no more than two hundred at any one time,”

who were owners of an average of 4,200 acres of land

each. He describes the inadequacy of the militia for

sustained service due to lack of corn and the strenuous

objections of men to being drawn away from their tobacco

crop. He also discusses how, even by 1680, there was no
constabulary,  no  army  except  the  inadequate  militia,  and
only  thirty-five  Anglican  priests  amid  a  population  of
40,000 to 50,000. His point, he writes,  “is to emphasize
the absence of an effective social control stratum” and that
there  was  “in  Virginia  no  intermediate  social  control
stratum based on a secure yeoman class such as had been
preserved in England” (this page–this page).
Allen sees a basic cause for the failure of the plantation
elite to establish a viable system of social control in the
seventeenth  century  in  the  workings  of  the  tobacco
monocultural  economy.  He  then  undertakes  a  statistical
analysis  that  shows  a  “marked  tendency  toward  the
concentration  of  land,”  capital,  and  laborers  on  the
plantations of the colonial elite (this page–this page).
He next discusses threats of Dutch seaborne incursions
during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1665–67
and 1672–74), and explains how the English bourgeoisie
finally secured direct access to African labor at the end of
the Second Dutch War, concluded in the Treaty of Breda
in 1667. Five years later, the Royal African Company was
established,  which,  within  less  than  forty  years,  made
English  merchants  the  pre-eminent  suppliers  of  African
bond-labor  to  the  Western  Hemisphere  (this  page–this
page).
Allen  writes,  “Finally,  the  plantation  bourgeoisie  was

brought within reach of the realization of the vision

foreshadowed in a number of laws already enacted, of

enrichment through the imposition of lifetime hereditary

bond-servitude of Africans and African-Americans.” The

“anticipated reduction in labor costs would have been

desirable for the employing class at any time, but as the

end of the seventeenth century neared, it appeared to offer

the bourgeoisie both a way of evading the unresolvable

contradictions between monoculture and diversity, and a

significant easing of the contention between English and

continental branches of the business with respect to profits

from low-priced tobacco.” Virginia Governor Thomas

Lord Culpeper would later stress this in a letter urging that

the Royal African Company moderate its prices for the

sale of lifetime bond-laborers in Virginia.” “[I]n regard to

the infinite profit that comes … I conceive it is for his

Majesty’s Interest full as much as the Countrys, or rather

much more, to have Blacks as cheap as possible in

Virginia” (this page).

Allen comments that it was “a conscious decision, not

an unthinking one” by Virginia’s plantation bourgeoisie to

opt for monoculture and chattel bond-servitude. However,

“a lack of capacity to command had made it impossible

for the plantation bourgeoisie to impose the necessary

social discipline on free and middle-rank tobacco

farmers.” In this setting, the Virginia ruling elite was

considering using African labor when it found itself three
thousand miles from home with no yeoman buffer between
it and a people of whom, according to Governor William
Berkeley in 1676, “six parts of seaven at least, are Poore,
Endebted, Discontented and Armed” (this page–this page).
I n Chapter  10,  “The  Status  of  African-Americans,”
Allen  reviews  his  four-pronged  definition  of  racial
oppression and points out that, in Chapters 8 and 9, he had
argued  inferentially  that  “  ‘the  white  race,’  and  thus  a
system of  racial oppression, did  not exist, and  could not
have  existed,  in  the  seventeenth-century  tobacco
colonies.”  In Chapter  8,  that  conclusion  was  based  on
evidence  of  class  solidarity  of  laboring-class  European-
Americans  with  African-Americans,  and  the  consequent
absence  of an all-class coalition of European-Americans
directed  against  African-Americans.  In Chapter  9,  the
thesis  was  linked  up  with  the  lack  of  a  substantial
intermediate buffer social-control stratum (this page).
In Chapter  10,  he  again  utilizes  Virginia  records  that
directly  bear  “on  the  actual  social  status  of  African-
Americans in those decades.” Allen’s position is that the
records  “compel  the  conclusion  that  the  relative  social
status  of African-Americans  and  European-Americans  in
that  ‘Volatile  Society’  can  be  determined  to  have  been
indeterminate.” It was indeterminate because it was being
fought out in the context of the great social stresses of high

mortality, the monocultural economy, impoverishment, and

an extremely unbalanced gender ratio – all of which were

based on, or derived from, “the abnormal system of chattel

bond-servitude.” The critical moment of that social

struggle arrived with Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676–77,

which posed the question of who should rule. The answer

“would not only determine the status of African-

Americans,” it would also “install the monorail of Anglo-

American historical development, white supremacy” (this

page).

Allen points out that “The reduction of the almost totally

English labor force from tenants and wage-laborers to

chattel bond-servitude in the 1620s was indeed a negation

of previously existing laws and customs, but it was

imposed by one set of colonists on another set of

colonists,” and it was not “an act of racial oppression.”

Other efforts were made at establishing two distinct

categories of servitude, limited term and lifetime. Allen

discusses one of the better-known such cases, that of John

Punch. From his analysis of this case, he concludes that

while “it showed a readiness of at least some of the

plantation elite to equate ‘being a negro’ with being a

lifetime bond-laborer,” it also showed that the

development of social policy along this line was

obstructed by several factors. He cited “institutional

inertia presented by English common law, by the historic

retreat from the slavery gambit of 1547 in the wake of

Ket’s Rebellion, and by the deep-rooted principles of

Christian fellowship.” He also cited the opposition of

“African-Americans, both bond-laborers and non-bond-

laborers, with the general support – certainly without the

concerted opposition – of European-American bond-

laborers, and other free but poor laboring people,

determined by a sense of common class interest” (this

page–this page).

Regarding seventeenth-century African-Americans, he

goes into great detail to examine how they exercised

marriage rights, exhibited social mobility, held significant

land-holdings, owned European-American bond-laborers,

and manifested many forms of resistance. He also

discusses Evangelical questions and objections, and

opposition from members of the propertied class to racial

oppression of African-Americans (this page–this page).

One of his most important treatments concerns the case

of Elizabeth Key. The case “presented a direct

confrontation between the desire among plantation owners

to raise their rate of profit by imposing lifetime hereditary

servitude on African-Americans, and an African-

American’s right to freedom on the basis of Christian

principles and English common law.” Elizabeth, the child

of a European-American father and an African-American

mother, was scheduled to complete her term of servitude

when the estate to which she was bonded sought to impose

lifetime bond-servitude status upon her on the grounds that

this “was the condition of her mother.” This argument

contradicted the English common-law principle of partus

sequitur patrem – the condition of the child follows the

condition of the father. A jury found Elizabeth Key to be

entitled to her freedom in 1656. That decision was also

sustained on the traditional English principle that her

Christian baptism and rearing barred her from being held

as a lifetime bond-laborer. Allen points out that if those

principles prevailed in all circumstances, they would have

prevented the establishment of racial slavery. In 1662, the

Virginia General Assembly took a different course and

established the principle of partus sequitur ventrem

(condition follows through the mother) (this page–this

page).

Allen concludes, “Given the English superstructural

obstacles and the already marked resistance of African-

Americans to lifetime hereditary bondage, a rapid and

large addition of African bond-laborers to the population

in the 1670s would certainly tend to reduce the

effectiveness of the already weak social-control stratum”

(this page).

In Part Four, “Rebellion and Reaction,” Chapter 11,

“Rebellion – and Its Aftermath,” Allen focuses on the

later, civil-war phase of Bacon’s Rebellion from April

1676 to January 1677. Bacon’s Rebellion began as a

dispute between the colonial elite, led by Governor

William Berkeley, and the subelite, led by Nathaniel

Bacon, over the rate of expropriation of Indian lands.

Allen explains that it was not primarily an anti-Indian war,

although that was the tenor of the first call to arms. But he

shows that the “lesson of history” to be drawn from the

anti-Indian phase of Bacon’s Rebellion is clearly still

relevant – the “bourgeois eye looks upon progress and

genocide indifferently, as incidental aspects of the process

of the accumulation of capital; the anti-Indian phase of

Bacon’s Rebellion was merely another example of that

lesson.” He adds that the U.S. government that

subsequently brought the American Indians to the verge of

extinction should “make restitution” and “the struggle for

justice in this respect merges with the general struggle

against white supremacist racial oppression” (this

page–this page).

In his treatment of the civil-war stage of Bacon’s

Rebellion, Allen pays special attention to the bond-

laborer component of the rebels and their demand for

freedom from bondage. He highlights Captain Thomas

Grantham’s account of how he was confronted by “foure

hundred English and Negroes in Armes who were much

dissatisfied”; how “some were for shooting mee, and

others were for cutting me in peeces”; and how, in the

final stages of the struggle, he confronted “Eighty Negroes
and Twenty English which would not deliver their Armes”
(this page–this page, esp. 211, 214).
Allen writes that Grantham’s testament has significance
“beyond  exaggeration.”  In  Virginia,  128  years  before
William  Lloyd  Garrison  was  born,  “laboring-class
African-Americans  and  European-Americans  had  fought
side  by  side for the  abolition  of  slavery” and  “provided
the supreme proof that the white race did not then exist”
(this page–this page).
In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, major destabilizing
factors persisted. Allen cited “the train of overproduction,
mass  impoverishment, and  indebtedness  produced  by the
tobacco monoculture,” the plantation bourgeoisie’s failure
to  diversify  the  economy,  the  increase  in  the  bond-labor
population, the continued lack of an effective intermediate
buffer  social-control  stratum,  and  the  “unfeasibility  of
maintaining  social  control  in  Virginia  by  means  of  the
English army” (this page).
Allen’s population analysis is of particular interest. He
points  out  that  in  1671  some  8,000  tithable  individuals
(roughly  6,000  European-American  and  2,000  African-
American) out of a total of 15,000 in Virginia were bond-
laborers.  The  total  population  at  that  time  was  about
40,000. Approximately 30,000 European-Americans came
to  the  Chesapeake  region  between  1680  and  1700,  and

Allen estimates that 24,000 were bond laborers. In “a

roughly equivalent period, 1674–1700, around 6,000

African bond-laborers were imported.” He emphasizes,

“Not only was the number of bond laborers increasing, it

was increasing as a total number of the tithables, and

doubtless of the population” (this page–this page, esp.

218).

I n Chapter 12, “The Abortion of the ‘White Race’

Social Control System in the Anglo-Caribbean,” Allen

explains that the English plantation bourgeoisie in the

continental colonies and in the Caribbean “opted to base

their ventures on chattel bond-labor, at first European, but

– sooner in the Caribbean, later in the continental

plantation colonies – mainly on African bond-labor.”

Then, in both cases, “the ruling class sought to establish

social control on the principle of racial oppression of non-

Europeans.” He emphasizes that the decision to deny “any

degree of social mobility” to Africans and African-

Americans – the hallmark of racial oppression – “was

driven simply and directly by the greater rate of profit to

be had by the employment of lifetime hereditary bond-

laborers – provided a cost-effective system of social

control could be established.” Ultimately, however,

“different ways of maintaining ruling-class social control

would be required” and the class struggle “would produce

forms of social control in the Anglo-Caribbean

colonies … that diverged in historically significant ways

from that which was adopted in continental Anglo-

America” (this page–this page).

Allen describes how in the British West Indies the

English made efforts to reduce natives of the Caribbean to

plantation bond-servitude, but the class-undifferentiated

Caribbean tribes were not deminated by “casiques” and

they responded with warlike resistance. The English

occupied Barbados in 1625, and at first, it imitated

Virginia as a tobacco colony using bond-laborers, mainly

English and Scots. In the 1640s, with the aid of Dutch

capital, techniques, and markets, and Dutch suppliers of

African laborers, Barbados began its development as the

prototype of the British West Indies sugar-plantation

colony, of which Jamaica, captured from the Spanish in

1655, was to become the largest. However, even before

the transition to sugar, there was rebellion. In 1634, the

island was reportedly in a state of emergency over a bond-

laborer revolt plot. Between 1675 and 1701, there were

four major revolt plots, including a 1692 “negro

conspiracy.” There were at least seven separate slave

revolts in the English islands between 1640 and 1713 in

which Europeans and Africans were killed. Thousands of

military prisoners were sent to Barbados as bond-laborers

along with ordinary felons and vagabonds. In 1649, they

devised a plot to take over the island. By that time,

runaway African bond-laborers had established maroon

settlements in outlying areas. In Jamaica, 1,500 African

bond-laborers left behind in the Spanish evacuation of

1655 established themselves in the central mountains.

These free, independent Jamaican maroons maintained a

separate set of communities until 1796 (this page–this

page).

Official notice was taken of the tendency of bond-

laborers to make common cause regardless of ancestry,

and this condition was general in the West Indies. Allen

quotes military historian John W. Fortescue that by the end

of the seventeenth century “the old system of defense by

white servants had broken down.” Allen adds, this

“applies also to the failure of the attempt to establish a

system of social control in the Anglo-Caribbean by an

English-style yeoman militia of European former bond-

laborers” (this page).

In “relation to the question of social control and

invention of the white race,” Allen explains, “the British

West Indies differed from the continental plantation

colonies in five significant ways.” First, “because of the

narrow absolute limits of land area, and the relatively high

capital costs of sugar production, the West Indies was

especially inhospitable to non-capitalist farmers or

tenants” and the capital requirements for becoming a sugar

planter were beyond the means of former bond-laborers.

In time, “the propertyless majority of the European

population of the British West Indies would be assigned to

a special category, socially and economically

marginalized as ‘poor whites.’ ” Second, in the West

Indies, the attempt to establish a “white race” social-

control system was seriously complicated by a substantial

Irish presence. Coming directly from the heightened racial

oppression in Ireland, “the Irish bond-laborers in the

British West Indies were often disposed to ally their cause

with any challenge to British authority” including

challenges “made by African bond-laborers.” Third, the

English military and naval forces were regularly stationed

in the West Indies. Fourth, the predominance of persons of

African descent in the population of the West Indies made

it impossible to exclude them from the intermediate

stratum. Euro-Caribbeans were a minority in the

Caribbean before the end of the seventeenth century. Fifth,

the “reliance upon persons of African descent in the

skilled trades and the internal economy led to the

emergence of the ‘free colored’ as the predominant

element in the middle class” (this page). By the 1830s,

“free blacks and coloreds” owned 70,000 of the

approximately 310,000 bond-laborers in Jamaica (this

page).

“What most distinguishes the story of both the Irish and

the Anglo-Caribbean histories … from that of continental

Anglo-America,” Allen writes, “is that Catholic

Emancipation in Ireland, and the admittance of ‘free

colored’ to full citizenship rights in the British West

Indies were the culmination of the growing economic and

political strength of the Catholic bourgeoisie in Ireland, in

the one case, and of the ‘free colored’ population of the

British West Indies, in the other.” In the United States, in

contrast, “free African-Americans were never

acknowledged as a legitimate part of the body politic,”

and “their very right to remain in the United States was

officially and unofficially questioned” (this page).

He next seeks to offer an explanation for that dramatic

difference and its “larger historical significance” (this

page).

In Chapter 13, “The Invention of the White Race – and

the Ordeal of America,” Allen explains that Virginia’s

free and bond laborers were fighting in Bacon’s Rebellion

for “an end to the version [of capitalism] imposed by the

plantation elite, based on chattel bond-servitude and

engrossment of the land.” They sought freedom from

bondage and improved opportunities to become

independent farmers.

However, just as the overthrow of the tenantry had cleared the ground for

the institution of chattel bond-servitude in the 1620s, so did the defeat of the

rebels in Bacon’s Rebellion clear the way for the establishment of the

system of lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude. The relative power of

the plantation elite increased because of the continuation of their large

landholdings and their advantages in bidding for lifetime bond-laborers. (this

page)

After Bacon’s Rebellion, the ruling class turned to a

system of control in which, according to historian Gary B.

Nash, “among upper- and lower-class whites.… Race

became the primary badge of status.” Allen addresses why

that happened (this page).

He contests the argument that this “was the result of the

shift” to African labor as the main labor supply source and

points out that the same shift occurred in the British West

Indies with far different results. He contests the argument

that it “was the result of the reduction of African-

Americans to lifetime hereditary bond-servitude” and

cites the solidarity of “the English and Negroes in Armes”

in Bacon’s Rebellion “at a time when the great majority of

African-Americans were held as lifetime bond-laborers.”

He notes that “23 percent of the African bond-laborers in

Jamaica on the eve of Emancipation were owned by

persons of one degree or other of African ancestry” (this

page).

Allen counters that rather than this “white race”

consciousness being the result, “it was only because

‘race’ consciousness superseded class-consciousness that

the continental plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve

and  maintain  the  degree  of  social  control  necessary  for
proceeding  with  capital  accumulation  on  the  basis  of
chattel bond-labor” (this page).
He recognizes that the “plantation bourgeoisie and those
engaged in the labor supply trade favored the imposition
of perpetual bondage on the plantation labor force … as
simply prudent business practice” designed to keep down
labor  costs  and  that  it  was  also  “understood
that … success depended on establishing and maintaining
an intermediate stratum for social control purposes” (this
page).  But,  he  asks,  “Why,  then,  were free  Negroes  and
‘mulattos’ to be excluded from that stratum in the pattern-
setting  continental  plantation  colony  of  Virginia?”  (this
page).
He  notes  how  in  May  1723  the  Virginia  Assembly
passed “An Act directing the trial of Slaves … and … for
the  better  government  of  Negroes,  Mulattos,  and  Indian,
bond  or  free,”  which  provided  that  “no  free  negro,
mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the
election.” The reason for that act, according to Governor
William Gooch, was “to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free
Negros & Mulattos” (this page–this page).
Allen  responds  emphatically,  “Surely  that  was  no
‘unthinking  decision’!  Rather,  it  was  a  deliberate  act  by
the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious
decision in the process of establishing a system of racial

oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral

principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a

century” (this page). Gooch’s letter of explanation for the

decision was “disingenuous” to Allen who then refutes it

point by point. Allen emphasizes that the “difference

between the English plantation bourgeoisie in the British

West Indies and the continental plantation colonies with

regard to the status of free persons of some degree of

African ancestry … was rooted in the objective fact that in

the West Indies there were too few laboring-class

Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while

in the continental colonies there were too many to be

accommodated in the ranks of that class” (this page).

He further explains that the plantation bourgeoisie

“assumed the bond-laborers would resist in every way

they could, including maroonage and revolt,” and they

knew they needed “a substantial intermediate buffer

social-control stratum.” The ruling elite was a “small

cohort” and needed “a substantial intermediate buffer

social control stratum to stand between it and great

disturbances, or even another rebellion” (this page).

Allen reviews historical research by Jackson Turner

Main and Aubrey C. Land and finds that in eighteenth-

century Virginia “somewhat less than 50 percent of the

total adult white male population were landowners” and

of these “one-fourth worked the land without the

employment of bond-labor.” Thus, “about 60 percent of

the adult white male population were not owners of bond-

laborers, but were put in competition with employers of

bond-labor” (this page–this page).

Allen maintains that the reason for the “proscription of

the free African-American can be explained … by the fact

that, despite its sway over the ‘yeomanry,’ the gentry

could not ‘safely ignore’ ” the laboring and non-bond-

holding European-Americans “because their bond-labor

system was antithetical to the interests, not only of

African-American bond-laborers, but also of all the rest of

the population that did not own bond-laborers.” The

laboring-class European-Americans had shown “their

solidarity with the African-American bond-laborers in

Bacon’s Rebellion,” “demonstrated their understanding of

their interests,” and had sympathy for their situation (this

page). How was such “laboring class solidarity to be

undone?”

The answer that the ruling class decided upon was

clear. “Instead of social mobility, European-Americans

who did not own bond-laborers were to be asked to be

satisfied with simply the presumption of liberty, the

birthright of the poorest person in England; and with the

right of adult males who owned sufficient property to vote

for candidates for office who were almost invariably

owners of bond-laborers.” The stability of the system of

capitalist agriculture based on lifetime hereditary bond-

servitude “depended on the ability of the ruling elite to

induce the non-‘yeoman’ European-Americans to settle for

this counterfeit of social mobility” and on their ability “to

establish a new birthright for not only Anglos but for every

Euro-American, the ‘white’ identity” (this page).

Historians have detailed how, toward the end of the

seventeenth century, there occurred “a marked tendency to

promote a pride of race among the members of every class

of white people.” This was the real reason for the

proscriptions against free African-Americans. “The

exclusion of free African-Americans from the intermediate

stratum was a corollary of the establishment of ‘white’

identity as a mark of social status.” If, as Allen explains,

the mere presumption of liberty was to serve as a social status for masses

of European-Americans without real prospects of upward social mobility,

and yet induce them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy and enlist

them actively, or at least passively, in keeping down the Negro bond-laborer

with whom they had made solidarity in the course of Bacon’s Rebellion, the

presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African-Americans. (this

page)

The Virginia General Assembly showed how this was to

be done. It “deliberately stuffed the ‘racial’ distinction

with anomalous privileges to make it look like the real

thing, promotion to a higher social class.” The distinction

“was even emphasized for European-American chattel

bond-laborers.” The owner of an African-American bond-

laborer “could legally use or abuse his African-American

bond-laborers, or dispose of them … as a matter of

course,” but by a 1691 law it “was forbidden to set them

free.” The revised Virginia code of 1705 “took pains to

specify unprecedented guarantees for the European

‘christian white’ limited-term bond-laborers.” Freedom

dues were enumerated with specificity and included “to

every male servant, ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings in

money (or the equivalent in goods), a gun worth at least

twenty shillings; and to every woman servant, fifteen

bushels of corn, forty shillings in money (or the equivalent

in goods).” In 1692 and in 1705, orders were issued to

confiscate livestock raised by African-American bond-

laborers. The act of 1723 not only imposed lifetime

hereditary bond-servitude on African-Americans, it also

sought “to implement it by a system of racial oppression,

expressed in laws against free African-Americans,”

including laws

making free Negro women tithable; forbidding non-Europeans, though

baptized christians, to be owners of “christian,” that is, European, bond-

laborers; denying free African-Americans the right to hold any office of

public trust; barring any Negro from being a witness in any case against a

“white” person; making any free Negro subject to thirty lashes at the public

whipping post for “lift[ing] his or her hand” against any European-American

(thus to a major extent denying Negroes the elementary right of self-

defense); excluding free African-Americans from the armed militia; and

forbidding free African-Americans from possessing “any gun, powder, shot,

or any club, or any other weapon whatsoever, offensive or defensive.”

The denial of the right of self-defense would become a

major factor “in the development of the peculiar American

form of male supremacy, white-male supremacy, informed

by the principle that any European-American male could

assume familiarity with any African-American woman”

(this page–this page).

The ruling class also “took special pains to be sure that

the people they ruled were propagandized in … white

supremacism.” Provisions were included for that purpose

in the “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” of 1705 and

in the Act of 1723 “directing the trial of Slaves … and for

the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians,

bond or free.” To raise consciousness and to prevent

“pretense of ignorance,” the laws “mandated that parish

clerks or churchwardens … read (‘publish’) these laws in

full to the congregants.” Sheriffs “were ordered to have

the same done at the courthouse door.” The “general

public was regularly and systematically subjected to

official white supremacist agitation.” It was to be

“drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first

time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or

her hand against a ‘Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or

Indian’ ”; that “African-American freeholders were no

longer to be allowed to vote”; that “the provision of a

previous enactment … was being reinforced against the

mating of English and Negroes”; that,

as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-

American bond-laborers, “any white person … found in company with any

[illegally congregated] slaves,” was to be fined (along with free African-

Americans or Indians so offending) … or to “receive, on his, her, or their

bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on.” (this page)

“Thus,” writes Allen, the “white race” was “invented as

the social-control formation whose distinguishing

characteristic was not the participation of the slaveholding

class, nor even of other elements of the propertied classes;

. What distinguished this system of social control, what

made it ‘the white race,’ was the participation of the

European-American laboring classes: non-slaveholders,

self-employed smallholders, tenants, and laborers.” In

time, “this white-race social-control system begun in

Virginia and Maryland would serve as the model of social

order to each succeeding plantation region of settlement”

(this page).

Not only would there no longer be African-American

and European-American labor solidarity and rebellions,

now “the poor and propertyless European-Americans

were the principal element in the day-to-day enforcement

of racial oppression.” The “white” slave patrols were

made up primarily of those from the “lower class.”

Although “this system of white-skin privileges

had … been initiated by the European-

American … plantation bourgeoisie, the European-

American workers were claiming them by the middle of

the eighteenth century” as when “white” workers in South

Carolina demanded “the exclusion of Negroes from the

skilled trades” (this page).

Allen writes, “If the Virginia laws of 1705 and others

cited … represent ruling class manipulation of the rank-

and-file, the inescapable implication seems to be that the

social transformation that they expressed – to the system of

racial slavery, racial oppression, white supremacy – must

have been contrary to the real interests of the majority of

the people, the small-holders, the tenants, and laborers,

those who did not own bond-laborers” (this page).

He then reviews the work of historians who counter that

conclusion with a different assessment of white

supremacism in relation to the foundation of the United

States as a republic. In particular, he discusses the

“paradox thesis” of American history, which contends

“that democracy and equality, as represented in the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1789,

were, by the logic of history, made possible by racial

oppression.” He focuses particularly on Edmund S.

Morgan’s espousal of this rationale, for the reason that his

book, American Slavery, American Freedom, appeared in

1975 after the civil rights struggles and because his socio-

economic approach to the origin of racial slavery supplied

“the most substantial response that had yet appeared to the

‘natural racism’ thesis of Carl Degler and of Winthrop D.

Jordan” (this page–this page).

Allen sees the “essence of Morgan’s paradox” in his

statement that “Virginians may have had a special

appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because

they saw every day what life without it could be.” This

argument, writes Allen, “rests on the assumption that,

early in the eighteenth century, ‘the mass of white

Virginians were becoming landowners, and the small

planters began to prosper, thus giving the large and small

planters a sense of common identity based on common

interests.’ ” Allen points out that the work of historians

Willard F. Bliss and Jackson Main “cast great doubt on

his [Morgan’s] facile conclusion” that there “were too few

free poor [white] to matter” (this page–this page).

“If … among ‘whites’ there were ‘too few free poor to

matter,’ ” asks Allen, “why did the social order not revert

to the normal class differentiation … in which the free

Negroes could take their individual places according to

their social class?” In this context, the “ ‘white race’ as a

social control formation would have been a redundancy.”

Instead, however, “there was a general proscription of the

free Negro,” a fact that Allen contends “is unchallengeable

evidence of the continued presence of poor whites

who … served as the indispensable element of the ‘white

race,’ the Peculiar Institution” (this page).

Allen cites a passage from Morgan’s 1972 presidential

address to the Organization of American Historians in

which he writes, “The rise of liberty and equality in this

country was accompanied by the rise of slavery. That two

such contradictory developments were taking place

simultaneously over a long period of our history, from the

seventeenth century to the nineteenth, is the central

paradox of American history” (this page).

Allen contends that “the effect of Morgan’s ‘paradox’

thesis seems no less an apology for white supremacy than

the ‘natural racism’ argument.” Morgan goes even further

when he writes, “Racism made it possible for white

Virginians to develop a devotion to … equality … Racism

became an essential … ingredient of the republican

ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation” (this

page–this page).

Then, writes Allen, “as if shying at his own conclusion,

Morgan suggests … that perhaps ‘the vision of a nation of

equals [was] flawed at the source by contempt for both the

poor and the black.’ ” Allen responds, “What flaw? If

racism was a flaw, then ‘the rise of liberty’ would have

been better off without it – a line of reasoning that negates

the paradox. On the other hand, if racism made ’the rise of

liberty possible, as the paradox would have it, then racism

was not a flaw of American bourgeois democracy, but its

very special essence.” Allen concludes, “The ‘Ordeal of

Colonial Virginia’ was extended as the Ordeal of

America, wherein the racial oppression and white

supremacism have indeed been the dominant feature, the

parametric constant, of United States history” (this page).

Allen then reviews the work of Frederick Jackson

Turner, famous for his theory that “the existence of an area

of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of

American settlement westward explain Americans

development.” He also discusses Turner’s subsequently

articulated safety-valve corollary regarding the emergence

of a popular socialist movement of sufficient proportions

to “substitute” for the end of the “free-land safety valve”

and work “in the interest of the common man” as a

“safeguard of democracy” and how that expectation was

disappointed (this page).

Allen comments, “The white laboring people’s prospect

of lateral mobility to ‘free land,’ however unrealizable it

was in actuality, did serve in diverting them from struggles

with the bourgeoisie.” But that was only one aspect of “the

Great Safety Valve, the system of racial privileges

conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural

and urban, poor and exploited” which “has been the main

historical guarantee of the rule of the ‘Titans,’ damping

down anti-capitalist pressures, by making ‘race, and not

class, the distinction in social life.’ ” He emphasizes,

“This, more than any other factor, has shaped the ‘contours

of American history’ – from the Constitutional Convention

of 1787 to the Civil War, to the overthrow of

Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, to the

Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle and ‘white

backlash’ of our own day” (this page).

He adds that Turner’s reference to the “safety valve”

potential in anti-capitalist “reform” had a successor in the

Keynesian New Deal.

The limitations of that line of reform, which had

become evident by 1938, were masked by the prosperity

of the United States in its role as the “arsenal of

democracy” in World War II, which ended with the United

States as the only industrial power left standing and the

possessor of three-fourths of the world’s gold reserves.

By 1953, other major powers had recovered to pre-war

levels; by 1957, the U.S. balance of trade began to shift

unfavorably; in 1971, the United States formally

abandoned the gold standard for settlement of international

balances of trade and the “gold cover” for the domestic

money supply. Finally, even the party of the New Deal has

cast all Keynesian pretence to the winds, proclaiming that

“the era of big government is over,” and boasting of

“ending welfare in any previously recognizable form”

(this page–this page).

Allen then describes the situation in 1997 at the time of

publication of the second volume:

Now at the end of the twentieth century, the social gap between the Titans

and the common people is at perhaps its historic maximum, real wages have

trended downward for nearly two decades. “Entitlements” and “welfare,”

as they relate to students, the poor, and the elderly, have become obscenities

in the lexicon of official society. There is less of a “socialist” movement

today in the United States than there was in Turner’s day, and anti-capitalist

class consciousness is hesitant even to call its name.… “Class struggle” is

an epithet cast accusingly at the mildest defenders of social welfare, and the

country is loud with the sound of one class struggling. (this page)

His next words, however, speak presciently to readers in

the twenty-first century as he describes “unmistakable

signs of a maturing social conflict … because of

intensifying efforts to ‘balance the budget’ at the expense

of the living standards of non-stockholders.” He

insightfully points out that “America bears the indelible

stamp of the African-American civil rights struggle of the

1960s” and draws the strands of his historical research

and analysis together, offering these final words:

Perhaps by virtue of that legacy, in the impending renewal of the struggle of

the “common people” and “Titans,” the Great Safety Valve of white-skin

privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class

European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed

their will in defense of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the ruling class.

(this page)

Editor’s Appendix H

Select Bibliography on Theodore W.

Allen

By Theodore W. Allen

Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The

Invention of the White Race (Hoboken, N.J.: HEP,

1975). Reprinted with an Introduction by Jeffrey B.

Perry (Stony Brook, NY: The Center for the Study of

Working Class Life, SUNY, 2006).

“Contradictions in Keynesian Economics: The Unstable

Economy: Booms and Recessions in the U.S. Since

1945,” Review of Victor Perlo, The Unstable

Economy: Booms and Recessions in the United

States (New York: International Publishers, 1973),

Guardian, April 11 & 18, 1973.

“Commentary on István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital,”

Cultural Logic Vol. 8 (2005).

“In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment Policy,”

Cultural Logic Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1998).

Interview by Chad Pearson, May 13 and 20, 2004,

available at

http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch2004jan-

june.html.

The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial

Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso,

1994).

The Invention of the White Race Vol. 2: The Origin of

Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York:

Verso, 1997).

“Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” Review of Kevin Phillips,

The Emerging Republican Majority, Guardian ,

November 22, 1969.

“Notes on Base and Superstructure and the Socialist

Perspective for a Panel Presentation by Theodore

Allen on ‘Base and Superstructure and the Socialist

Perspective’ at the Conference on ‘How Class

Works,’ to be Held at New York State University at

Stony Brook, June 10-12, 2004,” Socialism and

Democracy Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 2007).

“On Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, ” Cultural Logic

Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2001).

“ ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’: History and the 2000 Census,”

Cultural Logic Vol. 3, No. 1.

“Slavery, Racism, and Democracy,” Review of Edmund

S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:

The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1974), Monthly Review 29, No. 10 (March

1978).

“Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White

Race,” Cultural Logic Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1998).

“ ‘… They would have destroyed me’: Slavery and the

Origins of Racism,” Radical America Vol. 9, No. 3

(May-June 1975). Reprinted in White Supremacy: A

Collection (Chicago: Sojourner Truth Organization,

1976).

“White Supremacy in U.S. History,” A Speech Delivered

at a Guardian Forum on the National Question, April

28, 1973. Reprinted in White Supremacy: A

Collection (Chicago: Sojourner Truth Organization,

1976).

By Other Authors

Ignatiev, Noel, “Review of The Invention of the White

Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social

Control, by Theodore W. Allen,” Journal of Social

History 2005.

Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel and Ted (Theodore W.) Allen,

White Blindspot & Can White Workers Radicals Be

Radicalized? (Detroit: The Radical Education

Project, 1969; and New York: NYC Revolutionary

Youth Movement, 1969).

Perry, Jeffrey B., “In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen,”

Cultural Logic Vol. 8 (2005).

Perry, Jeffrey B., “Theodore William Allen: Expert on

Bacon’s Rebellion,” History News Network, October

11, 2005.

Perry, Jeffrey B., “Introduction,” in Theodore W. Allen,

Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery:

The Invention of the White Race (Stony Brook,

N.Y.: The Center for the Study of Working Class

Life, SUNY, 2006).

Perry, Jeffrey B., “The Developing Conjuncture and Some

Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W.

Allen On the Centrality of the Fight Against White

Supremacy,” Cultural Logic (2010).

Scott, Jonathan and Gregory Meyerson, “An Interview

with Theodore W. Allen,” Cultural Logic Vol. 1,

No. 2 (Spring 1998).

Winston, Stella, “The Invention of the White Race,” video

interview with Theodore W. Allen in two parts,

available at youtube.com.

Notes

Abbreviations of Some Frequently Cited Sources

AHR American Historical Review

Bacon,

Works

The Works of Francis Bacon, edited by

James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and

Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London,

1857–74).

Blathwayt

Papers

Blathwayt Papers, ca. 1675–1715, 41 vols.

on microfilm at Colonial Williamsburg.

Great Britain Public Record Office, Colonial

Office records.

County

Grievances

“A Repertory of the General County

Grievances of Virginia … with the humble

opinion of His Majesties Commissioners

annexed” (October 1677).

County

Records

Virginia County Court Records

(photocopies, microfilm and abstracts),

available at the Virginia State Archives,

Richmond.

[Henry] Coventry Papers Relating to

Virginia, Barbados and other Colonies,

microfilm prepared by the British

Coventry

Papers

Manuscripts Project of the American Council

of Learned Societies and available at the

Library of Congress (originals at the estate

of the Marquis of Bath, Longleat House,

Wiltshire, UK).

CSP. Col.

Great Britain Public Record Office,

Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series:

America and the West Indies, 44 vols.

(London, 1860–1969).

CTP

Commissioners of Trade and Plantations.

Operated under various official

designations: Committee (of the Privy

Council) for Trade and Plantations (from

1660); Lords of Trade and Plantations (from

1675); and Board of Trade (from 1696).

Force

Tracts

Peter Force, Tracts and Other Papers,

related principally to the Origin,

Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in

North America, from the discovery of the

country to the year 1776, 4 vols.

(Washington, 1836).

Gwynne,

Analecta

Irish Manuscripts Commission, Analecta

Hibernia,

No. 4

No. 4 (October 1932), “Documents Relating

to the Irish in the West Indies,” Aubrey

Gwynne SJ, collector, p. 266.

Hening

William Waller Hening, comp. and ed. The

Statutes-at-Large; being a Collection of all

the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session

of the Legislature in the year 1619, 13 vols.

(Richmond, 1799–1823; Charlottesville,

1969).

Hotten,

Original

Lists

John C. Hotten, The Original Lists of

Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious

Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold

for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children

Stolen; Maidens Pressed and Others Who

went from Great Britain to the American

plantations, 1600–1700 (London, 1874).

Manchester

Papers

In Historical Manuscripts Commission,

Eighth Report (London 1881), Part 1,

Appendix.

MCGC

Minutes of the Council and General Court

of Virginia, edited by H. R. McIlwaine

(Richmond, 1924).

Norfolk

County

Wills

Volume 3 of Virginia Colonial Abstracts, 34

vols., compiled by Beverley Fleet

(Baltimore, 1961).

RVC

Records of the Virginia Company of

London, 4 vols. edited by S.M. Kingsbury

(Washington, DC, 1906–35).

Smith,

Travels and

Travels and Works of Captain John Smith,

President of Virginia and Admiral of New

Works England, 2 vols., edited by Edward Arber
and A. G. Bradley (Edinburgh, 1910).
VMHB
Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography.
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly.
1 The Labor Supply Problem: England a
Special Case
1. See Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto,
1944), Part I, “Colonial Theories, 1570–1660.”
2. As mentioned in Volume One of  The Invention of the White Race (p.
8), in the early 1630s the English planted a colony on Providence Island, some
350 miles north of Panama and 135 miles from the eastern coast of present-
day Nicaragua, but they were forced to abandon it in 1641.
3. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History
of Europe,  Vol.  IV,  The Economy of  Expanding  Europe  in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1967), p. 304.
4. J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–98 (New York, 1968), pp. 24, 289.
5.  Between  1503  and  1660,  according  to  records  kept  at  Seville,  Spain
received from America 16 million kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of
gold,  of  which  the  Spanish  Crown’s  share  was  40  percent.  (J.  H.  Elliott,
Imperial Spain, 1469–1716  (New York,  1964),  pp.  174–75.)  This  treasure
quickly passed from Spain to  its creditors, most notably  the Fugger  family  of

Augsburg and Antwerp, as payments on imperial debts, however. (Immanuel
Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Vol. I,  The Modern World-System,
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in
the  Sixteenth  Century  [New  York,  1974],  pp.  178–85.  See  also  Henri
Pirenne, A History of Europe, From the Invasion to the XVI Century  [New
York, 1955], pp. 524–6.)
6.  Vieira’s  O Papel Forte is here cited from Robert Southey, History  of
Brazil, 3 vols. (London, 1817); 2:225. “(I)t was men of which Portugal was in
want,” said Southey, “not extent of territory.” (Ibid., p. 224.)
7.  Charles  R.  Boxer, The  Portuguese  Seaborne  Empire,  1415–1825
(New York, 1969), p. 88.
8.  Henry  Raup  Wagner,  The  Life  and  Writings  of Bartolomé  de  Las
Casas  (Alburquerque,  1967),  pp.  22,  38–43.  Though  Las  Casas’s  plan  for
establishing a Spanish peasant colony in the Americas failed, his proposal for
using  Negro  slaves  would  soon  lead  to  the  royal  licensing  of  the  wholesale
shipment of African bond-laborers to the Americas, which would come to be
known  as  the Asiento.  Some  thirty-five  years  later,  Las  Casas  regretted  his
role in this development. Even though he felt he had made a well-intentioned
mistake  that  was  generally  approved  by  his  contemporaries,  he  feared  the
divine  judgment  that  he  had  yet  to  face  for  his  role  in  bringing  such  terrible
injustice on the Africans. (Bartolomé de Las Casas, História de las Indias, 3
vols, edited by Augustin Millares [Mexico City, 1951]; 3:474 [Capitulo 129].)
9.  Charles  Edward  Chapman, Colonial  Hispanic  America  (New  York,
1933), p. 109. Special permission of the king or other qualified official had to be
obtained before anyone might go to the Indies.
10.  In  a  comment that  anticipated Adam Smith  and Edmund Burke  (See

The  Invention  of  the  White  Race,  Vol.  One,  pp.  33  and  71),  Las  Casas
decried  the  social  anomaly  of  “rabble  who  had  been  scourged  or  clipped  of
their  ears  in  Castile,  lording  it  over  the  native  chiefs.”  (Edward  Gaylord
Bourne, Spain in America, 1450–1580 [New York, 1907], p. 208.)
11. Luis Ivens Ferraz, “The Creole of Sao Tomé,” African Studies, 37:3–
68 (1978), p. 16. Most of these survivors married men and women who were
brought from the African mainland.
12. John Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change 1598–1700
(Oxford, 1992), p. 8; Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 300–301.
13.  Elliott, Imperial  Spain,  pp.  300–301.  Lynch,  p.  8.  In  1609,  the
moriscos  constituted  perhaps  one-third  of  the  population  of  Valencia,  where
they were chiefly agricultural laborers. (Elliott, p. 300.)
14.  Ernest  John  Knapton, Europe,  1450–1815  (New  York,  1958),  pp.
238–9.
15. Chapman, pp. 109–10. In an analogous situation, English governments,
whether guided by Puritan or Anglican principles, were untroubled by sectarian
scruples. Irish Catholics in significant numbers were sent to Anglo-American
plantation colonies in the seventeenth century, where their substantial presence
caused the plantation owners some anxiety. (See The Invention of the White
Race, Volume One, p. 74, and chapter 12 and 13 below.)
16. James A. Rawley,  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History   (New
York, 1981), p. 81.
17.  Jan de  Vries, Dutch Rural Economy (New Haven, 1974), pp.  87–8.
Rich and Wilson give the proportion as three-fourths (Economy of Expanding
Europe, pp. 46–7).

18. De Vries, pp. 120, 184 and 203–34. De Vries concludes this section of
his  discussion  by  speculating  that  the  absense  of  a  numerous  displaced  and
unemployed agricultural population retarded Holland’s industrial development.
19. Rawley, p. 80.
20. De Vries, pp. 120, 184 and 203–34.
21. Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800  (New
York, 1965), p. 58.
22. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 58.
23.  Ibid.,  p.  218.  Although  in  1630  the  Dutch  seized  from  Portugal  the
northern  region of  Brazil and  called  it New  Holland,  they  were driven  out  in
1654,  in part because  “they  were never  able to  induce  adequate  numbers of
Dutchmen to settle in the faraway colony to influence the ethnic makeup of the
settlement.” (Johannes  M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade,
1600–1815 [Cambridge, 1990], p. 19.)
24.  See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Appendix C, p.
207.
25. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 219.
26.  Jean  Jacquart,  “French  Agriculture  in  the  Seventeenth  Century,”
translated by Judy Falkus, in Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic
History, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 165–84; 165, 177.
27. Ibid., p. 180.
28.  The  failure  of  one  line  of  agricultural  development  is  discussed  in
Sigmund  Diamond,  “An Experiment  in  ‘Feudalism’:  French-Canada  in  the
Seventeenth Century,” WMQ, series 3, 18:3–34 (1961).
29. W. J. Eccles, France in America (New York, 1972), pp. 76–7. Léon

Vignols,  “La  Mise  en  Valeur  du  Canada  à  l’Époque  Française,’  La  Revue
d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 16:720–95 (1928); p. 736.
30.  Eccles, France in America p. 77. In 1680, Robert LaSalle,  the noted
French  explorer,  reported  that  in  Canada  more  trade  goods  were  being
converted into beaver pelts than Indians were being converted into Christians.
(Vignols, “La Mise en Valeur,” p. 724.)
31. Hispaniola was the name first given  by the Spanish to  the island  that
the native people called Haiti. At the end of the seventeenth century, France
took over the entire island and called it St Domingue. It reassumed the name
Haiti when France lost possession as a result of the Haitian Revolution (1800–
1804). Spain finally reasserted its claim to the eastern portion of the island in
1844.  Since  that  time  the  island  has  remained  divided:  Haiti  in  the  west,  the
Dominican Republic in the east.
32. Eccles, France in America, p. 148.
33. Ibid., p. 149.
34. For a further discussion of the French reasons for turning away from
the  idea of  supplying plantation labor  from  among the French population,  see
W. J. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV (Toronto, 1964), especially pp. 52–8.
35.  Eccles  cites  a  1681 finding  that  only one  out  of every  twelve  of the
engagé laborers were surviving three years out of service, and another that in
the  eighteenth  century  only  one  out  of  every  three  African  laborers  were
surviving as long as three years of labor  in the French West Indies. (Eccles,
France in America, pp. 149 and 151.)
For  a  more  detailed  treatment  of  the  subject  of engagé  labor,  see  two
articles  by  Léon  Vignols:  “Les Antilles  Françaises  sous  l’Ancien  Régime  –

aspects  économiques  et  sociaux:  l’institution  des  engagés,  1626–1774,” La
Revue  d’Histoire  Économique  et  Sociale,  16:12–45  (1928);  and  “Une
Question mal posée: le travail manuel des blancs et des ésclaves aux Antilles
(XVIIe–XVIIIe  siècles),” Revue  Historique,  175:308–15  (Jan.–June  1935);
pp. 310–11.
36.  Charles  Woolsey  Cole, Colbert  and  a  Century  of  French
Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York, 1939), 2:19–20.
37.  Eccles, France in America, pp. 76,  148. See also A. J.  Sargent, The
Economic  Policy  of  Colbert  (London,  1899;  1968  reprint),  pp.  47–8;  and
Cole, pp. 21–2.
38. Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 174–5.
39. William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in
1492, 2nd ed (Madison, 1992), xxiii–xvi, xxviii (Table 1); Noble David Cook,
Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge, 1981). Both
Denevan  (p.  xxiii)  and  Cook  (p.  2)  note  the  irreconcilable  extremes  of  the
estimates  of  the  1492  population  of  Hispaniola,  which  range  from  sixty
thousand to 8 million. Denevan, taking into account newly reported evidence of
a devastating  epidemic  of  swine  flu in  1493,  agrees  with  studies  that  fix  the
population  at  about  1  million.  The  1514  figure  is  mid-range  of  a  general
consensus. (Cook, p. 2.)
40.  In  1574  there  remained in  Hispaniola only  two  Indian villages,  and in
Cuba  only  nine,  comprising  270  married  Indian  men.  (Bourne,  pp.  197–8.)
Certain countervailing factors operated to limit the degree of destruction of the
indigenous population of Puerto Rico in this period. (James L. Dietz, Economic
History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development
[Princeton,  1986],  p.  6;  Salvador  Brau, Ensayos:  Disquicisiones

Sociológicas [Rio Piedras, 1972], p. 15.) I am indebted to Bill Vila Andino for

directing me to these sources relative to the history of Puerto Rico.

41. Encomienda was the assignment of a given number of Indian laborers

to a Spanish employer. Repartimiento was the assignment of Indian laborers

by an encomendero to another employer. Indentured servitude was an

alternative form to the forced labor of the repartimiento. (See Charles Gibson,

Spain in America [New York, 1966], pp. 144–7.)

Repartimiento involved movement to workplaces outside of one’s village;

however, it required twenty men to be travelling to and from the mines, to

maintain a supply of ten working in the mine. (T. R. Fehrenbach, Fire and

Blood, A History of Mexico [New York, 1973], p. 225.) The repartimiento

miners were forced to labor at a wage one-fourth that of free laborers.

(Lynch, pp. 306–7.)

Ultimately, the Indian agricultural laboring class in Mexico, though

nominally free, was reduced to peonage, a form of practical bondage by debt

to the owner of the hacienda. (Gibson, pp. 118–19, 147,156).

42. Denevan, ed., Table 1, p. xxvii. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F.

Cook, The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610 (Berkeley,

1960), p. 48. Cf. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru,

1520–1620 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 2–3.

The decline of the indigenous population of Mexico ended in the middle or

late seventeenth century, but by the end of the eighteenth century their number

was still less than it had been in 1492.

43. Markham, who spells the word mitta, identifies the term as a native

Peruvian Quichua word meaning “time” or “turn.” (Clement R. Markham, A

History of Peru [1892; reprinted New York, 1968], p. 157.)
44.  Cook,  pp.  113–14,  246.  Compare  the  slightly  higher  estimate  of  11.7
million  for  the  Indian  population  of  the  “Central Andes”  at  the  time  of  the
arrival of the Spanish. (Denevan, p. xxviii.)
45.  Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 88. Basic  to the difficulties
of  the  Portuguese  in  Brazil  was  the  fact  that the  unstratified,  non-sedentary,
native social structure there – in contrast to the class-differentiated sedentary
societies  found  by  the  Spanish  in  Mexico  and  Peru  –  did  not  present
opportunities for co-optation of native social forms for colonialist purposes.
46. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of the Portuguese  social  control
problems in Brazil.
47.  The  Belgian  historian Charles  Verlinden,  a  preeminent  authority  on
slavery in medieval Europe, has contributed a series of studies showing the link
between medieval European and Ibero-American colonial slavery, noting both
parallels and divergences. He emphasizes the historical continuity that existed
between  slavery  in  medieval  European  societies,  including  the  Portuguese
plantation gambits in the Atlantic islands, on the one hand, and the labor supply
system  in  colonial  Ibero-America,  on  the  other.  See  Charles  Verlinden,  The
Beginning of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with  an Introduction,
translated by Yvonne Feccero (Ithaca, 1970), especially pp. 33–51, Chapter 2,
“Medieval Slavery and Colonial Slavery in America.”
48. African bondmen and bondwomen, nearly fifty thousand of whom were
brought  to  Europe  in  the  sixteenth  century,  worked  mainly  as  domestic
servants,  artisans  and  farmers,  and  enjoyed  a  considerable  degree  of  social
mobility. (Verlinden, p. 47; Rawley, pp. 24–5.)
49. Verlinden, p. 38.

50.  Basil  Davidson, The  African  Slave  Trade,  Precolonial  History,
1450–1850 (Boston, 1961), pp. 33–4.
51.  A.  J.  R.  Russell-Wood,  “Iberian  Expansion  and  the  Issue  of  Black
Slavery:  Changing  Portuguese  Attitudes,  1440–1770,” Journal  of  American
History, 83:16–42; 27.
52.  Philip  D.  Curtin, The  Atlantic  Slave  Trade:  A  Census  (Madison,
1969),  p.  116.  See  also  Russell-Wood,  p.  22;  Boxer,  Portuguese  Seaborne
Empire, pp. 88–9; Rawley, pp. 24–5.
53.  Verlinden,  p.  39.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  among  these Africans
brought  to  Portugal  was  the  putative  great-grandmother  of  Jesuit  priest
António Vieira (1608–1697), the famous royal adviser and advocate of sparing
the Brazilian Indians of the Maranho region by substituting laborers bought and
brought  from Angola.  (“Não  custa  a  crer  tivesse  vindo  a  bisavó  de Africa,
trazida  por  escrava  a  Portugal.”)  (Lúcio  de Azevedo, História  de  António
Vieira, multi-volume [Lisbon, 1992–], 1:14. See also: the Inquisition documents,
ibid., pp. 311–17; Mathias C. Kiemen, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the
Amazon Region, 1614–1693 [Washington, DC, 1954], p. 140.)
54. Verlinden, p. 40.
55. Wagner, p. 40. Chapman, p. 119. Rich Wilson, eds. p. 322.
56. Rawley, pp. 26–27. Postma, p. 31. George Scelle, “The Slave Trade in
the  Spanish  Colonies  of  America:  The  Asiento,”  American  Journal  of
International Law, 4:612–61 (1910), pp. 614, 618, 622.
57.  Basil  Williams, The  Whig  Supremacy,  1714–1760 ,  revised  2nd  ed.
(Oxford 1962), pp. 265 n. 1, 315.
58.  Estimates  considered  include:  W.  E.  B.  DuBois,  10  or  12  million

(Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois, Volume 1,

Selections, 1877–1934 [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press], p.

124) and J. D. Fage, 11,360,000 (A History of West Africa, 3rd. edition

[Cambridge, 1969], pp. 82–3, 225). David Brion Davis puts the number at a

minimum of 15 million (Slavery in Western Culture [Ithaca, 1966], p. 9).

Rawley estimates the number at 11,048,000 (Rawley, pp. 428–9). Philip D.

Curtin concludes that more than 8 million and fewer than 10.5 million Africans

survived the Middle Passage to arrive as bond-laborers in the Americas.

(Curtin, p. 87). Fage bases his estimate on Curtin, adding a percentage for

those who lost their lives during the voyage.

Discussing the overall impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa,

Davidson writes: “it appears reasonable to suggest that one way or another,

before and after embarkation, it cost Africa at least fifty million souls”

(Davidson, pp. 80–81). See also Walter Rodney, How Europe

Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982),

pp. 95–8. (This work was originally published in London and Dar es Salaam,

1972.) Compare Rawley, pp. 425–7.

59. Rawley, p. 428.

60. Rawley, p. 424. I hope that my remarks are not inconsistent with

Rawley’s intention.

61. Curtin, p. 87.

62. The concluding stanza of “We Have Fed You All for a Thousand

Years,” by “An Unknown Proletarian”, in IWW Songs, Songs of the

Workers, 27th edition (Chicago, 1939), p. 64. IWW stands for Industrial

Workers of the World.

63. See “The Enslavement Process in the Portuguese Dominions of King

Philip III of Spain in the Early Seventeenth Century” (1612), in Robert Edgar

Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery

in Brazil (Princeton, 1983), pp. 11–15.

English captain Thomas Phillips described the determined resistance of

captive Africans being assembled for shipment to Barbados in 1693 in his ship

the Hannibal. Though shackled two-by-two “to prevent their mutiny, or

swimming ashore,” “… they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and

ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being

taken up by our boats, which pursued them; they have more dreadful

apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have of hell. (“A Journal of a Voyage

in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694 from England to Africa and so

Forward to Barbadoes, by Thomas Phillips, Commander of the said Ship,” in

John and Awsham Churchill, comp., A Collection of Voyages and Travels

[Churchill’s Voyages], 6:171–239; 219.)

Compared with ships in Mediterranean or Baltic commerce, the slave ships

required a higher crew-to-tonnage ratio to hold down their rebellious cargoes.

(Kenneth L. Davies, The Royal African Company, [London, 1957], pp. 193–

4.) In this brutal commerce, writes Basil Davidson, “Every ship’s captain

feared revolt on board, and with good reason, for revolts were many.” (Basil

Davidson, Africa in History [New York, 1968], p. 187.) It was for fear of

revolt that 120 Africans were suffocated below decks, in order that the

remaining 380 could be delivered to New Spain (Mexico), on a Portuguese ship

in about 1612. (Conrad, p. 15.) See, in the same work, pp. 39–40, Document

1.7, “A Slave Revolt at Sea and Brutal Reprisals [1845]”.

64. See Appendix II-A.

65. “. the Moors, with their women and children were leaving their houses

as fast as they could, for they had seen their enemies” (Document 1.1, “The

Beginnings of the Portuguese-African Slave Trade in the Fifteenth Century, as

Described by Chronicler Gomes Eannes de Azurata,” in Conrad, pp. 5–11; p.6;

the name of the chronicler is given as Gomes Eanes de Zurara in. biographical

encyclopedias.)

66. In the nineteenth century, the liberation struggle tended to merge into

the general abolitionist and anti-colonialist struggles, especially in Cuba,

Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil and Uruguay. (In Richard Price, ed., Maroon

Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York, 1973), see:

Jose L. Franco, “Maroons and Slave Rebellions in the Spanish Territories,” p.

48; Miguel Acosta Saignes, “Life in a Venezuelan Cumbe,” p.73; David M.

Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico,” p. 99;

Roger Bastide, “The Other [than Palmares] Palenques,” p. 171. In Magnus

Mörner, ed., Race and Class in Latin America, (New York, 1970), see:

Carlos M. Rama, “The Passing of the Afro-Uruguayans From Caste Society

into Class Society,” pp. 21, 37–9; Richard Graham, “Action and Ideas in the

Abolitionist Movement in Brazil,” pp. 62–6.

The maroon settlements in the mountains in eastern Cuba “lasted till the

beginning of the first War of Independence in 1868, when the maroons joined

en masse the ranks of the Cuban Liberation Army.” (Franco, p. 47.)

67. See: C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and

the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963), p.411; Robin Blackburn,

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York,

1988), pp. 245–6.

68. Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London

(Albany, NY, 1869), p. 11. Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the

Virginia Company, the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York,

1932), pp. 28–9. Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in

the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the Material Conditions of the

People, based upon original records , 2 vols. (New York, 1895; Peter Smith

reprint, 1935), 1:10–19. Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States, 2

vols. (Boston and New York, 1890), pp. 562–5.

69. Las Casas denounced his Christian fellow countrymen on this account.

Spanish encomenderos, given Indians of Hispaniola into their care to teach

them the Catholic faith, merely “took care,” said Las Casas, to “send the men

into the mines, to make them drain them out gold.” (Bartolomé de Las Casas,

Brevisima Relación de la Destruicion de las Indias Occindentales, written

in 1539; first printed in 1552, excerpted in George Sanderlin, trans. and ed.,

Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Selection of his Writings (New York, 1971), p.

84.) The Indian cacique Hathuey, who had fled from Hispaniola to Cuba in

about 1511, explained to the people what he had learned of the Spanish

religion. Pointing to a small chest of gold and jewels, he said: “Behold here the

God of the Spaniards.” (Ibid., p. 87.)

Francis Bacon, the famous English essayist and statesman and member of

the Virginia Company, generalized as follows: “It cannot be affirmed (if one

speak ingenuously) that it was the propagation of the Christian faith that was

the adamant of that discovery, entry and plantation [of America]; but gold and

silver and temporal profit and glory.” (Bacon, Works, 7:20–21, “An

Advertisement Touching An Holy War.”)

70. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic

Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present, no. 70, pp. 31–73

(February 1976); p. 69. R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the

Sixteenth  Century  (New  York,  1912),  p.  195.  George  M.  Trevelyan,  A
Shortened History of England (New York, 1942), pp. 206–8.
71.  “This  fortress  built  by  Nature  for  herself/ Against  infection  and  the
hand  of war …/…  set in the  silver  sea, /  Which  serves  it  in the office  of a
wall” (Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1). This sentiment perhaps was
even more appropriate to Shakespeare’s time than in  the reign of Richard  II
(1377–99).
72. J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors (Oxford, 1952), p. 450. Tawney, p.
195–6. Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century (London,
1969), pp. 120–21,126–8,132–3, 201.
73. Mackie, pp. 374–5.
74. See Tawney’s discussion of the stimulating effect of the confiscation
and redistribution of monastic lands on the pace of the conversion of arable to
pasture land (Tawney pp. 379–84).
75. C. S. L. Davies believes that the turbulence of the following couple of
years  may  have  been  worsened  by  the  tardiness  of  their  reabsorption  into
civilian life. (“Slavery and the Protector Somerset: the Vagrancy Act of 1547,”
Economic History Review, 2nd series, 19:533–49 (1936); p. 538.)
This  retreat  from  France  marked  the  withdrawal  from  the  alliance  with
Charles V, as whose ally the English had invaded France in September 1544. It
was the beginning of the Tudor “island policy,” which relied on the build-up of
the  Royal  Navy  rather  than  on  military  campaigns  in  Europe  to  protect  the
English position. (Trevelyan, p. 216.)
76. C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Armies, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1966), pp.
14–16. For the number of English soldiers in the Tyrone War (1594–1603), see

The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, Chapter 5.
77.  Demographers’  corrected  figures,  based  on  London  bills  of  mortality
for seven plague years in the period 1563–1665 (three in the sixteenth century
and four in the seventeenth century), totalled 292,598, only one-fifth of them in
the  sixteenth  century.  (E. A.  Wrigley  and  R.  S.  Schofield,  The  Population
History  of  England,  1541–1871:  A  Reconstruction  [Cambridge,  Mass.,
1981], pp. 81–2 [Table 3.9].)
78.  Wrigley  and  Schofield,  pp.  531–5  (Table A3.3).  The  annual  rate  of
natural  increase  of  the  English  population  in  the  last  six  decades  of  the
sixteenth century averaged 0.76 percent contrasted with 0.36 and 0.57 percent
for  the  ten  decades  of  the  seventeenth  and  the  eighteenth  centuries
respectively. (Ibid., p. 183 [Table 6.10].)
79.  Lawrence  Stone,  taking  issue  with  Tawney,  asserts  that,  “It  was
relentless  demographic  growth  …  rather  than  the  enclosing  activities  of
monopolistic  landlords  which  …  was  responsible  for  the  rise  of  a  landless
labourer  class,  of  a  semi-employed  squatter  population  eking  out  a  living  in
cabins  in  the  wastes  and  heaths,  and  of  a  small  but  conscious  body  of
unemployed vagrants.”  (Lawrence  Stone,  Introduction  to  the  1967  edition of
Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century.)
80.  Joan  Thirsk  and  J.  P.  Cooper,  eds.,  Seventeenth-century  Economic
Documents (Oxford, 1972), p. 200.
81.  Sir  John  Clapham, A  Concise  History  of  Britain  from  the  Earliest
Times to 1750 (Cambridge, 1949; Princeton, 1963), pp. 251–2.
82. Thirsk and Cooper, eds., p. 1 (House of Commons, 26 February 1621).
83. Journals of the [English] House of Commons, I:711.

84.  E.  M.  Leonard, The  Early  History  of  English  Poor  Relief
(Cambridge, 1900), p. 266.
85.  John  Eastcott  Manahan,  “The  Cavalier  Remounted:  A  Study  of  the
Origins of Virginia’s Population, 1607–1700,” PhD Dissertation, University of
Virginia, 1946; p. 28.
86.  Leo  Francis  Stock,  ed., Proceedings  and  Debates  of  the  British
Parliaments  Respecting  North  America,  5  vols.  (Washington,  DC,  1924),
1:64, “Petition of the Virginia Company” (26 April 1624).
87. “A Letter of Advice  Written  to the  Duke  of  Buckingham” (1616),  in
Bacon, Works,  13:  13–24,  21.  Richard  Hakluyt, A  Discourse  of  Western
Planting  (1584),  in Collections  of  the  Maine Historical  Society,  2nd  ser.,
2:37  (1877).  R.  I.  (Richard  Johnson), Nova  Britannia  (1609),  p.  19.  The
original sources are given here, but these quotations, along with twice as many
more to the same point, are found in Knorr, pp. 42–4.
The opposing minority did not challenge the colony-makers on the fact of
the  surplus of common  labor.  Instead, they argued mainly from  the following
three principles: (1) that a large population was essential to the strength of the
realm;  (2)  that  colonies,  once  established,  might  become  unwelcome
competitors  in  the  markets  supplied  from  England;  and  (3)  that  emigration
might seriously reduce the home supply of skilled workers.
88. “A Consideration of the Cause in Question before the Lords touching
Depopulation,” British Museum Mss., Cottonian Mss., Titus F, iv, ff. 322–3 (5
July 1607). Reprinted in Kerridge, pp. 200–203.
89. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, pp. 8–11, for my
criticism  of  Winthrop  Jordan’s  use  of  the  term  “unthinking  decision”  in  his

psycho-cultural explanation of the origin of racial slavery.

2 English Background, with Anglo-American

Variations Noted

1. The religious issue in England, which culminated in the overthrow of the

Catholic King James II, and which paralleled the establishment of the racial

oppression of Catholics in Ireland, had its echoes in Maryland, which was

founded as a proprietary colony of Catholic convert George Calvert (c. 1580–

1632). A number of Protestant rebellions, interlinked with class conflict, were

launched in the province, with varying degrees of success, against a succession

of Lords Baltimore, until 1715 when the third Lord, Charles Calvert, converted

with his family to the Protestant religion. The difference between the fate of

Catholics in Maryland and of those in Ireland is betokened by the fact that the

land holdings of Maryland Catholics remained intact, even in the 1691–1715

period when the Calvert proprietorship of the colony was revoked on religious

grounds. In Ireland, as has been discussed in Volume One, the Catholic

landowning class was systematically expropriated by Protestants under the

Protestant Ascendancy regime of racial oppression. Irish Catholics brought to

Maryland as chattel bond-laborers did become the occasion for expressions of

ruling-class alarm, principally because of the worry that they would join the

African-American bond-laborers in class solidarity.

2. See Part Two below.

3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of

Nations (London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.), Book III, Chapter IV, p. 329.

Karl Marx, Thorold Rodgers, R. H. Tawney and Rodney Hilton present a

more sober view. Tawney’s concluding eloquence on this point should not be

missed. (R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

[New York, 1912] pp. 406–8.)

Eric Kerridge (Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century [London,

1969], Introduction), however, thinks that Tawney sacrificed scholarship to the

social dogma to which Tawney supposedly adhered as a member of the Fabian

Society and the Labour Party. By portraying capital as relentless and

remorseless, as the violator of common-law rights of peasants, and as the

perpetrator of giant exploitation of man by man. Tawney – as Kerridge sees it

– led “whole generations of history students into grievous error.”

For a sharp counter-criticism of Kerridge, see Lawrence Stone in the

Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1970, pp. 1135–6.

4. A paraphrase of Tawney, p. 264.

5. Estimates range from 20 percent mortality (Josiah Cox Russell,

“Demographic Patterns in History” Population Studies, no. 1, 1948) to

possibly half (J. H. Clapham and Eileen Power, eds., The Agrarian Life of

the Middle Ages [Cambridge, UK, 1944], Volume I of Cambridge Economic

History of Europe, p. 512).

The preamble of the 1349 Statute of Labourers posed the feudal lords’

problem more adequately than the remainder of the law served to assuage it:

“Because a great part of the people, and especially workmen and servants, late

died of the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters and the great

scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages.”

(23 Edw. Ill, The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first

year of the reign of King George, the Third, inclusive [London, 1786–

1800].)
6.  See  Appendix  II-B,  on  Wat  Tyler’s  Rebellion.  Historians  such  as
Charles Dobson (The Peasant Revolt of 1381 [London, 1970], p. 30) question
the  importance  of  the  revolt  as  a  factor  in  bringing  an  end  to  feudalism  in
England. Yet Dobson concedes that in the following century “tenants did not
find it impossible to resist pressure from their landlords.”
Thorold Rogers, on the other hand, declares that, “the gradual emancipation
of  the  serfs  [dates]  unquestionably  from  the  great  Insurrection  [of  1381].
… The peasant of the fourteenth century struck a blow for freedom … and he
won.” (Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History [London, 1889]
pp. 31 and 82.) Rodney Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant
Movements  and  the  English  Rising  of  1381  (London,  1973)  presents  an
equally sympathetic discussion of the revolt, but takes note of fateful shortfalls
in its accomplishments.
7. Rogers coined the term (p. 82).
8.  W.  H.  R.  Curtler,  The  Enclosure  and  Redistribution  of  Our  Land
(Oxford, 1920), p. 117.
9.  “It  is  not  easy  to  discover  any  economic  reason  why  the  cheap  wool
required  for  the  development  of  the  cloth  manufacturing  industry  should  not
have been supplied by the very peasants in whose cottages it was carded and
spun and woven” (Tawney, p. 407).
10.  The  peasants  in Ket’s  Rebellion  put  forward  a  program  which,  had
they  won,  would  have  given  a  severe  check  to  the  ascendancy  of  the
bourgeoisie.  (See  S.  T.  Bindoff, Ket’s  Rebellion,  1549   [London,  1949],
Historical Association, General Series G. 12.)

11. Tawney, p. 318.
12. Ibid., p. 333.
13.  For  the  most  comprehensive  treatment  of  this  event,  see  Madeleine
Hope  Dodds  and  Ruth  Dodds, The  Pilgrimage  of  Grace,  1536–1537  and
the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge 1915), 2 vols.
14. J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p.
385.
15. Dodds and Dodds, 1:220 and 2:225–6. Tawney, pp. 334–35.
16. Tawney, p. 11.
17.  Gilbert  Bernet, History  of  the  Reformation  (originally  published  in
1679–81 and 1714; republished Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865; 3 vols., cited in
George L. Craig and Charles Macfarlane, The Pictorial History of England,
being a History of the People as well as a History of the Kingdom, 4 vols.
(New  York,  1843),  2:464.  Edwin  F.  Gay,  “The  Midland  Revolt  and  the
Inquisition  of  Depopulation  of  1607,” Transactions  of  the  Royal Historical
Society, Vol. 18 (1904): 195–214; p. 203 n. 2. John Hales,  The Discourse of
the Common Weal, edited by E. Almond (circa 1549) (London, 1893), p. viii.
[Raphael]  Holinshed, Chronicles  of  England,  Scotland  and  Ireland
(originally  published  1577;  London,  1808; AMES  Reprint  [New York,  n.d.]),
3:963–85 (Holinshed’s account of Ket’s Rebellion).
18.  Tawney,  pp.  335–7.  Bindoff,  Ket’s  Rebellion ,  p.  9.  The  quotation  is
from  Bindoff.  (Although “privatizing”  is  my  own  anachronism,  it  seems
appropriate  for  this  earlier  process  of  “the  rich  stealing  the  property  of  the
poor.”)
The government did make a notable concession in response to the demands

of the rebels, although it proved to be a time-limited and fundamentally

ineffectual one. Two years after Ket’s Rebellion, Parliament enacted a law (5

& 6 Edw. VI 5) requiring that as much land be established in tillage as was in

tillage in the first reign of Henry VIII (1509). This law was repealed a decade

later by 5 Eliz. 2. (E. M. Leonard, “The Enclosure of Common Fields in the

Seventeenth Century,” in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic

History 3 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:227–56; p. 242 n. 65.)

19. Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of

Depopulations of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,

18:195–244 (1904); pp. 212, 216 n. 3, and 240.

An interesting example of how in formulating a deliberate policy of social

control, ruling-class concessions were weighed against the danger of

encouraging rising expectations, is to be noted in a House of Lords

commentary following the Midlands anti-enclosure revolt of 1607. If indeed

“depopulation” was to be adjudged the cause of the revolt, the House of Lords

wondered “Whether time may be fit to give remedy, when such

encouragement may move the people to seek redress by the like outrage, and

therefore in Edward the sixth his time was not pursued until two years after

the rebellion of Kett.” (Kerridge, pp. 200–203; p. 200, Document No. 27

[British Museum, Cottonian Manuscripts, Titus F. iv, ff. 322–3, “A

Consideration of the Cause in Question before the Lords touching

Depopulation,” July 6, 1607].)

20. Curtler, p. 117.

21. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic

Development in Pre-industrial Europe,’ Past and Present, 70(1976):31–73; 63

n. 80.

22.  D.  C.  Coleman, “Labour in  the  English Economy  of the  Seventeenth
Century,”  in  Carus-Wilson,  ed.,  2:291–308;  295  (originally  published  in
Economic  History  Review,  2nd  ser.,  8(1956), no.  3).  Sir  John  Clapham, A
Concise  History  of  Britain  from  the  Earliest  Times  to  1750   (Cambridge,
1949;  Princeton,  1963),  pp.  212–13.  “By  no  means  the  least  burden  of
complaint,” writes Kerridge (p. 132), “was that family farmers were deprived
of their livings and replaced by wage workers.”
23.  E.  H.  Phelps-Brown  and  Sheila  V.  Hopkins,  “Seven  Centuries  of
Building  Wages,”  in  Carus-Wilson,  ed.  2:168–78;  pp.  177–8  (originally
published  in Economica, vol. 22 [1955]). E.  H. Phelps-Brown and  Sheila V.
Hopkins,  “Seven  Centuries  of  the  Prices  of  Consumables  compared  with
Builders’ Wage-Rates” in Carus-Wilson, ed., 2:178–96; pp. 194–6. (originally
published in Economica, vol. 23 [1956]).
24. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), pp. 14–15.
25. Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry Seventh, in
Works, 6:124. Laslett, pp. 14–15. Coleman, 2:295.
In  1688,  Gregory  King  estimated  that  of  the  total  English  population  of
5,500,000,  nearly  one-fourth,  or  1,300,000,  were  just  such  “cottagers  and
paupers”  (Gregory  King,  “A  Scheme  of  the  Income  and  Expense  of  the
several Families of England calculated for the year 1688,” in Jan Thirsk and J.
P. Cooper, eds.,  Seventeenth-century Economic Documents [Oxford, 1972],
pp. 780–81).
26.  Phelps-Brown  and  Hopkins  (“Wage-Rates  and  Prices:  Evidence  for
Population  Pressure  in  the  Sixteenth  Century,” Economica,  24(1957):  289–
306) relate this question specifically to the wage earners, but I have taken the
liberty of giving it more general reference. The term “upheaval” is not precise,

although the peasant revolts of 1536, 1549 and 1607 certainly qualify for that

term. But an “upheaval” sufficient to check the ascendance of the bourgeoisie

and its heedless and heartless expropriation and impoverishment of the laboring

people did not occur. It is in this broader sense that I wish the matter to be

understood in the discussion that follows concerning the establishment of

bourgeois social control.

Rodney Hilton, a historian who identifies emotionally with the peasant

rebels, traces their defeat in the sixteenth century to the fourteenth-century

“failure of the rebels [behind John Ball and Wat Tyler in 1381] to end villeinage

and to extend the rights of free tenure [as against mere manorial copyhold

rights] to all tenants.” Such a thorough sweep, he maintains, “would have

meant the end of manorial jurisdiction … [and] it would have involved the

removal of all cases about land to the common law courts.… At one stroke the

material basis for deference and the respect for the hierarchy which had

dogged the English rural masses for centuries would have been removed.”

(Hilton, pp. 232 and 224).

The “long” sixteenth century might be taken to mean roughly 1500–1640.

For a discussion of this concept, see I. W. Wallerstein, The Modern World-

System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-

Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 67–9.

27. These gradations related to the degree of security of the tenant’s claim

to the land. See Tawney, Chapter III; Kerridge, Chapter 2; and Mildred

Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts

(New Haven, 1942), Chapter IV.

28. The term “forty-shilling freeholder” was first defined by Thomas

Littleton, in his treatise on Tenures, near the end of the fifteenth century.

Strictly interpreted, it would mean a person free of personal labor obligations to
any lord, and holding a hereditary lease on lands yielding at least forty shillings’
annual  income.  While  the  land-income  qualification  remained  constant,  the
term came to be not so strictly applied in other respects.
29. See Tawney, pp. 340–44. “It was an essential feature of Tudor policy
to foster the prosperity of the yeomanry, from whose ranks were recruited the
defenders of the realm” (Ephraim Lipson, The Economic History of England,
3 vols. [London, 1926, 1931, 1931]; 1:141).
30.  Francis  Bacon, History of the  Reign of King Henry VII,  in  Francis
Bacon, Works, 6:28–245; pp. 93–5.
31. Ibid., 6:95.
32. Though the producer “intends only his own security … [and] only his
own gain, … he is … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no
part of his intention” (Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV Chapter 2, p.
354). But where does one’s self-interest lie? In this yeoman-preserving policy,
the English ruling class was drawing a distinction between the self-interest of
the individual exploiter and the overriding self-interest of the exploiting class as
a whole.
33. Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, in Works, 6:94.
34. Ibid., p. 219.
35. Campbell.  Chapter IX,  “For the Common Weal,” is  the general basis
for this paragraph on the public functions of the yeomen.
36.  Thomas  Smith, De  Republica  Anglorum,  Discourse  on  the
Commonwealth of England (1583; 1906, edited by L. N. Alston; reprint New
York, 1974), pp. 43–4.

37. Bindoff, p. 216. Joseph Clayton, Robert Kett and the Norfolk Rising

(London, 1912), p. 217.

38. Gay, p. 216.

39. The Statute of Artificers, in The Statutes at Large from Magna

Charta to the forty-first Year of the Reign of King Goerge, the Third,

inclusive (London, 1786–1800).

40. The wage level, whether high or low, operates as an essential

mechanism of social stability. The limits of its fluctuation, however, are set by

the premises of the bourgeois social order itself. The formulation of this basic

principle has not been improved upon since Sir Bernard de Mandeville first set

it down in his Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. With

an Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools, and A Search into the Nature

of Society, 6th edition (London, 1732), pp. 193–4: “[T]hose that get their

Living by their daily Labour … have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable

but their Wants, which it is Prudence to relieve but Folly to cure. The only

thing then that can render [them] industrious, is a moderate quantity of Money;

for as too little will … either dispirit or make [them] Desperate, so too much

will make [them] Insolent and Lazy.’

41. 25. Edw. Ill, Stat. 1, c. 1 (1351); 37 Edw. Ill, c. 6 (1363); 12 Richard II,

c. 3–9 (1388); 13 Richard II, Stat. 1, c. 8 (1390); 6 Henry VI, c. 3 (1427); 8

Henry VI, c. 8 (1429); 23 Henry VI, c. 12 (1445); and 11 Henry VII, c. 72

(1495). In The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the forty-first year

of the Reign of King George, the Third, inclusive (London, 1786–1800).

See also W. E. Minchinton, ed. Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England

(republished, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972). This collection comprises

works by R. H. Tawnet originally published in Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial-

und  Wirtschaftsgeschichte,  XI  (1914),  pp.  307–37  and  533–64;  R.  Keith
Kelsall,  “Wage Regulation  under  the Statute  of Artificers” R. Keith Kensall,
and, “A Century of Wage Assessment in Hertfordshire, 1662–1772,” originally
published in English Historical Review, vol. 57 (1942):115–19.
42.  Phelps-Brown  and  Hopkins,  in  Carus-Wilson,  ed.,  pp.  171,  177,  and
194.
43.  Rodney  Hilton,  ed., The  Transition  from  Feudalism  to  Capitalism
(London, 1978), p. 27.
44. 1 Edw. VI, 3. In The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to the
forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third, inclusive.
45. C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery  and  the Protector Somerset:  the Vagrancy
Act of 1547,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19:533–49 (1966); 535–6.
“The 1547 act,” says Davies, “was aimed at a wider target than those bands of
wandering beggars which terrorized the Tudor countryside. The latter were a
useful  excuse  to  make  palatable  a  policy  of  enforced  employment,  and,  by
implication  at  least,  to  reduce  still  further  the  worker’s  limited  ability  to
bargain” (p. 536).
46.  1 Edw.  VI,  3, Statutes at Large  from  Magna  Charta  to the forty-
first Year of the Reign of King George, the Third.
47.  3  &  4  Edw.  VI,  16, Statutes  at  Large  from  Magna  Charta  to  the
forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third.
48. Cited in Lipson, 1:149.
49. Cited in ibid.
50. Davies, pp. 547–8.
51. Tawney, p. 11.

52.  John  Cheke,  “The  Hurt  of  Sedition”  (1549;  republished,  1569),  in
Holinshed, 3:987–1011.
53. Davies, p. 546.
54.  F.  W.  Russell,  Kett’s  Rebellion  in  Norfolk   (1859),  p.  48;  cited  in
Tawney, p. 337.
55. Bindoff, while calling it “the only resounding denunciation of villeinage
ever heard in Tudor England,” still thinks that it had no reference to the slavery
provided  by  the  1547  law;  he  considered  this  rebel  programmatic  point  as
merely  high-flown  symbolic  verbiage  borrowed  from  the  German  peasant
uprising of 1512 (Bindoff, pp. 12–13).
Diarmuid  MacCullogh rejects  Bindoff’s  speculation.  He  believes  that  the
anti-bondage  demand  was  narrowly  directed  against  Thomas  Howard,  late
Duke  of Norfolk, who  was  much  disliked for mistreatment of and refusal  to
manumit bondmen (villeins) on his East Anglia estates (Diarmuid MacCullogh,
“Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” Past and Present, 84(1979):36–59; p. 55).
56.  Davies,  p.  547.  The  original  voice  was  that  of  one  Fitzherbert,
Description  of  England,  which  Davies  cites  from  E.  R.  Cheyney,  “The
Disappearance of English Serfdom,” Economic History Review, vol. 15:20–37
(1900); 24.
57. Davies, p. 548.
58.  Davies  is  here  citing  Charles  Lyell, A  Second  Visit  to  the  United
States, 2 vols. (New York, 1849), 2:72. Davies’s reference is by way of the
citation  in  Kenneth  Stampp, The  Peculiar  Institution:  Slavery  in  the  Ante-
bellum South (New York, 1956), p. 399. I cannot explain why Stampp’s page
reference differs from mine.

59. Davies, p. 544, citing ms. Cecil Papers, 152/96. But a century after the
repeal of the 1547 law, it yet provided the model for the first Barbadian slave
code. (Rev. George Wilson Bridges,  The Annals of Jamaica, 2 vols. [London,
1827],  1:507.  Cited  by  Lewis  Cecil  Gray,  assisted  by  Esther  Katherine
Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2
vols. [Washington, DC, 1932], 1:347.)
60. R. H. Tawney, “The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices
of  the  Peace,”  in  Minchinton,  ed., Wage  Regulation  in  Pre-Industrial
England, pp. 47–53.
61. 5 Eliz. 4, “An Act touching the divers Orders for Artificers, Labourers,
Servants  of  Husbandry  and Apprentices.”  Good  modern  discussions  of  this
statute are to be found in Minchinton, ed. and in S. T. Bindoff, “The Making of
the Statute of Artificers,” in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams,
eds., Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961), pp. 56–94.
62. Bindoff, “Making of the Statute of Artificers,” p. 72.
63.  The  studies  made  by  Phelps-Brown  and Hopkins  would indicate  that
the  statute  did  not  affect  the  trend  in  nominal  or  real  wages.  (See  Carus-
Wilson, ed., 2:168–96, especially pp. 177–78 and 193–96.) But Tawney’s study
of magistrates’ records led him to believe that “it is probable that the practice
of assessing wages tended to keep them low by setting up a standard to which
the  master could appeal, [but, he adds] it is also probable that it was evaded
without much difficulty by the exceptionally competent journeyman, or by the
master  who  was  in  difficulties  through  a  shortage  of  labor”  (Tawney,
“Assessment of Wages,” pp. 92–3).
64.  53  Geo.  3,  c.  40, Statutes  of  the  United  Kingdom,  p.  191,  “Act  to
Repeal  the  Statute  of  Artificers.”  Reprinted  in  Joel  H.  Wiener,  ed.,  Great

Britain,  The  Lion  at  Home,  A  Documentary  History  of  Domestic  Policy,
1689–1973, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers in association with
R. R. Bowker Company, 1974), 1:913.
65.  The  testimony  of  Sir  Thomas  Smith,  who  had  himself  been  a  major
architect  of  the  Statute  of  Artificers  (see  Davies,  pp.  542–3),  provides  a
catalog of degrees of servitude and freedom  of  labor  as they  had  evolved  in
the sixteenth century: “Thus necessitie and want of bondmen hath made men
to use free men as bondmen to all servile services: but yet more liberally and
freely, and with more equalitie and moderation, than … slaves and bondemen
were  wont  to  be  used.  This  first  [apprenticeship]  and  Latter  [wage-labor]
fashion  of  temporall  [limited-term]  servitude,  and  upon  paction  [mutual
agreement of employer and employee] is used in all such countryes,  as have
left  off  the  old  accustomed  man[n]er  of  servaunts,  slaves,  bondemen  and
bondwomen, which was in use before they received the Christian faith.” (De
Republica Anglorum, p. 139 [lib. 3, ch. 9].)
66. For instance Rogers (p. 38); Tawney (“Assessment of Wages,” p. 49),
and  Marxists  such  as A.  L.  Morton  (A  People’s  History  of  England ,  2nd
edition [London, 1948], p. 173).
67. Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law, 5 vols., 5th edition
(Dublin  1786),  p.  359,  paragraphs  46–8.  The  remedy,  “when  any  Man
covenants  to  do  a  Thing,  …  and  that  cannot  be,  then  [he  is]  to  render
Damages for not doing of it.”
68. Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1619); edited, with an appendix,
by William Nelson, London, 1727), p. 179.
69. Under certain unusual circumstances – such as the death of a master
or  the  removal  of  his  master  to  another  place  –  the  apprentice,  if  he  were

willing, might be put with another master, but the apprentice could not be

compelled to accept the assignment against his will. (Dalton, pp. 222, 245; John

Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s

Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, second edition, 2 vols. [London,

1782], 2:266–7.)

70. In 1648 a promotional pamphlet for colonizing in Virginia was written

by Beauchamp Plantagenet entitled, Description of the Province of New

Albion. It was printed in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating

Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies of

North America from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, 4 vols.

(Washington, DC, 1836–46); vol. 2, no. 7.

71. A number of modern historians, such as Edwin F. Gay, W. H. R.

Curtler, and Eric Kerridge, stoutly maintain that the actual extent of the

economic dislocation occasioned by the Agrarian Revolution was exaggerated

in the original accounts, and subsequently by uncritical historians. To the

present writer these objections seem narrowly based. However that may be,

the fact remains that real wages declined from decade to decade throughout

the sixteenth century and into the first decade of the seventeenth, when they

were only 44 percent of what they had been in the first decade of the sixteenth

century (Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “… Prices of Consumables,” 2:194–5). It

is impossible to believe that such a catastrophic decline in real wages could

have occurred without massive unemployment.

72. Tawney, p. 273, citing Historical Manuscripts Commission, Marquis of

Salisbury, Part VII (November 1597, “Notes for the present Parliament”).

73. These laws included 14 Eliz. 5 (1572) and 39 Eliz. 4, 5 and 17.

74. Preamble to 14 Eliz. 5  (1572),  cited  in  George  Nicholls, A  history  of
the Country and Condition of the People, 3 vols. (supplementary volume by
Thomas Mackay) (1898; 1904; Augustus M. Kelley reprint, 1967), 1:157.
75. Nicholls, 1:178, citing John Stow, Survey of London and Westminster
(1598), book V, chapter 30.
76.  Richard  Hakluyt, A  Discourse  of  Western  Planting  (1584),  in
Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2nd ser., 2:37 (1877).
77. Nicholls, 1:178.
78. Sir Henry Knyvet, The Defense of the Realme (1596; Oxford, 1906),
p.  11.  Cited  in  Klaus  E.  Knorr,  British  Colonial  Theories  1570–1850
(Toronto, 1944), p. 43.
79. Nicholls, 1:188.
80. It was repealed by the National Assistance Act of 1948, Geo. 6, c. 29,
Public  General  Statutes  (1948),  declaring  that  “The  existing  poor  law  shall
cease to exist.” Reprinted in Wiener, ed., 4:3553–9.
81. Nicholls, I:189–92.
82.  E.  M.  Leonard,  255–6,  citing State Papers, Domestic, Vol. 185,  No.
86.
83. Tawney, pp. 275–6 and 280.
84.  I  cite  but  two  examples:  First, A  Virginia  law  passed  in April  1962
provided  that  “all  horses,  cattle,  and  hoggs”  belonging  to  any  African-
American  or  other  lifetime  bond-laborer  were,  in default  of  the  claim  of the
bond-laborer’s owner, to be “forfeited to  the use  of  the poore  of  the parish”
through the good offices of the churchwardens. (Hening, 3:103.)
Second, under the provisions of a Maryland law of 1717, any free African-

American who married a European-American, or any European-American

marrying a free African-American, was to be taken and sold by the county

court into a seven-year term of servitude, the proceeds of the sale to be

“applied to a [whites only] Public School.” (Thomas Bacon, comp., Laws of

Maryland at Large [Annapolis, 1765], Chapter XIII, Section V.)

85. Male domination – the practice and the doctrine – is a social institution

of such immemorial origin that both the makers and the recorders of history

may have mistaken it for a natural condition, and thus outside the scope of their

concerns. Except for those investigators specifically committed to exposing

and abolishing the wrongs that women, as women, have been forced to bear,

our historians have generally ignored the function of male supremacy as a

basic element of ruling-class social control.

86. The unmarried adult woman (“feme sole”) of the propertied classes

was a partial exception, she having some limited individual rights with regard to

property. But even so, because of the generally subordinate social status of

women she would find her position extremely vulnerable if she attempted to

capitalize on her property independently.

87. Of the 216 persons executed for treason for participating in the

Pilgrimage of Grace, only one, Margaret Cheyne, Lady Bulmer, was burned at

the stake. Many women had been involved in the ill-fated rebellion, and some

of them more directly and deeply than Cheyne. But Henry VIII preferred to

make examples rather than to carry through large-scale executions, and Lady

Bulmer was vulnerable. She and her husband were true lovers; some of their

children were born before she and John were married; and they remained

faithful to each other to the end. According to the Dodds, Henry’s aim was

“an object lesson to husbands, which should teach them [women] to dread their

husband’s confidence” (Dodds and Dodds, 2:214 and 226).

Anne Boleyn, convicted of treason on charges instigated by her husband,

Henry VIII, in 1636, after she had twice miscarried in an attempt to bear him

his much-desired male heir, was treated with greater mercy than that shown to

Margaret Cheyne a year later. Instead of being burned alive, Anne Boleyn

was beheaded. A specially skilled executioner with his special French sword

was brought from Calais for the occasion. Anne Boleyn privately insisted on

her innocence to the end, but she abstained from doing so publicly for fear of

bringing down the wrath of her husband on her daughter, Elizabeth, the future

queen. (William Douglas Hamilton, ed., A Chronicle of England During the

Reign of the Tudors from AD 1485 to 1559, by Charles Wriothesley

[hereafter referred to as Wriothesley’s Chronicle ] 2 vols. [London: Camden

Society, 1875 and 1877]).

But Henry’s purpose was constant. When Anne Seymour, whom he

married the day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, pleaded with him to desist

from his expropriation of church abbeys, a course that had brought on the

beginnings of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry warned her against meddling in

“his” affairs, and cowed her into silence by a direct reference to the fate of

her predecessor (Dodds and Dodds, 1:108).

88. Unless otherwise noted, the comments made here on social

relationships under feudalism in England are based on the following readings:

(1) Paul Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (London, 1927), especially

Chapter II, “Rights and Disabilities of the Villain,” and Chapter V, “The Servile

Peasantry and Manorial Records”; (2) idem, The Growth of the Manor, 2nd.

edition (London, 1911), especially Book III, Chapter III, “Social Classes”; (3)

H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (London, 1948), especially pp.

240–44; (4) a legal discussion of the status of the serf vis-à-vis that of the

lifetime bond-laborer in continental Anglo-America, set forth in a decision by

Judge Daniel Dulany, of the Maryland Provincial Court, 16 December 1767;

printed in Thomas Harris and John McHenry, Maryland Reports, being a

Series of the Most Important Cases argued and determined in the

Provincial Court and the Court of Appeals of the then Province of

Maryland from the year 1700 down to the American Revolution (New

York, 1809), 1:559–64, especially 560–61.

89. Once, during the days of the final paroxysms of English feudalism, an

agent of the Duke of Norfolk (in order to promote a prosecution of interest to

the Duke) entreated a certain widow whose testimony was to be required “to

be my Lord’s wewe [a form of the Anglo-Saxon word “widewe’ (widow)] by

the space of an whole year next following, and thereto he made her to be

bound in an obligation.” (“R. L. to John Paston,” 21 October 1471, in John

Warrington, ed., The Paston Letters, 2 vols. (London: Everyman, 1956), pp.

118–19. The editor notes that, “The widow of a feudal tenant was called the

lord’s widow.”

In Roman times, the Latin term “nativus” was applied to the personally

unfree, the born slave. In feudal England, its etymologically evolved form

“naif” was reserved for the serf woman, thus emphasizing her doubly servile

role, by virtue of class and gender. A man of the laboring classes, whether free

or serf, was simply termed “villein.”

90. At one point during the Pilgrimage of Grace, in 1536, non-gentlemen

rebels sought to put this sort of upper-class concern to their own purposes, but

in a way was equally informed with callous and cruel male supremacism.

Having the Earl of Cumberland besieged in Skipton Castle in Yorkshire, these

rebels threatened to use  the Earl’s two daughters  and his daughter-in-law as
shields in assaulting the castle; and if they failed in that, they said, they would
“violate  and  enforce  them  with  knaves  unto  my  Lord’s  great  discomfort”
(Dodds and Dodds, 1:210, citing James Gairdner, ed., Letters and Papers of
Henry VIII, [London, 1888], vol. XII [1], 1186).
91. Henry VIII justified it as a necessity for the “purity of the succession,”
when  he  had  his  second  and  fifth  wives  charged  with  “adultery,”  and
executed. (Wriothesley’s Chronicle , 1:xxxviii [Hamilton’s introduction]). This
was but a royal example; the same basic principles applied (though not with the
same  latitude  of  remedy)  wherever  women  and  inheritable  property  were
present in conjunction.
92. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 200–205.
93.  1  Edw.  VI,  3, The  Statutes  at  Large  from  Magna  Charta  to  the
forty-first year of the Reign of King George, the Third . See also Davies, p.
534.
94. Documents relating to the assessment of wages for the East Riding of
Yorkshire in 1593, Lancaster in 1595, and Rutland in 1610. (James E. Thorold
Rogers, A  History  of  Agriculture  and  Prices,  7  vols.  in  8  [London,  1886–
1902], 6:686–93.
95.  Francis  Bacon,  “The  Case  of  the  Post  Nati  of  Scotland”  (1608),  in
Works, 7:641–79; pp. 644–6.
96.  In  “An  Advertisement  Touching  An  Holy  War,”  an  uncompleted
dialogue  written  about  1618,  Bacon  has  one  of  his  characters  pose  a  case
which in his view would justify holy war: “Now let me put a feigned case (and
yet antiquity makes it doubtful whether it were fiction or history) of a land of

Amazons, where the whole government public and private, yea the militia itself,

was in the hands of women. I demand, is not such a preposterous government

(against the first order of nature, for women to rule over men) in itself void,

and to be suppressed?” The speaker then goes on to link such a government

with two others whose very existence would justify holy war for their

destruction: “… for those cases, of women to govern men, sons the fathers,

slaves freemen, are much in the same degree, all being perversions of the laws

of nature and nations.” (Works, 7:33).

Bacon understood: “And therefore Lycurgus [the great Spartan state-

builder], when one councelled him to dissolve the kingdom, and to establish

another form of estate, answered, ‘Sir, begin to do that which you advise first

at home in your own house;’ noting, that the chief of a family is as a king; and

that those that can least endure kings abroad, can be content to be kings at

home” (“Case of the Post Nati of Scotland,” Works, 7:633–4).

97. Dodds and Dodds, 2:216.

98. J. C. Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 4 vols. (London,

1886–92), 1:lii–liii. Wynstone’s social station is inferred from the fact that he is

not accorded any distinguishing term of address.

99. I must not commit the error for which I have criticized Jordan and

Degler, by making sweeping assertions about the “English mind.” All I mean

here is that I have not come across records of any contemporaries of Bacon

and Wynstone repudiating male privileges.

100. Virginia laws imposed a year of extra servitude for a male bond-

laborer and two years for a woman bond-laborer for marrying without the

consent of the owner, and laid a heavy fine on any minister who performed

such a marriage. (Hening, 1:252–3 [1643]; 2:114 [1662].)

A Maryland man, together with his wife, was forced by impoverishment to

enter into a seven-year term of bond-servitude. One day in 1748 when his wife

was bound up to undergo a whipping by her overseer, the husband endeavored

to loosen her bonds, avowing that he would untie her “If it cost me my

life … for she is my lawfull Wife.” He himself was severely beaten and the

whipping proceeded. When he appealed to the county court for redress, his

appeal was rejected. (Prince George’s County Court Records, Book HH, 165–

8, CR 34717, Maryland Hall of Records.)

101. In a previously mentioned decision (see The Invention of the White

Race, Volume One, pp. 89, 90) handed down by the Maryland Provincial Court

in 1767, Judge Dulany made this point clear in differentiating between the

status of the English villein and the lifetime hereditary bond-laborer in Anglo-

America. “If a neif married a freeman,” he said, “she became free, it being the

necessary consequence of her marriage, which placed her in the power of her

husband [even though this] without doubt was an injury to the lord.” But

“slaves are incapable of marriage …,” he said, and consequently “we do not

consider them as the objects of such laws as relate to the commerce between

the sexes. A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his

bed.” (1 Harris and McHenry, Appendix, pp. 560, 561, 563.)

“To debauch a Negro woman they do not think fornication … they still

have the feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.”

(Statement of Colonel Samuel Thomas, Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of

Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands for Mississippi, appended to the

Report of Major General Carl Schurz to President Andrew Johnson, 27 July

1865, on “Conditions of the South,” 39th Congress, 1st Session (1865–66),

Senate Executive Documents, Vol. 1, p. 81.

As noted in The Invention of the White Race, Volume One (p. 148), a

major motive of the Negro Exodus of 1879 was the necessity to escape the

gross imposition of the white male privilege against black women in the South.

See 46th Congress, 2nd Session (1879–80), Senate Report 693, Report and

Testimony of the Select Committee of the US Senate to Investigate the

Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the

Northern States; Part II, pp. 177–8; part III, pp. 382–3.

3 Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of

Social Control

1. Of sixty-eight mentioned by name, thirty-eight were “Council Members,”

and “Gentlemen” (Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of

Virginia and Admiral of New England , 2 vols., edited by Edward Arber and

A. G. Bradley [Edinburgh, 1910], 1:93–4. In subsequent references, this work

will be abbreviated Smith, Travels and Works.)

2. “I came to get gold, not to till soil like a peasant!” Cortés replied when it

was first suggested that he might receive a large grant of land in Cuba.

(William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the

Conquest of Peru [New York: Modern Library, n. d.], p. 130.)

3. “Until 1622 each side [Virginia colonists and Powhatan Indians] tried to

gain control over the other one.” (Christian F. Feest, “Virginia Algonquians,” in

Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast, Volume 15 of Handbook of North

American Indians, William C. Sturdevant, General Editor, 20 vols.

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–), 15:256.)
Waterhouse, Martin and Smith were speaking in the immediate aftermath
of the massive attack made by the Powhatan Indians on the English settlement
on 22 March 1622. (See Chapter 5.)
4.  Edward  Waterhouse,  “A  Declaration  of  the  State  of  the  Colony  …”
[1622], in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of
London,  4  vols.  (Washington,  DC,  1906–35);  3:541–79;  562–3  (hereafter
abbreviated RVC). Waterhouse appears to have been right about the decline of
Spanish silver and gold. The peak of receipts of bullion at Seville was reached
in the early 1590s. (See J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 [New York,
1964], p. 175.)
5.  See  Gonzalo Aquirre  Beltrán,  “The  Integration  of  the  Negro  into  the
National  Society  of  Mexico,”  in  Magnus  Mörner,  ed., Race  and  Class  in
Latin America (New York, 1970), p. 18.
6. RVC, 3:558–9.
7.  John  Martin,  “The  manner  howe  to  bringe  the  Indians  into  subjection
without  makinge  an  utter  exterpation  of  them  …”  [1622],  in RVC,  3:704–7;
706.
8.  Smith, Travels  and  Works ,  2:579  (1622). A  decade  before  he  got  to
Virginia, Smith had been captured in battle against the Turks in Hungary and
served in Turkey as a slave, eventually escaping through Russia. (Ibid., 1:360.)
9. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:955–6.
10. Anthropologist William M. Denevan remarks that he and other scholars
in  that  field  “more  and  more  find  a  causal  relationship  between  size  of
population and cultural change and evolution.” (William M. Denevan, ed., The

Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd edition [New York, 1992],

p. 235.) Though I am not an anthropologist, it seems to me that comparisons

such as that between Portugal and Hispaniola suggest a more indirect

relationship between population density and complexity of social structure; that

both increasing population density and class differentiation are functions of the

development of the productivity of labor. If the productivity of labor is such as

to provide a storable surplus, population density may be higher and, moreover,

a possibility of the seizure of power may exist through control of the surplus

product by a segment of the society; then, and only then, is a basis for class

differentiation present. Without the wheel and domesticated animals, the level

of disposable surplus in Portugal would have made it as impossible as it was in

contemporary Haiti for a parasitic leisure class to emerge. This is not meant to

be the basis for a wider comparison; Noble David Cook points out that

intensive agriculture with terracing and irrigation, like that of ancient Peru and

in some places in the modern Far East, makes possible a higher level of labor

productivity (generally expressed in calories per unit of cultivated area) than

that achieved in some other places cultivated with domesticated animals and

wheeled equipment.

11. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevisima relación de la Destrución de las

Indias (written in 1539; first printed in Spain in 1552), edited by André Saint-

Lu (Madrid, 1982), p. 72.

12. Las Casas commented sarcastically, that the Spanish encomenderos,

who were supposed to care for the souls of the island natives, merely took

“care … to send the men into the mines, to make them drain out golde” (ibid.,

p. 84).

13. Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York, 1966), pp. 51–2.

14. Las Casas, pp. 81–2.
15.  Salvador  Brau, La  Colonizacion  de  Puerto  Rico,  Desde  el
descumbrimiento de la Isla hasta la reversión a la corona española de los
privilegios de Colón, 4th edition (San Juan de Puerto Rico, 1969), pp. 142–63,
259.
16.  Salvador  Brau, Ensayos:  Disquicisiones Sociológicas  (Rio  Piedras,
1972),  p.  15.  Dietz, Economic  History  of  Puerto  Rico,  p.  6.  Las  Casas
reported that the natives of Hispaniola also resisted the Spanish by inter-island
flight (Las Casas, p. 83).
17.  Comprising  the  present-day  Mexican  states  of  Vera  Cruz,  Oaxaca,
Guerrero,  Puebla,  Tlaxcala,  Morelos,  Mexico,  Hidalgo,  Distrito  Federal,
Michoacán,  Jalisco,  Colima,  and  Nayarit,  plus  small  portions  of  Zacatecas,
Querétaro,  and  San Luis  Potosi  (William  T.  Sanders,  “The Population  of the
Central Mexican Region, the Basin of Mexico, and the Teotihuacán Valley in
the Sixteenth Century,” in Denevan, p. 87.
18. Denevan, p. xxviii, Table 1.
19.  “The  Central  Mexican  Symbiotic  Region,”  as  it  was  termed  by
demographer  William  T.  Sanders,  comprises the  present-day  Distrito Federal
and  the  states  of  Mexico  and  Morelos,  plus  southern  Hidalgo,  southwestern
Tlaxcala, and the western third of Puebla (Sanders, in Denevan ed., p. 87). For
population and population density figures, see ibid., pp. 130–31, Table 4.9. To
convert square kilometers to square miles, divide by 2.59.
20. Woodrow Borah and S. F. Cook,  The Population of Central Mexico
in 1548,  p.  7.  The Aztec  Empire  was  an alliance  of  three  city states  in  the
Valley  of  Mexico,  composed  of  Tenochitlan  (Mexico  City),  Tezcoco,  and

Tlacopan.
21. Borah and Cook, pp. 57, 66–67.
22. Gibson, p. 149. In another work, Gibson’s glossary defines cacique as
an  Aztec  “Indian  chief  or  local  ruler.”  (Charles  Gibson,  The  Aztecs  under
Spanish  Rule:  A  History  of  the  Indians  of  the  Valley  of  Mexico,  1519–
1810  [Stanford,  California,  1964],  p.  600).  According  to  the  dictionary,
cacique  originated  as  a  Haitian  word.  Clement  R.  Markham,  writing  of  the
caciques of Peru, tends to this view, but he allows the possibility that it derived
from  the  Arabic  term  for  chieftain, sheikh,  which  the  Spanish  adapted  for
Hispaniola. (Clement R. Markham, A History of Peru [1892; reprinted, New
York, 1968], p. 156.)
Socially  subordinate  to  the  Aztec caciques,  but  still  free,  were  the
commoners,  the  land-owning  but  tribute-paying macegual  class.  The  social
attributes  of  this  class  –  their  relatively  substantial  numbers,  their  wide
distribution,  and  their  direct  contact  with  the  serf-like mayeques  –  were
characteristics  typical  of  a  buffer  social  control  stratum.  But  I  do  not  know
whether they actually functioned as such. (See Borah and Cook, pp. 8, 60.)
23. Gibson, Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, pp. 78–80.
24. Gibson, Spain in America, p. 149.
25. Ibid., p. 149.
26. Ibid., pp. 150–51.
27. Markham, p. 156.
28. See ibid., p. 157; Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change,
pp. 330–31.
29.  James  Lockhart, Spanish Peru,  1532–1560:  A  Colonial  Society

(Madison, 1968), p. 210.
30.  Markham,  pp.  145–6,  152. At  the  ceremonial  banquet  in  Lima,  Sayri
Tupac  fingered  the  richly  fringed  table  covering,  saying,  “All  this  cloth  and
fringe were mine, and now they give me a thread of it for my sustenance and
that  of  all  my  house.”  Returning  to  his  own  ancient  capital,  Cuzco,  he
languished in melancholy and died not long after. (Ibid., p. 146.)
31.  The  sheer  population  decline  eventually  diminished  the  importance of
these executors of the colonial labor supply system. Between 1650 and 1680,
say Borah and Cook, “much of the Indian nobility [in Mexico] … vanished into
the general mass of commoners which had become too small for supporting an
upper [Indian] stratum.” (The Population of Central Mexico in 1548, p. 65.)
I do not intend to pursue the matter of the history of the replacement of this
Indian cacique  class  as  the  intermediate  stratum,  beyond  referring  to  the
finding  of  T.  R.  Fehrenbach  that  in  Mexico  this  role  came  to  be  played  by
descendants  of  European  fathers  and  non-European  mothers.  (T.  R.
Fehrenbach, Fire  and  Blood: A History  of  Mexico  [New York,  1973],  pp.
238, 240.)
32.  Borah  and  Cook,  pp.  59–60;  Lynch,  p.  305.  One  would  hope  that
Fehrenbach  intended  to  allow  room  for  an  ironic  interpretation  of  his
characterization  of  the  Chichimec  resistance  as  “merely  the  savage
struggles … against advancing civilization.” (Fehrenbach, p. 217.)
33. Markham, pp. 93–6.
34. After the defeat of the rising, the Spanish beheaded the young Tupac
Amaru  on  4 October  1571,  after  instructing  him  in the  Christian  religion  and
baptizing him. (Markham, pp. 152–3.)
35.  Five  years  after  Bacon’s  Rebellion,  Virginia  Governor  Thomas

Culpeper  made  that  point  in  his  appeal  to  the  English  government  for  the
continued  maintenance of two  companies  of  soldiers  in  Virginia to  prevent  a
renewal of rebellion. “There is a vast difference [he wrote] between Virginia
and Jamaica, Barbados and all other Island Plantations, by its situation on the
Terra  Firma.  They  have  little  to  fear  whilst  England  is  Master  of  the
Sea … [In  island colonies]  there is no shelter or hopes for Rebels to escape
long unpunished.” (Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 25 October
1681. In Great Britain Public Record Office, Colonial Papers, CO 5/1355, pp.
407–9; 407.)
36.  Charles  R.  Boxer, The  Portuguese  Seaborne  Empire  1415–1825
(New York, 1969), p. 86.
37.  Richard  Graham, The  Jesuit  Antonio  Vieira  and  his  Plans  for  the
Economic  Rehabilitation  of  Seventeenth-century  Portugal  (São  Paulo,
1978), p. 29.
38.  Mathias  C.  Kieman, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the  Amazon
Region, 1614–1693 (Washington, DC, 1954), p. 181.
39.  Graham,  p.  30.  Justification  was  found  for  holding  still  other  Indians
captured in “just wars” (ibid.).
40. Boxer, p. 88.
41. Kieman, p. 184.
42. See ibid., pp. 181–6.
43.  A  similar  effort  was  made,  but  ultimately  failed,  in  Spanish  Florida,
where,  writes  Robert  L.  Gold,  “the  [Franciscan]  mission  rather  than  the
encomienda  became  the  institutional  structure  upon  which  colonial  power
rested.”  “The  indigenous  peoples,  and  territories  of  Florida,”  he  continues,

“were integrated within a system of missions which offered the Spaniards the

typical opportunities of expansion, exploitation and proselytization.” Robert L.

Gold, Borderline Empires in Transition: The Triple-Nation Transfer of

Florida [Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1969(?)], pp. 6–7.

44. António José Saraiva, História e Utopia, Estudos sobre Vieira

(Lisbon, 1992), pp. 56–7.

45. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations:

European Demands and Indian Responses in North-eastern Brazil,” Journal

of American History, 83:43–79 (1978); 45–7. It was a society characterized

by “[a] communal or reciprocal attitude toward production and consumption, a

domestic mode of production, a society on [in?] which status was not derived

from economic ability” (p. 47).

46. In the following argument, I have relied upon the analysis by Helen C.

Rountree and the criteria she has adapted from Mary R. Haas defining strong

rulership (Helen C. Rountree, Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their

Traditional Culture [Norman, Oklahoma, 1989], especially Chapter 6, “Social

Distinctions”); upon Feest, in Handbook of North American Indians,

15:256–62; and upon Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia

in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895; reprinted 1935), 1:149,

157, 168, 175, 178.

47. This thesis is anticipated in The Invention of The White Race, Volume

One, pp. 12–13, 23–4, 69–70, and Appendix G. It must be understood that the

distinction made here – between societies with and without the intermediate

stratum – is different from that between kinship and non-kinship societies.

Kinship societies may in some cases be class-stratified, even though the two

patterns of social division – kinship and class – are contradictory to each other.

(See the discussion of Irish tribal society in Volume One.)

48. Maurice A. Mook, “The Aboriginal Population of Tidewater Virginia,”

American Anthropologist, 46:193–208 (1944); pp. 206–7. Mook considers

valid John Smith’s estimate that the indigenous population numbered 5,000

within a sixty-mile radius of Jamestown. (Smith, Travels and Works , 1:360.)

This was the most densely populated area of the “South Atlantic Slope” region,

wherein the total Powhatan Confederacy numbered some 8,000, in an area of

0.89 inhabitants per square mile, compared with 0.43 per square mile for the

entire region. Other scholars present somewhat different estimates, on the

basis of different population numbers and territorial extent, ranging as high as

just over two persons per square mile. (Rountree, p. 143 and Feest, in

Handbook of North American Indians, 15:256.) The most important primary

sources in this regard are John Smith, Map and Description of Virginia

(1612) and William Strachey, Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (c.

1616), in Smith, Travels and Works.

It should be noted that, from the vantage of a consciousness raised by the

civil rights struggles of the 1960s, anthropologists and historians have critically

reexamined the scholarly European-American estimates of the population north

of the Rio Grande prior to the contact with the exotic diseases of the

Europeans. They have persuasively argued that the actual numbers were some

ten times greater than those given by earlier authorities. For examples of the

earlier ethnography see: James Mooney, “The Powhatan Confederacy, Past

and Present,” American Anthropologist, 9:128–30; idem, “The Aboriginal

Population North of Mexico,” in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,

LXXX, No. 7 (1928), edited by J. R. Swanton, pp. 1–40; and A. L. Kroeber,

Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, University of

California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, XXXVIII

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1939). For examples of recent critical

examinations of the subject, see: Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America:

Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975);

Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinctions of the

New England Indians,” Human Biology, 45:485–506 (1973); and Henry F.

Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of

Techniques with a New Hampshire Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7:395–

416 (1966).

49. “It pleased God, after a while to send those people which were our

mortall enemies to releeve us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish, and Flesh in

great plentie … otherwise wee had all perished. Also wee were frequented by

diverse Kings in the Countrie, bringing us store of provision to our great

comfort.” (George Percy’s Discourse [1608?], in Philip L. Barbour, The

Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–1609 , 2 vols.

[Cambridge, 1969], 1:145.)

50. Rountree, p. 143.

51. The possibility of a Mexican-style encomienda and hacienda form of

sedentary labor reserve never arose. But if it had, it would surely have proved

unsuitable for the constant westward-rolling cycle of clearing and transplanting

characteristic of the tobacco monoculture to which the Chesapeake colonies

were committed almost from the moment, around 1618, when the bourgeoisie

got the first whiff of its profitable possibilities. Of Mexico and Peru, Gibson

says: “Native agriculture was little affected by European techniques or crop

innovations …” (Spain in America, p. 142.)

52. Though veteran soldiers were important in the Company period of

Virginian history which ended in 1624, the colony was by no means primarily a
military  force.  They  certainly  had  no  cavalry.  When  Hernado  Cortes  sailed
from Cuba to invade Mexico, his forces included 110 mariners and 553 soldiers
(including 32 crossbowmen and 13 men with firearms) plus 200 Cuban Indian
auxiliaries. The force brought 10 heavy guns, four lighter pieces, well furnished
with ammunition, and sixteen cavalry horses. (Prescott, pp. 145, 157.)
53. Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, the
Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), pp. 167–8.
“The  argument of technological superiority at that time was  a weak  one;
despite  guns  and  large  ships,  the  Europeans  could  not  wrest  a  living  from  a
terrain  which,  by  English  standards,  supported  an  exceptionally  large
population.” (Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European
Civilization,”  in  James  Morton  Smith,  ed., Seventeenth-Century  America,
Essays in Colonial History [Chapel Hill, 1959] pp. 33–60; 39.)
54. “The appearance of the English was probably far less alarming [to the
Indians] than 350 years of hindsight indicate it ought to have been” (Lurie, p.
36).
55.  “There was  never  any real  chance  of  holding  the  English back  after
1646 …” (Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians
of Virginia through Four Centuries [Norman, Oklahoma, 1990], p. 89.)
56. “Treaty of Peace with Necotowance, king of the Indians,” 5 October
1646 (Hening, 1:323–6).
57. See The Invention of The White Race, Volume One, pp. 36–8.
58. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
59. Hening, 2:15–16 (11 October 1660).

60. Hening, 2:346, 404, 440; Hening, 4:10, 102.
61. Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the
Present Limits of the United States (New York, 1913), pp. 108–9, 123–5.
62.  See  tabulations  of  peltry  exports  from  Carolina  and  Virginia  and  the
prices  of  various  trade  goods  in  the  early  eighteenth  century  in  Verner  W.
Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732  (Durham, North Carolina, 1928),
Appendices A and B.
63.  “The  native  tribes  were  encouraged  [by  South  Carolina  traders]  to
make war on one another and to sell their prisoners to the colonists.” (Lewis
C.  Gray,  assisted  by  Esther  K.  Thompson, History  of  Agriculture  in  the
Southern  United  States  to  1860  [Washington,  DC,  1932;  1958  reprint].  p.
361.) See also: Lauber, pp. 170–71; 183–4; 184 n. 1; 286; Gary B. Nash, Red,
White  and  Black:  The  Peoples  of  Early  America  (Englewood Cliffs,  New
Jersey, 1974), pp. 116–17; Chapman James Milling,  Red Carolinians (Chapel
Hill. 1940), p. 87.
64.  A  section  of  the  Cherokee  Indians  complained  in  1715  that  if  they
complied  with  English Yamassee War policy by ceasing to make war on the
Creek tribe, “they should have no way in getting Slaves to buy ammunition and
Clothing” (Crane, p. 182).
65. Nash, p. 152.
66. See note 61.
67. Ibid., pp. 283–9.
68.  No  separate  comment  on  the  second  thesis  is  attempted;  it  will  be
briefly noted in the context of the discussion of the third thesis. (See note 122.)
Lauber’s fourth thesis seems consistent with the argument I am presenting.

69.  Stuart  B.  Schwartz,  “Indian  Labor  and  New  World  Plantations:
European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” Journal of
American History, 83:43–79 (1978); pp. 76–8.
70.  Kiemen,  p.  183.  See  also  Graham,  pp.  28–31,  34–35;  the  quoted
phrase, used in a letter written by Vieira to Portugal’s King John in May 1653,
is  at  page  28.  Charles  Edward  Chapman, Colonial  Hispanic  America:  A
History (New York, 1933), p. 80.
71. Lauber, pp. 173–4.
72. The preamble of the first (1712) South Carolina slave law justifies its
enactment on the ground of the “barbarous, wild, savage natures” of Negroes
and Indians. Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America
from the Discovery  of the  Continent to the Organization  of Government
under  the  Federal  Constitution,  1497–1789,  3  vols.  (New  York,  1848),
2:271–2.
Alexander Stephens, who became the Vice-President of the slaveholders’
Confederacy, declared that the Confederacy was founded on “the great truth,
that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the
superior  race  –  is  his  natural  and  normal  condition.”  (Savannah  Georgia
speech, 21 March 1861, quoted in Michael P. Johnson,  Toward a Patriarchal
Republic:  The  Secession  of  Georgia  [Baton  Rouge,  1977]  p.  125.)  See
Volume  One  of  The  Invention  of  the  White  Race,  p.  287  n.  15,  for  other
examples.
73.  William  C.  Sturtevant,  “Creeks  into  Seminoles,”  in  Eleanor  Burke
Leacock  and  Nancy  Oestreich  Lurie,  eds., North  American  Indians  in
Historical Perspective (New York, 1971), p. 101. Nash, p. 117.

74. Lauber, p. 171.
75. Ibid., pp. 169, 174.
76. Ibid., pp. 126–7.
77. Bruce, 2:385, 386; Nash, p. 112.
78. Bruce, 1:572–3.
79.  Lauber,  pp.  108,  187.  Governor  Berkeley  reported  that  there  were
2,000 “black slaves” in Virginia in 1671. (Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record,
1676–77, Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepysian Library, document 2582.)
He did not offer an estimate of the number of Indian slaves. Lauber does not
seem  to  be  justified  in  implying  that  Berkeley  included  Indian  slaves  in  the
2,000 figure. (Lauber, p. 108.)
80. Indeed, Lauber says, “it would seem that the supply was sufficient to
nourish  the  system  of Indian  slavery  indefinitely  …”; he  adds,  however,  that
the Indian tribes were “generally remote from the English settlements.” (Ibid.,
p. 283.)
81. Ibid., pp. 124–7.
82.  The  total  population  was  9,580,  of  whom  only  41  percent  were  free
persons (1,360 men, 900 women and 1,700 children). In addition to Indians, the
bond-labor force included 4,100 Negroes (1,800 men, 1,100 women and 1,200
children), 43 percent of the total population, and 120 “whites”, 60 men and 60
women.  (Governor  and  Council  of  South  Carolina  to  the  Commissioners  of
Trade and Plantations, 17 September 1709. CSP, Col., 24:466–9.)
83.  Lauber,  p.  106.  Crane,  pp.  112–13.  I  have  not sought  to  check  their
respective sources to account for the substantial discrepancy between Lauber
and Crane regarding the number of African-Americans (Lauber 4,100; Crane:

2,900).
84. Lauber, pp. 124–7.
85.  Ibid.,  p.  106.  Lauber  in  this instance was  referring  to  South  Carolina
but, as has been noted, the same policy was followed in other colonies.
86. Ibid., pp. 169, 174. Crane, p. 113.
87. Crane, p. 113. Lauber, 245.
88. Nash, p. 155.
89. There is at least one record referring to Carolina chiefs as “cassiques”
(Crane,  p.  137). The  cited  sources  are  (1) CO 5/288,  p.  100, Report of  the
Committee,  Appointed  to  examine  into  the  Proceedings  of  the People of
Georgia [1737], and (2) Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society,
5:456, n. But in terms of the colonial power social control function, there was a
fundamental  difference  between  the  Carolina  chiefs  and  the  Mexican  and
Peruvian caciques; the Carolina chiefs were in no position to recruit from their
own tribes bond-laborers for the colonizing power.
90. The  space  advantage could be limited in  special  circumstances, as  in
the case of the Appalachees and, later, the Seminoles, on the Florida peninsula;
and  that  of the Wampanoags cut  off  by  the  English-allied Mohicans  of New
York in the 1675–76 Metacom War. See Nash, p. 127; and Sturtevant, p. 75.
91. Milling, p. 86. The Delaware were by then under the hegemony of the
Iroquois. (Ibid.) See also Nash, p. 118.
92. The Creeks moved away from the English in 1717. (Sturtevant, p. 101.)
The Tuscarora  plan  to  migrate  to  Pennsylvania  failed  in  1711  because  they
were not able to get timely approval from the Quakers there. (Nash, p. 147.)
93. A portion of the Wampanoags merged into the Mohicans after defeat

in  the  Metacom  War,  1675–76;  and  the  Delaware  tribe  was  formed  by  a
number  of  remnants  of  other  tribes.  (T.  J.  C.  Brasser,  “The  Coastal
Algonkians,” in Leacock and Lurie, eds., p. 75; The Natchez, after defeat by
the French in the Lower Mississippi in 1730, “in small bands sought refuge with
other southeastern tribes.” (Nash, p. 109.)
94.  The  phrase  was  used  by Ulrich  Bonnell  Phillips  in  contrasting  the
situations  of  Indians  and  Africans vis-à-vis  the  Anglo-American  plantation
colonists. (Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South [Boston,
1929], p. 160)
95. Crane, p. 113.
96.  William  S.  Willis,  “Divide  and  Rule:  Red,  White  and  Black  in  the
Southeast,” Journal of Negro History, 48:157–76 (1963); p. 162.
97. Ibid., p. 161.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., p. 162.
100. Lauber, pp. 172, 172 n. 1. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes on the
Southern  Frontier,” Journal  of  Negro  History,  33:53–18  (1948)  pp.  59–62.
Sturtevant, pp. 100, 101. Crane, pp. 255–6, 274. Willis, p. 159.
101. Crane, pp. 247–8.
102. Porter, pp. 67–8.
103. Crane, pp. 162–5.
104. Willis, p. 158.
105. For a highly informative dissertation on “Indian policy” of the English
colonial  governors  and  legislatures  of  New  York  and  Maryland,  and  the
involvement  of Indian  tribes  in the  rivalries  of  England,  France,  Holland  and

Sweden in the seventeenth century, see Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and
Transfiguration:  The  Susquehannock  Indians  in  the  Seventeenth  Century,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102:5–53 (1968).
106.  Crane,  pp.  254,  272–3,  275.  “[I]t  certainly  is  of  the  Highest
Consequence that they [the Cherokees] should be engaged in Your Majesty’s
Interest, for should they once take another party, not only Carolina, but Virginia
likewise  would  be  exposed  to  their  invasion”  (Commissioners  of  Trade  and
Plantations to King George I, 8 September 1721 [CO 324/10, pp. 367–8]).
The  thesis  that  history  repeats  itself  finds  expression  in  the  pithy
colloquialism “What goes around comes around.” History’s cruel revisit to the
Cherokees, the most “English” of all tribes, is briefly noted in The Invention of
the White Race, Volume One, pp. 33–4, 37, and 243 n. 44.
107. CO 324/10, pp. 367–8. (8 September 1621).
108. Bruce, 2:115–16. Porter, pp. 59, 63. Willis, p. 169. Sandford Winston,
“Indian Slavery in the Carolina Region,” Journal of Negro History,  19:430–
40 (1934); p. 439.
109. Nash, p. 294. He goes on to say, however, that the bounties offered
“often evoked little response on the part of the Indians” (ibid.).
110. Willis, p. 163. See also Winston, p. 439.
111. Hening 1:325–6; a similar “agreement” was imposed in South Carolina
following the 1711–12 Tuscarora War. (Winston, p. 439.)
An April  1700  treaty  between  the  English  colony  of  Maryland  and  the
Piscataway Indians provided that “[i]n case any servants or slaves run away
from  their  masters  to  any  Indian  towne  in  Oquotomaquah’s  territory,  the
Indians shall be bound to apprehend them and bring them to the next English

Plantation; any Indian who assists fugitives shall make their masters such

compensation as an Englishman ought to do in the like case.” (CSP, Col ,

18:150–52; 9 April 1700 Minutes of the Maryland Colony Council, a treaty

between the Governor of Maryland and Oquotomaquah, Emperor of

Piscataway.)

112. CSP, Col., 18:150–52.

113. The critical significance of “nearness” informed an order issued by

the South Carolina Proprietors in 1680, purposing to prohibit colonists from

engaging in the Indian slave trade within 200 miles of Charles Town; two years

later the exclusion zone was widened to 400 miles (Crane, pp. 138–9). The

settlers on the ground, for whom at that time the Indian slave trade was the

principal source of income, were able to evade and nullify such formal

restrictions. But their disregard of the “nearness” principle would eventually

become a major consideration in the ending of Anglo-American enslavement

of Indians.

114. Milling, pp. 86–7.

115. In the extremity of its situation, the South Carolina Provincial

government sent emissaries to Virginia to appeal for three hundred “white”

volunteers. These recruits were to be paid 22s. 6d. per month. In addition, for

each volunteer who came, the South Carolina Provincial government undertook

to send one African-American woman to Virginia. (Milling, pp. 144, 146–7,

149.)

South Carolina Governor Charles Craven reported to the English

government that he had enlisted about two hundred Afro-American men, “who

with a party of white men and Indians are marching toward the enemy,” the

Yamassees. (CSP, Col, 28:228 [23 May 1715].) Noting the irony of the

situation,  Kenneth  Porter  commented  on  its  uniqueness:  “So  far  as  I  can
discover, in no other part of the British colonies in North America were slaves
so employed.” (Porter, p. 55.)
116. Crane, p. 138.
117. CSP, Col. ,  13:  331–2,  Proprietors  of Carolina  to  Governor Colleton,
18 October 1690.
118.  Indian  employees  within  the  colony  played  an  important  part  in  the
surprise  Indian  attack  of  Good  Friday  1622.  At  the  same  time,  the  English
credited  an  Indian  employee  with  giving  the  English  warning  of  the  attack
(RVC, 3:555).
119.  “Colonial  Papers,”  folder  30,  item  29  (27  October  1709),  Virginia
State Archives, Richmond.
120.  Hening  4:78.  Morgan  Poitiaux  Robinson, Virginia  Counties,  Those
Arising from Virginia Legislation (Richmond, 1916), p. 95.
121.  William  Byrd  II  of  Westover  to  Mr  Ochs,  ca.  1735.  Virginia
Magazine  of  History  and  Biography,  9:225–8  (1902);  226.  This  periodical
will hereafter be abbreviated VMHB.
122.  Lauber’s  second  thesis  regarding  the  decline  of  Indian  slavery
involves  not a reduction  in  the  number  of  slaves  but  rather  an  official ethnic
reclassification.  Upon  the  birth  of  a  child  of  an  Indian  bond-laborer  whose
other  parent  was  an African-American,  the  Indian  identity  ended. Any such
child was classified as a Negro, or “mustee,” a corruption of the Spanish term
mestizo. Lauber considers this erasure of the Indian identity simply a matter of
the dominance of African genetic traits. (Lauber, p. 287.)
Lauber might better have considered the cases of African-American male

bond-laborers who escaped to Indians beyond the boundaries of the colonies,

and who “in most cases … seemed to have disappeared into Indian society

where they took Indian wives [and] produced children of mixed blood” (Nash

p. 296). Two “disappearances,” but in one case the “Indian” identity

disappears; in the other, the Negro identity disappears. The disappearance of

the Negro identity is by the normal assimilation of the immigrant. But the

disappearance of the Indian identity does not involve immigration from one

people to another. Rather, the official stripping-away of the Indian identity may

be better understood in relation to the following three social control

considerations: (1) it was a way of breaking the children from the Indian tribal

stems, with the enhanced propensity for running away that such ties entailed;

(2) it was a cheap way of formally accommodating the policy of

discontinuance of the enslavement of Indians without losing any bond-laborers;

and (3) it served to preserve and strengthen the system of white-skin privileges

of the European-American colonists, first of all the presumption of liberty.

4 The Fateful Addiction to “Present Profit”

1. The periodicity is noted in Wesley Frank Craven, The Dissolution of

the Virginia Company (New York, 1932) p. 47; Philip Alexander Bruce,

Institutional History of Virginia , 2 vols. (New York and London, 1910),

2:229; Philip Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and

New York, 1898), Table of contents; and by others.

2. RVC, 3:98–99 (Virginia Company. Instructions to George Yeardley, 18

November 1618, RVC, 3:98–109). The document is also available in

Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet, No. 4, The Three Charters of the

Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624 , with introduction by Samuel M.

Bemiss, pp. 95–109, and in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography ,

2:154–65 (July 1894). The title of this journal will hereafter be abbreviated

VMHB. See also: Brown, p. 309; Lyman G. Tyler, Narratives of Early

Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), “Proceedings of the Virginia

Assembly, 1619,” pp. 249–78; Craven pp. 52–54.

3. The well-known facts in this introductory paragraph are conveniently

presented in William W. Abbot, A Virginia Chronology, 1585–1783 ,

Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 4 (Williamsburg, 1957),

pp. 1–11.

4. Brown, pp. 332 and 650. See also 2:633–6.

5. A corollary of the “germ” theory is found in the idea sometimes

advanced that the history of the Company period offers a vindication of the

“free enterprise” economic system as against the supposed “collectivism” of

the efforts made during the first two phases of the Company period, namely up

to 1618. A. E. Smith is one who subscribes to this view. In his standard

general work in the field of “white servitude,” as it is called, Smith sees the

failure of the early efforts of the Virginia Company as due to a “kind of

collective farming” approach: “The colony was saved because private

individuals took over the activities formerly reserved for the company, and

made the profits of the free planters themselves the basis of the settlement’s

life”. (Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict

Labor in America, 1607–1776, [Chapel Hill, 1947; New York, 1971] p. 14.)

Considering the dearth of material on the origin of chattel bondage during

the Company period, however, Smith’s brief discussion of it (pp. 6–16) is still

valuable.
6.  Philip  A.  Bruce, Economic  History  of  Virginia  in  the  Seventeenth
Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1895), 1:586–7.
7. James C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia  (Baltimore, 1902),
pp. 31–2.
8. Eric E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 19.
9.  Lerone  Bennett  Jr, The  Shaping  of  Black  America  (Chicago,  1975),
pp. 40–41.
10. For example: Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period in American
History,  4  vols.  (New  Haven,  1914–1938);  Wesley  Frank  Craven, The
Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge,
1949);  idem, Colonies  in  Transition,  1660–1713  (New  York,  1967);  and
idem, White, Red and Black, The Seventeenth-Century Virginian ; Carl N.
Degler, Out of Our  Past (New York,  1959  and 1970);  Winthrop D. Jordan,
White  Over  Black,  American  Attitudes  Toward  the  Negro,  1550–1812 ,
(Chapel  Hill,  1968);  Richard  L.  Morton, Colonial  Virginia ,  2  vols.  (Chapel
Hill,  1960);  Edward  D.  Neill, Virginia  Carolorum   (Albany,  NY,  1886);
Herbert L. Osgood, American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols.
(New York, 1904–1907); Thomas J. Wertenbaker  Patrician and Plebeian in
Virginia (Charlottesville, 1910); idem, Virginia under the Stuarts  (Princeton,
1914); and idem, The Planters of Colonial Virginia, (Princeton, 1922).
11. By  Russell R.  Menard,  in  his  works Economy and Society  in Early
Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), especially pp. 191–201, 234–5, 268–9,
286,  and  “From  Servants  to  Slaves:  The  Transformation  of  the  Chesapeake
Labor  System,” Southern  Studies,  16:355–90  (1977);  and  by  David  W.
Galenson in his “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial

America,” Journal of Economic History, 41: 39–47 (1981), in his White

Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York, 1981),

and in Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English

America (New York, 1986).

As historians, Menard and Galenson are economists rather than political

economists. The class struggle between laborers and employers does not enter

at all into their discussions; indeed Menard spends a lot of time establishing the

absence of class struggle, especially between poor and rich, bond-laborer and

owner among European-Americans. They seem to presume that all the

employer had to do was to decide that a given category of laborers was more

advantageous to employers’ interests, and that all else automatically followed.

On this basis Menard challenges Edmund S. Morgan’s attempt to suggest that

racial oppression of the Negro was a deliberate decision by the ruling class.

Menard and Galenson offer their presumption under the rubric of “the divided

labor market.” Job discrimination in early colonial times is rationalized by

Menard and Galenson as a function of the common language of the English

master and servant and the skills that the English workers brought with them to

America. This discrimination was undergirded, Menard says, by “cultural

barriers and the depth of racial prejudice.” (Economy and Society, p. 270).

Menard and Galenson appear not to be disposed to look at the “white”

identity objectively.

12. Cited here from Hening, 1:64; 95. This work will hereafter be cited as

“Hening, [vol. no.]: [page no.].” See also: Jamestown 350th Anniversary

Booklet, No. 4, The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London,

1606–1624, with an introduction by Samuel M. Bemiss; and Brown.

13. Hening, 1:103.

14. See Table 5.1.
15.  Charles  E.  Hatch  Jr, The  First  Seventeen  Years,  Virginia,  1607–
1624, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet, No. 6  (Williamsburg, 1957), p.
10.
16. Brown, pp. 126–7.
17.  “Coppie  of  A  Letter  from  Virginia,  Dated  22nd  of  June,  1607.  The
Councell there to the Councell here in England;” printed in Alexander Brown,
The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890) 1:106–8; 107.
18. Bruce, Economic History, 1:588 n. 1.
19. Answers to a 1624 Royal Commission on “the reformation of Virginia”
(Smith, Travels and Works, pp. 615–20; pp. 616, 618).
20. Brown, First Republic (“John Rolfe’s Relation,” [1616]), pp. 135, 144.
Evarts  B.  Greene  and  V.  D.  Harrington,  American  Population  before  the
Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), p. 135.
21. See Thomas Niccolls’s complaint, p. 68.
22. Referring to the 1609 charter, Alexander Brown says: “this charter, it
seems, was drafted by Sir Edwin Sandys, possibly assisted by Lord [Francis]
Bacon” Genesis, 1:207.
23.  Sir  Fernando  Gorges  (1566–1647),  an  early  venturer  in  American
colonization  schemes,  took  note  of  the  predisposition  of  English  mercenaries
displaced  by  the  (1603–24)  peace  with  Spain  to  find  employment  of  their
talents  in  Virginia.  The  Spanish  spy  Molina  reported  from  Virginia  in  1613
rather  disparagingly  on  the  quality  of  the  English  soldiers  there,  while  noting
“the  great  assistance  they  have  rendered  in  Flanders  in  favor  of  Holland,
where  some  of  them  have  companies  [of  soldiers]  and  castles”  (Brown,

Genesis, 2:649). From 1607 to 1627, from Captain Edward Maria Wingfield to

S ir George Yeardley (second term), every head of the Virginia colony

government, except Francis Wyatt (a kinsman by marriage of the Sandys

clan), was a veteran of mercenary service in the Netherlands. They were, as

was said of Yeardley, “truly bred in that university of Warre, and Lowe

countries” (Brown, Genesis, 2:1065). Some also served against the Turks, and

others against the Irish in the brutal plantation of Ulster. (See Brown, Genesis

vol. 2, “Brief Biographies” of Delaware, Thomas Dale, Thomas Gates, George

Percy, John Ratcliffe, John Smith, Winfield and Yeardley.) Gates and Dale

each served in Holland, both before and after their terms as governor in

Virginia. When Gates went to Virginia, he brought his company from the

Netherlands to Virginia (by way of England) under the command of George

Yeardley (Brown, Genesis, 2:895). Such references leave no doubt that such

men constituted the chief supply source for the “Governors and Captaines for

peace and war” which the Company was sending to Virginia in this period.

(The quoted phrase is from “Briefe Declaration of the State of Things in

Virginia,” by the King’s Council for Virginia [1616] [Brown, Genesis, 2:775–9;

775]. As “governors” they would oversee the laboring people; as “captains”

they would organize war against the Indians or against Spanish or other

European intruders. It would seem that their role corresponded to that of the

“Servitors” in the plantation of Ulster. (See The Invention of the White Race,

Volume One, pp. 118–19.) See especially Darrett B. Rutman, “The Virginia

Company and Its Military Regime,” in Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Old

Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernathy (Charlottesville, 1964),

pp. 1–20. Sir Richard Moryson, whose participation in the conquest of Ireland

by starvation in the Tyrone War (1594–1603) has been noted in Volume One,

urged  “using  Irish veterans in Virginia.” Indeed three veterans of the Tyrone
War (see Volume One) did serve successively as governors of Virginia in the
1610–16  period, namely, Acting Governor Sir  Thomas  Gates  (promulgator of
the “Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial,” a draconian set of laws derived from
European military codes in which he was well versed), Governor Lord De La
Warre (Delaware) and Acting Governor Sir Thomas Dale. (See:  A Memorial
Volume  at  Virginia  Historical  Portraiture , Alexander  Willbourne  Weddell,
ed.,  [Richmond,  1930],  pp.  66,  68,  79,  80;  Darrett  B.  Rutman,  “Virginia
Company”  pp.  6–7;  idem, A  Militant  New  World,  1607–1640  [New York,
1970, a reprint of the author’s PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1959],
pp. 134–9.)
24.  “[T]obacco  not  militarism  was  to  prove  the  ‘sovereign  remedy’  for
Virginia’s ills,” writes Rutman (Militant New World, p. 231).
25. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 33.
26. Ibid., p. 34.
27. “Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruits by Planting in Virginia.
Exciting all such  as  be  well affected to  further  the same,”  By R. I.  (Robert
Johnson probably, London alderman, rich merchant, and Deputy Treasurer of
the  Virginia  Company  from  1616  to  1619),  London,  1609;  printed  in Force
Tracts, Vol. I, No. 6, p. 23.
28. “A Letter from the Councill and Company of the honourable Plantation
in Virginia to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Companies of London,” London,
1609; printed  in Brown, Genesis,  1:252–3. The  term “inmate,” as used here,
simply means “inhabitant.”
In  their  crusade  to  “end  welfare  as  we  know  it,”  our  modern-day
conservatives  will  doubtless  find  reassurance  in  this  ancient  expression  of

bourgeois “traditional values”.
29.  See  Bruce’s  comment  on  the  laborers  of  Charles  Hundred:  “The
probability  is  that  the  emancipated  laborers  of  Charles  Hundred  became
tenants” (Economic History 1:220).
30.  Ralph  Hamor, A True  Discourse  of  the  Present  Estate  of Virginia
(London, 1615); cited in Brown, First Republic pp. 205–11; p. 205.
31.  Bruce, Economic  History  1:213–15,  219–20.  Bruce  says:  “It  is
impossible to give the proportion between those who received and those who
did not receive this privilege” (p. 214 n. 2).
32. Deputy-Governor Sir Thomas Dale promulgated this code in mid-1611.
It  was  published  in  London  in  1612.  See  William  Strachey,  comp.,  For  the
Colony of Virginian Britannia, Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, edited
by  David  H.  Flaherty  (Charlottesville,  1969).  See  Tyler;  H.  R.  McIlwaine,
Minutes of the Council and General Court of Virginia  pp. 14,  62, 85,  93,
117, 163–64 (hereafter abbreviated MCGC;  Rutman, Militant New World, p.
135.
33. John  Rolfe, Relation of Virginia   (London,  1616),  reprinted  in part in
Brown, First  Republic,  pp.  226–9;  p.  227.  The  bracketed  emendations  are
Brown’s. The term “familie,” as used here and generally in documents cited in
this present work, includes the household of persons, and not merely the blood
and marriage kin.
As  late  as  1622,  the  official  catalogue  of  social  statuses  comprised
“Gentlemen,”  “Freemen,”  “Tenants,”  “Hired  Servants,”  and  “Apprentices”
(RVC, 3:658 [Governor Francis Wyatt’s proclamation against drunkenness, 21
June  1622]).  The  absence  of  an  “indentured  servant”  category  presumably

reflects  the  fact  that  the  plantation  bourgeoisie’s  option  for  chattel-bond
servitude was just then being made.
34.  Speaking  specifically  of  laborers  in  this  middle  period,  L.  D.  Scisco
states: “they were really hired employees and were treated as such. [P]rivate
property  in  labor  was  absent.”  (“The  Plantation  Type  of  Colony,”  American
Historical Review,  Vol.  VIII,  No.  2  [January  1903],  260–70;  pp.  261.)  This
periodical will hereafter be abbreviated AHR.
35.  “Newes  from  Virginia,”  by  Robert  Rich  (London,  1610),  in  Brown,
Genesis, 1:420–26; pp. 425–6. The author of “Newes from Virginia” was an
interested party and an enthusiast, of course; but so was the author of another
promotional  pamphlet,  titled  “Leah  and  Rachel,”  published  to  the  glory  of
Virginia and Maryland half a century later. In the later tract, however, there is
no  promise  of  “day  wages  for  the  laborer,”  but  rather  the  prospect  of  long-
term, unpaid, chattel bond-servitude, at the end of which the worker would find
that  the  right  to  land  was  but  “an  old  delusion.”  (“Leah  and  Rachel,  or,  the
Two  Fruitfull  Sisters  Virginia  and  Maryland:  Their  Present  Condition,
Impartially Stated and Related,” by John Hammond [London 1656]; printed in
Force Tracts, III, No. 3, esp. pp. 10–11.)
36. Rolfe, p. 229.
37. Bruce, Economic History, 1:220.
38. Edwin Sandys, Report to the June 1620 Court of the Virginia Company
of London, in Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London
(Albany, NY, 1869), p. 180.
39. Bruce, Economic History, 1:221, 227–8.
40.  Native  Virginia  tobacco  could  not  complete  with  the  product  of  the

Spanish  colonies  in  the world  market. John  Rolfe  induced  a  friendly  ship
captain to smuggle Trinidad and Venezuela tobacco seeds into Virginia. When
planted  in  Virginia  they  produced  the  “sweet-scented”  product  that  tobacco
users found as appealing as the Spanish-American product. The first shipment
to  England  was  made  in  1615–16.  George  Arent,  “The  Seed  from  which
Virginia Grew,” WMQ second series, 19:123–9 [1939], pp. 125–6.
41.  Bruce, Economic  History  2:566.  Here  Bruce  was  assuming  the
indefeasibility  of  the  capitalist  principle  of  the  “bottom  line,”  as  it  might  be
called  today.  When  that  assumption  was  brought  into  question  by  social
upheaval later  in the seventeenth century,  class  struggle  was  revealed  as  an
even  more  fundamental  determinant  of  Virginia’s  fate.  However,  when
considered simply in terms of the  historical impact of innovations in  capitalist
production  techniques  in  Anglo-America,  the  “discovery”  of  tobacco  as  a
profitable Virginia crop in 1616 can only be compared with the invention of the
cotton gin in 1793 (see The Invention  of the  White  Race, Volume One,  pp.
160–61).
42. Bruce, Economic History, 1:226.
43. Ibid., 1:222–3.
44. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 33–4.
45. Brown, Genesis, 2:776, 777–9.
46.  Bruce, Economic History, 1:225–6. Bruce comments:  “Beginning his
control of the affairs of Virginia with the strict enforcement of the regulation
that every cultivator of the ground should plant four acres in grain, he [Argall]
ended with this regulation in entire abeyance.”
47.  Brown, First Republic, p. 254. A  year later Argall was trying  to get

the price of tobacco raised vis-à-vis the magazine supplies (ibid., p. 279).
48. Ibid., p. 278.
49. Ibid., p. 279.
50. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 117.
51. Brown, Genesis, 2:550–51.
52.  Ibid.,  2:939;  “William  Lovelace”  biographical  note.  Argall  came  to
Virginia the possessor of a new patent for 400 acres as the transporter of eight
tenants.
53. “Letter of the Virginia Company to Deputy Governor Argall, 22 August
1618”; in Neill, History of the Virginia Company , pp. 114–19; p. 115. Argall
was  liable  to  criminal  prosecution  for  his  acts.  In  a  letter  to Lord  Delaware
regarding  Argall,  the  Company  said,  “the adventurers  …  are  hardly
restrayned  …  [,]  the  Kings  Court  in  progress[,]  from  going  to  the  Court  to
make  there complaynte  and  to  procure  his Majesty’s  command  to  fetch him
[Argall] home” (ibid, p. 119).
54. Ibid., p. 115.
55.  Recent  historians  have  seemed  more  inclined  to  suspend  judgment
regarding Argall’s actions. For examples of the earlier condemnatory view, see
Brown, First Republic,  and Bruce, Economic History; for the revised view,
see Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, and Morton.
56.  “The  Trades  Increase,”  by  R.  I.  (Robert  Johnson)  (London,  1615);
extract in Brown, Genesis, 2:766. “Briefe Declaration of the present state of
things in Virginia, and of a Division now made of some part of those Lands in
our Actuall possession, as well to all such as have adventured their moneyes
there, as also to those that are Planters there” (London, 1616) (ibid., 2:775–9).

57.  My  use  of  “headright”  here  is  anachronistic,  since  that  laconic  term
was not in vogue until some time later than 1616.
58. Brown, Genesis, 2:779.
59.  Events  were  to  show  that absentee  landlordism  was  not  practicable.
Rutman  notes  that  these  so-called  “  ‘particular  plantations’  were  soon  to
disappear altogether from Virginia, their owners having first lost money in their
undertakings then lost interest” (Rutman, Militant New World, pp. 307–8).
60. RVC, 2:350 (Virginia Company. A Delcaration of the State of Virginia.
12 April 1623). In the four years 1619 to 1622, the number of “adventurers,”
London  investors  in  Virginia  plantations,  increased  by  ten times  the  previous
number, and each of the ventures involved at least 100 men (ibid.).
61.  Bruce, Economic History, 1:507–9. The patents lapsed, however, for
failure to settle the lands with the required numbers of tenants (ibid., 1:505–6).
62. Minutes of the Quarterly meeting of the General Court of the Virginia
Company  of  London,  2  February  1619;  reprinted  in  Neill, History  of  the
Virginia Company, pp. 129–30.
63. “Newes from Virginia,” in Brown, Genesis, 1:420–26; p. 426.
64. See Table 5.1.
65. Pocahontas’s actual native name was Matoaka. She was christened by
the  English  “Rebecca.”  She  and  Rolfe  were  married  around  the  middle  of
April  1614.  Their  Virginia-born  son  was  named  Thomas.  (Brown, First
Republic, pp. 203, 204, 225).
66. Rolfe, p. 226.
67. The three southern plantation colonies of the seventeenth century were
Virginia,  founded  in  1607;  Maryland,  founded  in  1634;  and  South  Carolina,

founded in 1670. Virginia was first also in the volume of exports. Tobacco was

first in time and importance, and it held the leading place throughout the

colonial period. The commercial cultivation of rice in South Carolina did not

begin until the end of the seventeenth century. (Lewis C. Gray, assisted by

Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States

to 1860, 2 vols. [Washington, DC, 1932] 1:57–8.) As in substance, so in form:

Virginia was the pattern-setter for the institution of racial slavery in the

southern colonies and in the development of the social and legal structure of

white supremacy to reinforce the institution. “The discovery of the great

resource for profit in raising tobacco,” writes Ulrich B. Phillips, “gave the spur

to Virginia’s large-scale industry and her territorial expansion … [and] brought

about the methods of life which controlled the history of Virginia through the

following centuries and of the many colonies and states which borrowed her

plantation system” (in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old

South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, edited by Eugene

D. Genovese [Baton Rouge, 1968], p. 8). Emphasizing the pattern-setting role

of Virginia in legal institutions of white supremacy and racial slavery, Phillips

says: “the legislation of Virginia was copied with more or less modification by

all the governments from Delaware to Mississippi and Arkansas” (ibid., pp.

26–7).

Maryland was a proprietary colony of the Catholic Calverts, with

“manorial” land ownership, where – in contrast to Virginia – the “headright”

principle of land acquisition never applied to the importation of African

laborers. These circumstances appear to have been the cause of the “large

proportion” of limited-term bond-laborers held by small planters there.

(Menard, pp. 129, 189.)

South  Carolina  was  different  in  that  the  rice  plantation  economy  did  not
emerge there until after the pattern of racial slavery (including the system of
white-skin  privileges  of  European-American  workers)  had  been  firmly
established  in Virginia  and Maryland.  The general employment  of  European-
American  bond-laborers in  plantation field labor in  South Carolina came  late,
was  relatively  less  important  than  it  was  in  the  other  two  early  plantation
colonies, and was short-lived.
Unless  one  accepts  the “natural  racism”  theory  of  the  “psycho-cultural”
school, these Maryland and South Carolina distinctions vis-à-vis Virginia have
no  contrary  implications  for  the  thesis  being  developed  in  the  present  work,
namely  that  the  chattelization  of  English  plantation  labor  constituted  an
essential  precondition  of  the  emergence  of  the  subsequent  lifetime  chattel
bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers in continental Anglo-
America under the system of white supremacy and racial slavery.
68. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 44–6.
69. Ibid., pp. 47–57.
70. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 180.
71. Morgan, “The First American Boom,” WMQ 28:169–98 (1971).
72.  For  deriving  these  ratios  the  following  sources  were  used:  export
figures  from  Gray  pp.  21–2;  population  figures  from  Brown, First  Republic,
pp. 226, 309, 464.
73. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 59. RVC, 2:350.
74. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company pp. 176–9, 301.
75.  Ibid.,  p.  178.  In  1619,  the  Virginia Assembly  was  established  as  the
first  elected  legislative  body  in  Anglo-America.  At  its  first  meeting,  the

Assembly decreed tobacco to be the money of the colony, making it clear in
the  following  order  to  the  Cape  Merchant  of  the  Colony:  “you are  bound to
accept the Tobacco of  the Colony,  either  for  commodities  or  upon letters,  at
three shillings the beste and the second sort at 18d the pund, and this shallbe
your sufficient discharge.” Tyler, p. 260.
76. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company , p. 190 n. 33, 301. See
also Table 4.1.
77. VMHB, 2:154–65 (1894); pp. 155, 159. RVC, 3:99, 104 (“Instructions to
Yeardley,” RVC, 98–109 18 November 1618).
78. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:571.
79.  RVC,  3:584  (Virginia  Colony  Council  letter  to  Virginia  Company  in
London, January 1621/22).
80.  RVC,  3:479  (Virginia  Company  of  London  Instructions  to  Virginia
Colony Governor and Council, 24 July 1621, 3:468–84); 3:489 (Treasurer and
Company in London to Virginia Colony Council, 25 July 1621, 3:485–90).
81. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 149–50.
82. Ibid., p. 184.
83. RVC, 3:98–108.
84.  “A  Briefe  Declaration”  (by  the  Virginia  Company),  Brown,  Genesis
2:774–9.
85.  Force  Tracts ,  III,  no.  5,  pp.  14–15.  Cf.  Craven, Dissolution  of  the
Virginia Company, p. 56; Bruce, Economic History, 1:231.
86. “Instructions to Yeardley,” RVC, 3:108.
87. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 100–102, 191.

88. Ibid., p. 189.
89. Gray, 1:259.
90.  Craven, Dissolution  of the Virginia Company , pp,  230–32. “Sandys
had accepted the Company’s dependence on tobacco” (ibid., p. 178).
91.  At  a  meeting  of  the  Virginia  Company  Court  in  July  1621,  Samuel
Wrote,  member  of  the  King’s  Council  for  Virginia,  called  attention  to  the
unreality of the high official price of tobacco in Virginia, and deplored the fact
that “It hath not been possible hitherto to awaken out of this straunge dream.”
(Virginia Company of London, Court Book I, cited in Gray, 1:260.)
92. The king got one-third of the crop and that transported to England free
of charge, plus a duty of half a shilling on the other two-thirds. Furthermore, at
a time when the Virginia crop sent to England would reach just 60,000 pounds
the  Company  was  required  to  agree  to  the  English  import  of  not  less  than
80,000 pounds of Spanish-produced tobacco, an amount approximatley equal to
the  crops being sent  from  Virginia at that time. (Craven, Dissolution  of  the
Virginia  Company ,  pp.  233–4.  Bruce, Economic  History,  1:269–70.  See
Gray, 1:22, for the 1622 Virginia tobacco export figure.)
93.  See,  for  example:  King  James  I, Counter  Blast  (1610);  Gray,  1:25,
180–81,  231.  “It  was  easier  to  decide  upon  such  limitations  [on  tobacco-
growing]  than to  make them efffective in  Virginia.” (Craven, Dissolution  of
the Virginia Company, p. 176.)
94. CSP, Col., 1:117, Governor John Harvey’s Report to the Privy Council,
29 May 1630. The price recovered to 6 pence a pound in 1635, but from then
to  1660  the  price  averaged  no  more  than  2¼  pence.  A  major  crisis  of
overproduction  in  1638  brought  prices  down  to  extremely  low  levels,  says

Gray, and even with recovery prices ranged between 1½ pence per pound until
the mid-1660s. (Gray, 1:26.) See also Russell R. Menard’s tabulations of prices
paid for tobacco in the Chesapeake (Economy and Society in Early Colonial
Maryland, pp. 444–50, Tables A-5 and A-6).
In London in 1634, “Virginia tobacco was so low in price that it would no
longer bear the old duty of twelve pence a pound; nor even the nine pence to
which the duty had been reduced in 1623.” (Aspinwall Papers, Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections, Series 4, IX [Boston, 1871], p. 71.)
95. Brown, First Republic, pp. 562–3. See also Bruce, Economic History,
1:255.
96.  Gray,  Vol.  1,  Chapter  XII.  See  Chapter  9 of this  volume  for  further
treatment of the diversification of the Virginia economy.
97. This is another insight to be had from the frequently quoted comment of
the Secretary of the Virginia Colony, John Pory, in 1619: “Our principall wealth
consisteth  of  servants”  (Pory  to  Sir  Dudley  Carleton,  30  September  1619
[RVC,  2:219–22;  221]).  In  1618  a  method  was  suggested  of  airing  tobacco
leaves by hanging them on strings rather than laying them on loose hay. When
they could get the needed string from England, the colonists used this method
which, by preserving tobacco, raised the productivity of labor. Aside from this
innovation, however, there was to be but little technological advance in tobacco
raising, and that would come slowly. (Brown, First Republic, p. 260. Craven,
Dissolution of the Virginia Company , p. 181. See “Pounds of Tobacco Per
Laborer,  1619–1699,”  Menard, Economy  and  Society  in  Early  Colonial
Maryland, p. 462.)
98. Brown, First Republic, pp. 248–9.
99. Ibid., p. 348.

100. Minutes of the meeting of the Virginia Company Court, 17 November
1619 (RVC,  2:271).  See The  Invention  of  the  White  Race,  Volume  One,  p.
118, for the shipment into exile of mainly  Ulster Irish rebels in 1610. George
Hill  notes  the  1619  proposal  of  the  English  Lord  Lieutenant  of  Ireland  for
shipping  away  Irish  “woodkernes.”  (George  Hill, An  Historical  Account  of
the plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century,
1608–1620 [Belfast 1877], p. iii, n. 2.)
101.  They  were  forbidden  to  return except by  express  permission  of the
Privy Council as provided in a General Order of 24 March 1617. Acts of the
Privy  Council  of  England,  Colonial  Series,  Vol.  I,  1618–1638  (London,
1908), pp. 12–13, 19, 22, 52, 55, 56. See also Bruce, Economic History 1:603–
4: “At this time, there were three hundred crimes in the calendar from which
capital  punishment  was  inflicted.  It  seemed  to  be  too harsh  a  punishment  to
impose deaths for the smallest offense. Transportation was a compromise on
the part of the English judges with the more humane feelings of their nature.”
102. This man was put to death in Virginia in 1623 for the theft of a cow
worth £3 sterling. The cow was the property of the once and future governor
Yeardley  who  himself  had  stolen  with  impunity  fifty-four  men  from  the
Virginia Company, his employer, two years previously. (MCGC, 4, 5.)
103. Brown, First Republic, pp. 273–4.
104.  RVC,  2:270–71  (General  Court  of  the  Virginia  Company of  London
meeting, 17 November 1619).
105. RVC, 2:271.
106.  Acts  of  the  Privy  Council,  Colonial,  1:28–9  (31  January  1619/20).
Prior  to  1750,  the  legal  year  began  on  25  March.  Therefore  dates  falling

between 1 January and 24 March inclusive appear in the records in the form
shown here. Where one year only is indicated, it is to be understood according
to the modern calendar.
107. Brown, First Republic, p. 375.
108. RVC, 2:271.
109. Gray, 1:366. Bruce, Economic History, 1:629–30.
110. This is the average of estimates in the record as made by: John Rolfe,
in  1619,  250 pounds (Smith, Travels and Works ,  2:541); John  Pory,  in  1619,
two  “rare  cases”  averaging  about  1,054 pounds  according  the  1619  price  of
42d.  in  London  (RVC,  3:221);  William  Spencer,  recalling  his  experience  in
1620, which works out to an average of 538 pounds (RVC, 1:256, 268); William
Capps, in 1623, 500 pounds (RVC, 4.38); and Richard Brewster, also in 1623,
700  pounds  (RVC,  2:524).  Russell  Menard’s  estimate  of  712  pounds  per
worker for the period 1619–29 appears to be based on his figures for this same
five-year 1619–23 period. (Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial
Maryland, pp. 460, 462.) Although my average figure of 712 per pounds per
worker  is  exactly  the  same  as  Menard’s,  they  were  not  derived  altogether
from the same sources.
111. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 444,
Table  A-5,  “Chesapeake  Tobacco  Prices.  1618–1658.”  The  average  is
calculated from fourteen citations (all but two being for 1619 and 1620) mainly
from  the Records of the Virginia Company ; I did not count those tagged as
“overstatements.”  Averaging  by  the  year,  the  price  paid  in  Virginia  for  the
1619–23 period was 20d. (Ibid. p. 448, Table A-6.)
112.  Ibid.  This  is  the  average  of  fifteen  instances  of  London  wholesale
prices.

113.  RVC,  3:264  (William  Weldon,  letter  to  Sir  Edwin  Sandys,  6  March
1619/20).
114. Ibid.
115. See discussion  and  notation  in  Chapter 6,  under  the heading “Bond-
servitude was not an adaptation of English practice.”
116.  Records  of Magistrate’s  Court,  Netherstone,  Somerset,  England,  19
October  and 13  November  1618, Correspondence, Domestic, James I,  vol.
103, Nos. 42, 42, I, 87 and 87 I; reprinted in VMHB, vi (1898–99), pp. 228–30.
117.  Neill, History  of  the  Virginia  Company ,  p.  121.  Brown, First
Republic, p. 292.
118. Brown, First Republic, p. 376. The late Professor Richard L. Morton
made the erroneous statement that “the women who were sent to be wives” in
Virginia were not sold like merchandise, and that the enterprisers did not intend
to make a profit on the transaction. (Colonial Virginia, 1:71.)
119. Virginia Company Court, 22  June 1620, RVC, 3:115. See also  David
Ransome, “Wives for Virginia,” WMQ 48:3–18 (1991).
120. RVC, 3:313.
121. Brown, First Republic, pp. 459, 461. Actually a few of these women
arrived in January on the pinnace Tiger.
122.  Craven, Dissolution  of  the  Virginia  Colony ,  pp.  191–2.  Of  these
five  subsidiary  joint-stocks  launched  in  1621,  only  the  matrimonial  business
returned a profit (RVC, 2:15).
123.  Virginia  Company  in  London  to  the  Virginia  Colony  Council  in
Virginia, 12 April 1621; in Neill,  History of the Virginia Company, pp. 233–9;

234–5.
124. Ibid., pp. 241–50.
125. Ibid., p. 235.
126. MCGC, p. 54.
127. Neill, History of the Virginia Company, p. 235.
128. Ibid.
129.  Manchester  Papers,  in Historical Manuscripts  Commision,  Eighth
Report  (London,  1881),  Part  I,  Appendix,  p.  41  (hereafter  referred  to  as
Manchester Papers).
130. Ibid.
131. MCGC, pp. 154–5 (11 October 1627).
132. Brown, First Republic, p. 627.
133. MCGC, pp. 117, 142 (11 October 1626 and 4 April 1627).
134. Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture: Patterns of
Colonia  America,” WMQ  3d  ser.,  2:113–53  (1945),  p.  114.  Historical
Statistics  of  the  United  States,  Colonial Times  to  1970  (Washington,  DC,
1975), Series Z-121–131 (p. 1171).
135. Moller, p. 115, citing J. A. Goodman,  The Pilgrim Republic  (Boston
and New York, 1920), pp. 182–4.
136. Rutman, Militant New World, p. 355.
137. Moller, pp. 116–17. John C. Hotten,  The Original Lists of Persons
of  Quality,  Emigrants;  Religious  Exiles;  Political  Rebels;  Serving  Men
Sold for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed
and  Others  Who  went  from  Great  Britain  to  the  American  plantations,

1600–1700 (London, 1874), pp. 35–138. Hereafter noted as Hotten, Original
Lists.
138. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 145.
139. “The Puritans, broadly speaking, arrived by families, although they had
a considerable surplus of men. The movement to Virginia, on the other hand,
consisted predominantly of male workers” (Moller, p. 118).
140. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern
Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 34.
141.  Bruce, Economic  History,  1:538–89;  Morgan,  p.  176; A.  E.  Smith,
pp. 14–16.
142. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Colony, p. 311.
143.  John  Smyth  of  Nibley  Papers,  documents  in  the  New York  Public
Library, calendared in the New York Public Library  Bulletin, 1:68–72 (1897),
and 3:276–95 (1899).
144.  “A  Lyste  of  the  men  nowe  sent  for  plantacon  under  Captayne
Woodleefe …” (September 1619), RVC, 3:197–8.
145. Ibid. See also  “Capt Woodleefes Bill,  Setpember, 1619,”  New York
Public Library Bulletin, 3:221 (1899), p. 221.
146. “Berkeley, Thorpe, Tracy, and Smith. Agreement with Richard Smyth
and Wife and Others” (1 September 1620), RVC, 3:393–4.
147. A. E. Smith, p. 14.
148. RVC, 3:210–11 (Indenture between the Four Adventurers of Berkeley
Hundred  and  Robert  Coopy  of  North  Nibley,  7  September  1619).  Among
thirteen other men  engaged  for  Berkeley Hundred  in  that same month,  there
were two other Coopys – Thomas and Samuell – but I do not know whether

they were kin.
149. RVC, 3:210–11.
150. A. E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage, p. 15.
151.  Part  of  “Drafts  of  a  Statement  touching  the  miserable  condition  of
Virginia  [May  and  June,  1623]  by Alderman  Robert  Johnson”  (RVC,  4:174).
This was the opening blast of the campaign  that was to  end  in  the following
year in the revocation  of  the  Virginia Company charter.  Johnson  was a  rich
London merchant, who had over the years held positions of great authority in
both the East India Company and the Virginia Company. See note 27.
152.  Broadside  published  by  the  Virginia  Company  in  1622,  prior  to  the
receipt of the news of the Indian attack a of 22 March of that year; in Brown,
First Republic, p. 486.
153. Ibid.
154.  Virginia  Governor  and  Council  to  Virginia  Company  of  London
(January 1621/22), RVC, 3:585–8; 586.
155. Thomas Nuce to Edwin Sandys, 27 May 1621 (RVC, 3:457).
156. RVC, 3:588. The actual enclosure seems not to have survived in the
records, but the essential substance is clear from references to it in documents
that  have  been  preserved. It  is  curious  that historians have  chosen to  ignore
Nuce’s  proposal,  while  at the  same  time  noting  (Craven, Dissolution  of  the
Virginia  Colony ,  p.  173,  Morgan,  “First American  Boom,”  p.  172)  a  letter
written seven months earlier in which he states that his tenants are depressed
by  the  prospect  of  a  seven-year  term  of  service,  “which  course,  I  am  of
opinion you should alter” (Nuce to Edwin Sandys, 27 May 1621 [RVC, 3:456–
7]). The facts are that the conditions of the tenants were altered – to those of

chattel bond-labor; that Nuce specifically recommended that tenants be

replaced by “servants”; and that he was unwilling to pay the wages of free

wage workers. Therefore, the imputation of benign motives to Nuce should not

divert attention from his apparent role in promoting the change in the conditions

of labor that took place in the 1620s in Virginia.

157. Virginia Company of London to the Virginia Governor and Council, 10

June 1622; (RVC, 3:646–52; 647).

158. Virginia Company of London to the Virginia Governor and Council, 7

October 1622 (RVC 3:683–90; 684).

159. Idem, 20 January 1622/23 (RVC, 4:9–17; 16).

160. RVC 4:178. The word used in this instance was, “pencons.” This word

is nowhere else to be found in the records, but it seems to suggest a servant

who lives with the employer, or at least one whose meals are provided by the

employer. Indeed, references to this proposed change from tenantry all

translate the term as “servant.” Although the term “servant” has various

applications in the records of the time, it is not necessary to explore that matter

here; it is clear that the purpose was to reduce the cost of labor, and to levels

below the wages then current in Virginia.

5 The Massacre of the Tenantry
1. See pp. 56, 61.
2.  Back  projection  of  the  average  annual  crude death  rate,  1619–1625,
inclusive of a 4.16 percent spike for 1625. (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
The  Population  History  of  England,  1541–1871:  A  Reconstruction
[Cambridge,  Massachusetts,  1981],  p.  352.)  This  modern  study  confirms  the
reliability of the estimate of 2.5 percent made by Sir William Petty more than
three  centuries  ago  in  his An  Essay  concerning  the  Multiplication  of
Mankind together with another Essay in Political Arithmetick concerning
the Growth of the City of London … (London 1686), reprinted in part in Joan
Thirsk  and  J.  P.  Cooper,  eds.,  Seventeenth-century  Economic  Documents,
(Oxford, 1972), pp. 761–4.
3.  Edmund  S.  Morgan, American  Slavery,  American  Freedom:  the
Ordeal  of  Colonial  Virginia   (New  York,  1975),  p.  120.  Idem,  “First
American boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” WMQ, 28: 169–198 (1971), p. 185.
4. “The answere of the Generall Assembly in Virginia to a Declaration of
the  state  of  the  Colonie  in  the  12  years  of  Sir  Thomas  Smiths  Government,
exhibited  by  Alderman  Johnson  and  others”  (RVC,  4:458,  20  February
1623/40).  Edward  D.  Neill, History  of  the  Virginia  Company  of  London
(Albany, NY, 1869), pp. 407–11.
5. RVC, 3:74.
6. See Chapter 1, pp. 10–11.
7. [House of] Commons Journals, I, p. 711.
8. “Instructions to Yeardley,” VMHB, 2:154–65.

9.  Wesley  Frank  Craven, The  Dissolution  of  the  Virginia  Company
(New York, 1932), p. 60.
10. Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New
York, 1898), p. 427.
11. This conclusion is based on an analysis of the following two documents:
the  Virginia  Muster  of  1624/25  in Annie  Lash  Jester  and  Martha  Woodruff
Hiden,  eds., Adventurers  of  Purse  and  Person:  Virginia,  1607–1625
(Princeton,  1956);  and  “The  Virginia  Rent  Rolls  of  1704;”  in  T.  J.
Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia . See further in Chapter 9, Table
9.1.
12. See McIlwaine, MCGC, pp. 72–3, 83, 136–7, 154.
13. Neill, p. 408.
14. RVC, 3:307–40; 313–14 (“A Declaration of the State of the Colony and
Affaires of Virginia. By his Majesties Counsell for Virginia,” 22 June 1620).
15.  RVC,  3:226–7  (Virginia  Colony  Council,  11  November  1619,  “The
putting  out  of  the  Tenants  that  came  over  in  the  B.  N.  [Bona  Nova],  with
other orders of the Councell”).
16.  Letter  of  William  Weldon  to  Sir  Edwin  Sandys,  6  March  1619–20
(RVC, 3:262–5; p. 263).
17. See Smith, Travels and Works, p. 541. RVC, 3:586 and 4:38.
18. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:542.
19. RVC, 3:226 (The Governor and Council in Virginia “The putting out of
the  Tenantes  that  came  over  in the  B.  N.  [Bona  Nova]  …,”  11  November
1619).
20.  RVC,  3:263  (William  Weldon.  Letter  to  Edwin  Sandys,  6  March

1619/20).

21. RVC, 219–22; 220–21 (Letter of Colony Secretary John Pory in

Virginia to Sir Dudley Carleton in England, 30 September 1619).

22. RVC, 1:584–604 (Record of the Meeting of the Virginia Company of

London Court, 30 January 1621/22).

23. RVC, 3:241–8; 243 (Letter of John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, January

1619/20). Rolfe does not describe these new arrivals as “Africans” but as

“Negroes.” The fact that some of these new workers bore Christian names

(Maria and Antonio, for example) and the fact that the ship on which they

arrived came to Virginia from the West Indies, suggests that at least some had

spent time in the Caribbean, or might even have been born there.

24. Those who read Edmund S. Morgan’s “First American Boom” and

Chapter 4 of his American Slavery, American Freedom, may realize how

much I am indebted to his insights. Credit must go to Morgan for opening the

way to a reexamination of the history of the Company period, particularly the

critical years 1619–24, from the standpoint of the consideration of the internal

contradictions of the colony, those between the few rich and the common run

of the people. After a year-by-year review and analysis of colony’s food

supply situation, Morgan concludes: “Yeardley’s complaints, his purchase of

the Negroes, and his disposal of the men from the Bona Nova at a time when

the colony was reporting an unprecedented abundance, suggest that the

problem was not altogether one of whether supplies existed, it was a question

of who had them and who could pay for them. In a year of plenty the governor

and Council were unable or unwilling to make use of fifty men without supplies

when other Virginians were able and willing to do so. The great shortage of

supplies, to which we attribute the failure of the Sandys program, was not an

absolute shortage in  which all Virginians  shared and suffered alike.  It was a
shortage  that  severely  afflicted  the  Company  and  its  dependants,  but  it
furnished  large  opportunities  for  private  entrepreneurs  and  larger  ones  for
Company  officials  who  knew  how  to  turn  public  distress  to  private  profit.”
(“First American Boom,” p. 175).
25. RVC, 2:375; RVC, 4:186; 234. Morgan, “First American Boom,” p. 182.
26. Smith, Travels and Works , 2:571. RVC, 3:581–7; 584 (Virginia Colony
Council to Virginia Company of London, January 1621/22).
27.  Virginia  Company  of  London  to  Deputy  Governor Argall,  22 August
1618 (Neill, History to the Virginia Company, pp. 114–17; p. 115).
28. Virginia Company of London to Lord Delaware, 22 August 1618 (Neill,
History  of  the  Virginia  Company   pp.  117–29;  p.  119).  Delaware  died  en
route to Virginia. Argall returned to England aboard a ship specially sent by his
patron, the Earl of Warwick, not waiting for instruction or permission from the
London authorities.
29. RVC,  1:601  (13  February  1622). RVC,  1:579 (30  January 1622).  The
Virginia Company Court granted Weldon a patent for the transportation of one
hundred persons which, at the allowance of fifty acres each, implied for him a
private plantation of five thousand acres.
30. RVC, 3:485–9; 489. Virginia Company of London to the Governor and
Council in Virginia, 25 July 1621 (Neill, History of the Virginia Company , pp.
223–33; p. 230).
31.  RVC,  3:584–5  (Virginia  Colony  Council  to  Virginia  Company  of
London, January 1621/22).
32. RVC, 3:219–23; 221 (John Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, 30 September

1619): “the Governor here [Yeardley], who at his first coming, besides a great
deale of worth in his person, brought onely his sworde w[i]th him, was at his
late being in London, together with his lady, out of his meer gettings here, able
to  disburse  Very  near  three  thousand  pounds  to  furnish  himselfe  for  his
[return] voiage.”
33. An incomplete indication of Yeardley’s success at self-enrichment is to
be found  in  his Last Will,  dated 12 October 1627  (New  England  Historical
and  Genealogical  Register,  28:  69  [1884],  p.  69).  Yeardley’s  estate,
“consisting  of  goods  debts,  servants  ‘negars,’  cattle  …”  and  including  his
thousand-acre  plantation  on  Warwicke  River,  was  valued  at  six  thousand
pounds by his uncle in a petition to the Privy Council in 1629.
34. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. pp. 176–8.
35. Weldon to Sandys (RVC, 3:263).
36. RVC, 3:581–8; 586 (Council in Virginia to Virginia Company of London,
January 1621/22).
37.  In  1622,  tenants  who  had  been  brought  to  Bermuda  by  Captain
Nathaniel  Butler  included  in  a  letter  of  grievances  the  charge  that  they  had
been  “forced  to  send  all  their  tobacco  into  England  unto  their  undertakers
[employers], undivided,” in spite of the fact that their contracts provided that
they  were  to  “divide  their  yearly  tobacco”  and  “to  be  accountable  for  the
moiety [half] only” (Manchester Papers, p. 38).
38. MCGC, p. 46 (Last day of January 1624/25).
39. “It was the Powhatan Uprising that both unleashed the company’s self-
destructive  urges  and  accelerated  Virginia’s  evolution”  (J.  Frederick  Fausz,
“The  Powhatan  Uprising  of  1622: A  Historical  Study  of  Ethnocentrism  and

Cultural Conflict,”  Ph.D  Dissertation,  College  of  William  and  Mary,  1977,  p.
547).
40. Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890),
2:971.
41.  Neill, History of the Virginia Company , pp. 96–105.  Philip Barbour,
Pocahontas and Her World: A Chronicle of America’s First Settlement in
which  is  Related  the  Story  of  the  Indians  and  the  Englishmen  –
Particularly  Captain  John  Smith,  Captain  Samuel  Argall,  and  Master
John Rolfe (Boston, 1970), pp. 169–70.
42. Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1960), 1:74.
43.  RVC,  3:556  (“A  Declaration  of  the  State  of  the  Colony  and  …  a
Relation of the Barbarous Massacre,” after April 1622, 3:541–80).
George Yeardley  was  accused in  England  of having provoked the  Indian
attack  of  22  March  by  treacherously  attacking  an  assembly  of  the  friendly
Chickhominy Indians with whom he had asked to parley. Thirty to forty of the
Indians were killed. “The perfidious act made them all fly out & seek revenge,
they  joined  with  Opichankano”  (RVC,  4:118  [Sir  Nathaniel  Rich’s  Draft  of
Instruction to the commissioners to investigate Virginia affairs, 4:6–8]).
44.  RVC,  3:555  (Edward  Waterhouse  “A  Declaration of the  state  of the
Colony and … a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, 1622).
45. Brown, First Republic, p. 467 n.1.
46. See Appendix II-C.
47. RVC 3:613; 4:11–12. In the summer of 1622 the Virginia Governor and
Council did contemplate moving  out,  but  to  just across the  Chesapeake Bay.
The  Company  in  London  strenuously  condemned  the  notion,  and  by  the

following  January  the  Governor  and  Council  were  disowning  the  idea. RVC:
3:613  (Virginia  Colony  Council  to  Virginia  Council  in  London,  3:609–15,  13
April  1622). RVC:  3:366–7  (Treasurer  and  Council  for  Virginia  to  Governor
and  Colony  Council  of  Virginia,  3:366–73,  1  August  1622).  RVC,  4:11–12
(Virginia Colony Council to Council for Virginia, 4:9–17, 20 January 1622/23).
48. The first English colony was established in 1587 on Roanoke Island on
the North Carolina coast by an expedition organized by Sir Walter Raleigh (a
second attempt). When the first relief ship returned to the spot in 1591, there
was no trace to be found of the colony, except the eternally mystifying scrawl
“Croatan.” It is assumed that the colonists were adopted into an Indian tribe of
the region. (See Hamilton MacMillan of Robeson County, North Carolina, “Sir
Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, with the traditions of an Indian Tribe in North
Carolina  indicating  the  fate  of  the  Colony”  (1888),  cited  in  Brown, Genesis,
1:189–90.  During  a  military  trial  in  1864,  according  to  MacMillan,  an  Indian
named  John  Lowrie  asserted  he  was  descended  from  this  merger,  and
complained that nevertheless “white men have treated us as negroes.”
49.  RVC,  3:146  (Treasurer  and  Council  in  Virginia  to  George  Yeardley,
3:146–8, 21  June 1619). RVC 3:496 (Virginia Company in London to Virginia
Colony Council, 3:492–8, 12 August 1621).
50. See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 172–3, 175.
51. RVC, 3:555.
52.  At  the  end  of  October  1618,  the  Company,  in  order  to  reduce
overcharging for goods  at the  colony’s supply  store  (called the  “magazine”),
forbade  any  mark-up  on  goods  beyond  “the  allowance  of  25  in  the  hundred
proffitt” (RVC, 3:167).
53.  The  precariousness  of  property  claims  in  the  conditions  of  epidemic

death prevailing at that time in Virginia, and the danger of fraud in disposition
of property of deceased persons there is to be seen in the letter addressed by
the Company to the Colony Governor and Council, 7 October 1622, in which
they noted “greevances for wrongs by unjust factors and partners in Virginia,
and of claymes to lands and foods by the late death of friends” (RVC,  3:689
[Virginia Company to the Governor and Council of Virginia, 3:683–9]).
54.  RVC,  3:537  gives  the  population  as  1,240  (Notes  from  Lists  showing
Total  Number  of  Emigrants  to  Virginia  [1622]).  See  also  Brown,  First
Republic, pp. 467, 624.
Regarding the number of lives lost in the colony, Brown writes, “The exact
number may not be certainly known … [at first] the company published a list
of 347; but it was almost necessary to make the list as small as possible at that
time.…  The  Company  afterwards  placed  the  number  at  ‘about  400,’  and
Edward  Hill  put  it  at  ‘400  and  odd.’  ”  Hill  was  a  Virginia  planter  living  in
Elizabeth  City.  (Brown, First  Republic,  467,  624;  and  Philip  A.  Bruce,
Economic  History  of  Virginia  in  the  Seventeenth  Century ,  2  vols.  [New
York, 1895] 2:71.)
55.  RVC,  3:611–15  (Virginia  Colony  Council  to  Virginia  Company  of
London, April (after 20) 1622). RVC, 4:13 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia
of London, 4:9–17, 20 January 1622/23).
56. RVC, 4:58 (Richard Frethorne letters, 4:58–62, Spring 1623).
57. RVC, 4:22 (George Sandys to Mr Ferarr).
58. RVC, 3:613.
59.  RVC,  4:525  (Virginia  Company  of  London,  Discourse  …  April  (?)
1625).

60. RVC, 3:614
61. RVC,  4:233 (Letters  arriving  in  England  on the Abigail,  4:228–29,  19
June 1623).
62.  RVC,  4:61  (Richard  Frethorne  letters  to  his  father  and  mother,  20
March and 2 and 3 April, 1623, RVC, 4:58–63).
63. RVC, 4:41, 59. Brown, Genesis, 2:802–3, 826.
64. RVC, 4:58.
65. RVC, 4:41 (Frethorne to Bateman, 5 March 1622/23).
66. RVC, 4:62.
67. RVC, 4:236.
68. Ibid.
69. RVC, 4:231–2. Great Britain Historical Manuscripts Commission Eighth
Report and Appendix (London, 1881), Part I; Appendix (Duke of Manchester
Papers), p. 41.
70. RVC, 3:639.
71. RVC, 4:525 (Virginia Company “Discourse of the Old Company,” April
1625, 4:519–61).
72.  This  is  an  inference  drawn  from  the  rate  of  profit  specified  to  be
secured on the supplies subsequently sent on the relief ships the George,  the
Hopewell, and the Marmaduke (RVC, 4:263–4).
73. RVC, 4:61–2.
74. RVC, 4:107, 116, 230.
75.  RVC,  4:120  (Letter  from  Captain  Kendall  in  Somers  Islands  to  Sir
Edwin Sandys, 14 April 1623).

76. RVC, 4:105 (Sir Francis Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623).
77. Brown, First Republic, p. 559.
78. RVC, 3:639 (28 March 1623).
79.  RVC,  4:215–16  (Draft  for  a  Report  on  the  Condition  of  the  Colony,
June or July 1623).
80.  Butler  was  a  leading  opponent  of  the  Edwin  Sandys  headship of the
Virginia  Company,  and  might  therefore  be  expected  to  be  biased.  But
Alexander Brown, an early and staunch historiographical supporter of Sandys,
believes that Butler’s report was on the whole factual (First Republic, p. 506).
81. In seeking to counter this point in Butler’s report, Sandys’s supporters
conceded  that  such  public  dying  might  occur  in  Virginia.  But  they  were
confident that it did not take place under hedges, because, they asserted, “there
is no hedge in Virginia” (RVC, 2:382). Next case!
82.  Brown, First Republic,  pp.  444,  506,  627.  Professor  Morgan  revises
the total population figures upward from those given by the records for 1623–
24  and  1624–25,  by  20  percent  and  10  percent  respectively.  He  does  not
suggest  any  revision  of  the  1622  figure.  (American  Slavery,  American
Freedom, pp. 101, 404.)
83. Besides the specific references to the record for the period up to 1626
in this paragraph, see Chapter 4, note 94.
84. RVC, 4:46 (17 March 1622/23).
85. RVC, 2:523. Brown, First Republic, p. 563.
86. RVC, 2:519–20 (Virginia Company of London Court, 21 April 1624).
87. RVC, 4:453 (30 January 1623/24); 4:570 (4 January 1625/26).
88. RVC, 4:271–2. (“A proclamation touching the rates of Comodities,” 31

August 1623.)
89. RVC, 4:14.
90. RVC, 4:271.
91. The census of Virginia Colony for 1624–25 (March 1625) showed 432
male  adults  who  were  free  in  a  total  population  of  1,227.  Of  the  non-free
adults, 298 were in the service of an elite bourgeois group of fifteen employers.
(Hotten, Original Lists, pp. 261–5.) See also Morgan’s analysis and tabulation
in “First American Boom,” pp. 188–9.
92. RVC, 2:339 (Virginia Company of London Court, 24 March 1622/23).
93. RVC, 3:614. Brown, First Republic, pp. 474–5.
94. It seems not unlikely that there was a shortage of English trade goods,
since the production of glass beads had been halted at this time in the colony
for lack of suitable sand (RVC, 4:108).
95.  RVC,  4:9–10  (Virginia  Colony  Council  to  the  Virginia  Company  of
London,  20  January  1622/23).  For  references  to  Mountjoy’s  strategy  of
starvation in the Tyrone War, see Volume One of  The Invention of the White
Race.
96. RVC, 3:614.
97.  RVC,  4:186  (“Rough  Notes  in  Support  of  the  Preceding  Charges  of
Mismanagement of the Virginia Company, May [after May 9] or June, 1623,”
4:183–7);  4:234  (letter  of  Edward  Hill  to  his  brother  Mr  Jo.  Will,  14  April
1623).
98. RVC, 4:186.
99. RVC, 4:105. Brown, First Republic, p. 513.

RVC, 2:375 (“The Unmasked face of our Colony in Virginia as it was
in the Winter of the yeare 1622,” 2:374–6).
RVC, 4:6–7.
Ibid.
 RVC,  4:9–10.  These  Colony  Council  members  were  Yeardley,
Tucker, George Sandys and Hamor.
Ibid.
RVC,  4:37 (Letter of William Capps to  Dr  John Wynston, March  or
April, 1623).
RVC, 4:14.
 Brown  (First  Republic,  p.  627)  says  that  11,185  bushels  was
regarded as a minimum supply in March 1625.
Smith, Travels and Works, 2:615.
Brown, First Republic, pp. 625–6, 627.
RVC, 4:89, 92, 231.
RVC, 4:234.
RVC, 4:14.
RVC, 4:453.
RVC, 3:612 (Virginia Colony Council to Virginia Company of London,
April [after 20 April] 1622, 3:611–15).
RVC, 3:656 (Sir Francis Wyatt, A commission to Sir George Yeardley,
June 1622).
Brown, First Republic, pp. 617–20.
See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 189.2.

118. RVC, 3:613.
119.  RVC,  2:94–5  (Virginia  Company  of  London  Court,  17  July  1622).
RVC, 3:689 (Virginia Company of London to Governor and Council in Virginia,
3:683–90, 7 October 1622).
120.  RVC,  2:124  (Virginia  Company  of  London  Preparative  Court,  18
November 1622, 2:124–31).
121.  Brown, First  Republic,  pp.  617,  618,  620,  623,  627.  Brown  adds,
however, that he does not know the particulars of the disposition of the large
corporate  holdings  such  as Southampton  Hundred. John  C.  Rainbolt  argues
that English heirs of Virginia Company land claims “parlayed [these holdings]
into estates of several thousand acres” in the third quarter of the century. (“An
Alteration  in  the  Relationship  between  Leadership  and  Constitutents  in
Virginia,  1660–1720,” WMQ,  27:411–34  [1970];  413).  Bernard  Bailyn,  in  his
essay  on  the  evolution  of  the  Virginia  social  structure,  provides  the  details,
showing that mid-seventeenth century claims on Company period inheritances
constituted “the most important, of a variety of forms of capital” that provided
the  fortunes  on  which  were  based  the  oligarchy  of  slaveholding  families  of
Virginia  of  the  eighteenth  century  (Bernard  Bailyn,  “Politics  and  Social
Structure,” in James Morton Smith, Seventeenth-century America, Essays in
Colonial History [Chapel Hill, 1959], p. 99).
122.  I  have  assumed  that  the death  rate  was  at  least  as  high  among
workers as among employers.
123. RVC, 4:185 (May or June [after 9 May] 1623).
124.  RVC,  3:658  (Proclamation  of  Governor  Sir  Francis  Wyatt  for  the
suppression of  drunkenness,  21  June  1622).  The  quintuplex  of  social  classes

set forth in this Virginia order perfectly mirrored the categories as established

in England at that time: noblemen, freemen, yeomen, artisans, and farm

laborers. See Sir Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600,

Publications of the Camden Society, 3rd ser., Vol. 52, Camden Miscellany,

Vol. 16 edited by F. J. Fisher (London, 1936), p. 17.

125. See Morgan, “First American Boom,” pp. 171–75. The use by

Professor Morgan of the “mining camp”, boom-town metaphor seems

somewhat questionable on the grounds of one-sidedness. Lewis C. Gray used

the same argument (see Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, in the History

of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 [Washington, DC,

1932; reprinted 1958], 1:256). I am no student of that aspect of social history,

but was it characteristic of the gold and oil boom towns in the American West

and in Alaska, for example, to have two-thirds of the people die of starvation

and starvation-related disease in a one- or two-year period? In a boom town,

do not wages rise, even though the lucky, grasping few may fare better? In

Virginia in the 1620s, the position of the laboring people deteriorated not only

relatively but absolutely.

126. RVC, 4:37–8 (William Capps, Letter to Doctor Thomas Wynston.

March or April 1623). But that same April, Governor Wyatt said that on the

best ground a pair of tenants could make 2,500 pounds, and that because of

guard duty his sixteen tenants produced only 1,000 pounds per capita. (RVC,

4:104–6 [Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623].)

127. RVC, 4:175 (“Alderman Johnson(?), Parts of Drafts of a Statement

Touching the Miserable Condition of Virginia,” 4:174–87, May or June [after 9

May] 1623).

128. RVC, 4:13 (Virginia Colony Council to the Virginia Company of

London, 4:9–17).
129.  RVC,  4:74  (George  Sandys  to  Sir  Samuel  Sandys,  30  March  1623,
3:73–5).
130. RVC 3:105 (Sir Francis Wyatt to John Ferrar, 7 April 1623, 4:104–6).
131. “From 1606 to 1624, the average value of wheat in England was only
five shillings a bushel” (Bruce, 1:256). As noted above (page 91), the price of
corn in Virginia was twenty shillings per bushel in 1623.
132. VMHB, 71:410 (1963), citing Harleian Ms. 389, f. 309, unsigned letter
to Joseph Mead, 4 April 1623.
133. RVC, 3:221 (John Pory to Sir Dudley Carlton and Edwin Sandys, 30
September 1619).
134. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, p. 119.
135.  See Historical  Statistics  of  the  United  States,  Colonial  Times  to
1970 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC,
1975), series Z-125–128.
136.  Morgan, American  Slavery,  American  Freedom,  p.  119  n.  50.
Morgan refers to A. J. and R. H. Tawney, “An Occupational Census of the
Seventeenth  Century,” Economic  History  Review,  5:25–64  (1934–35).
Although Morgan omits page references, his comment seems to be supported
by  the  Gloucestershire  figures  showing  19,402  men  between  the  ages  of
twelve  and  sixty  (p.  31),  and,  in  agricultural  and  domestic  occupation,  only
sixteen employers with ten or more employees (tables VI and VII, pp. 52 and
53).
137. VMHB, 71:409 (1963). See also RVC, 4:104.
138.  RVC,  3:618  (Edwin  Sandys  Letter  to  John  Ferrar,  30  April,  1622

[before  news  of  the  22  March  Indian  attack  had  arrived  in  England]).
Historians  (Craven, Dissolution  of  the  Virginia  Company ,  pp.  152–3,  and
Morgan,  “First  American  Boom,”  pp.  171  and  183,  for  example)  have
considered  it  a  “blunder”  on  Edwin  Sandys’s  part  to  have  persisted  in  the
policy of sending thousands of ill-provisioned emigrants to Virginia. If so, it was
a  blunder  that  flowed  from  flawless  bourgeois  logic:  an  oversupply  of
dependent  and  ill-supplied  laborers  was an  objective  necessity  for  securing a
general reduction of labor costs and thus keeping tobacco profitable enough to
attract capital investment.
139. RVC, 4:220–22 (9 June 1623).
140.  Colony  Secretary George  Sandys  was  one  of  the  purchasers
(Manchester  Papers,  p.  39  Letter  from  “G.  S.”  [George  Sandys?]  to  “Mr
Ferrer” [Ferrar]).
141.  MCGC,  pp.  19–20  (16  August  1623).  Tyler’s  opinions  are  from
testimony against him in the General Court.
142. MCGC, pp. 22–4 (10 October 1624).
143. MCGC, p. 105 (7 and 8 August 1626).
144.  MCGC,  p.  117  (11  October  1626).  For  her  part,  servant  Alice
Chambers was ordered to receive unspecified “worthy punishement.”
145.  MCGC,  pp.  135–7  (13  January  1626/7).  “The  Order  by  which  the
[thirty-six] Tenants of the Company are distributed to the Governor & [8 other
members  of  the]  Councill”  shows  eighteen  assigned  to  Governor  Francis
Yeardley, and three to most of the others. The Colony Council order regarding
the “Duty boys” was issued on 10 October 1627 (p. 154).
146. Bruce, 2:43.

147. By the end of 1624, the Virginia Colony Council was reporting to the
Virginia Company that there was much corn in the colony, but that they were
short of laborers (RVC, 4:507–8, 2 December 1624).
148. So characterized by George Sandys in a letter to his brother Samuel in
England, 30 March 1623 (Manchester Papers, p. 39).
149. RVC, 4:106 (George Sandys to John Ferrar in England, 8 April 1623).
See also Bruce, 1:47–8.
6 Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No
Intermediate Stratum
1.  See  Oliver  Ellsworth’s  comment  cited  in The  Invention  of  the  White
Race, Volume One, p. 286 n. 3.
2. Labor might also have been recruited from among the native population
if terms were made sufficiently attractive, or as a result of the destruction of
the  original  native  population’s  economy  of  the  area  by  the bombardment  of
cheap commodities, or by the expropriation of the lands and resources. But this
alternative and reasons for its ineffectiveness were discussed in Chapter 3.
3.  RVC,  3:592–8  (Virginia  Company,  The  Form  of  a  Patent,  30  January
1621/22);  3:629–34  (Virginia  Company,  The  Form  of  a  Patent  for  a  Planter
Only, 22 May 1622).
4. This principle of granting land patents at the rate of fifty acres for each
person brought into Virginia would later be known as the “headright” system.
See Chapter 4, pp. 58–9.

See p. 72.
RVC, 3:507.
RVC, 3:586; 4:558.
RVC, 2:105, 3:699, 4:14 (7 October and 2 November 1622; 20 January
1622/23).
RVC, 4:22 (March 1622/23).
See p. 86.
RVC, 4:235 (12 April 1623).
RVC, 4:466–7. MCGC, p. 12 (9 March 1623).
RVC, 4:467 (9 March 1622/23).
MCGC, p. 40 (3 January 1624/25).
MCGC, p. 109 (28 August 1626). Hotten, Original Lists, p. 237.
MCGC, p. 90 (20 January 1625/26).
MCGC, pp. 131–2 (20 January 1626/27).
RVC, 4:5–6 (between January and April 1622/23).
MCGC, p. 83 (19 December 1625).
MCGC, pp. 136–7 (13 January 1626/27).
Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America, (Boston and New
York, 1898), p. 627.
New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 38:69 (January
1884).
 See  Theodore  K.  Rabb, Enterprise  and  Empire  (Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1967).

24.  “The  liberties  of  Englishmen  –  the  privileges  and  immunities  of  the
free-born  English  subject  …  [include]  personal  liberty  …  signifying  the
freedom  to  dispose  of  one’s  person  and  powers  of  body  and  mind,  without
control  by  others  who  are  not  representatives  of  the  ultimate  supreme
authority.”  (John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the
United States, 2 vols. [Boston, 1858; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1968]
1:140.)
25. RVC, 3:683–4 (“Virginia Company. A Letter to the Governor and the
Council in Virginia, October 7, 1622,” RVC, 3:683–90).
26.  In  the  Gloucestershire  occupational  census  of  1606,  the  only  such
existing record for seventeenth-century England, tabulations of employers and
their  servants  in  agriculture  or  domestic  employment  show  that  servants
constituted 27 percent  of the total;  4 percent  were  of  the  leisure classes, 11
percent were yeomen, and 58 percent were husbandmen (A. J. Tawney and
R.  H.  Tawney,  “An  Occupational  Census  of  the  Seventeenth  Century,”
Economic History Review, 5:25–64 [1934–35]; see Tables VI and VII, pp. 52
and  53).  In  Virginia  in  the  era  that  followed  the  economic  massacre  of  the
tenantry,  the  great  majority  of  the  laboring  population  were  to  be  not  even
husbandmen, but chattel bond-laborers.
27. The reader is referred particularly to my Introduction to The Invention
of the White Race, in Volume One.
28. With  the honorable  exception  of Edmund S. Morgan,  those  historians
who  have  concerned  themselves  with  the  origin  of  chattel  bond-labor  of
European-Americans have repeated this rationale as an article of faith.
See,  for  example,  Marcus  W.  Jernegan, Laboring  and  Dependent
Classes  in  Colonial  America  (New  York,  1931),  p.  46;  Lewis  C.  Gray,

assisted  by  Esther  K.  Thompson, History  of  Agriculture  in  the  Southern
United States to 1860 (Washington, DC, 1932; reprinted 1958), 1:342; Philip
A.  Bruce, Economic  History  of  Virginia  in  the  Seventeenth  Century:  An
Inquiry into the Material Conditions of the People, based upon original
records, 2 vols. (New York, 1895; reprinted 1935), 1:587. Winthrop D. Jordan
is content to say “it was indentured  servitude that best met the requirements
for settling in America” (White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550–1812 [Chapel Hill, 1968], p. 52].).
29. Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict
Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1947; New York, 1971), pp. 8–
9. Bruce, Economic History, 1:262.
30. It is also analogous to the argument advanced by coalmine owners in
the twentieth century, with the support of even United Mine Workers officials
in McDowell County, West Virginia in 1940–41. Resolutions passed by several
United Mine Workers locals demanding portal-to-portal pay were dismissed as
utopian. “What!” opponents cried. “Do you think the coal operators are going
to  pay  you  for  just  sitting  in  the  man-trip?”  But  in  that  case  the  general
relationship  of  class  forces  was such  that after  Pearl  Harbor  we  miners  got
our just due in this matter.
31. (English) Statutes at Large, 23 Ed. Ill (1349).
32.  A.  E.  Smith,  p.  305.  Smith  was  here  generalizing  about  the  entire
history of “white servitude.”
33. See pp. 65–6.
34.  Documents  relating  to  the  History  of  the  Early  Colonial
Settlements, principally on Long Island, with a Map of its Western Part,

made in 1666, translated and compiled from this Historical Records by B.

Fernow (Albany, 1883).

35. Voyages from Holland to America, AD 1632–1644 , Collections of

the New York Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. III, part 1, translated and edited

by Henry Murphy (New York, 1857). There is no indication of de Vries’s

feelings regarding the buying and selling of African bond-laborers in which the

Dutch were then principal merchants.

36. See especially pp. 22–4.

37. Under English common and statute law, the failure of a servant to fulfill

his or her contract could be remedied by pecuniary damages only, not by

“compelling a specific performance.” (Hurd, 1:138). The English courts

resolved as follows. By 27 Henry VIII, legal compulsion to performance of a

contract was ended; failure to perform as contracted could only be remedied

by the recovery of damages from the party failing to meet the contractual

obligation. (Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law, 5th edition, 5

vols. [Dublin, 1786], 5:359, “Covenants to stand seized to Uses,” paragraphs

46–48).

The distinction between the penalty of adding time to the bond-laborer’s

term of servitude in colonial Virginia and the provision of English law is

underscored in a Virginia manumission agreement requiring a to-be-freed

laborer to pay to his emancipator 6,000 pounds of tobacco over a three-year

period, but with the proviso that the worker could “not bee restrained of his

liberty for default of payment, but is left to the course of the Law as all other

free subjects are in case of debt.” (Northampton County Records, 1668–80,

pp. 158–9 [1678]).

38. Paul H. Douglas begins by equating plantation bond-servitude and

apprenticeship. But he then honestly presents “the chief differences” until, in

spite of his intentions, his premise is in tatters (Paul H. Douglas, American

Apprenticeship and Industrial Education [New York, 1921], pp. 28–9).

Louis P. Hennighausen says that though “white servitude” was sometimes

called “apprenticeship,” it was slavery (Louis P. Hennighausen, The

Redemptioners and the German Society of Maryland [Baltimore, 1888], p.

1. Cheesman Herrick found that in Pennsylvania, “What ordinarily passes as

the apprenticeship system differs from that now under discussion …”

(Cheesman Herrick, White Servitude in Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, 1926;

Negro Universities Press reprint, 1969], p. 108). There is no reason to think the

conditions and status of bond-laborers were more favourable in Virginia in the

seventeenth century than they were in Maryland in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.

39. Thomas Jefferson, Reports of Cases Determined in the General

Court of Virginia, from 1730 to 1740; and from 1768 to 1772

(Charlottesville, 1829); Gwinn v. Bugg, p. 89.

40. John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of

Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer , 2 vols. (London,

1782); 2:1266–7. See also: William Salkeld, Report of Cases Adjudged in the

Court of King’s Bench …, (Philadelphia, 1822) 6th edition, 3 vols., 1:67–8;

and Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1619; edited with an appendix, by

William Nelson London, 1727), p. 191. (I am grateful to Director Frederic

Baum and the staff of the Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of

New York for making these old books available to me.) In a marginal note,

Dalton says that by London custom (allowance for which appears to be made

in the Statute of Artificers [5 Eliz. 4] section 40 – T.W.A.) an apprentice “may

be turned over to another.” But the consent of the apprentice was presumably

still required. With regard to such transfers of an apprentice to another master,

according to Lipson, only rare exceptions were made, and these involved

extraordinary and particular review and agreement by the wardens of the trade

(Ephraim Lipson, Economic History of England, 3 vols. (London, 1926),

1:285).

The distinction between assignability and non-assignability, between chattel

and non-chattel indenture to bond-servitude, was explicitly instanced in an

order of the Charles County Maryland Court of 28 January 1661. The court

approved an agreement between widow Ane Ges binding out her step-

daughter (called “daughter-in-law” in those times) to one man for six years,

and her three-year-old son, for fifteen years, to another man, specifying in

each case that the child was bound to the man, “his heirs, Executors,

administrators but not Assignes” (Archives of Maryland, 52:182–3). For

Virginia examples of such specific provisions, see: Rappahannock County

Records, 1656–64, pp. 275–6 (1683); Northumberland County Records,

1678–1698, pp. 250, 826 (1685; 1698).

41. This characterization is given by Gray in his History of Agriculture in

the Southern United States to 1860 (1:344), in concluding his discussion of

the origin of “indentured servitude” (1:342–4). On this point, Gray appears to

have misappropriated the authority whose title he cites but does not quote.

Indeed, that authority seems to contradict Gray’s assertion most directly, as

follows: “[T]he relation of master and servant in indented servitude was

unknown to that [English apprenticeship] law, and could neither be derived

from nor regulated by its principles. it had to depend entirely for its sanction on

special statutes, or on the action of tribunals which had no precedents before

them.” (James Curtis Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia: A
Study  of  the  System  of  Indentured  Labor  in  the  American  Colonies
[Baltimore, 1895; 1969 reprint], p. 46).
Awareness of the distinction between colonial indentured chattel servitude
and  terms of employment in the  home  country  is revealed in  the exceptional
indentures  that  were  conditioned  upon  non-assignability.  See,  for  example,
Virginia  County  Records, Rappahannock  County  Records,  1656–64,  pp.
275–6 (18 February 1662/3; Lancaster County Records,  1660–80, p. 353 (8
March 1675/6); Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, pp. 250, 826 (1
January 1684/5 and 15 June 1698).
42.  Tobacco seeds  were  first  planted  in  England in  1565  (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 15th edition (Chicago, 1997), 11:812, “Tobacco.”). The short-lived
1547 slave law (1 Edw. VI, 3) was repealed in 1550.
43. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 19, and p. 239
n. 96, for the names of half a dozen champions of the “paradox” thesis.
44.  Bruce, Economic  History  1:52–69;  238–9;  254–62;  411–12;  585–6;
2:43, 48–51, 415–17.
45.  The patentee’s  first seven  years  in possession  were  free  of quit-rent
(Hening, 1:228).
46. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern
Cultures  in  the  Chesapeake,  1680–1800  (Chapel  Hill  1986),  pp.  132–4.
Authorities agree that elsewhere in Virginia tenancy was much less practiced,
although  the  tax  records  provide  no  category  for  tenants.  (Ibid.,  p.  134;
Jackson  Turner  Main,  “The  Distribution  of  Property  in  Post-Revolutionary
Virginia,” Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  41:241–58  (1954–55);  pp.
245  n.  12;  248  n.  21.  The  name  of  this  publication  was  later  changed  to

Journal of American History.)
47. Willard F. Bliss, “The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia,”  VMHB, 58:427–41
(1950), p. 429.
48.  Ibid.,  p.  427.  Cf.  Carville  V.  Earle,  The  Evolution  of  a  Tidewater
Settlement System: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650–1783 , University
of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper No. 170, 1975. “Slaves
did not cause tenancy and the decline of the yeomen,” says Earle (p. 226).
49.  Russell  R.  Menard, Economy  and  Society  in  Early  Colonial
Maryland (New York, 1985), p. 72.
50. Ibid., p. 76; Kulikoff, p. 133; Gregory A. Stiverson, Poverty in a Land
of  Plenty:  Tenancy  in  Eighteenth-century  Maryland  (Baltimore,  1977),  p.
10.
51. Kulikoff, p. 133.
52. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (1812 reprint of  3 vols. in 1 by  Ward Lock, & Co.,  London, n.d.
[19th century]), p. 354.
53.  Bruce,  1:586.  A.  E.  Smith  likewise  rejects  the  possibility  of  any
alternative  to  chattel  bond-servitude,  seeing  it  as  being  “too  expensive,”  for
purposes of colonization “without rearranging society in some utopian fashion”
(Colonists in Bondage,  p. 305).  Craven describes the bond-labor system as
merely  a  part  of  Virginia’s  being  “allowed  to  follow  what  was  perhaps  her
most natural development as a commonwealth of tobacco plantations” (Wesley
Frank  Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company; the Failure of a
Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), p. 334).
54.  Incidentally,  while  it  is  true  enough  to  say,  as  Bruce  does,  the  “The

system of large estates was the result of tobacco culture alone,” large estates

are by no means necessary for the raising of tobacco. Indeed, tobacco is

especially suitable for cultivation on small farms. (Fernando Ortiz,

Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y Azucar [Havana, 1940], pp. 82–3, 466;

Eric Bates, “The ‘Tobacco Dividend’: Farmers Who are Kicking the Habit,”

The Nation, 13 February 1995, pp. 195–8. Bates quotes a “farm activist” as

saying that, “If it weren’t for tobacco, we wouldn’t have small farms” [p.

196]).

55. Francis Bacon, Works, 6:93–5.

John C. Rainbolt (From Prescription to Persuasion, Manipulation of

Eighteenth Century Virginia Economy [Port Washington, NY, 1974])

examines circumstantial factors that frustrated efforts at diversification of the

Virginia economy. Although the title refers to the eighteenth century,

Rainbolt’s main attention is directed to the 1650–1710 period, well after the

commitment to tobacco had become a settled question in practical terms, and

the guiding principle of colonial Virginia government had been firmly

established: to secure the highest quickest profit for the Virginia planters,

shippers, servant-trade merchants, English Crown interests, tax-and-customs

farmers.

56. Bruce, Economic Histroy, 1:51–2.

57. Being of the aristocracy himself, Bacon favored control by “noblemen

and gentlemen.” But this would seem to lapse from Bacon’s wonted

attachment to empirical data. The Earl of Warwick, a prominent member of

the Virginia and Bermuda companies, was so passionate for present gain that

he directed his main adventurers to piracy (Wesley Frank Craven, “The Earl of

Warwick – A Speculator in Piracy,” Hispanic American Historical Review,

10:457–79 [1930]). And by 1622 the arch-aristocrat King James I had come to

a view of the matter quite opposite to that held by Bacon. Said the king:

“Merchants were the fittest for the government of that Plantation [Virginia]”

(RVC, 2:35).

58. In regard to the rate of expansion of the colony’s population and the

colony’s relations with the native population, Bacon’s words seem like good

advice wasted: “Cram not in people, by sending too fast company after

company; but hearken how they waste, and send supplies proportionably; but

so as the number may live well in the plantation, and not by surcharge [excess

population] be in penury.” Then, in logical corollary to this doctrine of slow and

controlled population expansion, Bacon urged that: “If you plant where savages

are, do not only entertain them with trifles and jingles; but use them justly and

graciously, with sufficient guard nevertheless: and do not win their favor by

helping them to invade their enemies, but for their defense it is not amiss.”

Bacon was successively Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Lord Keeper

of the Seal, and Chancellor during the period of the completion of the plantation

of Ulster by the English. In that light, it is especially interesting to find Bacon

saying in this essay: “I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are

not displanted to the end to plant in others. For else it is an extirpation than a

plantation.”

59. James and Charles, father-and-son Stuart kings of England, decreed

the encouragement of the sale of Virginia tobacco in England at the expense of

English-grown tobacco (royal Proclamations of 29 September 1624 and 9 May

1625: reprinted in Ebenezer Hazard, Historical Collections, 1:198ff, 203ff).

This act brought a net gain to the English balance of trade, in which English-

grown tobacco was a negligible factor.

See Craven’s comment on Nathaniel Butler’s “Unmasking of Virginia”
(Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 255).
“The practice was loudly condemned in England and bitterly resented
on  the  part  of  the  servants,  but  the  planters  found  their  justification  in  the
exigencies of the occasion …’ (Ballagh, p. 43).
See p. 51.
RVC, 2:125.
RVC, 2:110–13.
RVC, 2:129.
 RVC,  2:124–5,  128–31  (Report  of  the  Committee  on  Registering  of
Contracts  between  men  of  the  Company  and  their  Servants,  18  November
1622).
RVC, 4:235 (12 April 1623).
RVC,  4:235 (12 April  1623). Atkins  was  also  the  employer  who sold
Thomas Best.
MCGC, p. 109 (28 August 1626).
RVC, 4:437 (30 March 1624).
RVC, 4:128–9 (26 April and 3 May 1623).
MCGC, pp. 75–6, 82.
MCGC, p. 105 (7 and 8 August 1626).
 Martha  W.  Hiden,  “Accompts  of  the  Tristram  and  Jane,”  VMHB,
427–47 (1954); p. 437.
 Richard  Kemp,  Secretary  of  Virginia  colony  to  Francis  Windebank,
English Secretary of State, 6 April 1638; in CSP, Col., Vol. 18). Hurd, 1:136, n.

4.
76. See pp. 17–19.
77. See pp. 55–6.
78. See pp. 17–18.
79. See p. 96.
80.  Smith, Travels and Works , 2:618 (Reply to the questions of the royal
commission  for  inquiring  into  the  state  of  conditions  in  Virginia  in  1624),
emphasis  in  original.  Looking  back  two  and  a  half  centuries  later,  Scharf,  a
most  eminent  historian  of  his  state,  seemed  to  confirm  Smith’s  prediction  of
“misery” and its root cause: “Unquestionably, tobacco made Maryland a slave
State,  and  much  poorer  than  she  would  otherwise  be”  (J.  Thomas  Scharf,
History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day , 3. vols.
[Baltimore, 1879; 1967 reprint], 2:48).
7 Bond-labor: Enduring …
1. Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict
Labor in America, 1607–1776  (Chapel Hill, 1947), p. 39. Smith makes  this
generalization for the entire period 1607 to 1776.
2. Smith, pp. 99, 102, and 103.
3.  Essex  [County,  England]  Overseers  of  the  Poor,  1631  accounts
(extract), Broadside, “Transportation of the Poor to Virginia, 1631,” courtesy
of Francis L.  Berkeley, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library Manuscripts
Division, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

4. Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: the Seventeenth-

century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971; New York, 1977), pp. 5, 14–16, 85–

86. Craven’s count of some 66,000 head-rights granted in Virginia between

1625 and 1682, plus his estimated 6,000 free immigrants for the period prior to

1625, minus some 1,400 head-rights granted for persons of African ancestry,

gives a European immigration total for Virginia of between 70,000 and 71,000.

A. E. Smith, working with head-right records for Maryland, estimated the

European emigrants to that colony in the period 1633 to 1680 at 21,000,

practically all of them bond-laborers (Colonists in Bondage, pp. 323–4). See

also: Russell R. Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the

Seventeenth Century,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 68:323–7 (1973);

idem, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985),

pp. 117, 128; Eugene I. McCormac, White Servitude in Maryland 1634–

1824 (Baltimore, 1904) p. 30; James Horn, “Servant Emigration in the

Seventeenth Century,” in Thad Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The

Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays in Anglo-American

Society and Politics (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 51–95; p. 54.

5. Governor William Berkeley’s answers to questions submitted by the

Lords of Trade and Plantations: Hening, 2:511–17; 515 (1671). The same

questions, together with answers stated in the third person plural, appear in

Peypsian ms. 2582, Magdalene College, England, Samuel Wiseman’s Book of

Record, 1676–1677 (available on microfilm of the Virginia Colonial Records

Project, survey report 578, pp. 108–11, microfilm reel 6618). They are signed

by John Hartwell as being “a true copy.” The date of the answers in the

Hartwell copy is not given. Since Samuel Wiseman was the Secretary of the

Royal Commissioners who arrived in Virginia in January and February 1677 to

investigate  the  causes  of  Bacon’s  Rebellion  and  to  propose  remedies  in  its
wake, it would appear that the answers were sufficiently current for the Royal
Commissioners’ purposes.
6.  CO  5/714,  Nicholson  letter  to  the  Lords  of  Trade  and  Plantations,  20
August 1698.
7.  Robert  Powis,  a minister  of  the  Church,  lost  out  in  the  bidding  for
Eleanor  Clure.  But  “in  a  drinking  merriment,”  in  order  to  frustrate  the  high
bidder,  he  married  Clure  to  a  third  party,  Edward  Cooper.  Months  later,  by
way of penalty against Powis for his abuse of office, the court deducted 300
pounds  of tobacco from  a  judgment  of  a  debt  of  3,200 pounds owed him  by
Cooper. It appears that Clure herself was not asked to testify. (Norfolk County
Records, 1656–1666, pp. 125, 151 [16 February 1657/8; 15 June 1658].) As a
general note on the marketing process, see also Smith pp. 17–18.
8.  A  Relation  of  Maryland  (London,  1635),  Ann  Arbor  University
Microfilms, Inc., March of America Facsimile Series, 22; p. 53.
9. The military force dispatched from England in October 1651 to reduce
Virginia  to  obedience  to  the  Cromwellian  Commonwealth  also  brought  “one
hundred and fifty Scotch prisoners, taken in the recent battle of Worcester, and
sent over to be sold as servants” (John Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland
from the Earliest Period to the Present Day , 3 vols. [Baltimore, 1879; 1967
reprint], 1:209).
10. Of the total of some 250,000 limited-term bond-laborers that came  to
the  continental  colonies  from  1607  to  1783,  35,000  to  50,000  were convicts;
most of them, however, were sent following passage of a law (4 Geo. I 11) in
1717 “for the further preventing robbery, burglary, and other felonies, and for
the  more  effectual  transportation  of  felons  and unlawful  exporters  of  wool,”

and at the same time supplying the “great want of servants who by their labor

and industry might be the means of improving and making more useful the said

colonies.” By that time the term “servants” was reserved for European-

Americans bond-laborers.

A Council of State of the Commonwealth in 1653 authorized Richard

Netherway of Bristol “to export one hundred Irish tories who were to be sold

as slaves in Virginia.” (Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of

Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the Material

Conditions of the People, based upon original records, 2 vols. (New York,

1895; reprinted 1935), 1:609, citing Interregnum Entry Book , vol. 98, p. 405.)

Perhaps the order was interpreted to include potential “tories”: in October

1654, two Maryland investors bought eight Irish boys, four of whom were so

little that it was suggested that the buyers should have “brought cradles to rock

them in.” (Archives of Maryland, 41:478). See also The Invention of the

White Race, Volume One, p. 74, for reference to “the Irish slave trade.” See

also John W. Blake, “Transportation from Ireland to America, 1653–60,” Irish

Historical Studies, 3:267–81 (1942–43), especially pp. 271, 273, 280 in relation

to Virginia.

11. “Certain propositions for the better accommodating Forreigne

Plantations with servants,” CO 324/1, ff. 275–83; f. 275.

12. The number of kidnapped British laborers in the entire colonial period

has been estimated at between ten thousand and twenty thousand. (Albert

Hart Blumenthal, Brides from Bridewell, Female Felons Sent to Colonial

America [Rutland, Vermont, 1962], p. 76.)

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

14, 47.

14.  CO  324/1.  “A  much  larger  portion  of  our  colonial  population  than  is
generally supposed  found  itself  on American  soil  because  of the wheedlings,
deceptions,  misrepresentations  and  other devices  of  the ‘spirits.’  ” (Smith,  p.
86.)
15.  CO  389/2,  items  “I,”  “J,”  and  “K.”  These  were  affidavits  taken  in
proceedings  before  Justice  William  Morton  in  England  in  January  1671.
Haverland’s aggressiveness is noted in the testimony given by Thomas Stone
and  by  Mary  Collins  who,  it  seems,  was  also  a  spirit.  According  to  her,
Haverland  was  reckless  and  disdainful  of  the  law  in  the  practice  of  his
profession.  He  replied  to  hints  of  possible  trouble  with  the  authorities  in
unrestrained language: “… He did not care a turd for my Lord Chief Justice
nor his warrant and that he would wipe his arse with the Warrant.” Speaking
of a Dorsetshire Justice of the Peace who was said to be seeking Haverland,
Haverland “swore God damn him … He would have the life of … [the Justice
of the Peace] Mr Thomas or hee should have the life of him [Haverland], and
shooke his sword and Swore God damn him, his sword should be both Judge
and justice for him” (CO 389/2, item “I”).
16. CO 389/2, items “I,” “J,” and “K.”
17. CO 389/2, item “K,” Haverland affidavit, 30 January 1670/1.
18. Bullock, p. 47.
19. Smith, p. 36.
20. Bullock, pp. 35–6.
21.  Francis  L.  Berkeley  (see  note  3)  cites  that  entry  as  evidence  that
“persons dependent on the parish were transported to the colonies.”
22. Smith. In 1668, sixty-nine bond-laborers were shipped from England to

Thomas Cooper, Maryland merchant or planter, at a charge of about £3 10s.
each.
23. Ibid., p. 36.
24. Ibid., pp. 41–2.
25.  The  principle  was  reinforced  by  Royal  Instructions,  as  in  Queen
Anne’s  directions to  Francis  Nicholson,  who  was  then  Governor of Virginia:
“[N]one shall acquire a [head] Right meerly by importing or buying servants.”
The patentee  was  required  to  employ  the  bond-laborers  in  work  on  the
headright land within three years. (CO 5/1360, p. 268. 16 October 1702.)
26. Apparently young Verney opted for the latter course; he was back in
England  in  less  than  a  year. Verney  Papers ,  Camden  Society  Publications,
56:160–63 (1853).
27.  James  Revel,  ’The  Poor  Unhappy  Transported  Felon’s  Sorrowful
Account of His Fourteen Years of Transportation at Virginia in America (circa
1680),” cited by John M. Jennings, VMHB, 56:189–94 (1948). There is no way
of  tracing  the  lineage  of  this  poem  to  an  actual  identifiable  author;  its  first
publication was in the form of a chapbook, or popular pamphlet, sold by street
peddlers in London in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its authenticity is
indicated  by certain  place  names, topographical references  and  travel routes,
that  were  not  familiar  in  England.  Jennings  refers  to  authorities  such  as
Jernegan,  Ballagh,  and  Bruce  in  concluding  that,  in  any  event,  the  work
“presents  a  realistic  picture  of  conditions  in  Virginia  in  the  middle  of  the
seventeenth century.” Jennings is able to deduce that the author  would have
had  to  have  come  to  Virginia  somewhere  between  1656  and  1671.  I  would
further hazard that, since the poem does not allude to Bacon’s Rebellion, Revel
would  have  completed  his  term  of  servitude  before  that  unignorable  event.

That fact would seem to fix the date of his arrival in the colony between 1656
and  1662.  The  poem  is  reprinted  in  Warren  M.  Billings,  ed., The  Old
Dominion  in  the  Seventeenth  Century,  A  Documentary  History  of
Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 137–42. This particular passage
is found there at pp. 138–9.
28.  Richard  Beale  Davis,  ed., William  Fitzhugh  and  his  Chesapeake
World, 1676–1701 (Chapel Hill, 1963), pp. 128–9.
29. See Chapter 3, especially pp. 40–45.
30.  Hening,  1:396  (1656);  1:410  (1655);  1:455–6  (1658);  1:481–2  (1658);
1:546 (1660).
31. Hening, 2:143 (1662).
32. Hening, 2:283.
33. Hening, 2:346.
34. Hening, 2:404 (February 1677).
35.  Hening,  2:492–3.  This  1682  law  resulted  in  the “importation  of  many
more  Indian  slaves  than  has  usually  been  recognized.”  (Edmund  S.  Morgan,
American  Slavery,  American  Freedom:  The  Ordeal  of  Colonial  Virginia
[New York, 1975], p. 330.)
36.  Bruce,  2:129. Economic  History.  James  C.  Ballagh, A  History  of
Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), pp. 35–6.
37. Hening, 3:69.
38. Hening, 3: 69 n.
39. William W. Hening and William Munford,  Reports of Cases, Relating
Chiefly to Points of Practice, Decided by the Supreme Court of Chancery

for the Richmond District, 2nd edn., “Hudgins v. Wrights,” (1806), 1:133–43;

p. 137. But the court refused to extend the presumption of liberty to African-

Americans as Judge George Wythe had urged. That privilege, the court stated,

“relates to white persons and native American Indians” but not “to native

Africans and their descendants” (pp. 134, 143).

40. Lewis C. Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of

Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, DC, 1932;

reprinted 1958), 2:1025; Table 39 gives the number of African-American bond-

laborers for four colonies/states (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South

Carolina, and Georgia) as 632,000. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade:

A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 72, estimates the number of African bond-

laborers brought into the thirteen original colonies to have been around 275,000.

41. Replying to an inquiry about the mortality rate made by the

Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in 1676, Governor William Berkeley

said that, “whereas previously not one in five escaped the first year,” the

situation had so improved that “not one in ten unseasoned hands die now.”

Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record, pp. 108–11. Cf. Hening, 2:515.)

The average annual death rate in England in the 1670s was less than 3

percent. (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of

England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction [Cambridge, Mass., 1981], p. 532.)

42. Russell R. Menard: Economy and Society in Early Colonial

Maryland (New York, 1985), pp. 254, 268–9; idem., “From Servants to

Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern

Studies, 16: 355–90 (1977); David W. Galenson, “White Servitude and the

Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America,” Journal of Economic

History, 41:39–47 (1981); idem, White Servitude in Colonial America: An

Economic Analysis (New York, 1981); idem,  Traders, Planters and Slaves:
Market Behavior in Early English America (New York, 1986), pp. 162–6.
43. Annie Lash Jester, comp. and ed., Adventurers of Purse and Person:
Virginia,  1607–25   (Princeton,  1956;  2nd  edition,  1964),  pp.  1–70.  The
discussion  of  the  muster  by  Irene  W.  D.  Hect,  “The  Virginia  Muster  of
1624/25  as  a  Source  for  Demographic  History”  (WMO,  30:65–92),  is  of
invaluable  help  to  students  of  that  period.  Her  use  of  the  phrase  “Negro
servants or slaves” in the “or slaves” part does not reflect the record that she
has produced and discussed.
44.  Hening,  2:170  (1662). Archives  of  Maryland,  1:533  (1663–64).  See
further in Chapter 10.
45.  MCGC,  p.  466  (June  1640).  Hening,  2:26  (1661).  Helen  Tuncliff
Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning Emerican Slavery and the Negro,
5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1926–37 Octagon reprint, 1968), 4:189.
46.  Hening,  2:170  (1662). Archives  of  Maryland,  1:533  (1663–64).  See
also:  Whittington  B.  Johnson,  “The  Origin  and  Nature  of African  Slavery  in
Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 73:236–45
(1978); p. 237.
47. Gray, 1:203.
48. Morgan, p. 404.
49. “A Perfect Description of Virginia,” in  Force Tracts, Vol. 2, No. 8, p.
14.  A  study  of  twenty-two  estate  inventories  recorded  in Surry  County,
Virginia in the years 1686 to 1688, found not one plow listed. (Kevin P. Kelly,
“Economic  and  Social  Development  of  Seventeenth-century  Surry  County,
Virginia,” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1972; p. 138.)

50. Tobacco historian Robert says that in order to remove buds more

efficiently in order to limit the number of tobacco leaves drawing on the plant’s

nutrition, “Some of the yeomen who worked their own crops allowed their

thumb nails to grow long and then hardened these nails in the flame of a

candle.” (Joseph Clarke Robert, The Story of Tobacco in America [New

York, 1940], p. 14 n. 3.) I have not seen any evidence of this practice among

bond-laborers; perhaps they did not see any advantage for themselves in such

an improvement in “the instruments of production.”

51. Gray, 1:215–17. Bruce, 1:439–43. Joseph Clark Robert, The Tobacco

Kingdom: The Plantation, Market, and Factory in Virginia and North

Carolina (1800–1860) (Durham, North Carolina, 1938), pp. 34–55. Ulrich

Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929; 3rd edn.,

1967), pp. 112–15.

52. Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial

Maryland (New York, 1985), p. 462. Menard’s summary of extensive data

that he presents on the previous two pages for the period 1619 to 1698 cites

mainly, but not exclusively, Maryland data only from 1635 on. There is no

significant discrepancy between the increase of product per worker in Virginia

and Maryland. See also Gray, 1:218–19.

53. Morgan, pp. 126–9, 281–2. Morgan also attaches much importance to

the “unadaptability” of English laborers for colonial labor. (He seems to imply

that Africans were better suited by their previous labor experience.) But

whereas Smith attributes the inability to adapt to those who had not been

agricultural laborers in England, Morgan finds the typical rural English worker

to have been unsuited for plantation labor. He even gives this typical emigrant

worker a sobriquet, “The Lazy Englishman,” linking his unsuitability for

plantation labor  to  that of “The  Idle  Indian”  (Ibid., Chapter  3,  especially,  pp.
50–65).
54. Archives of Maryland, 54:234.
55. Hening, 1:257; 2:113. Archives of Maryland, 2:147–8. I have used the
term “adult bond-laborers” to cover the various cases in which the non-youth
ages range from sixteen for Irish and “aliens,” in 1643 and 1658, respectively,
and then for all bond-laborers in 1662 in Virginia, to twenty-two in Maryland in
1666.
56. Archives of Maryland, 2:147–48.
57. Hening, 2:240.
58.  John  Codman  Hurd, The  Law  of  Freedom  and  Bondage  in  the
United States, 2 vols. (Boston, 1858; Negro Universities Press reprint, 1968),
1:138–9. Under the Statute of Artificers of 1562, a laborer who failed to fulfill
the  terms  of  a  contract  for  a  particular  job  might  also  be  put  in  jail  for  one
month. (See pp. 22–3.)
59. MCGC, p. 105.
60. MCGC, pp. 466–8.
61. Hening, 1:440. (1658).
62. Archives of Maryland, 1:107–8.
63. McCormac, p. 52.
64.  Archives  of  Maryland,  2:524;  “Runaway  servants  were  usually
rewarded with a severe whipping by their masters …” (Proceedings  of  the
County  Court  of  Charles  County,  1658–1666,  and  Manor  Court  of  St
Clement’s  Manor,  1659–72,  Archives  of  Maryland ,  53:xxxiii  (editorial
comment).

65. Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1666–1674,
Archives of Maryland, 60:xxxv-xxxvi (editorial comment).
66. Ibid., 2:149; 65:xxxiii.
67.  At  that  time  the  average  product  per  worker  was  1,553  pounds  of
tobacco per year, and the price of tobacco was exceptionally low at 0.9d. per
pound. The price of male bond-laborers with four years or more to serve was
then  2,100  pounds  of  tobacco.  (Menard, Economy  and  Society  in  Early
Colonial Maryland, pp. 249 (Table VII–2), 448 (Table A–7); 462 (Table A–
14).  The  product  of  sixty-two  weeks  of  labor  would  equate  to  nearly  1,800
pounds of tobacco.
68. Archives of Maryland, 65:92
69. Archives of Maryland, 69:154–5.
70. For Virginia laws, see Hening, 2:273–4 (1663), 277–8, (1669) and 283
(1672).  See  also Archives  of  Maryland,  54:502,  527,  524,  for  examples  of
court awards to captors of runaway bond-laborers.
71. Archives of Maryland, 2:523–8.
72.  In  authorizing  the  expenditure  of  1,000  pounds  of  tobacco  for
construction  of  the  apparatuses  for  these  forms  of  punishment,  the
Northumberland  County  Court  gave  most particular  specifications:  “The  said
pillory is to be supplied with two Locust posts, the plank of which it is made to
be white oake two inches and a halfe thick [not recommended for the short-
necked], Eight foot in Length, and at least Seaven foot and a halfe high from
the holes [for the hands and the head of the victim] in the pillory to the Ground,
with a bench of Convenient height to stand upon[.] The stocks to be made of
white oake ten foot long and three inches and halfe thick with a bench to sitt

upon[.]  The whip[p]ing post to be of Sound  Locust at least Eight  foot  above
the  ground  and  three  foot  and  halfe  within  the  ground,  to  be  eight-square
[octagonal] and at least eight inches in Diameter” (Northumberland  County
Records, 1678–98, p. 424 [15 February 1687/8]).
73. Hening, 1:265–7, 463–5; 2:143–6.
74.  Raphael  Semmes, Crime  and  Punishment  in  Early  Maryland
(Baltimore,  1938),  pp.  37–8.  Semmes  comments:  “A  man  must  indeed  have
been in wretched circumstances if life in one of the jails  seemed attractive.”
See also Hening, 2:278–9.
75. Hening, 2:278–9 (1670). Archives of Maryland, 10:292.
76.  Good  surveys of  this  aspect of the  status  of bond-laborers  are  to  be
found  in:  Smith pp.  270–274;  Bruce,  2:35–9; Economic  History  (Baltimore,
1895) and James C. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia , pp.
50–51.
Smith generalizes: “Legal marriage without the consent of the masters was
always  forbidden”  (p.  271).  Bruce  appears  to  empathize  with  the  owners:
“Secret  marriages  among  the  servants  of  the  colony  seem  to  have  been  a
common source of serious loss to masters” (2:37).
77.  If  a  master  consented  to  the  marriage  of  a  woman  bond-laborer
belonging to him, the woman was freed from him (MCGC, p. 504 [12 March
1655/56]).
78. The record seems to reflect the fact that defiance of this law was more
likely where the bond-laborer was attempting to marry a free person, since it
almost necessarily involved  absconding from the owner’s  plantation. In 1656,
the  Lancaster  County  Virginia  Court  judged  the  marriage  of  a  bond-laborer

John Smith to be “no marriage” and ordered him to be returned constable-to-
constable to his owner (Lancaster County Records, 1652–57, p. 285).  The
following  year,  the  fine  for ministers  conducting  such  marriages  was  by  law
increased from 1,000 pounds of tobacco to 10,000 pounds (Hening, 1:332, 433).
For other examples of such illegal marriages, see: Norfolk County Records,
1637–46,  p.  51  (1640); Norfolk  County  Records,  1646–51,  ff.  147–147a
(1650); and Essex County Records, 1703–1708, p. 3 (1703).
79. Hening, 1:252–3 (1643). Archives of Maryland, 1:97 (1640). See also
John Leeds Bozman, The History of Maryland from Its First Settlement in
1633 to the Restoration in 1660, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1837), 2:135.
80. Forlorn bond-laborer Sarah Hedges was unsuccessful in her invocation
of this defense because the man she said was her husband, a seaman, did not
return with “the next shipping.” (Norfolk County Records, 1656–66, f. 423
[17 April 1665]; Norfolk County Orders, 1666–75, f. 2 [10 May 1666].) For
successful  invocations  of  this  immunity,  see: Accomack  County  Records,
1690–97,  pp.  173–173a  (21  November  1695).  See  Also Northampton
County records, 1657–64, ff. 163, 166 (23 March 1662/3; 28 April 1663).
81. See Hening, 3:74, 139, 361.
82. Ibid., 1:253.
83. Ibid. 2:114–15.
84. A minister’s salary was £80 by law (ibid., 2:45 [1662]). Ten thousand
pounds of tobacco would have equated officially to £34 (ibid., 2:55).
85. When the English takeover of New Netherlands began in 1664, the so-
called “Laws of the Duke of York” were promulgated for the former Dutch
territories. These were compiled from those already in effect in earlier Anglo-

American  colonies.  One  paragraph  of these  laws  declared  that marriages  of
bond-laborers done without owner consent “shall be proceeded against as for
Adultery  or  fornication.”  Children  of  such  unions  were  to  be  “reputed  as
Bastards.”  (Cheesman  A.  Herrick, White  Servitude  in  Pennsylvania
Indentured  and  Pennsylvania  Labor  in  Colony  and  Commonwealth
[Philadelphia, 1926. Negro Universities reprint, 1969], pp. 28, 287.)
86. Hening, 2:114–15.
87. Bozman, 2:135n.
88. Ibid.
89. The Maryland Provinical Court in 1657 sentenced a free woman and
free man to twenty lashes each for “having lived in a notorious and Scandalous
Course  of  life  tending  to Adultery  and  Fornication.”  The  man’s  punishment
was remitted upon the payment of a fine of five hundred pounds of tobacco.
(Archives of Maryland, 1:508–9, 588.)
In  April  1649,  in  an  instance  that  apparently  involved  no  physical
punishment,  a  Virginia  county  court  ordered  that  “William  Watts  &  Mary,
Captain Cornwallis’s Negro Woman … each of them doe penance by standing
in a white sheet with a white Rodd in their hands in the Chapell of Elizabeth
Rivers  in  the  face  of  the  congregation  on  the  next  Sabbath  day  that  the
minister  shall  reade  divine  service  and  the  said  Watts  to  pay  the  court
charges.” (Norfolk Wills and Deeds, 1646–51, p. 113a.) I have noted half a
dozen  early  Norfolk  County  cases  in  which  this “white  sheet,  white  rod”
penance was imposed on fornicators.
90. Archives of Maryland, Vol. LIII,  Proceedings of the County Court
of Charles County, 1658–66; editor’s comment, p. xxx.

91. Bozman, 2:135n.
92. Hening, 2:115 (1662); 3:139 (1696).
93.  For  Virginia  instances  in  which  the  “coverture”  defense  was  used
(once  unsuccessfully  and  once  successfully)  see Henrico  County  Record
Book  No.  1,  1677–92,  p.  164  (1  August  1684);  and Accomack  County
Records, 1690–97, f. 153 (18 June 1695).
On the other hand, the Virginia Assembly in 1662 ordered the erection of a
ducking-stool  for punishment  of  women  whose  utterances  might  make  “their
poore  husbands”  subject  to  law  suits under  the  “coverture”  principle.  But  it
appears that there were reasons for which unmarried women as well could be
subjected  to  this  sometimes  fatal  treatment.  In  1663,  Elizabeth  Leveritt,  a
husbandless  bond-laborer,  was  sentenced  to  endure  the  ordeal  of  watery
suffocation for being “impudent” to her owner. In an order that was unique so
far  as  my  study  of  the  seventeenth-century  Chesapeake  records  goes,  the
same court ordered that her owner be similarly tortured for failing to maintain a
proper discipline over Leveritt. (Accomack County Records, 1663–1666,  f.
26.)
94. 18 Eliz. I, c. 3. George Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law
in Connection with the state of the country and Condition of the People, 3
vols.; (supplementary volume by Thomas Mackay), (1898; 1904; Augustus M.
Kelley reprint, 1967), 1:165–6.
95. Hening, 2:115, 167. In 1691, the added time was reduced to one year
when the parents were European-Americans (Hening, 3:139–40).
96. Archives of Maryland, 1:373–4.
97. Hening, 2:115. Bruce, 2:35–6.

98.  Archives  of  Maryland,  58:28.  The  editors  of  this  volume
(Proceedings  of  the  County  Court  of  Charles  County,  1658–1666  and
Manor Court of St Clement’s Manor, 1659–1672) state that “Both men and
women were whipped indiscriminately, women on the bare back apparently as
frequently as men” (p. xxx).
99.  Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia ,  p. 48. Smith, p.
271.
100. York County Deeds, Orders, Wills Etc., 1684–87 , f. 7 (26 January
1685).
101. Commenting on the common occurrence of sentences of two or three
years for mothers in such cases, A. E. Smith notes that the actual time off for
child-bearing  rarely lasted for more than  a month or six weeks.  “[I]t is  plain
that  the  maidservant  generally  served  far  more  extra  time  than  she  can
possibly  have  lost  through  her  misdeeds  [let  that  judgementalism  pass];
sentences  of  two  and  even  three  years  are  quite  common,  though  childbirth
can rarely have incapacitated a woman for more than a month or six weeks.”
(Smith, p. 271.)
102. See Chapter 8, note 37, regarding the extent of these records.
103.  Rating  tobacco  at  10s.  per  hundred  pounds,  and  the  cost  of
transportation of European-American bond-laborers at £6 each.
104.  Output  per  worker  in  pounds  of tobacco increased  in  every  decade
from 1619 to 1699, and it is estimated to have been more than 1,500 pounds in
the  1660s. (Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland,  p.
426, Table A–14.) Though the price of Chesapeake tobacco fluctuated, it was
officially rated at about ten shillings a hundred pounds, 1.2d. per pound, during

the last four decades of the seventeenth century. (See Morgan, p. 204 n. 29.)
105. Smith, p. 271. Hening, 2:168.
106. Accomack County Records, 1666–70, f.  176, 3  February  1669/70.
Accomack County Records, 1697–1703, f. 78, 17 November 1699. Norfolk
County Records, 1675–86, p. 44, 22 November 1677.
107. Norfolk County Records, 1646–51, f. 140, 26 March 1650.
108. Archives of Maryland,, 53:xxviii-xxix, pp. 28–30.
109. Ibid., 53:xxix, p. 37.
110. For instances of this aspect of gender-class oppression, see: Norfolk
County  Records,  1651–1656,  ff.  35  and  46  (1653); Lancaster  County
Records, 1655–1666,  p.  82  (1659); Charles  City  County  Records,  1655–
1665, p. 523 (1664); Norfolk County Records, 1666–1675 (part 2), f. 74a
(1671); Norfolk  County  Records,  1675–1686,  ff.  44  and  99  (1677,  1679);
Accomack  County  Records,  1697–1703,  ff.  78–78a,  and  129a-130  (1699,
1702); Surry County Records, 1671–91, pp. 454–55 (1684). In four of these
cases, the owner sold away his own child in the womb of the pregnant bond-
laborer.
These  acts  were  treated  as  “fornication,”  which  entailed  a  fine  of  500
pounds  of tobacco on each party. If  the  woman  bond-laborer  was unable  to
pay her fine, she was to suffer 20 or 30  lashes  at the whipping post “on her
naked  back,”  or  alternatively,  if  the  owner  paid  her  fine,  she  was  bound  to
serve six months for that, and two years more for the expense her pregnancy
and  the  child  would  be  to  the  master  (Hening,  2:115;  3:74,  159).  In  Virginia
after 1662, as is noted below, the extra two years was to be served under a
different master, to whom she was to be sold by the churchwardens (Hening,

2:167).
111.  Hening,  2:167.  In  Maryland  in  1694  a  woman  in  this  situation  was
required  to  swear  “in  her  pains of Travaille” that the  owner was  the  father.
This oath, which the bond-laborer could swear falsely only at the peril of hell’s
eternal fire, would be taken as proof only if it seemed to the male judges to be
consistent  with  all  other  evidence  and  testimony.  (Archives  of  Maryland,
19:47.)
112.  Archives  of  Maryland,  60:xxxvi,  9–11.  The  court  record  identifies
Yansley as a “Spinster,” most likely a reference to her occupation, not to her
unmarried status. The editor of this volume of the Archives of Maryland, says
that Yansley was “presumably” a bond-laborer.
113. George Nicholls, 1:114–19, 121–5, 189. The laws were 22 Henry VIII
c. 10, 27 Henry VIII c. 25, and 43 Eliz. c. 2.
114. Nicholls, 1:189.
115.  Hening,  2:240. Archives  of  Maryland,  2:147–8.  See  also  Semmes,
pp. 85–7.
116. Hening, 2:115, 168.
117. Hening, 1:552.
118.  Menard, Economy  and  Society  in  Early  Colonial  Maryland,  pp.
460–61,  462.  It  is  to  be  noted  that  European-American  women  were  not
tithable unless they were “working in the ground”; but the records indicate that
many, perhaps most, were engaged directly in the cultivation of tobacco fields.
119.  See  the  cases  of  Bridgett  (last  name  omitted  in  the  record)  and
Wilking (?) Jones: Norfolk County Records (part 2, Orders), 1666–75, pp.
94, 101 (June and August 1673); Norfolk County Order Book, 1675–86, p.

108 (2 March 1679/80). For the 1662 law, see Hening, 2:114–15.
120. When the plantation bourgeoisie was able to reduce its labor force to
mainly lifetime, hereditary servitude, in the eighteenth century, the birth of the
children did become “cost-effective,” as the bourgeois term is.
121.  Hening,  1:361 (1649); 3:256.  Under  a  law passed in  1680, imported
children of African origin were not to be tithable until they were twelve years
of  age,  those  coming  from  Europe  not  until  they  were  fourteen  years  old
(Hening, 2:479–80).
122. Hening, 2:168 (1662).
123. Ibid., 2:298 (1672).
124. Ibid., 2:170.
125. Hening, 3:87.
126. In the opinion of Whittington B. Johnson, “This course of action was
probably  forced  upon  slaveowners  because  there  were  so  few  African
females  in  the  colony”;  it  brought  the  owner  “potential  monetary  gain”
(Johnson, p. 242.)
127.  This  calculation  was  propounded  in  an  opinion  delivered  by  Judge
Daniel  Dulany,  himself  a  slaveholder,  in  a  historical  appendix  to  a  decision
delivered by him on behalf of the Maryland Provincial Court on 16 December
1767.  (Thomas  Harris  Jr  and  John  McHenry, Maryland  Reports,  being  a
Series  of  the  Most  Important  Cases  argued  and  determined  in  the
Provincial  Court  and  the  Court  of  Appeals  of  the  then  province  of
Maryland  from  the  Year  1700  down  to  the  American  Revolution   [New
York, 1809], 2 vols., 1:559–64; 563.)
128. Archives of Maryland, 1:533 (1662); 13:546–9 (1692).

129. Hening, 2:170. Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia, p. 57.
130. Hening, 3:87.
131. CSP, Col, 13:644 (Minutes of the General Assembly of Maryland, 21
May 1692).
132.  Elizabeth  City  County  Records,  1684–99  (transcript),  p.  83  (30
December 1695).
133. Accomack County Records, 1703–9, ff. 107-a, 118 (3 February and
2 June 1708).
134.  Hening,  1:153–4;  2:195;  273. Archives  of  Maryland,  2:523–4.  For
some  Virginia cases arising  under such laws,  see Norfolk  County  Records,
1665–75,  p.  42  (1670),  and  ibid., 1675–86;  Middlesex  County  Records,
1673–80,  f.  135  (1678);  and Accomack County Records, 1678–82,  p.  173
(1680).
135. Hening, 2:115–16 (1662).
136. The  situation  reported  by an emissary of  the London  government  in
1701 surely was not of recent origin. “A great many,” he said, “choose to sit
down  loosers  rather  than  go  to  the  Law.”  (Report  of  George  Larkin  to  the
Lords of Trade and Plantations, CO 5/1312, 22 December 1701.)
137. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New
York, 1946), pp. 312–13.
138. Charles City County Court Orders, 1655–1658, in Beverley Fleet,
comp., Virginia  Colonial  Abstracts ,  34  vols.,  (Baltimore,  1961),  vol.  10,  p.
441 (8 February 1663/64).
139. McCormac, p. 44.
140. Ibid.,  p. 66. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia ,  p.

59. Hening, 2:268 (1668).
141. Archives of Maryland, Vol. 60,  Proceedings of the County Court
of Charles County, 1666–1674, pp. xxxv-xxxvi.
142. Ibid., pp. 45–47. The matter is presented in fuller detail in the record.
143. Ibid., pp. 108–9.
144.  Northampton  County  [Wills]  Order  Book ,  No.  10,  1674–1679,  p.
270.
145.  Calendar  of  Virginia  State  Papers  and  Other
Manuscripts … Preserved in the Capitol at Richmond, 1652–1859  edited
by  W.  P.  Palmer,  S.  McRae,  H.  W.  Flourney,  et  al.,  11  vols.  (Richmond,
1875–1893); 1:9–10.
146. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia , H. R. McIlwaine,
ed., 13 vols. (Richmond, 1915); 2:34–5. Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers,
Series 8, Vol. 7 (Miscellaneous Documents), p. 232 (24 October 1666).
147. Smith, pp. 237–8. This was not so in Barbados in the late decades of
the  seventeenth  century,  where  by  law  the  European  bond-laborers  were
guaranteed five pounds of meat  a week  and four pairs  of shoes every  year,
along with corresponding quantities of other items of wearing apparel (Smith,
p.237).  This  contrast  is  rooted  in  the  relative  difficulty  of  keeping  European
bond-laborers in the West Indies as compared with  the continental plantation
colonies. (See Chapter 12.)
148.  Accomack  County  Order  Book  I,  1632–1640,  p.  68  (1  February
1635/36); Accomack  County  Deeds  &  Wills  [Orders],  1666–1670 ,  p.  48
(17 February 1667/8). See also Smith, p. 250.
149. Gray, 1:366. Smith, p. 250.

150. For the customary diet in England, see E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila
V.  Hopkins,  “Seven  Centuries  of  the  Prices  of  Consumables  compared  with
Builders’  Wage-rates,”  Economica,  23:296–307  (1956).  Although  the
tabulation skips from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, it indicates a trend
of increase  in  the importance  of  meat and dairy  products in  the English diet.
While the grains-and-peas proportion declined slightly, beef replaced herring in
the diet, and by 1725, out of every 100 pence [the equivalent of less than ten
days builders’ wages] spent on “consumables” (food, drink, fuel and light, and
textiles), the meat and dairy  products portions accounted  for  37½ pence and
included  33  pounds  of  beef,  10  pounds  of  butter,  and  10  pounds  of  cheese.
(See ibid., Tables 1 and 2.) How nearly this approximated the wage worker’s
diet is not revealed, however.
See pp. 151–2 for bond-laborers’ struggles over diet.
151.  Aubrey  C.  Land,  “The  Planters  of  Colonial  Maryland,” Maryland
Historical Magazine, 67:109–28 (1972); p. 124.
152. Bruce, 1:486. Gray, 1:209.
153. E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Wage-rates and Prices:
Evidence  for  Population  Pressure  in  the  Sixteenth  Century,” Economica,
24:289–306 (1957); table 4, “England” column 1.
154. Bruce, 2:205–11.
155. Gray, 1:209.
156.  Cf.  Bruce,  2:8.  Bruce  cites York  County records  for 1657–1662  to
argue that in 1661 bond-laborers were given meat three times a week. But he
seems unable to find grounds for his speculation that, “It could not have been
many years before this allowance was extended to each day in consequence

of the enormous increase in the heads of hogs and horned cattle.” Perhaps he

might have cited from the same volume of York County records the rebellious

complaint of bond-laborers that they were dieted on only corn and water,

whereas they were supposed to get meat three times a week. (York County

Deeds, Orders, Wills, Etc , f. 149 [6 January 1661/2]. Besides the folio

number given here, there is page number 297 inscribed by the Virginia State

Library, and a typescript page 384 of the same record. Bruce cites “p. 384.”

Could he have been using the typescript; and did he mean 1662 instead of

1661?) See references to this bond-laborers’ plot in Chapter 8.

157. “Questions proposed by his Majestie and Councell for which I return

this humble plain and true answer.” [Henry] In Coventry Papers Relating to

Virginia, Barbados and other Colonies , microfilm prepared by the British

Manuscripts Project of the American Council of Learned Societies and

available at the Library of Congress (originals at the estate of the Marquis of

Bath, Longleat House, Wiltshire, England, hereafter to be cited as Coventry

Papers.) The present citation is Vol. 77, f. 332. The report is not dated, but

was obviously written in the fall of 1676. Henry Coventry was a Secretary of

State with primary responsibility for the colonies.

158. Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New

York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679–80 ,

translated and edited by Henry C. Murphy, Long Island Historical society

Memoirs I (Brooklyn, 1867), p. 191.

The report of George Larkin to the Lords of trade and Plantations in

December 1701 revealed that in Virginia and Maryland the owners still held to

the principle of getting pennies by saving them at the expense of the bond-

laborers’ food allowance: “… a man had really better be hanged than come a

servant into the Plantations, most of his food being homene and water.… I

have been told by some of them that they have not tasted flesh meat in three

months.” (CO, 5/1312).

159. Gray, 1:365–6.

160. Using Menard’s tabulations for the period 1660–79 inclusive for

Maryland, the average output per worker was 1,603 pounds of tobacco, and

the average price was 1.18d. In five years the labor of each bond-laborer

would thus have brought to the owner an income of £39 8s. (See Menard,

Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 449 and 462.) In

Virginia before 1660, according to Thomas J. Wertenbaker, “the average

annual income from the labor of one able worker … was not less than £12”

(The Planters of Colonial Virginia [Princeton, 1922], p. 71). Morgan says

that Virginia tobacco prices were “probably somewhat higher” than those in

Maryland, and he notes that in official transactions in Virginia in the last four

decades of the seventeenth century, tobacco was rated at 10s per hundred

pounds (1.2d per pound). (Morgan, p. 204 n. 20.) See also L. C. Gray’s

discussion of tobacco prices, 1:262–8.

Semmes states that an owner made an annual profit of “about fifty pounds

sterling,” citing, among other facts, the claim by a member of the Maryland

Colony council that on average the bond-laborer “would produce to his master,

at least fifty pounds sterling clear profit into purse, most commonly far more.”

(Semmes p. 80; the quoted phrase is cited from “Letters of Robert Wintour”,

unpublished manuscript in the collection of Dr Hugh H. Young, of Baltimore,

Maryland.)

161. CO 5/1312. See notes 136 and 158 above. A quarter of a century

before, the Virginia Assembly noted the practice among owners of pressuring

bond-laborers who were nearing the end of their terms to agree to extend their
servitude. (Hening 2:388–9.)
162.  ‘…  The  observed  increase  in  productivity  probably  resulted  from
making  servants  work  harder”  (Joseph  Douglas  Deal, Race  and  Class  in
Colonial  Virginia:  Indians,  Englishmen,  and  Africans  on  the  Eastern
Shore during the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993), p. 115).
163. Phillips, p. 126.
164. Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, p. 18.
165. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, p. 239.
166. George Fitzhugh in De Bow’s Review, 30:89 (January 1861), cited in
Phillips, p. 126.
167. Consequently, early in the season, when ready tobacco might not be
available,  exchanges  were  sometimes  made  completely  or  partially  by  direct
barter, as in the following cases found in the Maryland court records. In April
1663, Elizabeth Holbrooke, a bond-laborer belonging to John Williams with four
years to serve, was exchanged for “One yearling heyfer, with her encrease.”
In  March  1667,  John  Godshall  acquired  a  parcel  of  land  called  “Hogge
Quarter” for “a Servant named Thomas Porch in hand paid.” When Thomas
King the following year bought five hundred acres of land on the north side of
Nangemy  Creek  from  Thomas  and  John  Stone,  he  paid  “Seven  Thousand
Pounds  of  Tobacco  and  Caske  and  two  Servants”  (Archives  of  Maryland,
49:7 [1663]; 60:147, 168–9 [1668]). The Lancaster County Virginia records for
that same month reveal that Thomas Williamson had taken out a “mortgage”
on  a  male  bond-laborer,  one  Samuel  Pen[?],  on  whom  the  mortgage  holder,
Thomas  Williamson,  was  seeking  foreclosure.  (Lancaster  Orders,  Etc.,
1666–1680, p. 34 [13 March 1666/7].)

168. Bruce, 1:447.
169. Land, p. 124.
170.  Referring  particularly  to  the  1660–80  period,  when  tobacco  prices
were much lower than in previous decades, Edmund S. Morgan writes that the
small  self-employed  farmer  was  apt  to  be  debt-ruined  in  times  of  especially
low tobacco prices, but “a man with capital or credit to deal on a large scale”
could  thrive  through it all by prudent  market operations,  and  “by  working  his
men [and women] a little harder” (Morgan, p. 191).
171. Bullock, p. 11. See also A Perfect Description of Virginia, Being a
Full  and  True  Relation  of  the  Present  State  of  the  Plantation,  Their
Health, Peace, and Plenty … (London, 1649) in Force Tracts, II, No. 8, p. 6.
A century later the much-quoted William Eddis found that in Maryland, as
a  general  rule,  European  bond-laborers  were  “strained  to  their  uttermost  to
perform their allotted labor” under the watchful eye of the “rigid planter [who]
exercises inflexible severity in matters of supervision.”
172.  Accomack  Court  Orders,  1666–1670,  ff.  60–62  (16  June  1668).
The name of this entrepreneur is notorious to the fellowship of scholars of the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
173. Dankers and Sluyter, p. 216.
174. Archives of Maryland, 10:521 (22 September 1657).
175. Archives of Maryland, 1:21.
176.  James  Revel,  “The  Poor  Unhappy  Transported  Felon’s  Sorrowful
Account …,” VMHB, 56:189–94 (1948). Reprinted in Billings, p. 140.
177. Archives of Maryland, 10:484–5 (10 March 1656/7).

178. Bruce, 2:33.

179. Revel, p. 140.

180. According to the author of A Description of the Province of New

Albion, And a Direction for Adventurers with small stock to get two for

one, and good land freely, written in 1649, only one out of nine Virginia

immigrants was dying in the first critical year in the colony, but in the first three

decades, five out of six died in the first year of bondage, called the “seasoning”

time. (Force Tracts, II, No. 7, p. 5.) Governor Berkeley reported to the Lords

of Trade and Plantations in 1671 that the bond-laborers then generally survived

the first “seasoning” year, but that “heretofore not one of five escaped the first

year” (CO 1/26, f. 198. Hening 2:515).

The Virginia records led Thomas J. Wertenbaker to conclude in 1922 that

in the 1635–60 period one-third or more of the bond-laborers died in the first

year of their servitude, but that conditions improved so much that by 1671 the

proportion was only one out of five (Wertenbaker, pp. 40, 80). Abbot E. Smith,

in 1947, without giving specific dates, wrote thus of the bond-servitude of

European immigrants: “kill them it usually did; at least in the first years, when

fifty over seventy-five of every hundred … died without ever having a decent

chance at survival” (Smith, p.304). Walter Hart Blumenthal, in 1962, believed

that of the bond-laborers coming to the tobacco colonies between 1620 and

1680, 35 percent of the women and 50 percent of the men died within five

years after landing. (Blumenthal, p. 23). Wesley Frank Craven, in 1971, noted

the high death rate among the earliest Virginia immigrants, but believed that

subsequently the “first year … was usually not fatal” (Craven, p. 26).

The odds against a chattel bond-laborer surviving the first year are

indicated by the fact that a new laborer with five years to serve was

commonly sold for less than a seasoned hand who had only three or four years

to serve (Morgan, pp. 175–6). Russell Menard believes that the inflow of

immigrant laborers did not rise steadily after 1644 as Morgan (p. 180) argues,

but that it rose and fell in response to the rise or fall of tobacco prices

(Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, pp. 119–26). But, he

says, “the mortality rate among new arrivals must have been frightening” (ibid;,

p.191; see also Table IV–4, p. 137).

Both Morgan and Menard call attention to the disparity between the

mortality rates of New England and those in the tobacco colonies. That

disparity explains why New England’s population growth in the seventeenth

century did not depend upon immigration, while in Maryland and Virginia

population growth did. Among the factors making for the difference was that

while some 80 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake were chattel

bond-laborers, only a small percentage of New England immigrants were in

that category. (Morgan, p. 180; Menard, pp. 129–30, 140, and Tables IV–3

and IV–5, pp. 135 and 141.)

181. Dankers and Sluyter, p. 217.

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

August 1681).

183. Accomack County Order Book I (Orders, Deeds, Etc., No. 1),

1632–1640, p. 104 (3 July 1637). Norfolk County Wills & Deeds B, 1646–

1651, p. 117a (19 April and 31 July 1649).

In 1692 the Provincial Assembly of Maryland enacted a law providing that

owners who grossly abused “any English Servant or Slave,” or denied them

provisions, or forced them to work beyond their strength, for the first and

second offense were to be. fined, and if the offense were then repeated, the

bond-laborers were  to  be  “free  from  their servitude.’.’ Accordingly,  Thomas
Courtney, who “most barbarously dismembered and cutt off both the Ears” of
a “Molattoe girl,” a limited-term bond-laborer, was merely ordered to set her
free. There was no further “recompense” to the girl. Furthermore, that did not
mean  she  was  to  be  freed  from  servitude,  but  merely  from  servitude  to
Courtney. (Archives of Maryland, 13:451–7 [4 June 1692]).
184. Morris, pp. 485–7.
185. Hening, 2:53.
186.  Although  I  am  working  directly  with  the  colonial  records  as  cited,
almost  all,  or  nearly  all,  of  the  cases  mentioned  here  are  also  mentioned  in
Morris, pp. 485–8 and 491–96 (the Henry Smith case).
187.  Northampton  County  Orders,  Deeds,  Wills,  Etc.,  No.  2,  1640–
1645 (3 August 1640). I have had  to interpolate  somewhat in describing the
indenture, because of damage to the manuscript.
188. But the inquest jury said, ’how hee came by his death wee know not.”
(Northampton County Order Book, 1654–1664, pp. 21–2 [29 June 1658].)
Burton may have had no reason to feign a headache. In a subsequent autopsy,
a physician  found  that Burton’s  “heart [had  been]  very  defective  and  …  his
Lungs  imperfect  blacke  and  putrefied.” (Ibid.,  p.  25 [same  date].)  For  other
examples,  see: Charles  City  County  Records,  1655–1665,  p.  357  (3
February 1662/3; bond-laborer found starved to death, his body showing stripes
from  a whipping  administered  by  the  wife  of  his  owner). Northampton
County Order Book, 1657–1564, pp. 140, 142 (10 July and 24 August, 1662;
owner  posts  “good  behaviour”  bond,  which  is  returned’  to  him  three  months
later). Lancaster  County  Orders,  Etc.,  1666–1680,  f.  10.  (2  September
1666;  bond-laborer  dies  “very  shortly  after”  being  “switched”  by  owner  for

“feigning” illness; court finds owner “innocent.”) Northampton County Order

Book, 1664–1674, p. 130. (28 June 1672; owner’s agent kicks, a young

African-American boy to death, depositions are taken from fellow bond-

laborers but no further court action is recorded.) See also: Surry County

Records, 1671–91, p.219. (12 September 1678; inquest finds owner to have

caused the death of his woman bond-laborer; the court nullifies that finding.)

Middlesex County Order Book, 1694–1705, pp. 234–42, 300, 458. (1

August and 2 October 1699; account of the whipping to death of a “Mulatto

runaway boy” at the specific orders of his owner, Samuel Gray, a minister;

there is no record of any penalties.) The minister remained “one of the boys”

of the county elite; he served as a member of the first Board of Visitors and of

the Board of trustees of the College of William and Mary. (Richard L. Morton,

Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. [Chapel Hill, 1960], 1:346 n. 15.)

189. Archives of Maryland, 3:146, 187–8; 10:522, 534–45. Seven years

later, a member of the indicting grand jury, John Grammer, killed one of his

bond-labors with a hundred lashes, but the grand jury declined to indict him.

Archives of Maryland, 49:307–12.

190. Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1663–1666 Archives of

Maryland, 49:290, 304–7, 311–14. Fincher’s last words before sentence of

death was pronounced are a curiosity; after three months in jail he displayed

none of the choler he had shown when in authority: “If I deserve it I must die”

(p. 313).

191. Archives of Maryland, 54:390–91; 57:60–65. To be granted “benefit

of clergy,” a person found guilty was merely shown a bible and asked if he

could read it “as a cleric.” If the answer was “yes,” the defendant was let go

with a formalistic branding of the base of the thumb. This routine was a

vestigial relic of medieval times when only persons of clerical status were able
to  read  the  Bible  and  when  priests  were  to  be  tried  only  in  ecclesiastical
courts.  Carpenter  was  assessed  2,998  pounds  of  tobacco  for  sheriff’s  fees,
and  1,000  for  the  surgeon  who  “opened  the  skull”  of  the  victim  at  inquest.
(Ibid., 54:410.)
192.  Smith  appears  in  the  record  as  a  successful  planter  and  as  a
thoroughgoing pathological brute. He scorned his wife, and beat her until she
finally had to return to England to save her life. He sexually assaulted two of
his women bond-laborers, so that they ran away. (Retaken, they were ordered
to serve additional time double the days of their absence from Smith.) Another
bond-laborer,  mother  of  a  child  by  him,  charged  that  Smith  had  killed  it.
Accomack  County  Orders,  1666–1670,  pp.  67  (December  1668);  112  (4
February 1668/9); 129, 131–7 (17 March and 2 April 1668/9); 168 (25 January
1669/70);  176–9  (3  February  1669/70). MCGC,  p.  217  (1668–70),  cited  by
Morris, p. 496 n. 145.
193. Archives of Maryland, 69:xvi–xvii, 413. Morris, p. 486.
194. Archives of Maryland, 41:478–80.
195. Ibid., p. 385.
196. Ibid., 49:166–8, 230, 233–5.
197. See Appendix II-D.
198.  For  cases  in  which  special  judicial  consideration  was  given  to
psychopathic  persons  accused  of  crime,  see  Hening,  2:39  (1661)  and
Northumberland County Records, 1678–98 (1 November 1683).
199. See p. 22, above.
200. “You may  be a model citizen,  perhaps a member of  the Society for

the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odor of sanctity to boot; but

the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast.

That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating.” Thus spake

Marx’s wage-worker in 1869. It was just as true for the relations of labor and

capital in the plantation bond-labor system. (See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I,

Chapter X, “The Working Day,” Section 1.)

8 … and Resisting

1. W. E. B. DuBois, in Annual Report of the American Historical

Association for the Year 1909 (1911), a forerunner of his Black

Reconstruction, published in 1935.

2. Timothy H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in

Virginia 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History, Fall 1973, pp. 3–25.

3. Ibid., p. 7.

4. Ibid., p. 17. It will be apparent that this chapter draws on many of the

same records cited by Breen. However, as I have indicated briefly in the

Introduction of this work (The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p.

20), I question Breen’s attribution of the disappearance of solidarity of

European-American and African-American laborers against the plantation

bourgeoisie after 1676 to exclusively objective factors (such as tobacco prices

and the arrival of non-English-speaking laborers directly from Africa). I also

object to certain assertions requiring the reader to share his undocumented

speculations about the attitudes of the European-American workers (he called

them “whites”) (pp. 7, 17). Finally, I attempt in this work to give some attention

to  the  role  of  male  supremacy  and  the  resistance  to  it in  the.  history  of  the
period  embraced  in  the  title  of  Breen’s  article.  This  aspect  appears  to  have
been ignored, but not only by Breen.
5. “Servants responded to their lot in different ways. Some ran off at the
first  opportunity;  other  stole  from  their  owners  or  attacked  them;  still  others
found  momentary  solace  in  drink  or  casual  sexual  liaisons.  Planters  viewed
such behavior as a clear and constant danger to an orderly society and to their
own  economic  well  being. And  why  not? As  a  group  the  servile  population
accounted for half of Virginia’s settlers.” (Warren M.  Billings,  “The Law of
Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography, 99:45–62 [January 1991]; p. 50.)
6. In the words of the Virginia Assembly in 1661 (Hening, 2:35).
7. Northampton County Records, 1655–57, p. 26. This first John Custis
was  the  great-grandfather  of  Daniel  Parke  Custis,  whose  widow,  Martha
Dandridge  Custis,  married  George  Washington.  (Edward  Duffield  Neill,
Virginia Carolorum, the Colony under the Rule of Charles the First and
Second, AD 1625–1685 [Albany, NY, 1886], p. 209.)
8. See The Invention of the White Race, Volume One, p. 74, and Chapter
7, note 10 of this volume.
9. Hening, 1:411 (March 1655). After the restoration of the crypto-Catholic
Charles II to  the throne in England, the distinction was  repealed  in 1662, but
the new law was not retroactive (Hening 2:113–14).
10. Westmoreland County Records, 1661–62, p. 52.
11.  York  County  Records,  1657–62 ,  f.  122.  For  other  cases  of  bond-
laborer suicide, see: Archives of Maryland,  53:501–2; Northampton County

Records, p. 106 (1651); York County Records, 1657–62, f. 67. (1659); York
County  Records,  1665–72,  p.  115  (1666); Accomack  County  Records,
1676–78, p. 29 (1677); Accomack County Records, 1676–90, f. 122 (1678).
Perhaps there was a class predisposition to “want of Grace”; I have found
no seventeenth-century record of a suicide by a Chesapeake owner of bond-
laborers.
12. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 46.
13.  Archives  of  Maryland,  65:2–8.  A  second  African-American  bond-
laborer  was  among  the  group  of  those  originally  charged,  but  the  jury  found
him not guilty. Nevertheless, he was ordered to act as hangman of the other
four.
The editorial definition of “petty treason” is “the killing of a master by his
servants,  of  a  husband  by  his  wife,  or  of  a  high  ecclesiastic  by  one  of  his
inferiors” (p. xvii).
14. Hening, 2:118.
15.  For  a  number  of  such  Virginia  “violent  hands”  cases,  besides  those
detailed  here,  see: Accomack  County  Records, 1666–70,  pp.  14,  38  (1666,
1667); York County Records, 1665–72 , f. 52 (1666); Northampton County
Records,  1664–74,  pp.  69–70  (1669); Northumberland  County  Records,
1666–78, f. 93 (1670); Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, p. 200 (1671);
Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 6 (1674); Northumberland County
Records, 1666–78, f. 197 (1674); Accomack County Records, 1676–78, pp.
20–21 (1676).
16. Norfolk County Records, 1666–75, p. 7 (1666).
17. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, pp. 200–201.

18. Northampton  County  Records,  1664–74,  pp.  133,  134,  137–8,  219,
(1672, 1673).
19. Surry County Records, 1671–84, ff. 82, 97. You had to be there!
20. Hening 1:257 (March 1643).
21. Norfolk County Records, 1651–56, pp. 101, 105, 114. No reference
is  made  to  Bradley’s  age.  The  next  law  on  this  subject  (Hening,  1:441–2)
required  non-indentured,  “custom-of-the-country”  bond-laborers  who  were
under  fifteen  years  old  at  the  time  of  their  arrival  to  serve  until  they  were
twenty-one. But that law was not enacted until 1658.
22. Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 389.
23. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, ff. 132–3.
24.  Hening,  1:244 (1643), 350  (1647);  2:129  (1662),  441 (1679). To kill a
marked hog would logically make one subject to prosecution; but why did the
ruling  class  insist  on  these  severe  penalties  for  killing  and  eating  wild  hogs?
Was  it  a  way  of  emphasizing  to  bond-laborers  their  general  dependence  on
their  owners  for  their  “diet”?  Was  it  aimed  at  discouraging  runaways  who
might hope to maintain themselves on wild pork? Governor Francis Nicholson
articulated that concern: the “stock of cattle and hogs” running “in the woods
and  about  the  frontiers,”  he  said,  “would  supply  them  [runaways]  with
victuals.”  (CSP,  Col. ,  16:391,  Nicholson  to  Commissioners  of  Trade  and
Plantations, 20 August 1698.)
25. For typical examples, see: Northumberland County Records, 1652–
65,  f.  351;  ibid., 1666–78,  f.  151;  ibid., 1678–98,  p.  6; Lancaster  County
Records,  1666–80,  ff.  142,  215,  230,  352; Middlesex  County  Records,
1673–80, f. 36; ibid., 1680–94, pp. 5, 31; ibid., 1694–1705, p. 98, 289–90.

26.  Accomack  County  Records,  1676–90,  pp.  389–90  (7  November
1684).
27. Archives of Maryland, 49:8–10 (31 March 1663). The sentence of the
court  was  that  six  suffer  30-lash whippings,  to  be  administered  by  the  other
two.
28. Lancaster County Records, 1666–80, f. 158 (13 July 1670).
29. In regard to the components of the English diet at that time see page
321, n. 150.
30.  York  County  Records,  1657–62 ,  ff.  85  (24  July  1660);  143  (24
January 1661/2); 149 (25 January 1661/2); 150 (10 March 1661/2). A part of
this record is printed in VMHB. 11:34–6 (1902–1903).
31.  Library  of  Congress,  Virginia  (Colony)  Collection  microfilm,  reel  4,
depositions  taken  13  September  1663.  These  materials  have  been  printed  in
VMHB,  15:38–43  (1907–8).  See  also  Robert  Beverly, History  and  Present
State of Virginia  (1705); John Burk, The History of Virginia from its First
Settlement  to  the  Commencement  of  the  Revolution,  3  vols.  (Petersburg,
Virginia,  1822),  1:135–7;  and  Charles  Campbell, History  of  the  Colony and
Ancient Dominion of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1860).
32. Perhaps this was the Birkenhead mentioned in the Interregnum Record
Book  for  28  June  1653,  who  was  scheduled  to  speak  with  a  committee
“concerning  matters  of  importance”  and  to  “give  in  names  of  such  other
persons  as  to  be  summoned  before  the  Committee”  (Great  Britain  Public
Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 37:445).
33. Hening, 2:204 (16 September 1663).
34. Hening, 2:195.

35. Hening, 2:204.

36. A great portion, quite possibly half, of the seventeenth-century Virginia

court records no longer exist. Of the lost seventeenth-century county records,

a major part was destroyed by fires set when Robert E. Lee’s Confederate

army retreated from Richmond in the first days of April 1865. However, says

an archival specialist, “an awful lot of [the] dates of destruction have nothing at

all to do with the Civil War,” many of the records having been lost in other

wars, and in floods and non-wartime fires. Some few seem not to be

accounted for at all. (Robert Clay, of the Virginia State Library Archives, in

The Callaway Family Association Journal, 1979, pp. 48–56; see p. 51 for a

list of Burned Record Counties.) This is simply a limitation to which historians

must be reconciled, aware as they must ever be of the risks of attempting to

generalize on the basis of incomplete information.

Of the approximately 1,675 total of all the years of existence of all the 27

Virginia counties that at some time existed in Virginia between 1634 (the

beginning of county formation) to 1710, county court records of varying extents

are available in photocopy and on microfilm as well as in abstracts from the

records, at the Virginia State Archives in Richmond, comprising some 1,275

county-years. In the preparation of this study, I have examined the records

covering some 885 of these county-years, including some made in four

counties that were extinguished during that period: Accawmacke, Charles

River, and Warrosquoake in 1643; Rappahannock in 1693. (See Martha W.

Hiden, How Justice Grew, Virginia Counties: An Abstract of Their

Formation, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 19

[Richmond, 1957], especially charts 1–9, pp. 83–5.)

37. Billings, p. 50, J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia:

Indians,  Englishmen,  and  Africans  on  the  Eastern  Shore  During  the
Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993), p. 126.
38. There were paradoxical cases, as noted in Chapter 7, when the owners
might  find it  to  their  advantage  to  “encourage”  flight  of bond-laborers  in  the
last month or so of their bondage to avoid payment of the customary “corn and
clothes” due at the end of their terms.
39. Due to “the late unhappy rebellion,” the Assembly said in amending the
statute of limitations in October 1677, “all judiciary proceedings were impeded
and  hindred  for  the  greatest part  of  the  last year.”  (Hening,  2:419–20).  The
records of the Provincial Court of Maryland tell of the flight of eight African-
American  bond-laborers  from  that  province  to  Virginia  during  the  time  of
Bacon’s Rebellion. (Archives of Maryland, 49:355–6.)
40. Hening, 2:35.
41. Governor Berkeley to Lords of Trade and Plantations (Hening, 2:515):
according to Berkeley there were bond-laborers in Virginia.  6,000 European-
American  and  2,000  African-American.  Governor  Culpeper’s  estimate,  12
December  1681,  put  the  numbers  at  “fifteen  thousand  servants,”  of  whom
3,000 were African-Americans (CSP, Col., 11:157).
42. When “takers-up” of runaways applied to be certified by the General
Assembly  for  compensation,  the  list  of  the  captives  gave  no  indication  of
whether two or more had acted in concert.
43.  MCGC,  p.  467  (17  October  1640).  In  the  end  the  costs  were  to  be
repaid by extensions of the servitude of bond-laborers recaptured.
44. MCGC, p. 466. The owner would have preferred to dispose of them in
Maryland.

45. MCGC, p. 468.
46. MCGC, p. 467 (22 July 1640).
47.  MCGC,  p.  467  (13  October  1640).  By  “The  Dutch  Plantation”  they
may have meant present-day Delaware.
48. Ibid.
49. Northampton County Records, 1645–51, f. 2 (11 November 1645).
In  this  and  subsequent  notes,  the  dates  given  are  those  of  the  court
proceedings; where the dates of the events described are significantly different
from the date of the court record, those dates will be given.
50.  Accomack  County  Records,  1666–70,  ff.  31–3.  Although  the
depositions in this case were taken in August 1663, they were not entered in
the record until 16 July 1667.
51. Two, and possibly three, of the women were married, from which fact
I  infer  that  they  were  probably  not  chattel  bond-laborers.  By  the  same
reasoning, I conclude that the conspirator husbands of two of them were not
chattels. In all probability they were former bond-laborers.
52.  They  were,  respectively,  the  son-in-law  and  daughter  of  Colonel
Scarburgh (Deal, p. 119).
53.  “Black  James,”  was  associated  in  the  accounts  with  “Cornelius  a
dutchman’s wife.” James is not further identified. It is worth noting, however,
that  among  the  tithables  of  Lieutenant  Colonel  William  Kendall  in  1668  in
neighbouring  Northampton  County  were  “Cornelius  Arreale”  and  “James
Negro.” (Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 55.)
54.  Accomack  County  Records,  1671–73,  pp.  93–7.  Although  the
depositions were taken in December 1670, they are entered in the record on 23

April  1672,  more  than  two  years  later.  Possibly  they were  used  in  evidence
against  one  of  the  plotters,  Isack  Medcalfe,  who  at  the  later  date  was
appealing for leniency in the matter of the extension of his time of servitude.
55. Middlesex County Records, 1673–80, f. 226 (4 October 1680).
56. Accomack County Records, 1678–72, p. 95 (16 July 1679).
57.  Lancaster  County  Records,  1666–80,  ff.  487–8  (10  September
1679).
58. Northumberland County Records, 1678–98, p. 176 (18 April 1683).
59. Accomack County Records, 1682–97, p. 131 (2 April 1688).
60. Norfolk County Records, 1686–95, p. 108 (17 February 1688).
61.  Middlesex  County  Records,  1680–94,  pp.  309–10  (14  October
1687).
62 Middlesex  County  Records,  1680–94,  pp.  526–7 (9  October  1691);
535  (23  November  1691);  539  (4  January  1691/2.  See  also Rappahannock
County Orders, 1686–92, p. 335 (3 February 1691/2).
63.  Northumberland  County  Records,  1678–98,  p.  443  (17  October
1688).
64. York County Records, 1687–91, p. 527 (26 January 1690/91; the date
of their flight was 18 August 1690). One might speculate that these men had
hoped for a better lot in Quaker country.
65. Norfolk County Records, 1666–75, f. 37 (18 August 1669).
66.  Lancaster  County  Records,  1666–80,  ff.  211–18  (10  March
1674/75).
67. Norfolk  County Orders, 1675–86,  f.  10  (15 December  1675).  The

Beverleys  apparently  represented  the  exceptional  case  of  a  bond-labor
marriage.
68. Accomack County Records, 1697–1703, f. 67 (24 June 1699).
69.  Northampton  County  Records,  1664–74,  p.  123  (28  February
1671/2).  A  previous  entry  of  the  same  date,  concerning  Rodriggus’s  wife,
indicates  that  Rodriggus  was  employed  by  planter  Mr John Eyre  (or  Eyres),
though not as a bond-laborer.
70. Norfolk County Orders, 1675–86, p. 99 (16 August 1679).
71. Northampton County Records, 1690–97, p. 4 (19 November 1690),
Presumably  this  is  the  same  Crotofte  of the  clandestine  feasts  (see  p.  151).
Has  he  survived  as  a bond-laborer  after  all these six years? But  who is  this
John Johnson? Presumably he is neither the son nor the grandson of Anthony
Johnson, the patriarch of Pungoteague Creek. And what were the respective
offenses for which they were in jail?
72.  Richmond  County  Records,  1694–99  (4 August  1697).  When  Loyd
sued Thacker for the long loss of Redman’s services, Thacker, citing the 1662
Virginia  law  of  descent  through  the  mother,  successfully  contended  that
Redman  was  a  free  person,  the  child  of  an African-American  father  and  a
European-American woman.
73. Henrico County Records, 1694–1701, pp. 100–101 (1 April 1696).
74. In view of the fact that the woman was legally obligated to reveal the
name  of  the  father  of  the  child,  and  in  some  instances  was  jailed  until  she
complied, it is a mystery that the majority of the court records of such cases do
not provide the name of the child’s father. Does that mean that the owner was
being  protected?  The  person  who  paid  the  bond-laborer’s  “fornication”  fine

generally claimed  the  six months of servitude  due  from  her  on that  account.
Sometimes  that  claim was  not  explicitly  asserted  in  the  record.  Although  it
might  be  surmised that  in some  such  cases  the  fine-payer  was  the  father,  I
have left them out of account.
In some of these 140 cases where the identity has been given only as “a
negro,” the social status is assumed to be that of a bond-laborer. For the rest,
when a person is not explicitly identified as a bond-laborer, it is assumed that
he/she is a free person, because bond-laborers were identified as servants of
an  owner.  It  is  possible  to  identify  the  male  partner’s  social  status  in  fewer
than half the “fornication” case records; no conclusions can be drawn as to the
free-to-bond proportions among the male partners in the other cases.
75. This inference is based on two facts. The overwhelming proportion of
the seventeenth-century male inhabitants of the Chesapeake arrived as bond-
laborers. Second, of these 121 men, only one is termed “Mr,” the lowest order
of honorific address.
76.  Four  of the  women  –  three  Europeans  and one African-American –
were  free  persons  involved  with  male  bond-laborers.  Of  the  total  of  139
women  (one  was  involved  with  two  different  bond-laborers),  eight  were
African-Americans, the rest were European-Americans.
77. York County Records, 1657–62, f. 148 (25 [?] January 1661/2).
78. See p. 131.
79.  Two  Middlesex  County  Court  decisions  applied  this  principle  in
declaring invalid  two  separate  contracts  executed  by bond-laborers  Rebecca
Muns and of Martha Carroll (Middlesex County Records, 1673–80,  ff.  54,
83 [10 April 1676, 19 November 1677).

80.  Friedrich  Engels  dwells  on  this  subject  in  relation  to  the  proletariat,
arguing that true monogamous relationships are best achieved where property
considerations  are  absent  (Friedrich  Engels, The  Origin  of  the  Family,
Private Property and the State [New York, n.d.], p. 59]).
81.  Four  of  the  women,  including  one  African-American,  were  free
persons.
82. Accomack County Records, 1666–67, pp. 59, 150.
83. York County Records, 1677–84, p. 535.
84. Accomack County Records, 1682–97, pp. 70, 95 (1 and 7 September
1685).
85. Hening, 2:114 (1662).
86. Essex County Records, 1703–1708, pp. 3, 10 (August and September
1703).
87.  This  point  will  be  elaborated  on in the  discussion of  Gernor  Gooch’s
letter to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations of 1736, in Chapter 13.
88.  The  general  subject  of  the  status  of  African-Americans  in  the
Chesapeake colonies will be treated in Chapter 10.
89.  Hening,  2:84  (March  1662);  170  (December  1662);  267  (September
1668).
90. Accomack County Records, 1666–70, p. 112 (4 February 1668/69).
91. York County Records, 1694–97, pp. 9–13.
92. Accomack County Records, 1676–78, pp. 54–5. (18 June 1677). Dun
is identified as a bond-laborer of John David in the 1675 list of tithables.
93.  Accomack  County  Records,  1678–82,  pp.  271,  295–6.  How  much

was Griffin’s attitude different from that of two bond-laborers who nearly beat

to death a James “a Scotchman” whom their owner had appointed to be their

overseer? Northampton County Records, 1664–74, p. 61 (1 March 1668/9).

94. York County Records, 1677–84 , pp. 360, 362–4 (2 December 1681).

It is not absolutely clear whether the “he” in Wells’s remark referred to

himself or to Frank. What is not in doubt is that Wells and Frank were on the

same side in the affair. All the persons mentioned in this account were

European-Americans, except Frank.

95. Conway Robinson, “Notes from the Council and General Court

Records, 1641–1672,” p. 279, April 1669, in VMHB, 8:243 (1900–01).

96. “If, as Winthrop Jordan has remarked, the language of the laws against

miscegenation was ‘dripping with distaste and indignation,’ it was the language

of the most politically active of the planter class. We have no evidence that

during most of the seventeenth century, most whites shared it.… The ideology

of racism may have been present in the culture of the elite as early as 1600,

but nonslaveowning whites in the Chesapeake seem to have absorbed it only

gradually, with the growth of slave society in the late seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuries” (Deal, p. 181.)

9 The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate

Stratum

1. Warren M. Billings, “ ‘Virginia’s Deploured Condition,’ 1660–1676: The

Coming of Bacon’s Rebellion,” PhD thesis, University of Northern Illinois,

June 1968, p. 128.

2.  The  county  (originally  “shire”)  form  was  adopted  in  August  1634
(Hening,  1:224).  Martha  W.  Hiden, How  Justice  Grew,  Virginia  Counties:
An Abstract of Their Formation, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Booklet No.
19 (Richmond, 1957).
3. Hening, 2:21 (March 1661).
4. Hening, 1:402 (March 1665/6). The county courts were courts of origin
for  all  civil  cases  involving  damages  and  costs  amounting  to  less  than  1,600
pounds  of  tobacco,  and  for  all  criminal  cases  except  those  in  which  the
penalties included dismemberment or death (Hening, 2:66).
5. Hening, 2:280. The right of all freemen to vote had had its legislative ins
and outs. In 1658,  the last law on the matter (Hening,  1:475) enacted  before
that of 1670 had restored the right that had been taken away in 1655 (Hening,
1:411–12).
6. Hening, 2:59.
7. Hening, 1:483.
8.  Hening,  2:21.  As  encouragement  to  the  constables,  they  were  to  be
rewarded by the owner of each runaway recaptured and returned.
9. Hening, 2:273–4.
10.  Ibid.  A  year  later  the  General  Assembly,  upon  reflection  on  the
prospective cost of the law and its susceptibility to local collusion, reduced the
amount of the reward to 200 pounds of tobacco, payable for fugitives taken up
more than ten miles from their owner (Hening, 2:277). See also Hening, 2:283–
4, regarding fraudulent claims.
11. Charles City County Records, 1655–65, pp. 279–81, 284–8.
12. CO 1/30, pp. 114–15 (16 July 1673). This document may also be read

in VMHB, 20:134–40 (1912).
13.  Edmund  S.  Morgan, American  Slavery,  American  Freedom:  The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), pp. 247–8.
14. Sir Francis Bacon, Essay No. 15, “Of Seditions and Troubles” (1625) in
Works, 6:406–12; p. 407. Bacon draws this reference from Isaiah, 45:1.
15. In the period 1660–76, seven out of ten of the colony elite had been in
the country for no more than twelve years (Billings, p. 130).
16.  Lionel  Gatford, Publick  Good  Without  Private  Interest   (London,
1657), p. 3.
17. John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of
Eighteenth-century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, NY, 1974), pp. 19–
20.  William  S.  Perry,  ed.,  Collections  Relating  to  the  American  Colonial
Church  (Hartford,  1870),  1:11,  15;  Philip  Alexander  Bruce,  Institutional
History  of  Virginia  in  the  Seventeenth  Century ,  2  vols.  (New  York  and
London,  1910),  1:131,  194–207;  George  M.  Brydon, Virginia’s  Mother
Church  and  the  Political  Conditions  under  Which  it  Grew   (Richmond,
1947–52), 1:passim.
Apparently  disregarding  the  mammonistic  implication  of  the  observation,
one  doctoral  student  commented  in  a  footnote  that  “tobacco  was  to  prove
almost the coalescing factor in Virginia that religious fanaticism was to prove
in New England” (Darrett B. Rutman, “The Virginia Company and Its Military
Regime,” in Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas
Perkins  Abernathy  [Charlottesville,  1964;  Arno  Press,  1979],  p.  231).  In
justice to Rutman, it must be noted that the book and the author had “grown
very far apart” in the interval between its writing and its publication (see the
author’s prefatory “Apologia,” dated 1978).

18. Hening, 2:48, 180–83, 198; 3:298.

19. Rainbolt, p. 19. Historical Statistics of the United States from

Colonial Times to 1970, p. 1168. Yet in 1692, when Commissary James Blair,

head of the Anglican Church in Virginia, requested funds to found a college in

order to train up soul-savers for gospel-starved Virginia, English Attorney-

General Hedges expostulated, “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!” (Charles

Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia

[Philadelphia, 1860], p. 346; Campbell cites “Franklin’s correspondence”). This

was reminiscent of the comment of a Barbadian slaveholder about 1680, that

sugar planters “went not to those parts to save Souls, or propagate Religion,

but to get money” (Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate

[London, 1680], p. 39 marginal note). Godwyn repeated the observation five

years later in his Trade Preferr’d before Religion and Christ made to give

place to Mammon (London, 1685), p. 11. Nevertheless Blair’s proposal for a

college was given financial support by the English government, and when it

opened its doors in 1697, it was named after the then reigning English

monarchs, William and Mary.

20. Thomas Ludwell to John Lord Berkeley (Sir William Berkeley’s

brother), 24 June 1667 (Cited in Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of

Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. [New York, 1895], 1:394.)

21. Rainbolt, p. 6. Rainbolt examines circumstantial factors that frustrated

efforts at diversification of the Virginia economy. Although the title of his book

(From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth Century

Virginia Economy) refers to the eighteenth century, Rainbolt’s main attention

is directed to the 1650–1710 period, yet well after the commitment to tobacco

had become a settled question in practical terms, and the guiding principle of

colonial Virginia government had been firmly established: to secure the highest

quickest profit for the Virginia planters, shippers, servant-trade merchants,

English Crown interest, tax-and-customs farmers.

22. I fully accept the conclusion reached by Edmund S. Morgan, in a

general note on tobacco prices, that “no reliable or regular series of annual

prices current can be constructed for seventeenth-century Virginia” (Morgan,

pp. 135–6, n. 7). Morgan refers to Russell R. Menard’s work in assembling the

available data. I have chosen to draw upon Menard’s figures for present

purposes, referring particularly to his summary of Chesapeake farm prices

(Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland

[New York, 1985], pp. 448–9). I feel justified in this course because I have

found much of the same data by my own research, and because Menard’s

picture of decade-to-decade trends is supported by other economic historians,

such as Philip Alexander Bruce and Lewis C. Gray, and by Morgan himself.

23. Wilcomb E. Washburn is a dissenter from this generally accepted view.

Washburn acknowledges the prevalence of desperate poverty among the

people and their “unwillingness to accept their fate passively,” but at the same

time he considers poor planters’ mutinies as insignificant (Wilcomb E.

Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion

in Virginia [New York, 1957], pp. 31, 187 n. 63). Moreover, Washburn denies

that Bacon’s Rebellion can be ascribed to the existence of class conflict within

the colony. Rather, he regards the rebellion as merely a manifestation of

“frontier” hostility to Indians (ibid., p. 235 n. 3).

Readers of Volume One of The Invention of the White Race will know

how much I appreciate Dr Washburn’s research and argument regarding the

white-supremacist treachery toward, and repression of, American Indians

under Anglo-American and United States “Indian policy.” But his sensitivity to
“racism” seems curiously limited in the dismissive terms with which he treats
the participation by African-Americans in Bacon’s Rebellion. As bond-laborers
they were not motivated by anti-Indian interests, but by a determination to be
freed form their bondage. (Ibid., p. 88. See Chapter 11.)
24. Bruce, Economic History, 1:391.
25. Accomack (for all the years except 1660, 1661, and 1662), Lancaster,
Lower  Norfolk,  Northampton,  Northumberland,  and  York  (all  years  except
1663 and 1664). (Billings, pp. 168–73.)
26. Ibid., p. 159.
27.  Edmund  S.  Morgan  shows  a  total  population  of  3,628  in  these  six
counties in 1674. (Morgan, pp. 412–13.)
28. The total of all debts was 51,870,000 pounds of tobacco; those owed to
the  elite  amounted  to  12,225,000  pounds;  those  owed by  the  elite  totalled
6,227,000 pounds.
29.  In  three  years  the  amount  owed  by  the  elite  exceeded  the  amount
owed to them, in the amount of 585,000 pounds; in the other thirteen years, the
account stood the other way by 6,596,000 pounds.
30. Edmund S. Morgan, “Headrights and  Head Counts,” VMHB,  80:361–
71  (1972);  p.  366.  The  same  information  is  largely  recapitulated  in  Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 221–2.
31. Although Menard did not find a similar pattern of concentration of land
ownership  in  three  Maryland  counties  in  the  1659–1706  period,  he  does  not
regard those findings as adequate for drawing a general conclusion regarding
the matter. He comments on the rise in tenancy in this period, noting that an

increasing number of people were falling into a landless status, a condition that
would  eliminate  them  from  land  ownership  statistics  altogether  (Menard,  pp.
309–12).
32.  Kevin  P.  Kelly,  “Economic  and Social  Development  of Seventeenth-
century Surry County, Virginia,” PhD thesis, University of Washington, 1972,
p. 137.
33.  Thomas  J.  Wertenbaker,  The  Planters  of  Colonial  Virginia
(Princeton, 1922), p. 58.
34.  CO  5/1539,  pp.  20–22  (margin  date,  6  October  1696).  By  way  of
remedy, Randolph recommended a strict collection of the one shilling per fifty
acre quit-rent and the limiting of future land patents to 500 acres.
35. Wertenbaker, p. 59.
36. Menard, p. 316.
37. CO 1/30, pp. 114–15 (16 July 1673). This document may also be read
in VMHB, 20:134–40 (1912).
38. Ibid.
39.  Surry  County  Records,  1671–84,  pp.  40–43  (3  and  20  January
1673/4); 1671–91, pp. 41–2 (6 January 1673/4). Extensive excerpts from the
record  are  printed  in  Warren  M.  Billings,  ed., The Old  Dominion  in  the
Seventeenth  Century,  A  Documentary  History  of  Virginia,  1606–1689
(Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 263–7.
The  proportion  of  propertyless  freemen  remained  high.  An  exchange
between  the  Surry  County  Court  and  Governor  Effingham  provides  a  rare
example  of  precision  regarding  this  economic  differentiation  among  the  free
population.  Surry  County  submitted  the  names  of a  total of 314  men  for  the

militia at the end of 1687. Effingham returned the list and asked that the names
of those who were “Free men [but] not free holders, or Housekeepers … be
struck  out.”  As  a  result,  the  roll  was  reduced  by  114,  or  36  percent,
presumably  propertyless  freemen.  (Surry  County  Records,  1671–91,  pp.
597–601; 619–23.)
40. Rainbolt, p. 12.
41.  Sir  William  Berkeley,  A  Discourse  and  View  of  Virginia   (London,
1663), p. 5.
42. Rainbolt, p. 46.
43. Historians have frequently taken note of the  recurring enthusiams for
diversification  of  the  Virginia  economy  and  of  efforts  to  curtail  tobacco
production; the most thorough study of the subject is John C. Rainbolt’s From
Prescription  to Persuasion  (see  note  17,  and  note  21  on  the  period  mainly
covered).
See  also  the  special  study  of  the  subject  by  Sister  Joan  de  Lourdes
Leonard, “Operation Checkmate: The Birth and Death of a Virginia Blueprint
for Progress,” WMQ. ser. 3, 24:44–74 (1967).
44.  Leo  Francis  Stock,  ed., Proceedings  and  Debates  of  the  British
Parliaments  Respecting  North  America,  5  vols.,  (Washington,  DC,  1924);
1:374.  House  of  Commons,  7  March  1671. CSP,  Col. ,  11:318.  Petition  of
sundry  merchants  possessing  estates  in America  to  the  Lords  of  Trade  and
Plantations, received 7 November 1682.
45. Rainbolt, pp. 154, 155, 159.
46. CO 324/9.
47. Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, Vol I,

1651–1781 (Richmond, 1875), edited by William P. Palmer; pp. 137–8.

48. Archives of Maryland, 25:266–7.

49. “Representation of the Board of Trade relating to the Laws made,

Manufactures set up, and Trade Carried on in His Majesty’s Plantations in

America,” 1734; manuscript in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public

Library, Research Libraries.

50. See, for example, the justification of “An Act for Ports” as a design to

stop the “import or export [of] goods and merchandises, without entering or

paying the duties and customes due thereupon.” (Hening, 3:53–4 [1691]. In the

end, the consequences of the prolonged struggle to achieve a diversified

economy were thoroughly incongruous with the initial motives behind the

effort. Designed as a solution to the economic ills of the tobacco economy, the

various schemes often only disrupted the economy still more (Rainbolt, p. 171).

51. Eighteenth-century developments lie largely beyond the scope of the

present work, but in the context of this discussion of diversification, brief

mention is required of the increase in the relative importance of grain

cultivations in the Chesapeake beginning in about 1740. This shift was not the

result of any general diminution of demand for tobacco exports; indeed,

tobacco exports to Britain, including that portion destined for re-export,

followed a generally rising trend between 1740 and the War of Independence.

(Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970

[Washington, DC, 1976], Series Z-441, Z-442, Z-449.) Rather, it resulted from

two principal causes. The exhaustion of the soil under tobacco cultivation was

such that under the custom of field rotation, twenty acres per hand was

required to maintain tobacco production on three acres. That compelled either

the acquisition and clearing of new land or a reduction of the size of the labor

force, both of which tended to reduce the rate of profit. Second, there was a

rise in demand for grains, particularly wheat, in Europe, as well as in northern

colonies and the West Indies. This shift hardly qualified, however, as

significant diversification of the economy of the region. Despite the limited

increase in the value of grains in total exports, tobacco still accounted for three

times as much as wheat and corn together in the period 1768–72 (Klingaman,

“Significance of Grain”, pp. 274–5, cited in full below); and the profits of the

Chesapeake bourgeoisie remained absolutely dependent on exports of one

major and one or two minor crops. (This paragraph is based on the following

sources: Lewis Cecil Gray, assisted by Esther K. Thompson, History of

Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols., [Washington,

DC, 1932], pp. 166–9; David Klingaman, “The Development of the Coastwise

Trade of Virginia in the Late Colonial Period,” VMHB, 77:26–45 [1969],

especially pp. 30–31; idem, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of

the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History, 29:268–78 [1969]

especially pp. 270–75; Allan Kulikoff, “The Economic Growth of the

Eighteenth-century Chesapeake Colonies,” Journal of Economic History,

39:275–88 [1979], especially pp. 284–6.)

Yet instead of promoting the rise of a domestic market by investing in

developing improved instruments of production and raising the productivity of

labor, the plantation bourgeoisie spent their revenues “to increase their

standard of living, improve their land, and expand the size of their labor force”

(Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern

Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 [Chapel Hill, 1986], p. 118).

The capitalist exploiters of bond-labor seemed to sense their dilemma

before Marx and Engels made it manifest: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist

without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the

relations of production …” In 1690, Dalby Thomas pointed out that

diversification of production in the colonies would lead the plantation

bourgeoisie to “part with their black slaves” (Dalby Thomas, An Historical

Account. Rise and Growth of the West Indies Colonies and great

Advantages they are to England in Respect to Trade [London, 1690], in

Harleian Miscellany, 12 vols., 9:432.) Obversely, among reasons cited by

General James Oglethorpe in the eighteenth century for excluding slavery from

the projected colony of Georgia was his conviction that it would result in a

market-glutting monocultural economy rather than a diversified one (Diary of

the Earl of Egmont, entry for 17 January 1739, cited in Elizabeth Donnan,

Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade [Washington, DC,

1931], 4 vols; 4:592.)

52. Rainbolt, p. 169.

53. In 1663, the English seized a number of labor-exporting locations in

West Africa. The Dutch made a generally successful counterattack later that

year, but the English did manage to maintain their hold on one major fort there,

at Cape Corso, or Cape Coast Castle, and their position there was confirmed

by the Treaty of Breda. (Sir George Clark, The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714,

2nd edn. [Oxford, 1956], p. 332.) Those disposed to deal with the almost

arcane diplomatic language of the relevant documents may read them in

Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History

of the United States, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1929; volume 2, documents 53

and 57.

54. See Appendix II-E.

55. CO 5/1356, p. 47 (King in Council to Culpeper, 27 January 1681/82).

The  Royal  African  Company  was  headed  by  the  Duke  of  York,  Charles’s
brother,  who  reigned  as  James  II  from  1685  to  1688.  But  a  number  of  the
leading shareholders had a dual interest as employers of plantation bond-labor.
(Kenneth L. Davies, The Royal African Company [London, 1957], pp. 64–6.)
56. CO 5/1356, p. 138 (Culpeper to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 20
September 1683).
57. See Gray, 1:369–71. I apologize for the tone of these lines, but that is
how the bourgeoisie weighs investment choices. The Royal African Company
in 1672 posted a price of £18 each for bond-laborers to be delivered in Virginia
(Davies, p. 294).
58.  CO  5/1356,  p.  138.  In  the  years  1680  to  1688,  capitalists  in  both
commerce  and  agriculture  were  naturally  concerned  that  nearly  one-fourth
(23.5  percent)  of  their  investment  was  lost  in  the Middle  Passage. A  half-
century later they could congratulate themselves that these losses were down
to 10 percent. (Davies, p. 292).
59.  Reference  has  been  made  in Chapter  6  to  Bruce’s  exposition  of  the
question, and to his conclusion that the Virginia colony was destined by nature
for tobacco monoculture.
60.  Sir  Francis  Bacon  advised  historians  to  leave  observations  and
conclusions to others (Advancement of Learning,  Book  II, in Works,  3:339),
but  he  himself  could  not  forgo  the  opportunity,  as  when  he  interpreted  the
events of the reign of Henry VII.
61. Bacon, Essay Number 33, “Of Plantations,” in Works, 6:457–9; p. 458.
62. See p. 109.
63.  Philip Alexander  Bruce,  A.  E.  Smith  and  Wesley  Frank  Craven  are

among those who propound this thesis. See Chapter 6, pp. 103–6, and p. 312
note 53 for full citations.
64. New  England’s  genocidal  policy  with regard  to  the  native  population,
however, was far from that advocated by Bacon in his essay.
65.  Michael  G.  Kammen,  ed.,  “Virginia  at  the  Close  of  the  Seventeenth
Century: An Appraisal  by  James  Blair  and  John  Locke,”  VMHB,  74:141–69
(1966);  p.  155.  Kammen  says  that  while  the  opening  lines  were  written  by
John  Locke,  the  most  influential  member  of  the  Commission  of  Trade  and
Plantation  and  a  strong  support  of  Blair,  this  work  “has  to  be  Blair’s
composition” (p. 147).
66. See p. 69.
67. Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture: Patterns of
Colonial America,” WMQ, 3d ser., 2:113–53 (1945) p. 118.
68.  Melville  Egleston, The Land  System  of the  New England Colonies,
Johns  Hopkins  University  Studies  in  History  and  Political  Science,  Vol.  4
(Baltimore, 1886), pp. 15, 21–2, 26.
This  practice  was  the  basis  of  the  six-mile  square  “township”  form  of
allotment of “public” land established by the Continental Congress in 1785 that
prevailed in states formed out of the Northwest Territory. It is relevant to note
that,  “The  southern  members  …  did  not  believe  in  the  township  system  of
settlement.”  (Payson  Jackson  Treat,  “Origin  of  the  National  Land  System
under  the  Confederation,”  in  Vernon  Carstensen,  ed.,  The  Public  Lands;
Studies in the History of the Public Domain [Madison, Wisconsin, 1968], pp.
11–12.)
69. Egleston, pp. 44–5.

70. Percy Wells Bidwell and John L. Falconer,  History of Agriculture in
the  Northern  United  States,  1620–1860  (Washington,  1925;  1941  reprint),
pp. 49–50.
71. Ibid., p. 54.
72.  In  the  first  three  decades  of  the Massachusetts  colony,  before
individual  royal  land  grants  were  discontinued  in  favor  of  community  land
grants,  just  over  one  hundred  individual  land  grants  were  made.  Six  were
extremely large, ranging from 2,000 to 3,200 acres each; the rest averaged less
than 400  acres each.  But the  greatest  part  of New  England  land  distribution
throughout the colonial period was made out of community land grants by the
communities themselves. (Egleston, pp. 19–20.)
73. Gary B. Nash, “Colonial Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R.
Pole, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Modern
Era  (Baltimore,  1984),  p.  238.  An  economic  historian,  referring  to  “the
northern  colonies”  generally  throughout  the  colonial  period,  writes:  “In  the
absence of a market strong enough  to  enforce specialization  and  necessitate
acquiring anything by purchase, people produced for themselves.” (Robert E.
Mutch, “Yeoman and Merchant in Pre-industrial America: Eighteenth-century
Massachusetts as a Case Study,” Societas, 7:279–302; 282.
74.  Recent  academic  discussions  of  the  subject  of  “the  transition  to
capitalism”  in  continental  Anglo-America  have  directly  and  indirectly  shed
important light upon this aspect of the question. The discussion centers on the
extent to which households in non-plantation areas were engaged in exchange
of products, even to the extent of interregional exchanges. The time period that
gets  most  attention  begins  about  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century.
Regardless of how one may view the controversies that arise in this regard, for

our  present  purpose  all  of  these  studies  serve  to  show  that  communities  of
family  households,  largely  independent  of  export/import  exchanges,  were
characteristic  of  these  areas.  For a bibliography on  this discussion  see Allan
Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,”  WMQ  46:120–144
(1989).
This debate seems to have been induced by the long-running debate on the
transition  from  feudalism  to  capitalism  as  it  occurred  in  Europe.  I  find
discussion  conducted  under  this  heading  useful  for  drawing  conclusions
regarding the degree of dependence on, or independence of, the New England
colonial  economy  with  respect  to  the  export/import  trade.  But  as  Kulikoff
points  out  (pp.  126–7),  there  is  a  fundamentally  different  significance  to  be
attached to the class struggle interpretation of the revolutionary transition from
feudalism  to  capitalism  in  Europe,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  evolution  from
subsistence  farming  to  capitalist  production  (neither  the  producer  nor  the
consumer being the owner) in non-plantation areas of rural continental Anglo-
America.
75. Bidwell and Falconer, pp. 82–3.
76. One informative narrative  of this transition  is Hannah Josephson, The
Golden  Threads:  New  England’s  Mill  Girls  and  Magnates   (New  York,
1949).
77.  Gary  B.  Nash,  “Social  Development,”  in  Greene  and  Pole,  eds.,  pp.
236, 243.
78. Ibid., pp. 236, 247.
79. Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations.”
80.  Governor  William  Berkeley  to  Thomas  Ludwell,  1  July  1676.  In

Coventry Papers, microfilm reel no. 63.

The outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion, says Thomas J. Wertenbaker, was the

outcome of policies that “practically eliminated the middle class” (Thomas J.

Wertenbaker, Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676 , Jamestown 350th Anniversary

Historical Booklet No. 8 [Williamsburg, 1957], p. 55. Cf. Charles M. Andrews,

Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690 [New York, 1915], pp. 11–12.)

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).