Part 1 (1/2)
The Planters of Colonial Virginia.
by Thomas J. Wertenbaker.
PREFACE
America since the days of Captain John Smith has been the land of hope for mult.i.tudes in Europe. In many an humble home, perhaps in some English village, or an Ulster farm, or in the Rhine valley, one might find a family a.s.sembled for the reading of a letter from son, or brother, or friend, who had made the great venture of going to the New World. ”Land is abundant here and cheap,” the letter would state. ”Wages are high, food is plentiful, farmers live better than lords. If one will work only five days a week one can live grandly.”
In pamphlets intended to encourage immigration the opportunities for advancement were set forth in glowing colors. In Virginia alone, it was stated, in 1649, there were ”of kine, oxen, bulls, calves, twenty thousand, large and good.” When the traveller Welby came to America he was surprised to ”see no misery, no disgusting army of paupers, not even beggars;” while Henry B. Fearson noted that laborers were ”more erect in their posture, less careworn in their countenances” than those of Europe.
In Virginia, as in other colonies, it was the cheapness of land and the dearness of labor which gave the newcomer his chance to rise. The rich man might possess many thousands of acres, but they would profit him nothing unless he could find the labor to put them under cultivation.
Indentured workers met his needs in part, but they were expensive, hard to acquire, and served for only four years. If he hired freemen he would have to pay wages which in England would have seemed fantastic.
Thus the so-called servants who had completed their terms and men who had come over as freemen found it easy to earn enough to buy small plantations of their own. That thousands did so is shown by the Rent Roll which is published as an appendix to this book. One has only to glance at it to see that the large plantations are vastly outnumbered by the small farms of the yeomen. It proves that Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century was not the land of huge estates, worked by servants and slaves, but of a numerous, prosperous middle cla.s.s.
Owning plantations of from fifty to five hundred acres, cultivating their fields of tobacco, their patches of Indian corn and wheat, their vegetable gardens and orchards with their own labor or the labor of their sons, the yeomen enjoyed a sense of independence and dignity. It was their votes which determined the character of the a.s.sembly, it was they who resisted most strongly all a.s.saults upon the liberties of the people.
As the small farmer, after the day's work was over, sat before his cottage smoking his long clay pipe, he could reflect that for him the country had fulfilled its promise. The land around him was his own; his tobacco brought in enough for him to purchase clothes, farm implements, and household goods.
But he frowned as he thought of the slave s.h.i.+p which had come into the nearby river, and landed a group of Negroes who were all bought by his wealthy neighbors. If Virginia were flooded with slaves, would it not cheapen production and lower the price of tobacco? Could he and his sons, when they hoed their fields with their own hands, compete with slave labor?
The event fully justified these fears. The yeoman cla.s.s in Virginia was doomed. In the face of the oncoming tide they had three alternatives--to save enough money to buy a slave or two, to leave the country, or to sink into poverty.
It was the acquiring of a few slaves by the small planter which saved the middle cla.s.s. Before the end of the colonial period a full fifty per cent. of the slaveholders had from one to five only. Seventy-five per cent. had less than ten. The small farmer, as he led his newly acquired slaves from the auction block to his plantation may have regretted that self-preservation had forced him to depend on their labor rather than his own. But he could see all around him the fate of those who had no slaves, as they became ”poor white trash.” And he must have looked on with pity as a neighbor gathered up his meager belongings and, deserting his little plantation, set out for the remote frontier.
It was one of the great crimes of history, this undermining of the yeoman cla.s.s by the importation of slaves. The wrong done to the Negro himself has been universally condemned; the wrong done the white man has attracted less attention. It effectively deprived him of his American birthright--the high return for his labor. It transformed Virginia and the South from a land of hard working, self-respecting, independent yeomen, to a land of slaves and slaveholders.
_Princeton, New Jersey_ THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER _August, 1957_
_CHAPTER I_
ENGLAND IN THE NEW WORLD
At the beginning of the Seventeenth century colonial expansion had become for England an economic necessity. Because of the depletion of her forests, which const.i.tuted perhaps the most important of her natural resources, she could no longer look for prosperity from the old industries that for centuries had been her mainstay. In the days when the Norman conquerors first set foot upon English soil the virgin woods, broken occasionally by fields and villages, had stretched in dense formation from the Scottish border to Suss.e.x and Devons.h.i.+re. But with the pa.s.sage of five centuries a great change had been wrought. The growing population, the expansion of agriculture, the increasing use of wood for fuel, for s.h.i.+pbuilding, and for the construction of houses, had by the end of the Tudor period so denuded the forests that they no longer sufficed for the most pressing needs of the country.
Even at the present day it is universally recognized that a certain proportion of wooded land is essential to the prosperity and productivity of any country. And whenever this is lacking, not only do the building, furniture, paper and other industries suffer, but the rainfall proves insufficient, spring floods are frequent and the fertility of the soil is impaired by was.h.i.+ng. These misfortunes are slight, however, compared with the disastrous results of the gradual thinning out of the forests of Elizabethan England. The woods were necessary for three all-important industries, the industries upon which the prosperity and wealth of the nation were largely dependent--s.h.i.+pbuilding, for which were needed timber, masts, pitch, tar, resin; the manufacture of woolens, calling for a large supply of potash; smelting of all kinds, since three hundred years ago wood and not coal was the fuel used in the furnaces. It was with the deepest apprehension, then, that thoughtful Englishmen watched the gradual reduction of the forest areas, for it seemed to betoken for their country a period of declining prosperity and economic decay. ”When therefore our mils of Iron and excesse of building have already turned our greatest woods into pasture and champion within these few years,”
says a writer of this period, ”neither the scattered forests of England, nor the diminished groves of Ireland will supply the defect of our navy.”[1-1]
From this intolerable situation England sought relief through foreign commerce. If she could no longer smelt her own iron, if she could not produce s.h.i.+p-stores or burn her own wood ashes, these things might be procured from countries where the forests were still extensive, countries such as those bordering the Baltic--Germany, Poland, Russia, Sweden. And so the vessels of the Muscovy Company in the second half of the Sixteenth century pa.s.sed through the Cattegat in large numbers to make their appearance at Reval and Libau and Danzig, seeking there the raw materials so vitally necessary to England. ”Muscovia and Polina doe yeerly receive many thousands for Pitch, Tarre, Sope Ashes, Rosen, Flax, Cordage, Sturgeon, Masts, Yards, Wainscot, Firres, Gla.s.se, and such like,” wrote Captain John Smith, ”also Swethland for Iron and Copper.”[1-2]
But this solution of her problem was obviously unsatisfactory to England. The northern voyage was long, dangerous and costly; the King of Denmark, who controlled the entrance to the Baltic, had it within his power at any moment to exclude the English traders; the Muscovy company no longer enjoyed exemption from customs in Prussia, Denmark and Russia.
In case war should break out among the northern nations this trade might for a time be cut off entirely, resulting in strangulation for England's basic industries. ”The merchant knoweth,” said the author of _A True Declaration_, ”that through the troubles in Poland & Muscovy, (whose eternall warres are like the Antipathy of the Dragon & Elephant) all their traffique for Masts, Deales, Pitch, Tarre, Flax, Hempe, and Cordage, are every day more and more indangered.”[1-3] Moreover, the trade was much impeded by the ice which for several months each year choked some of the northern ports.
The most alarming aspect of this unfortunate situation was the effect of the shortage of s.h.i.+pbuilding material upon the merchant marine. Situated as it was upon an island, England enjoyed communication with the nations of the world only by means of the ocean pathways. Whatever goods came to her doors, whatever goods of her own manufacture she sent to foreign markets, could be transported only by sea. It was a matter of vital import to her, then, to build up and maintain a fleet of merchant vessels second to none. But this was obviously difficult if not impossible when ”the furniture of s.h.i.+pping” such as ”Masts, Cordage, Pitch, Tar, Rossen” were not produced in quant.i.ty by England itself, and could be had ”only by the favor of forraigne potency.”[1-4] Already, it was stated, the decay of s.h.i.+pping was manifest, while large numbers of able mariners were forced to seek employment in other countries. ”You know how many men for want of imploiment, betake themselves to Tunis, Spaine and Florence,” declared one observer, ”and to serve in courses not warrantable, which would better beseeme our own walles and borders to bee spread with such branches, that their native countrey and not forreine Princes might reape their fruit, as being both exquisite Navigators, and resolute men for service, as any the world affords.”[1-5]