The Peculiar Institution, pt. 9

Over the course of the previous few installments, we’ve seen that the lower classes of English society were viewed with a mixture of contempt and paternalism, disgust and pity, suspicion and fear by their social betters. Like black slaves in later years, the English poor were described as dirty, lazy, ugly, conniving, lustful, gluttonous, as well as a potentially dangerous source of rebellion and disorder - in short, the personification of animality, dissolution, and chaos. Far from being uniquely English, this view of society’s dregs has been common in civilizations around the world, since time immemorial. By the mid-1600s, there were still very few Africans in colonial America, but the stereotypes that would later attach to Negroes and become synonymous with anti-black racism were already in place, waiting to be passed on to them by the poor whites whose place they were to take at the bottom of society.

The rarity in America of black slaves until the late 17th century might seem curious, given that the trade in Africans had already been well-established for a century-and-a-half by then. There are ideological, commercial, and geopolitical reasons for the delay, but in this installment I want to discuss the conditions that drove English American planters to make the momentous transition from using white servants and tenants to black slaves as the primary means of plantation labor.

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In the first few decades of English colonization, Virginia was a brutal place to be poor. Of course, the world, including England, was a brutal place to be poor in those days, but Virginia was worse. Imported servants rarely lived long enough to experience freedom, and those who did often had nothing but the hard life of a tenant sharecropper waiting for them. Servants were bought, sold, traded, inherited, seized in bankruptcy, and even gambled away by their owners. Those who rebelled, or even complained, were often subjected to draconian punishments that would later be illegal to use even against slaves. In the first few decades after the founding of Jamestown in 1607, nothing in Virginia was cheaper than human life, as batch after batch of new laborers, purchased for the cost of their transportation, were brought in to replace those who died. It was not until the 1640s that these circumstances began to change.

For reasons that are not entirely understood, men began to live longer in Virginia, so that more and more servants were surviving their contracts. In 1625, eighteen years into the Virginia project, there were only about 1,300 people in the colony, though many thousands had been sent. That number doubled to 2,600 in the next four years, and by 1640 the population was up to 8,000. The colony would continue to grow, reaching a population of over 14,000 by the early 1650s, and about 25,000 by the end of that decade. Until this time, Virginia society had been dominated by landed planters and their dependents - both servants and tenants - but to these was now added a third substantial class of independent farmers. The big planters still controlled all affairs in the colony, and used that power to their own benefit, but the small freeholders had the numbers to represent their interests if only they could coordinate their efforts.

The material standard of living for the average free Virginian also trended upward in the second quarter of the 17th century. It may seem counterintuitive, but history has shown that people in a state of severe deprivation rarely unite against the existing structure of power. People consumed with surviving from day to day tend to live for themselves and their families alone, and do not risk those things to stand on general principles. More often, rebellion and revolution follow improvements in the lives of the poor and middle classes, after they have acquired a taste for better things and gained the confidence to assert their collective dignity. The planters and their dependents were very conscious of their social class, and it was only a matter of time before the newly independent small farmers formed a class consciousness as well. Events back in England helped to accelerate this process.

As the European continent geared up for the final bloody phase of its Thirty Years War, civil war broke out in England between supporters of Parliament and partisans of the Stuart monarchy. Throughout the decade-long conflict, events in the New World faded into background noise, and Virginians were left to govern and fend for themselves to a degree unprecedented in the past. By the time the civil wars were resolved they had come to enjoy their freedom. Historian Edmund Morgan writes:

The Virginians elevated England’s salutary neglect into a matter of principle by asserting their right to a free trade and by affirming it as “the liberty of the Colony and a right of dear esteem to free-born persons… that no law should be established within the kingdom of England concerning us without the consent of a grand assembly here.” When a rumor was spread in 1647 that Parliament had violated this right by forbidding foreigners to trade with English colonies, the assembly dismissed it as “a forgery of avaricious persons [i.e., the London merchants] whose sickle hath been ever long in our harvest already.”

King Charles I (after he lost his head, not before)

The governor of Virginia throughout this period and for many years after was Sir William Berkeley, a loyal subject of the monarch who opposed the usurpations of Parliament during the civil wars, but who adopted Virginia as his home and gained respect as an ardent defender of the colony’s prerogatives against Parliament, king, and anyone else who challenged them. In order to maintain a united front, it was necessary to rally the support of Virginia’s small farmers, who were encouraged to think of themselves not only as Englishmen, but as Virginians - and, though it was largely unspoken, to think of themselves as Virginians first. As European governments found out in the 19th and 20th centuries, bonding people together by inviting them to share an identity with, and sense of proprietorship over, their society is a blade that cuts both ways. The big planters were able to rally support among Virginians when it came to defying London, but that same solidarity could just as easily be used to defy them.