The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants.36
If civilization was to be firmly planted, Jamestown would have to be given the look of a normal English village, along with efforts to promote good habits among the people. The colony needed to shed its image as a penal colony and to plant firmer roots. It needed more than tobacco. It needed herds of cattle, fields of crops, and improved relations between masters and servants. Most of all, it needed many more manageable women. In 1620 the Virginia Company sent to the colony fifty-seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides.” Over the next three years, 157 more women made the crossing. They were thought of as emissaries of a new moral order. Company records hint at something else as well: the “greatest hindrances” to “Noble worke” rested on “want of comforts”; men deserved to “live contentedlie.” The transportation of female cargo would “tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children.” Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists.
All that was required of the women was that they marry. Their prospective husbands were expected to buy them, that is, to defray the cost of passage and provisions. Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37
Despite everything, Jamestown never became a stable agrarian community. The Virginia plantation remained strangely barren during the first half of the seventeenth century. First, the anticipated harvest of the region’s natural resources did not occur. Nor did the various ranks and stations (balancing skilled laborers and manual workers) form according to plan. As late as 1663, Governor William Berkeley was still advocating for the goods Hakluyt had proposed: flax and hemp, timber and tar for ships, and exotics such as silk and olive oil. The “vicious ruinous plant of Tobacco,” as Berkeley condemned it, left Virginia without a diversified economy.38
At the heart of the Jamestown system was the indentured contract that made laborers disposable property. In so harsh an environment, survival was difficult, and the unappreciated waste people were literally worked to death. Young men and boys who came without families were the most vulnerable and most exploited of all. Unable to plant roots, many failed to produce heirs and secure the cherished English ideal of attachment to the land.
Class divisions were firmly entrenched. The ever-widening gap in land ownership elevated large planters into a small, privileged faction. At the same time, the labor system reduced servants to debt slaves, and, living so far from home, they had little recourse to demand better treatment. Isolation, then, increased the potential for abuse. The only liberty for colonial servants came with their feet—by running away. Jamestown’s founders reproduced no English villages. Instead, they fashioned a ruthless class order.
• • •
Despite Jamestown’s intractable problems, a group of English investors and religious separatists secured a patent from the Virginia Company and set their sights on land near the mouth of the Hudson River. Whether by accident or, as some have speculated, by secret design, their first ship, the Mayflower, landed on Cape Cod, beyond the purview of the Virginia Company, in 1620. The small, struggling band lost half their number to starvation and disease during the first year. The wife of one of the leaders, William Bradford, mysteriously disappeared over the side of the Mayflower. It would be a full decade before the English settlers in Massachusetts made significant inroads in attracting new settlers to the region.39
When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community. Far more intact families migrated to the colony than had to Virginia, and a core of the settlers were Puritans who did not need the threat of a death sentence to attend church services on the Sabbath—one of the many examples of heavy-handedness practiced in the early days of Jamestown.
Land ownership was New England’s most tempting lure. During its first decade, the Bay Colony received some twenty-one thousand settlers, only about 40 percent of whom came from East Anglia and the coastal towns where a high percentage of Puritan converts lived. For every religious dissenter in the exodus of the 1630s, there was one commercially driven emigrant from London or other areas of England. The majority in these years came as extended families accompanied by their servants. And almost 60 percent of the arrivals were under the age of twenty-four—one-third of them unattached males.40
When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. Beyond fighting corruption and the Catholic antichrist, however, the new governor proved himself a pragmatic man. To attract settlers, he boasted that the amount of money required for purchasing a few measly acres in England translated into hundreds of acres in Massachusetts. In overpopulated Britain, he said, the land “groaneth under her inhabitants.” Nevertheless, Winthrop had no plan for redeeming all the poor, whom he referred to as the “scum of the land.” His vision of vile waste people differed little from that of the Anglican cleric Richard Hakluyt’s.41
Inequality was a given in the “Citty upon a Hill,” submission was regarded as a natural condition of humankind. In “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop declared that some were meant to rule, others to serve their betters: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” Lest there be any doubt, Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government.” For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.42
In Puritan society, the title of “gentleman” usually applied to men with some aristocratic pedigree, though wealthy merchants who held prominent positions in the church could acquire the same designation. “Master” or “Mister” and “Mistress” were for educated professionals, clergymen, and their wives. “Goodman” attached to the honorable husbandman, who owned land but did not occupy a prominent position as magistrate or minister. New Englanders used these titles sparingly, but they were certainly conscious of them; the government they abided by, after all, imitated English county oligarchies in which the landed elite monopolized government offices.43
The Puritan elite depended on a menial labor force. At the top of the pecking order were apprentices and hired servants. Lower down were those forced into servitude because of debt or after having committed a crime, as we have seen in Virginia. Case in point: in 1633, Winthrop presided over the trial of a man accused of robbery. Upon conviction, his estate was sold and used to repay his victims. He was then bound for three years of service, and his daughter, as added collat
eral, bound for fourteen. This was typical. The 1648 Laws and Liberties established two classes of an even lower order who could be divested of liberty: Indians captured in “just wars,” and “strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us.” The “strangers,” in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves.44
For servants, seventeenth-century New Englanders relied most heavily on exploitable youth, male and female, ages ten to twenty-one. By law, single men and women were required to reside with families and submit to family government. Children were routinely “put out” to labor in the homes of neighbors and relatives. The 1642 Massachusetts General Court’s order for the proper education of children treated apprentice, servant, and child as if all were interchangeable. Parents and masters alike assumed responsibility to “breed & bring up children & apprentices in some honest Lawfull calling.” Family supervision policed those who might otherwise become “rude, stubborn & unruly.”45
Monitoring the labor of one’s own offspring became the norm, as landed families retained control over the males well into adulthood. Young men could not leave the family estate, nor escape their father’s rule, without endangering their inheritance. So family members worked long hours, as did servants of various ranks. While the extended Puritan family functioned with less recurrence to acts of ruthlessness than the system adopted during the tobacco boom in Virginia, legal and cultural practices muddied the distinction between son and servant.46
Thus the Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, because one or another parent was likely to die young, making remarriage quite common. Winthrop fathered sixteen children with four different wives, the last of whom he married at age fifty-nine, two years before his death. Most households also contained child servants who were unrelated to the patriarch; during harvest season, hired servants were brought in as temporary workers, and poor children were purchased for longer terms as menial apprentices for domestic service or farm-work. The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47
While servants were expected to be submissive, few actually were. Numerous court cases show masters complaining of their servants’ disobedience, accompanied by charges of idleness, theft, rudeness, rebelliousness, pride, and a proclivity for running away. In 1696, the powerful minister Cotton Mather published A Good Master Well Served, which was an unambiguous attempt to regulate the Bay Colony’s disorderly servant population. Directing his words toward those who served, he insisted, “You are the Animate, Separate, Active Instruments of other men.” In language that is impossible to misunderstand, he reaffirmed, “Servants, your Tongues, your Hands, your Feet, are your Masters, and they should move according to the Will of your Masters.” Those of mean descent would learn from a sharp tongue or a ready whip that submission was expected of them.48
Puritan wariness did not end there. Among servants, and those of “meane condition” above them, were men and women of enlarged ambition who were deemed undeserving. At least according to anxious oligarchs. Puritans never opposed commerce or the acquisition of wealth, but they were clearly conflicted when it came to social mobility. The government enacted sumptuary laws, penalizing those who wore rich silks or gold buttons in an attempt to rise above their class station. Overly prosperous people aroused envy, and Puritan orthodoxy dictated against such exhibition of arrogance, pride, and insolence. In the 1592 tract On the Right, Lawful, and Holy Use of Apparel, the English Puritan clergyman William Perkins had shown how appearance demarcated one’s standing in the Great Chain of Being, God’s class hierarchy. Unsanctioned displays of finery were disruptive, an infraction on the same order as masters who treated servants too leniently. Both were perceived as early indicators of a society falling from grace.49
One had to know his or her place in Puritan Massachusetts. Church membership added a layer of privilege before the courts and elsewhere to an already hierarchical regime. Expulsion from the church carried a powerful stigma. Heretics such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer were physically banished, cut off and ostracized. Only those who begged forgiveness and humbled themselves before the dual authority of court and church returned to the community. Dyer returned unrepentant, determined to challenge the ruling order. Between 1659 and 1661, she and three other Quakers were charged with “presumptuous & incorrigible contempt” of civil authority. After trial, they were summarily hanged.50
Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston congregation and expelled from the Bay Colony in 1638 for refusing to bend to the authority of the town fathers. She was sternly advised: “You have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject.” Hutchinson had held religious classes in her home, and had acquired a large following. Turning the social order upside down, she had undermined the carefully orchestrated moral geography of the Puritan meetinghouse. Male dominance was unquestioned, and ranks so clearly spelled out, that no one could miss the power outlined in something so simple as a seating chart. Members and nonmembers sat apart; husbands and wives were divided; men sat on one side of the room, women on the other. Prominent men occupied the first two rows of benches: the first was reserved exclusively for magistrates, the second for the families of the minister and governor, as well as wealthy merchants. The more sons a man had, the better his pew. Age, reputation, marriage, and estate were all properly calculated before a church seat was assigned.51
Puritans were obsessed with class rank. It meant security to them, and they could not disguise the anxiety that even the thought of its disruption—or dissolution—produced. After the bloodletting of King Philip’s War (1675–76), Mary Rowlandson’s cautionary tale, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, appeared widely in print, offering up a forceful example of the role of class at a susceptible moment of rebuilding. At the outset of the war, Narragansett Indians dragged Rowlandson from her burning house in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and held her as a prisoner for eleven weeks. Her 1682 account detailed the psychological struggle she had endured as she sought to preserve her identity as a member of the English gentry after being forced into servitude by her Indian captors. As the wife of a minister and the daughter of a wealthy landowner, Rowlandson told a double story: on one level it was a journey of spiritual redemption, on another a tale of the loss of breeding, followed by the former prisoner’s restoration to her previous class rank.52
Rowlandson’s Indian mistress is the story’s villain. Weetamoo was a powerful sachem (queen) of the Pocasset Wampanoags, who had inherited her station after displaying the savvy to marry three other prominent sachems. Dressed in girdles of wampum beads, wrapped in thick petticoats, and adorned with bracelets, Weetamoo spent hours on her toilette. A “severe and proud dame,” she ordered Rowlandson around and slapped her. In Rowlandson’s eyes, her detested mistress was the Indian equivalent of the English noblewoman, a royalist of the New World who flaunted her power. Submission—the same quality Puritans demanded of their own servants—did not come easily to Rowlandson. The once-proud minister’s wife had been reduced to a lowly maidservant. In this way, she did not equate the Natives with primitive savages, as the captive Jane Dickenson did in Virginia; instead they were usurpers and posers, who grossly violated the divine order of assigned stations.53
The Puritans used family authority, reinforced by the law, to regulate their servant population. Distrustful of strangers and religious outsiders, they also granted privileges to the religious “Elect,” or those who comprised the core constituency of the church laity. Children of the Elect gained the inherited religious privilege of an easier path to church membership. Indeed, the “halfway covenant” of 1662 established a system of religious pedigree. As Cotton Mather’s long-lived father, Reverend Increase Mather, put it: God “cast the line of Election” so that it passed “through the loins of g
odly Parents.” Excommunication alone ended this privilege, saving the flock from a corrupt lineage. Minister Thomas Shepard agreed, projecting that a child of the Elect would be pruned, nurtured, and watered, so as to grow in grace. By this method, religious station reinforced class station. And by celebrating lineage, the visible saints became a recognizable breed.54
• • •
Colonizing schemes all drew on the language of breeding. Fertility had to be monitored, literally and figuratively, under the watchful supervision of household and town fathers. This was the case in disciplining unruly children, corralling servants, and dispensing religious membership privileges to the next generation (i.e., the offspring of the godly). Good breeding practices tamed otherwise unmanageable waste, whether it was wasteland or waste people; breeding sustained the pastoral tradition already associated with the Elizabethan age, which found its best literary expression in testaments to rustic beauty and cosmic harmony.
What separated rich from poor was that the landless had nothing to pass on. They had no heirs. This was particularly true in Jamestown, where the orphans of dead servants were sold off like the possessions of a foreclosed estate. As “beggarly spawn,” the poor were detached from the land. Only proper stewards of the fertile ground deserved rights.
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