Locating promising sites for their settlement, they quickly began the struggle to open wild fields to cultivation. Like Robert Cole, a yeoman’s son from Middlesex, England, who in 1652, with resources brought from home, settled his family on a riverside plot in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, they acquired land through purchase or headrights and began providing subsistence for their families, producing goods for local trade, and growing tobacco for distant markets. Slowly, in small parcels, they took over promising lands along the main riverways and streams, settled into rigorous seasonal routines, and learned ways of coping with the vagaries of distant tobacco markets, the periodic upheavals of nature, and the isolation and lack of community life in this borderland world. In hundreds of modest farms, the planters, their families, and one or a few servants lived alone, their only regular contacts the commercial agents or more prosperous planters who managed the marketing of their tobacco crop, and their few closest neighbors five or ten miles distant. As their numbers grew and their lives became more complex with a degree of prosperity, the need had emerged for at least the most essential public institution, local courts, which were beginning to multiply within newly created county jurisdictions.2
The inner lives of these thousands of small and middle-level planters will never be known, but as in the case of Cole, most of whose farming records have survived, one can see the outline of their exterior lives and ordinary routines. Survival required diligence, discipline, calculation, family cooperation, and a modicum of luck. They lived frugally, but they did not assume, as they might have been expected to assume, that “some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion.” They were ambitious—for greater security, an increase in wealth if not income, and a higher position in life than they had had before. They took what they could as soon as they could and in any way they could, acting, as Karen Kupperman has remarked of their predecessors, “with barbarity toward those who were powerless, whether they were Indians, Africans, or fellow Europeans.”3
Origins of free immigrants to the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century
Click here to see a larger image.
With the initial expectation that profits would rise in proportion to the scale of tobacco cultivation, and with golden opportunities beckoning with each cyclical boom in the fluctuating market price of tobacco, efforts were made to acquire larger and larger plots of land and therefore to recruit, by any means, legal or illegal, a labor force capable of working successfully in the expanding tobacco fields.
The work, as it took standard form, was arduous. Seeds had to be planted in constructed mounds, the plants had to be topped off to enhance the leaves’ growth, weeds hoed out, suckers and worms removed by hand, and the mature leaves cut off, hung up for curing, and then carefully packed for shipment. In this hard, tedious regime, which extended over the entire year, casual workers would not succeed. Strong motivation and effective discipline were needed; both were present in sufficient degree through most of the seventeenth century.4
The legal mechanism for securing and binding voluntary labor remained, as it had been, the contract of indenture—a legal commitment for full-time labor for four-, five-, seven-, or more year terms in exchange for maintenance, protection, and at termination some form of “freedom dues.” By midcentury, notices of labor needs in the Chesapeake colonies as in the West Indies appeared everywhere in England’s major port towns and the surrounding clusters of villages—posted in taverns, hawked at hiring fairs, and advertised widely by recruiters sent out through the countryside by merchants with investments in the colonies. Enticements were offered and loudly publicized: familial care, protection, and at least the prospect of land of one’s own when one’s bondage was completed.5
But propulsion was more important than enticement. With England’s population growing steadily through the first half of the century (from 4.1 million to 5.3 million in those fifty years), real wages declining, periodic depressions disrupting key industries, and political upheavals unsettling development plans of all kinds, tens of thousands of unskilled laborers and insecure tradesmen and craftsmen faced unemployment and its consequences. Wandering from village to village and from farms to towns in search of employment, they intensified the population’s usual mobility, and in desperation many, fearing vagrancy and destitution, chose the risks of an overseas voyage and labor in strange circumstances. Approximately one hundred thousand Britons, the great majority English, are known to have migrated to the tobacco coast in the seventeenth century. At least 70 percent of them and probably 85 percent came as indentured servants. Bonded for service, they were at work in the oldest settled areas as in the newest, arriving year after year on veritable convoys of ships from the major English ports. Middlesex County, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers, a contemporary wrote, was a “sea of servants”—45 percent of that county’s entire population were servants in 1668—and the same could have been said of other counties.6
Who were these tens of thousands of voluntarily bonded servants? Where were they from, what were their backgrounds, what were the differences and similarities among them? How did they live in this strange environment? What would become of them when they were released from service?
Leaving England at first mainly through London, then increasingly through Bristol and Liverpool, most were recorded as residents of those major port cities or of their hinterlands within a range of forty miles. But many came from distant places not only in the south of England but in the Midlands and the north country as well. Almost 40 percent of those leaving Bristol said that their homes were more than forty miles distant from the port—how distant, we do not know. And many of those who listed the ports of departure as their homes in fact came from elsewhere, from places unknown, the ports of departure being secondary or tertiary stopping points as they wandered in search of employment. Thus the migrants to the Chesapeake represented a drainage of the local “surpluses”—those dislodged in the nation’s shifting economy—from “declining market towns, pastoral parishes, and proto-industrial villages.” One Virginia county, York, along the Rappahannock River, had recent settlers—both bonded and free—from eleven English counties extending from Devon to Yorkshire as well as from London and Bristol, and they brought with them a variety of English subcultures, and to a lesser degree Welsh, Scottish, and Irish backgrounds as well.
Dislodged workers, caught in a buyer’s market, had only their labor to offer and whatever small skills they could claim. In the early years some, perhaps half, of the male migrants could claim some skill in a craft or trade and could therefore be classified as having been drawn from middling levels of the working population. But at the point of migration all were living at the lower margins of British society. The most debased, possibly 40 percent of the total, were the youngest, the least skilled and most destitute; they shipped out without the protection of legal indentures and served therefore according to the harsh terms of extemporized contracts that followed Virginia’s “local custom.”7
Within the great flow of immigrant workers there continued to be utterly destitute vagrants picked up by recruiting agents at “beggars’ fairs,” where one could find “more rogues than ever … whipped at a cart’s arse through London…[or] dropping out of Ireland.” There were young orphans routinely disposed of to brokers by parish overseers to reduce welfare expenses. There were those “lewd and dangerous persons, rogues, vagrants, and other idle persons”—those “sturdy beggars as gypsyes and other incorrigible rogues and wanderers”—who were ordered by the Commonwealth government to be seized by the local constables, imprisoned, and unless acquitted of vagrancy, sent to the plantations “for five years under the condition of servants.” And there continued to be clandestine seizures of men and boys—occasionally women as well—for forced shipment to the colonies, where their services were offered for sale. It was a brutal traffic, described in vivid accounts by victims and in court records. What had been occasional in the
Virginia Company’s earliest years had developed into an organized system with safe houses for confining victims until shipping could be arranged and with standardized transaction costs and procedures.
Week after week, month after month, children, male and female, were snatched from the streets of London for shipment and sale “for a slave” in Virginia. One was “an infant about foure years of age,” the Middlesex County Court in London recorded, “to the endangering of his life”; another, a servant deluded and enticed by false promises; still another, an apprentice sold by his master and held on shipboard for a week before being rescued. As early as 1645, kidnapping for the servant trade in Virginia had become so notorious that the government ordered all public officers to apprehend anyone caught “stealing, selling, buying, inveigling, purloyning, conveying or receiving children so stolne.” But what the Privy Council denounced as a “barbarous and inhumane” traffic continued. In 1664 Bristol sought to control the traffic by creating a registry office to record all legitimate outbound passengers and exclude all others. London later did the same. But “spiriting” could not be stopped by legislation or bureaucratic procedures. Only the decline in the market for such servants could reduce its profitability and hence its frequency. Until then stealing, buying, and inveigling children, servants, and vagrants remained a particularly vicious, if minor, part of the peopling of the tobacco lands.8
Vicious too, though legal, was the forced transportation to the colony of convicts, the practice that Dale had hopefully imagined would solve the labor problem. Less vicious, and greater in volume, was the traffic in prisoners of war, which flourished in the years of the Commonwealth’s military campaigns. How many captured troops of the royalist armies actually reached the Chesapeake and were forced to work in the fields for seven years cannot be known. It is known, however, that after each of Cromwell’s major victories—at Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester (1648–50)—hundreds of captured troops, most of them Scots, were rounded up and disposed of. Some were allowed to return to their homes, but some were handed over to local merchants in need of cheap labor, some were sent to serve as mercenaries in foreign armies, and many, below the “quality” of lieutenant or “cornet of horse,” were bound to service in the plantations. At least a thousand prisoners were authorized to be shipped to Virginia and New England after Dunbar, and after Worcester 1,610 were granted to people desiring them in Virginia, upon assurance that the prisoners would be accorded “Christian usage.” In all, close to three thousand war prisoners were authorized in a short period of time for shipment to the Chesapeake. And while their arrival and precise location in the colonies cannot be traced, by the late 1650s Scottish names suddenly became prominent in the land patent books. In 1665 a Scottish minister in Virginia reported that his countrymen in the colony were “living better than ever ther forfathers, and that from so mean a beginning as being sold [as] slav[e]s here, after … Worster fight are now herein great masters of many servants themselfs.”9
2
Thus the workforce, flooding into the Chesapeake colonies after the boom in the tobacco industry and the expansion of land settlement, was an amalgam of people, largely English, of various geographical and subcultural backgrounds, some from provincial farmlands, some from forests and fens, some from inland towns and villages, many from the slums of the two main Atlantic ports. Some were respectable, some vicious, some hopeful; many were destitute and despairing. Yet there were measurable characteristics of this great miscellany of people. The two main surviving registers of outbound passengers—Bristol’s of 1654–84 and London’s of 1682–86—have made possible statistical samplings of part, at least, of this immigrant population, consisting largely of indentured servants.10
At the start it was preponderantly a male population of young adults, the great majority between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. But in both characteristics, sex and age, there were basic changes as the decades passed that reflect forces at work in British society, played out against a constant if erratic demand for labor in the colonies. The socioeconomic foundations shifted. England’s population growth slowed, the nation’s economy stabilized after the Restoration, industry and commercial agriculture revived, and markets increased for agricultural and industrial production, hence for labor in various forms.
The results were palpable in the changes in the immigrant flows to the Chesapeake. The disproportion of incoming males decreased steadily through the mid and later years of the century, from six to one in the early years to perhaps three to one at midcentury to about 2.5 to one in 1700. And when women, largely spinsters and widows, appeared in relatively greater numbers, the average age of men declined, from only 5 percent younger than sixteen years to three times that proportion in the 1680s to perhaps eight times at the end of the century. Both changes suggest the growing difficulty of recruiting from the optimal, core population of Britain’s middling working classes and the turn to the margins of society, to people less desirable to Chesapeake plantation owners: convicts, vagrants, war prisoners, orphans, and women. Increasingly there were Irish among them, despite the fact that in the West Indies, where Irish laborers had been recruited in large numbers, they had proved to be difficult, unreliable, and often rebellious, largely as a consequence of their resistance to the vicious treatment they received from the English planters, who despised them.11
Once debarked at the small Chesapeake ports and riverside inlets on the mainland, the incoming servants found themselves transformed into commodities—commoditized units of labor. If their service was not already committed, they—their services—were sold to the highest bidder. Most of the uncommitted were disposed of in shipboard and dockside transactions, the length of their labor determined by the terms of sale. Those who were not sold on shipboard were peddled through the countryside for sale in small numbers or individually to inland farmers, many of whom had themselves only recently been freed and were struggling to produce enough tobacco to buy a sufficient stake in the land.12
Though conditions had improved since the earliest, most barbarous years, mere physical survival for the newly recruited laborers was still the most immediate problem. The sudden encounter with the hot, malarial climate, especially in tidal and low-lying areas, was shocking and debilitating, and when the effect of the environment was compounded by a severe work regime, the result was devastating. Between 15 and 30 percent of male immigrants to Maryland at midcentury died within the first, “seasoning” year of their residence, and those who were alive at age twentytwo could expect to live only another twenty-three years. In one county 17 percent of the immigrant males who were alive at age twenty-two died before thirty, 41 percent by age forty, 70 percent by age fifty. In Middlesex County, Virginia, “only a minority lived to the end of their service and joined the ranks of the free.”
The mortality rates were scarcely better for those born in the land. In Maryland nearly 30 percent of all infants died in their first year; overall 47 percent of the population was dead by age twenty, and those who reached that age would live, on average, only another twenty-six years. Women fared slightly better than men, but the differences were slight. The death rate was so high among both the 100,000 immigrants and the American-born Europeans that the total European population in 1700 was only approximately 87,000: fewer by 15,000 than the number of immigrants that had arrived. An estimated 34,000 people, white and black, arrived in Maryland between 1634 and 1680, but the colony’s total population in 1680 was only 20,000. The demographic deficits would never be made up as long as the male preponderance among the servant population persisted and indentured women lost four or more reproductive years in service. The consequences of the devastating death rate and reproductive deficiencies transformed the structure of family life.13
Family life was twisted, devastated, by early death. In Charles County, Maryland, marriages lasted on average only nine years before one partner died. In Virginia most children lost at least one parent by the time they reached majority; over a third lost both. I
n Middlesex County a quarter of all children lost one or both parents before age five; half did so by age thirteen; and almost three-quarters by age twenty-one or by the time of marriage. Old people were rare. Few children ever knew their grandparents, and orphanage was common. Thirty percent of all children were orphans before their eighteenth birthday and were left in the care of uncles, family friends, legal guardians, godparents, and above all stepparents.
With marriages so frequently broken by the early death of one partner, second and third marriages of widows and widowers with children (serial polyandry) led to the creation of households that were complex, jumbled, unstable, at times bizarre. Had one dropped in on a typical Middlesex household in the mid-seventeenth century, that county’s historians write, one would have found
orphans, half-brothers, stepbrothers and stepsisters, and wards running a gamut of ages. The father figure in the house might well be an uncle or a brother, the mother figure an aunt, elder sister, or simply the father’s “now-wife”—to use the wording frequently found in conveyances and wills.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 21