The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  Childhood, so often riven by parental loss or clouded by fears of looming disasters, scarcely existed as a time of security and nurturing. Thus the experiences of the child Agatha Vause: by her tenth birthday, she had lost a father, two stepfathers, a mother, and a guardian uncle. Stability and security might be found, in some small degree at least, in this world of transience and childhood trauma, the same historians write, not in nuclear families but in neighborhood communities of kin and quasi-kin, neighbors and friends who interacted not in formal institutions (church, parish, markets, manorial courts) but in irregular workaday encounters and on occasions of mutual help.14

  Living conditions contributed to the brutality of life and the savage death rate. Houses on the small plantations in Maryland as in Virginia continued to be drafty wooden boxes, “dribbled over the landscape without apparent design.” As in earlier years most houses consisted of a single room or at best two rooms with a loft above. Floors were usually beaten earth, the walls made of raw unpainted planks thinly chinked with clay. Normal furnishings were rolled-up mattresses for beds (bedsteads were rare), a bench and a table, a few chests for storage, and pewter and wooden dishes. Spoons and one’s fingers were the only utensils for eating. There were no privies, and even chamber pots were rare. People relieved themselves outside, close to the walls, “creating stenches that must have pervaded all rooms of the house.” Clothing hung from the walls or was stretched out as a space divider. The small flimsy buildings were cold in winter and hot and insect-ridden in summer; with shuttered windows, they were always dark. Above all, as the family’s central place for meals, sleeping, procreation, care for the sick, and entertainment, they were crowded. Two persons per bed was the average for Maryland’s ordinary families, and in this as in so many other aspects of daily life, there were few differences between servants and masters.

  Most of the small farmers and their servants lived at the level of the most menial householders in England, their dwellings only “slightly larger and modified versions of flimsy English huts erected on commons and wastes,” their “standard of living little different from the lowest levels of society in England.” Few whose estates were worth less that £50 (the great majority of the planters) had beds to sleep on with sheets and blankets or enough furniture for all to eat at a table. And life for those at the bottom of the tobacco world was primitive. At suppertime, the leading archaeologists of seventeenth-century Virginia write, one can imagine

  a wife, husband, two children, and perhaps a servant are gathered together in the perpetual dusk of their shuttered cottage … their dinner is cornmeal mush boiled in an iron pot. The food is ladled into five plates or porringers, one for each person. The father sets his down on a large storage trunk which he straddles and sits on. His daughter is perched on the edge of a small chest, the only other piece of furniture in the room. The rest either stand or squat along the walls. They spoon up the food from the plates they must hold in their hands or place on the floor. They drink milk or water from a common cup, tankard or bowl passed around. No candle or lamp is lighted now or later when the room grows completely dark except for the glow of embers on the hearth.… While someone rinses the bowls in a bucket of water (there being only one pot) someone else drags out a cattail mattress and arranges it in front of the fire. The husband, wife, and daughter lie down there, covering themselves with a single canvas sheet and a worn-out bed rug. The son and servant roll up in blankets on the floor. For warmth all sleep in their clothes.

  The wealthier planters fared better, but their houses have been compared to “modest farm cottages in England.” Only the wealthiest had multi-room houses. There were no spacious brick mansions; even the upper gentry’s dwellings were “small, inconspicuous, and inconsequential.” The greatest of them, the Wormeleys’ “Rosegill,” overlooking the Rappahannock River, was only a nine-room wooden building, surrounded by small outhouses for cooking, storage, and housing servants.15

  In theory relief might have been found in the benevolence of master-servant relations, since indentured servants were assumed to be temporary family members, protected as well as disciplined by the paternalism of the household. And so it was in many cases. But in the grinding reality of small-scale tobacco farming, where masters lived and worked intimately with servants, their clothing and appearance in no way different from those of their hirelings, relationships, however benevolently begun, easily frayed and became brutal. Some masters, especially the most marginal and desperate, drove their servants hard, stirring resistance that could become violent and that could lead to savage reprisals. Murders were reported. Women were commonly exposed to sexual exploitation: more than 10 percent of all children born to immigrant women in seventeenth-century Maryland were bastards. Women who bore illegitimate children, like those who attempted escapes and forceful resistance, were punished most commonly by extensions of service and so to still further exploitation.16

  Yet however miserable their existence, however brutalized they may have been in service, most of the immigrant servants carried with them a sense of independence derived from the knowledge that their bondage was voluntary, contractual, and limited in time, and that they could look forward to an independent future and possibly a stake in the land. And some, like Clocker, Fenwick, and Adams in Maryland, saw their aspirations fulfilled as they advanced from servitude to freedom and acquired, with hard work and careful management, an independent if small stake in the land, with one or two servants and a place in the management of local affairs. But as hundreds of freed servants became thousands, as the most fertile coastal and riverine lands were claimed if not yet cultivated, and as a long depression in the tobacco trade compounded the problems for small farmers, the incidence and prospects of freed servants acquiring land of their own declined. By the end of the century the majority of freedmen had little choice but to move to more remote or poorer land exposed to Indian attacks, or to continue in service, now for small wages, ultimately to become lifelong tenants or sharecroppers. So in Maryland in the late seventeenth century fully one-third of all householders were tenants; in Virginia perhaps only one in ten former servants were able to establish themselves in the ranks of independent proprietors and profitable planters.17

  Such discouraging prospects, relayed back to England by returnees and correspondents, were in themselves enough to reduce the flow of new recruits to the North American servant population. By the 1670s the decline in their numbers within increasing flows of immigrants to the region was palpable. By the 1680s it was a major problem for the established planters. Their ultimate solution, slow in coming at first but reaching fulfillment at the end of the century, was the substitution of African slaves for the familiar British and European servants—people utterly alien to the planters, of perplexing character, and believed to be barbarous by nature.18

  3

  “Negars,” “negors,” and Africans otherwise identified by color had begun appearing in very small numbers well before 1619, when John Rolfe noted the arrival in Virginia of “20. and odd Negroes.” They were Angolans hijacked from a shipment to Spanish America and sold by their Dutch captors “for victualles.” Their numbers rose very slowly, their arrivals random occurrences. The Virginia census of 1625 identified only twenty-three blacks, scattered thinly through the separate plantations. In 1640 Maryland recorded twenty blacks. But then the numbers began to rise as planters gradually, almost casually, began including them in their purchasing orders. So in 1638 Baltimore ordered his agent to buy for him—along with forty cattle, ten sows, and forty hens—“ten negroes to be transported to St. Mareys,” and in 1642 Leonard Calvert offered a passing ship captain three manors or 24,000 pounds of tobacco for fourteen “negroe men-slaves, of between 16 & 26 yeare old, able & sound of body and limbs.” By 1650 there were 300 blacks in Maryland; in 1660, 758; and in 1670, 1,190 (9 percent of the population), by which time Virginia’s black population had reached 2,000. But there was as yet no wholesale importation of slaves. The proposal of the Royal A
frican Company in 1664 to send one to two hundred slaves a year to Maryland had to be refused, Charles Calvert reported, because there were not “men of estates good enough to undertake such a businesse,” despite the fact that “wee are naturally inclin’d to love neigros if our purses would endure it.” Most if not all of those who arrived in Maryland came not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean islands, Barbados in particular, from Spanish settlements on the mainland, and from Dutch islands via New Netherland, hence people who were to some extent “seasoned” and used to life in European colonies. And they came in various statuses. Some came as freemen and remained free, though often under particular disabilities. Others could show by oral or written testimony that their service was contractually limited to a specific term, after which, like indentured servants, they were to be released.19 And a very few, who came bound in service, through ceaseless labor and fierce determination were able to buy their freedom and that of their families and establish themselves in the society at large. In 1668 nearly a third of the fifty-nine blacks in Northampton County on Virginia’s lower Eastern Shore, all of whom had arrived bound in unlimited servitude, had acquired freedom; some had bought property which they were able to pass on to the next generation, established effective community ties among themselves, and participated broadly in the larger white society. All blacks before 1660, Edmund Morgan writes, “whether servant, slave, or free, enjoyed most of the same rights and duties of other Virginians. There is no evidence … that they were subjected to a more severe discipline than other servants.”20

  But the importance of the most remarkable achievers among the blacks can easily be exaggerated. Their numbers in fact were small, they are found only in one or two counties, they were subject to white harassment, and their claims to independence and full equality were tenuous, contestable, and not long sustained. The great majority of Africans, even in this most favorable period, were never viewed as fully equal to white servants. Lacking contracts, actual or implicit, and having been bought or seized in Africa or abroad, they were considered to be bound in servitude for life unless otherwise identified, a condition never imposed on whites but that seemed suitable in most Europeans’ eyes. For they were black, and color mattered. It carried with it a plethora of cultural assumptions. To be black in north European culture, and especially in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, was to be dark in a cultural sense—base, sinister, inferior, “grossly uncivil … unscrupulous, thieving, and sometimes treacherous.”21 It was this assumption of the blacks’ cultural baseness, of their inborn inferiority in the scale of human development, and their complete alienation from English cultural values, that, together with the rapidly increasing demand for labor, made possible the barbarism of their reduction to the emerging legal status of “slaves.”

  In Elizabethan usage, slave was a general term of derogation used in offhand ways to refer to any deeply vulgar, degraded people and commonly applied to blacks held in servitude. As the economic value of servants without limit of time grew in the labor-short plantations and as white indentured servants became less available, the term slave—the word itself—acquired a salience it had not had before and, gradually, a new specific, legal meaning that would render the use of the word “scandalous,” a contemporary wrote, if it were to be applied to white servants. Something new and vital, a newly defined legal category, began to emerge, out of the difficulties of the labor situation, out of experience in plantation agriculture, out of necessity, and out of a sense of racial differences.22

  There had been no preexisting legal definition of slavery, and no one set out to infuse the term with a new, specific meaning. But as the blacks’ importance in the labor force grew, disputes arose over the terms of servitude which could only be resolved through litigation, despite the lack of legal precedents. Laws to resolve the conflicts and confine the blacks to maximum exploitation had to be devised. Analogies were useless. Kidnapped boys who, like Africans, arrived without work contracts were bound simply by “the custom of the country” which however harsh allowed for eventual release. Few thought the same should apply to blacks, or that a limited contract of some sort was implied where bondage was unspecified. If slavery meant lifelong servitude, as in fact it most often did, was that status heritable? Did it carry over to the slaves’ offspring? Were marriages between whites and blacks, free and unfree, Europeans and Africans, legal? If so, were the children of such unions white or black in the eyes of the law? Did conversion to Christianity release one from bondage?

  Answers had to be found if the planters’ economy was to prosper. What began as conditions de facto became statuses de jure, as the planters, merchants, and lawyers sought to remedy discrepancies, resolve ambiguities, and bind into an effective and reliable labor force the growing mass of black workers. There were some working models, if not legal precedents, that might in some degree be followed. Blacks had been enslaved in the Caribbean islands before the Chesapeake authorities began searching for legal definitions, and slave laws had been passed there, especially in Barbados, that were known in Virginia. So to some extent, as April Hatfield has suggested, the emerging legalities of slavery developed as an intercolonial “conversation.” But the Barbadian laws and practices did not cover all contingencies or fit closely the more complex economy of the Chesapeake.23

  So the planters, merchants, and lawyers in Virginia and Maryland began the process of finding their own way toward a full legal definition of the Africans’ bondage. Though by midcentury some clarity had been reached, ambiguities and constraints remained—but not because of moral concerns. There were none. To those Virginians and Marylanders who owned slaves, bought and sold them, forced them into degrading and perpetual labor, there were no moral constraints. Even the few planters known to have been generous to their slaves, who freed them in their wills and provided for their welfare, did not condemn slaveholding as such.24 The English were people who denounced barbarism as they knew it, declared it to be un-Christian, uncivilized, and immoral. But sensibilities in the world they knew were blunt, and relationships between masters and servants were commonly abrasive, at times savage. Though slavery however defined was degrading and brutal, in its various forms it was familiar, venerable, and as far as the planters knew, in principle uncontested. It had existed in one form or another, defined in one way or another, for ages untold, and it flourished elsewhere in their own time: in the Middle East, in North and sub-Saharan Africa, in Iberian America, and among native tribes.25 The question was not what the moral limits of slavery might be but how it might best be elaborated and defined in law for maximum use in the Chesapeake, and how it might relate to differences in race.

  Answering these questions—even grasping their implications—was difficult, and successive efforts to reach a logical and complete resolution were halting and confused. By the 1660s and 1670s, the need for clarity in the legal status of blacks had become urgent, and laws and regulations of deepening confinement, incomplete and ambiguous though they were, followed in quick succession.

  One of the most important of the early laws, an epitome of the difficulties of definition, was adopted by Maryland in 1664. It was the first statute to recognize lifelong heritable slavery as a matter of law, but strangely that was not its primary purpose. Confusing in its very title (“An Act Concerning Negroes & Other Slaves”—the latter unspecified), the law stated at the outset that all negroes or other slaves already in the colony or others who would come in the future “shall serve Durante Vita” (for life), and their children will follow their fathers’ status into the same condition. That profound assertion, which went to the heart of the matter, seemed obvious to the authors of the statute, and they disposed of it quickly, without elaboration, comment, or justification. What concerned them and needed detailed comment and justification was the question of miscegenation: what to do about the “divers freeborne English women [who] forgettfull of their free condicion and to the disgrace of our nation doe intermarry with negro slaves.” Conflicts had arisen �
��touching the issue of such woemen” that threatened “great damage” to the slaves’ masters. To prevent such “shamefull matches,” the law stated that in the future white women who married blacks would become slaves of their husbands’ masters as long as their husbands lived, and that their children would become slaves “as their fathers were.” As for the children of the white women who were presently married to negroes, they were to serve their parents’ masters “till they be thirty yeares of age and noe longer.”26

  By this statute, ambiguous and incomplete in its logic, slavery was declared to be lifelong servitude, but this condition was not exclusively confined to the negro race, since there could be “other slaves” as well. Interracial marriages were fiercely condemned, but they were recognized as legal; and derivative slavery, though absolute for slaves’ children, was limited for the white wives of black husbands and for the children of interracial marriages that already existed. The statute ruled that the status of children of mixed marriages would follow the condition of their fathers, which was the normal provision of the English common law. But it would soon be seen that in the plantation world this provision would have bizarre consequences. Slave women would be bringing up their own children in freedom and the women’s masters would be denied the benefit of their slaves’ fertility. The law was therefore changed to matrilineal descent, which became the normal American usage. And when in 1681 it was seen that the law as written might encourage planters to marry off their white female servants to black slaves to reduce the women to slavery, the entire statute was repealed. Even more confusing was the struggle, not even attempted in this early statute, over how to define slaves as the property they evidently were. Were they realty (like land and buildings) or chattels (like horses and plows) or freehold (permanent attachments to specific realty)?