American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

Morgan shows how the “abundance of land and shortage of people” shaped Virginia and America’s history for many centuries (158).

Key to the labor shortage was the death rate: From 1625 to 1640, only 7,000 of 15,000 immigrants survived. Women and their children lived longer, likely because they had better resistance to disease. But since men so frequently died during the colony’s first 50 years, it could only continue through immigration.

The death rate also changed the social landscape. First, an increase in quack doctors, charging exorbitant fees, caused deaths, since no one would call the doctor. There was also an increase in widows, who would remarry within months. Their rarity—and power, since they were usually given their husband’s estates and made administrator—meant they were not fined when debts against their estates went unpaid.

The change in property with the death rates led to some instability in land and property. In the first half of the century, investing in land was the “least valuable investment a Virginian could make” (171). Inherited land, worked or unworked, could also “decline in value” (172). But the headrights were still bought and sold for tobacco in the 1650s, while many wealthy Virginians waited to claim the land from headrights from their servants. Houses usually did not increase the land’s value, since they “rapidly declined” in value with the land (174).

The “most stable, most secure commodity was cattle” (175). But even cattle was not entirely secure. Thus, the “most risky” but highest investment was servants. But like cattle and servants and land and tobacco (which was perishable), any ability to gain wealth was open to theft and “embezzlement of all kinds” (176).

Virginians created a stable economy by making “exchanges in advance, in promissory notes” based on the next crop (177). The big farmers, “who could take the risk” (177), became planters and bought English goods and sold them for promissory notes to their neighbors. But the death rate upset the system, causing the House of Burgesses to prevent fraud and debt repayment, to ensure that Virginia could build its own “local system of credit and exchange,” which created “stability out of instability” (179). Importantly, and unlike in England, any servant who survived seasoning (the first summer and the diseases to which immigrants were not immune) and service could own land and even vote, and perhaps one day become a representative.

Morgan examines why tobacco caused so many problems for the new colony.

By 1644, the colony had only grown to 8,000 people, but they were dying. In the early years, “unrecognized disease” killed many settlers (181). Morgan shows they were living longer due to (1) an increase in fruit, which decreased scurvy; (2) cider consumption, which kept settlers from drinking local water, which carried typhoid; (3) improvements in transportation to the colony and arrival times in the fall or early winter, to avoid summer seasoning; and (4) better clothing and provisions (184).

But longer lives did “create rising expectations” (184) that were invested in tobacco, which is why the colony remained dependent on the crop. Some Virginians, however, wanted to the colony to be richer, exemplified by sturdier houses and new production. When tobacco prices fell and “population and production figures headed up” (186), it was the perfect time to reinvent the colony. Berkeley, who “was summoned […] back to office, at a time when the colonists’ health had improved,” also sought to “improve the colony’s economy” (186).

Berkeley’s plan, like that of colonists in New England, was to move colonists into towns and to diversify the economy to make products for export—but neither the king nor English merchants would invest. Virginians would have to put up the capital, but the Navigation Acts and shipping tobacco directly to England depressed Virginia’s economy. Undaunted, Berkeley went ahead with a plan to build a home on every river, advising that “people should plant mulberries and grow silk,” for example (189). The burgesses agreed: Houses would be built in brick to last longer. However, after achieving its own political stability, England provided little support.

Tobacco diversification might have failed, but Berkeley was able to limit the crop and had the backing of the Maryland assembly. Thus, in 1666, when the tobacco crop was left unsold, North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia “agreed to halt planting from February 1, 1667, to February 1, 1668” (193). But Baltimore eventually rejected the end to tobacco planting.

Although New England diversified, Virginians’ “attitudes toward servants, work, and time” and corruption prevented a change in the short term, since no one was willing to suffer short-term pain for long-term gain. Moreover, with an increase in workers due to a lower death rate, new types of exploitation arose.

This chapter investigates how the king, among others, took advantage of Virginia’s tobacco growers to make profits after 1660.

By 1775, Morgan suggests that “the revenue from tobacco was spectacular” (197). So, when Virginians started to live longer and production increased, it meant more revenue for the king’s treasury, and no other “colonial product yielded so much revenue” (198). The large volume of exports occasioned the rise of pirates, often indistinguishable from those charged with their interception, as well as corruption, given the opportunities for men in positions like collectors, who made more from fringe benefits (like bribery in the form of “free freight for their own tobacco in return for overlooking certain duties”) than salary (202).

And ships were not seized for violating the Navigation Acts but for theft, smuggling, or to collect bribes. For the average farmer, the increase in tobacco production and the Navigation Acts kept tobacco prices mostly low through the end of the 17th century, although the government allowed others to become enriched through illegal trade.

Even when the price of tobacco fell, Virginia’s governing leaders kept making profits. For example, when Berkeley returned to office in 1660, the House of Burgesses “voted him a gift of a bushel of corn from every tithable in the colony,” a huge sum (204). Moreover, these gifts became part of officials’ offices, so when Lord Culpeper became governor in 1678, his salary was increased considerably, and he was given money for rent. After the governor, next in line was the secretary, “whose profits came mainly from fees,” like collecting a sum from “every official document issued or recorded” or every person who left the colony (207). The burgesses voted themselves money to attend meetings, which Morgan notes were the “largest expense borne by Virginia’s taxpayers” (208), since a meeting could last up to a month.

The money that Virginians paid to “support their government” and the churches came in the form of poll taxes (one sum applied to each person) for any man over the age of 15 and any woman who worked in tobacco (209). The taxes for freedmen, men who were free from their tenancy, were extreme since each man “had only his own labor to support him” (209). Indeed, this tax burden meant that after 1640, no newly arriving servant became a burgess, since “only the very successful could expect the highest offices” (209).

In the late 17th century, Morgan shows that big farmers like Culpeper, the king, and other officials who benefited from tobacco had less and less incentive to change the system that they profited from. Although they continually reformed their political institutions to give more freedom “and greater security” to the small men, as soon as death no longer “gripped” the colony, the king, governors, and other officials, they started to “reduce the rights” of the laborers they relied on (211).