American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

During the later 1610s, however, the company and the colonists made two great adjustments. First, the company gave up trying directly to control the land and the laborers and instead permitted the colonists to own and work land as their private property.

Because tobacco plants prefer a long, hot, and humid growing season, the crop thrived in Virginia but not in England, giving the colonial farmers a comparative advantage.

Virginia’s tobacco production surged from 200,000 pounds in 1624 to 3,000,000 pounds in 1638, as the Chesapeake outstripped the West Indies to become the principal supplier of tobacco to Europe.

During the 1620s, tobacco sold in England for about five to ten times as much as it cost to produce in the Chesapeake. That meant that if a planter could obtain land and a few laborers and keep them alive and working, he could make more in a year than in a decade spent in England.

From only 350 in 1616 the colonial population in the Chesapeake surged to about 13,000 by 1650. Increased immigration, rather than natural increase, drove this population growth, for the annual mortality rate remained about 25 percent until mid-century.

Disease and war reduced the Virginia Algonquians from 24,000 in 1607 to only 2,000 by 1669.

Paying an especially heavy tax, tobacco generated 25 percent of the customs revenue collected by the crown in England during the 1660s.

Led by Nathaniel Bacon, the ill-fated rebellion invited increased crown intervention in Virginia’s government. To stem that encroachment and defend their power, the leading Virginians created a more popular mode of politics, which required an alliance between common and great planters.

Their alliance became both easier and more essential at the turn of the century, when the great planters switched their labor force from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans.

As the historian Edmund S. Morgan has aptly argued, the colonial Virginians developed the American interdependence of elite rule, popular politics, and white racial supremacy. That distinctive combination increasingly set the colonies apart from both their English origins and the colonies of other empires.

This decentralization of power stood in marked contrast to the Spanish and the French colonies, which permitted neither elected assemblies nor individual liberties.

In 1625, men composed 74 percent of Virginia’s population; only 10 percent were women; the remaining 16 percent were children.

Beginning in 1619, some planters bought a few slaves imported from Africa, but slavery was not yet economical because slaves were too expensive to risk where few newcomers, either black or white, survived more than five years.

In 1650 enslaved Africans numbered only three hundred, a mere 2 percent of the Chesapeake population.

servants composed at least three-quarters of the emigrants to the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century: about 90,000 of the 120,000 total. Too poor to afford the £6 cost of a transatlantic passage, the servants mortgaged four to seven years of their lives to a ship captain or merchant, who carried them to the Chesapeake for sale to tobacco planters.

Before 1620, most of Virginia’s indentured servants were forcibly transported either as unwanted orphans or as criminals punished for vagrancy and petty theft. After 1620 the great majority were technically volunteers—but their poverty in England constrained their exercise of free choice.

Although provided no land at the end of her indenture, the female servant had better prospects in the Chesapeake than in England of marrying a man with a productive farm.

Despite the importation of fifteen thousand indentured servants between 1625 and 1640, Virginia’s population increased by only seven thousand.

In part, health improved as many new plantations expanded upstream into locales with fresh running streams, away from the stagnant lowlands, which favored malaria, dysentery, and typhoid fever. Gradually, the Chesapeake farms also developed apple orchards, and cider was healthier than well water tainted with salt or bacteria. In addition, over time, a growing proportion of the population became “seasoned” by surviving bouts with the local diseases.

Quickly built without sills or foundation, the houses usually rotted within twenty years. Only five exceptional structures survive from seventeenth-century Virginia, all of them built of brick by wealthy colonists.

Most colonists had plenty to eat, in contrast to their past in both England and the early years of the colony. By moving to the Chesapeake, the common colonist sacrificed comfort and life expectancy for an improved diet and the pride and autonomy of owning land.

the new regulations (known as the Navigation Acts) doubly hurt the colonial planters by reducing the number of shippers competing for the tobacco trade and by saturating the English market with tobacco.

Instead, most had to rent land from the wealthiest planters at the rate of 10 to 25 percent of their tobacco crop. Such tenants composed about a third of Virginia’s population by 1675.

To popular acclaim, Bacon led indiscriminate attacks on the Indians, in open defiance of the governor.

In early 1676, Berkeley declared Bacon guilty of treason, which led Bacon to march his armed followers against the governor in Jamestown.

“Bacon’s Rebellion” represented a division within the planter elite, a split between a cabal allied with the royal governor and a rival set of ambitious but frustrated planters who resented their relative lack of offices and other rewards. Bacon and two partners felt especially aggrieved that Berkeley monopolized the Indian trade and denied their bid to purchase an interest.

To discourage their return, Bacon burned Jamestown to the ground. A month later, however, Bacon suddenly died of dysentery, leaving his movement leaderless and divided. Assisted by armed merchant ships newly arrived from England, Berkeley returned to the western shore to reassert his authority.

Seeking popularity, the assembly dramatically reduced the poll tax, the most burdensome levy borne by the poor planter. During the 1690s that tax fell to about a quarter of its 1670s level and then declined to a tenth in the early eighteenth century.

Virginia’s eighteenth-century assemblymen cultivated popularity by conspicuously opposing taxes, infuriating a succession of royal governors with instructions to secure a revenue for imperial defense.

By reducing taxes, the Virginia gentry reinvented themselves and Virginia politics, transferring the odium of parasitism and tyranny to the royal governor.

Less burdened by taxes and enjoying greater prosperity, eighteenth-century common planters began to regard their wealthy neighbors as powerful protectors of their common interests.

Frontier wars urged poor whites to see a better future in the dispossession of Indians rather than in rebellion against their colonial elite.

The great planters also earned deference by mastering the genteel public style known as “condescension”: a gentleman’s ability to treat common people affably without sacrificing his sense of superiority.

Ambitious gentlemen were especially solicitous during elections to the assembly, for about 60 percent of the white men met the property requirement to vote (a house and at least twenty-five acres).

English emigration to the Chesapeake declined from 18,000 during the 1660s to 13,000 during the 1680s. Economic growth in England pushed up real wages at the same time that bad economic news from the Chesapeake discouraged potential emigrants.

During the 1680s and 1690s, those who did emigrate preferred other, newer colonies—Jamaica, Carolina, and Pennsylvania—that offered the sort of frontier opportunities that had dissipated in the Chesapeake.

Faced with a declining supply of white laborers, the Chesapeake planters increasingly turned to African slaves for their plantation labor. At the end of the seventeenth century, slaves became a better investment, as servants became scarcer and more expensive: £25 to £30 for a lifelong slave compared well with £15 to purchase just four years of a servant’s time. In addition, the moderating virulence of the local diseases increased life expectancy, which made planters more confident that their slaves would live and work long enough to repay their extra cost.

The slave numbers surged from a mere 300 in 1650 to 13,000 by 1700, when Africans constituted 13 percent of the Chesapeake population. During the early eighteenth century, their numbers and proportion continued to grow, reaching 150,000 people and 40 percent by 1750.

To keep the slaves intimidated, the great planters needed a colonial militia drawn from the common farmers. Consequently, in shifting to African slaves, the great planters acquired yet another reason to cultivate the common white men.

Before 1670, planters developed no systematic legal code to regulate slaves, because they were so few. Early in the century Chesapeake slavery was relatively amorphous and fluid. Some early planters apparently treated their Africans like indentured servants, freeing the survivors after a few years of hard labor. More commonly, masters permitted slaves to acquire and manage their own property, primarily a few chickens, hogs, cattle, and small garden plots of maize and tobacco.

Because the colonial laws did not yet forbid black progress, the black freedmen and women could move as they pleased, baptize their children, procure firearms, testify in court, buy and sell property, and even vote. Some black men married white women, which was especially remarkable given their scarcity and high demand as wives for white men. A few black women took white husbands.

When white neighbors lured away his slave, Johnson went to court, winning damages and the return of his property. That the authorities supported an African against whites and upheld his right to own slaves reveals that slavery and racism had not yet become inseparably intertwined in the Chesapeake.

Where most Chesapeake settlers were poor and short-lived indentured servants, New England attracted primarily “middling sorts” who preserved their freedom because they could pay their own way across the Atlantic.

Puritan values helped the colonists prosper in a demanding land. In the process, they developed a culture that was both the most entrepreneurial and the most vociferously pious in Anglo-America.

Most New England farmers had to rely on their own families for the labor to build their especially demanding farms. That reliance on family labor kept New England more egalitarian in the distribution of property and power than was the case in the richer Chesapeake, where an elite of great planters exploited the labor of servants and slaves.

During the 1530s, Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had rejected the Catholic pope to become the head of an independent Church of England. Thereafter, the English monarch appointed and commanded a hierarchy of two archbishops, twenty-six bishops, and approximately 8,600 parish clergy in England and Wales. Because the monarch led the official church, religious dissent smacked of treason as well as heresy.

The crown employed the Anglican Church to promote political as well as religious conformity. A system of church courts (without juries) gave the crown a vehicle to extort revenue and to punish dissidents.

In 1620, King James I demanded sermons against “the insolency of our women and their wearing of broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn.”

King Charles I, dictated that the clergy preach that Parliament sinned when it denied new taxes demanded by the monarch.

Begun as an epithet, “Puritan” persists in scholarship to name the broad movement of diverse people who shared a conviction that the Protestant Reformation remained incomplete in England.