SOCIETY IN THE OLD DOMINION.
[Sidenote: Tobacco and liberty.]
A learned son of Old Virginia, who is fond of wrapping up a bookful of
meaning in a single pithy sentence, has declared that “a true history
of tobacco would be the history of English and American liberty.”
This remark occurs near the beginning of Mr. Moncure Conway’s dainty
volume printed for the Grolier Club, entitled “Barons of the Potomack
and the Rappahannock.” When construed liberally, as all such sweeping
statements need to be, it contains a kernel of truth. It was tobacco
that planted an English nation in Virginia, and made a corporation
in London so rich and powerful as to become a formidable seminary
of sedition: it was the desire to monopolize the tobacco trade that
induced Charles I. to recognize the House of Burgesses; discontent with
the Navigation Act and its effect upon the tobacco trade was potent
among the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion; and so on down to the eve of
Independence, when Patrick Henry won his first triumph in the famous
Parson’s Cause, in which the price of tobacco furnished the bone of
contention, the Indian weed has been strangely implicated with the
history of political freedom.
Furthermore, when we reflect upon the splendid part played by Virginia
in winning American independence and bringing into existence the
political framework of our Federal Republic; when we recollect that
of the five founders of this nation who were foremost in constructive
work--Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Marshall--four were
Virginians,--it becomes interesting to go back and study the social
features of the community in which such leaders of men were produced.
The economic basis of that community was the cultivation of tobacco on
large plantations, and from that single economic circumstance resulted
most of the social features which we have now to pass in review.
[Sidenote: Rapid growth of tobacco culture.]
[Sidenote: Attempts to check it.]
We have seen in a previous chapter how important was the cultivation
of tobacco in setting the infant colony at Jamestown upon its feet in
1614 and the following years. In the rapid development of the colony
during the reign of Charles I. other kinds of agriculture thrived,
there were good crops of wheat, and Indian corn was exported. But
tobacco culture increased rapidly and steadily until in the latter part
of the century it nearly extinguished all other kinds of activity,
except the raising of domestic animals and vegetables needed for food.
Long before this result was reached, the tendency was deplored by the
colonists themselves. To use a modern political phrase, it was “viewed
with alarm.” This is quite intelligible. “We know now that tobacco,
though not strictly a necessary of life, is one of those articles
whose consumption may be looked on as certain and permanent. In the
seventeenth century, men could hardly be blamed if they regarded the
use of tobacco as a precarious fashion.”[123] It was also felt that
in case of war it would be dangerous for Virginia to be forced to
rely upon importing the manufactured necessaries of life. Moreover,
the absorption of the colony’s industry in the production of a single
staple made it especially easy for the home government to depress
that industry by stupid legislation, as in the reign of Charles
II., when the Navigation Act so seriously diminished the purchasing
power of tobacco. For these various reasons many attempts were made
to check the cultivation of the Indian weed. The legislation of
the seventeenth century was full of instances. It was attempted to
establish rival industries and to produce silk, cotton, and iron; laws
were made forbidding any planter to raise more than 2,000 plants in one
year’s crop, and so on. All such attempts proved futile; in spite of
everything that could be done, tobacco drove all competitors from the
field.
[Sidenote: Need for cheap labour.]
[Sidenote: Indented white servants.]
This tobacco was generally cultivated upon large estates. The policy
of making extensive grants of land as an inducement to settlers was
begun at an early date, and all that was needed to develop the system
was an abundance of cheap labour. English yeomanry, such as came to
New England, was too intelligent and enterprising to furnish the right
sort. English yeomanry, coming to Virginia, came to own estates for
itself, not to work them for others. It soon became necessary to have
recourse to servile labour. We have seen negro slaves first brought
into the colony from Africa in 1619, but their numbers increased very
slowly, and it was only toward the end of the century that they began
to be numerous. In the early period the demand for servile labour was
supplied from other sources. Convicted criminals were sent over in
great numbers from the mother country, as in later times they were
sent to Botany Bay. On their arrival they were indented as servants
for a term of years. Kidnapping was also at that time in England an
extensive and lucrative business. Young boys and girls, usually but not
always of the lowest class of society, were seized by press-gangs on
the streets of London and Bristol and other English seaports, hurried
on board ship, and carried over to Virginia to work on the plantations
or as house servants. These poor wretches were not, indeed, sold into
hopeless slavery, but they passed into a state of servitude which might
be prolonged indefinitely by avaricious or cruel masters. The period
of their indenture was short,--usually not more than four years; but
the ordinary penalty for serious offences, such as were very likely to
be committed, was a lengthening of the time during which they were to
serve. Among such offences the most serious were insubordination or
attempts to escape, while of a more venial character were thievery,
or unchaste conduct,[124] or attempts to make money on their own
account. Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an
indented servant came to his death from prolonged ill-usage, or from
excessive punishment, or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to
get a verdict against the master. In those days of frequent flogging,
the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less
compunction than upon the purchased slave; and in general the condition
of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the
latter, save that the servitude of the negro was perpetual, while that
of the white man was pretty sure to come to an end. For him, Pandora’s
box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.
[Sidenote: Notion that Virginians are descended from convicts.]
In England the notion presently grew up that the aristocracy of
Virginia was recruited from the ranks of these kidnapped paupers and
convicts. This impression may have originated in statements, based
upon real but misconstrued facts, such as we find in Defoe’s widely
read stories, “Moll Flanders”[125] and “Colonel Jack.” So, too, in
Mrs. Aphra Behn’s comedy, “The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon
in Virginia,” one of the personages, named Hazard, sails to Virginia,
and on arriving at Jamestown suddenly meets an old acquaintance, named
Friendly, whereupon the following conversation ensues:--
_Hazard._ This unexpected happiness o’erjoys me. Who could have
imagined to have found thee in Virginia?...
_Friendly._ My uncle dying here left me a considerable plantation....
But prithee what chance (fortunate to me) drove thee to this part of
the New World?
_Hazard._ Why, ’faith, ill company and that common vice of the town,
gaming.... I had rather starve abroad than live pitied and despised at
home.
_Friendly._ Would [the new governor] were landed; we hear he is a noble
gentleman.
_Hazard._ He has all the qualities of a gallant man. Besides, he is
nobly born.
_Friendly._ This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a
well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but
for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of whom have
been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates
are now become Your Honour and Right Worshipful, and possess all places
of authority.[126]
[Sidenote: Malachy Postlethwayt.]
[Sidenote: Dr. Johnson.]
It is not only in novels and plays, however, that we encounter such
statements. Malachy Postlethwayt, author of several valuable and
scholarly treatises on commerce, tells us: “Even your transported
felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we
are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and
improvement, and (which is best of all) to honesty, become rich,
substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been
famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates,
officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good
estates.”[127] Either from the study of Postlethwayt, or perhaps simply
from reading “Moll Flanders,” we may suppose that Dr. Johnson got the
notion to which he gave vent in 1769 when quite out of patience because
the ministry seemed ready to make some concessions to the Americans.
“Why, they are a race of convicts,” cried the irate doctor, “and ought
to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!”[128]
Thus we witness the progress of generalization: first it is some
Virginians that are jail-birds, or offspring of jail-birds, then it is
all Virginians, finally it is all Americans. A few years ago, in the
time of our Civil War, one used to find this grotesque notion still
surviving in occasional polite statements of European newspapers,
informing their readers that the citizens of the United States are the
“offspring of the vagabonds and felons of Europe.”[129]
[Sidenote: The real question.]
The statement of the worthy Postlethwayt seems based partly on
observation, partly on information, and has unquestionably been the
source of inferences much more sweeping than facts will sustain. In
order to arrive at clear views of the subject, we must distinguish
between two questions:--
1. What sort of people, on the whole, were the indented white servants
in Virginia?
2. How far did they ever succeed, as freedmen, in attaining to high
social position in the colony?
[Sidenote: Redemptioners.]
In answering the first question, a mere reference to “felons” and
“convicts” will carry us but little way. A considerable proportion
of the indented white servants were poor but honest persons who sold
themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the
voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the
passage-money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over
the passenger to be the planter’s servant until the debt was wiped out.
Indented servants of this class were known as “redemptioners,” and
many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character.
Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the
middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand
for any kind of servile labour was but small.
[Sidenote: Punishments for crime.]
Again, among the transported convicts were many who had been sentenced
to death for what would now be considered trivial offences; the poor
woman who stole a joint of meat to relieve her starving children was
not necessarily a hardened criminal, yet if the price of the joint were
more than a shilling she incurred the death penalty. For counterfeiting
a lottery ticket, or for personating the holder of a stock and
receiving the dividends due upon it, the punishment was the same as
for wilful murder.[130] The favourite remedy prescribed in law was
the gallows, as in medicine the lancet. Yet many judges and officers
of state were conscious of the excessive severity of the system, and
welcomed the device of sending the less hardened offenders out of the
kingdom instead of putting them to death. There is reason for believing
that murderers, burglars, and highwaymen continued to be summarily
sent to Tyburn, while for offences of a lighter sort and in cases with
extenuating circumstances the death penalty was often commuted to
transportation. As a rule it was not the worst sort of offenders who
were sent to the colonies.
[Sidenote: Number and distribution of convicts.]
The practice of sending rogues beyond sea began soon after the
founding of Virginia, and continued until it was cut short in America
by the War of Independence; thereafter the Australasian colonies were
made a receptacle for them until the practice came to an end soon
after the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated that
between 1717 and 1775 not less than 10,000 “involuntary emigrants” were
sent from the Old Bailey alone;[131] and possibly the total number sent
to America from the British islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries may have been as high as 50,000.[132] In the lists of such
offenders their particular destinations are apt to be very loosely and
carelessly indicated; the name Virginia, for example, is often used
so vaguely as to include the West Indies.[133] The destinations most
commonly specified are Virginia, Maryland, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, but
it is certain that all English colonies outside of New England received
considerable numbers of convicts. Very few were brought to New England,
because the demand for such labour was less than elsewhere, and
therefore the prisoners would not fetch so high a price.[134] Stringent
laws were made against bringing in such people. In 1700 Massachusetts
enacted that every master of a ship arriving with passengers must
hand to the custom-house officer a written certificate of the “name,
character, and circumstances” of each passenger, under penalty of a
fine of £5 for every name omitted; and the custom-house officer was
obliged to deliver to the town clerk the full list of names with
the accompanying certificates.[135] The existence of this wholesome
statute indicates that undesirable persons had been brought into the
colony; and the reënactment of it in 1722, with the fine raised from
£5 to £100, is clear proof that the nuisance was not yet abated.
Nevertheless, partly because of such vigilant measures of prevention,
but much more because of the economic reason above alleged, the four
New England colonies received but few convicts.
[Sidenote: Prisoners of war.]
A very different class of transported persons consisted of those who
were not criminals at all, but merely political offenders, or even
prisoners of war. For example, of the Scotch prisoners taken at Dunbar
in 1650, Cromwell sent about 150 to Boston. The next year orders were
issued for sending 1,610 of the Worcester captives to Virginia, but
very few of them seem to have arrived there.[136] In 1652 a party
of 272 men captured at Worcester were landed in Boston, but so
small was the demand for their labour that they were soon exported
southward,--perhaps to the West Indies in exchange for sugar or rum.
After the restoration of the monarchy so many non-conformists were
sold into servitude in Virginia as to lead to an insurrection in 1663,
followed by legislation designed to keep all convicts out of the
colony.[137] On the whole, the number of political offenders brought to
those colonies that have since become the United States was certainly
much smaller than the number of criminal convicts, while the latter
were in all probability much less numerous than the redemptioners.
During the seventeenth century the demand for wholesale servile white
labour was much greater in Virginia and Maryland than elsewhere,
and there are many indications that they received more convicts and
redemptioners than the other colonies. In the eighteenth century,
however, the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, probably
received at least as large a share.
[Sidenote: Careers of white freedmen.]
[Sidenote: Representative Virginia families are not descended from
white freedmen.]
Our survey shows that in the class of indented white servants there was
a wide range of gradation, from thrifty redemptioners[138] and gallant
rebels at the one extreme down to ruffians and pickpockets at the
other. Bearing this in mind, we come to our second question, How far
did white freedmen succeed in attaining to high social position in such
a colony as Virginia? There is no doubt that, as Postlethwayt declares,
some of the best of them did work their way up to the ownership of
plantations. In the seventeenth century they were occasionally elected
to the House of Burgesses. The composition of that assembly for 1654
affords an interesting example. One of the two members for Warwick
was the worthy Samuel Mathews, soon to be elected governor; and one
of the four members for Charles City was Major Abraham Wood, who, as
a child of ten years, had been brought from England in 1620, and had
been a servant of Mathews. John Trussel, the member for Northumberland,
and William Worlidge, one of the two members for Elizabeth City,
had been servants brought over in 1622, aged respectively nineteen
and eighteen.[139] Whether these lads had been offenders against
the law does not appear, nor do we know whether the child had come
with parents not mentioned, or as the victim of kidnappers. We only
know that all three were servants,[140] and, if the word is to be
understood in the ordinary sense, it was much to their credit that
they rose to be burgesses. Cases of ordinary indented servants thus
rising were certainly exceptional in the seventeenth century, and
still more so in the eighteenth. Nothing can be more certain than
that the representative families of Virginia were not descended from
convicts, or from indented servants of any sort. Although family
records were until of late less carefully preserved than in New
England, yet the registered facts abundantly prove that the leading
families had precisely the same sort of origin as the leading families
in New England. For the most part they were either country squires, or
prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds; and
alike in Virginia and in New England there was a similar proportion of
persons connected with English families ennobled or otherwise eminent
for public service.
[Sidenote: Some white freedmen became small proprietors.]
As for the white freedmen, those of the better sort often acquired
small estates, while some became overseers of white servants and
black slaves. The kind of life which they led is described in
Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” with that great writer’s customary minuteness
of information. The class of small proprietors always remained in
Virginia, and included many other persons beside freedmen. With the
increasing tendency toward the predominance of great estates in
tidewater Virginia, there was a tendency for the smaller proprietors
to move westward into the Piedmont region or southward into North
Carolina, as will appear in the next chapter.
[Sidenote: Some became “mean whites.”]
While it was true that “the convicts ... sometimes prove very worthy
creatures and entirely forsake their former follies,”[141] it was
also true that many of them “have been and are the poorest, idlest,
and worst of mankind, the refuse of Great Britain and Ireland, and
the outcast of the people.”[142] These degraded freedmen were apt to
be irreclaimable vagabonds. According to Bishop Meade, they gave the
vestrymen a great deal of trouble. “The number of illegitimate children
born of them and thrown upon the parish led to much action on the part
of the vestries and the legislature. The lower order of persons in
Virginia in a great measure sprang from those apprenticed servants and
from poor exiled culprits. It is not wonderful that there should have
been much debasement of character among the poorest population, and
that the negroes of the first families should always have considered
themselves a more respectable class. To this day [1857] there are many
who look upon poor white folks (for so they call them) as much beneath
themselves; and, in truth, they are so in many respects.”[143] Indeed,
the fact that manual labour was a badge of servitude, while the white
freedmen of degraded type were by nature and experience unfitted to
perform any work of a higher sort, was of itself enough to keep them
from doing any work at all, unless driven by impending starvation.
As manual labour came to be more and more entirely relegated to men
of black and brown skins, this wretched position of the mean whites
grew worse and worse. The negro slave might take a certain sort of
pride in belonging to the grand establishment of a powerful or wealthy
master, and from this point of view society might be said to have a
place for him, even though he possessed no legal rights. There was no
such haven of security for the mean whites. If the negro was like a
Sudra, they were simply Pariahs. Crimes against person and property
were usually committed by persons of this class. They were loungers in
taverns and at horse-races, earning a precarious livelihood, or violent
death by gambling and thieving; or else they withdrew from the haunts
of civilization to lead half-savage lives in the backwoods. In these
people we may recognize a strain of the English race which has not yet
on American soil become extinct or absorbed. There can be little doubt
that the white freedmen of degraded type were the progenitors of a
considerable portion of what is often called the “white trash” of the
South. Originating in Virginia and Maryland, the greater part of it
seems to have been gradually sifted out by migration to wilder regions
westward and southward, much to the relief of those colonies. As to the
probable manner of its distribution, something will be said in the next
chapter.
[Sidenote: Development of negro slavery; treaty of Utrecht.]
[Sidenote: Anti-slavery sentiment in Virginia.]
Long before the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia and Maryland
had begun to protest against the policy of sending criminals from
England,[144] and as negro slaves became more numerous white servitude
was greatly diminished. The rapid increase of negroes began toward
the end of the century, and an immense impetus was given it by
the _asiento_ clause of the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By way of
indemnifying herself for the cost of the War of the Spanish Succession,
victorious England bade Spain and France keep their hands off from
Africa, while she monopolized for herself the slave-trade. We are
reminded by Mr. Lecky that this was the one clause in the treaty that
seemed to give the most general satisfaction; and while an eminent
prelate affixed his name to the treaty and a magnificent _Te Deum_ by
Handel was sung in the churches, it occurred to nobody to denounce as
unchristian a national scheme for kidnapping thousands of black men
and selling them into slavery.[145] Before 1713 the part which English
ships had taken in the slave-trade was comparatively small; and it
is curious now to look back and think how Marlborough and Eugene at
Blenheim were unconsciously cutting out work for Grant and Sherman
at Vicksburg. In 1700 there were probably 60,000 Englishmen and 6,000
negroes in Virginia; by 1750 there were probably 250,000 whites and
250,000 blacks, while during that same half century the peopling of the
Carolinas was rapidly going on.[146] This portentous increase of the
slave population presently began to awaken serious alarm in Virginia.
Attempts were made to restrict the importation of negroes, and at the
time of the Revolutionary War the humanitarian spirit of the eighteenth
century showed itself in the rise of a party in favour of emancipation.
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson announced the principle upon which Abraham
Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860, the prohibition of
slavery in the national domain; Jefferson attempted to embody this
principle in an ordinance for establishing territorial government
west of the Alleghanies. In 1787 George Mason denounced the “infernal
traffic” in flesh and blood with phrases quite like those which his
grandchildren were to resent when they fell from the lips of Wendell
Phillips. The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short.
After the abolition of the African slave-trade in 1808 had increased
the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the
very idea of emancipation faded out of memory.
[Sidenote: Theory that negroes were non-human.]
I have already remarked upon the approval with which negro slavery
was by many people regarded in the days of Queen Elizabeth. To
bring black heathen within the pale of Christian civilization was
deemed a meritorious business.[147] But there were people who took
a lower and coarser view of the matter. They denied that the negro
was strictly human; it was therefore useless to try to make him a
Christian, but it was right to make him a beast of burden, like asses
and oxen.[148] This point of view was illustrated in the remark made
by a lady of Barbadoes, noted for her exemplary piety, to Godwyn,
the able author of “The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate;” she told him
that “he might as well baptize puppies as negroes.”[149] This line of
thought was pursued to all sorts of grotesque conclusions. Some held
that mulattoes were made half human by the infusion of white blood,
and might accordingly be baptized. Others deemed it poor economy to
baptize the slave, since it would be incumbent on the master to feed
Christians better than heathen, and so flog them less. And there were
yet others who had heard the doctrine that Christians ought not to be
held in bondage, and feared lest baptism should be judged equivalent to
emancipation.[150] This notion was at first so prevalent in Virginia
that in 1667 it was enacted: “Whereas some doubts have risen whether
children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of
their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme,
should by vertue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and
declared by this grand assembly and the authority thereof, that the
conferringe of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as
to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this
doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity
by permitting children, though, slaves, or those of greater growth if
capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.”[151]
[Sidenote: Negroes as real estate.]
During the seventeenth century the slave was regarded as personal
property, but a curious statute of 1705 declared him to be for most
purposes a kind of real estate. He could be sold, however, without the
registry of a deed; he could be recovered by an action of trover; and
he was not reckoned a part of the property qualification which entitled
his master to the political privileges of a freeholder.[152]
[Sidenote: Taxes on slaves.]
In the system of taxation white servants and negro slaves played an
important part. The primary tax upon all landholders was the quit-rent
of a shilling for every fifty acres, payable at Michaelmas. This
quit-rent was at first collected in the name of the Company, but after
1624 in the King’s name; and the proceeds were devoted to various
public uses. It was always an unpopular tax, inasmuch as there was
no feasible way (as now-a-days with our blessed tariffs) of making
dullards believe that “the foreigner paid it,” and there were frequent
complaints of delinquency. Another tax was the duty of two shillings
upon every hogshead of tobacco exported. A third was the tax upon
slaves and servants. At the close of the seventeenth century adult
negroes were valued at from £25 to £40, and children at £10 or £12;
there seems to have been little if any difference between the prices
of men and women.[153] The taxation of slave property was equitable,
inasmuch as it bore most heavily upon those best able to pay.
[Sidenote: Treatment of slaves.]
It is generally admitted that the treatment of slaves by their masters
was mild and humane. There were instances of cruelty, of course.
Cruelty forever lurks as a hideous possibility in the mildest system of
slavery; it is part of its innermost essence. In every community there
are brutes unfit to have the custody of their fellow-creatures. Such a
ruffian was the Rev. Samuel Gray, who had his runaway black boy tied
to a tree and flogged to death. Separation of families also occurred,
though much less frequently than in later times. But cases of cruelty
were on the whole rare. The cultivation of tobacco was not such a drain
upon human life as the cultivation of sugar in the West Indies, or the
raising of indigo and rice in South Carolina. It created a kind of
patriarchal society in which the master felt a genuine interest in the
welfare of his slaves. “The solicitude exhibited by John Page of York
was not uncommon: in his will he instructed his heirs to provide for
the old age of all the negroes who descended to them from him, with as
much care in point of food, clothing, and other necessaries as if they
were still capable of the most profitable labour.”[154] The historian,
Robert Beverley, writing in 1705, tells us that “the male servants and
the slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring
the ground, in sowing and planting corn, tobacco, etc. Some distinction
indeed is made between them in their clothes and food; but the work of
both is no other than what the overseers, the freemen, and the planters
themselves do.... And I can assure you with a great deal of truth that
generally their slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many hours
in a day, as the husbandmen and day-labourers in England.” As for
cruelty, he exclaims, with honest fervour, “no people more abhor the
thoughts of such usage than the Virginians, nor take more precaution to
prevent it.”[155]
[Sidenote: Fears of insurrection.]
[Sidenote: Cruel laws.]
Nevertheless, a state of enforced servitude is something which
human nature does not willingly endure. A slave-holding community
must provide for catching runaways and suppressing or preventing
insurrections. It is one of the remarkable facts in American history
that there have been so few insurrections of negroes. There have been,
however, occasional instances and symptoms which have kept slave-owners
in dread and given rise to harsh legislation. In 1687 a conspiracy
among the blacks on the Northern Neck was detected just in time to
prevent the explosion.[156] In 1710 a similar plot in Surry County
was betrayed by one of the conspirators, whom the assembly proceeded
to reward by giving him his freedom with permission to remain in the
colony.[157] The fears engendered by such discoveries are revealed
in the statute book. Slaves were not allowed to be absent from their
plantations without a ticket-of-leave signed by their master. The negro
who could not show such a passport must receive twenty lashes, and was
liable to be treated as a fugitive or “outlying” slave. Such runaways
were formally outlawed; a proclamation issued by two justices of the
peace was read on the next Sunday by the parish clerk from the door
of every church in the county, after which anybody might seize the
fugitive and bring him home, or kill him if he made any resistance. In
the latter event the master was indemnified from the public funds. At
the discretion of the county court, such mutilation might be inflicted
upon the outlying negro as to protect white women against the horrible
crime which then as now he was prone to commit.[158] In 1701 we find
an act of the assembly directed against “one negro man named Billy,”
who “has severall years unlawfully absented himselfe from his masters
services, lying out and lurking in obscure places, ... devouring and
destroying stocks and crops, robing the houses of and committing and
threatening other injuryes to severall of his majestye’s good and leige
people.” It was enacted that whosoever should bring in the said Billy
alive or dead should receive a thousand pounds of tobacco in reward,
and if dead, his master’s loss should be repaired with four thousand
pounds. Anybody who should aid or harbour Billy was to be adjudged
guilty of felony.[159] No penalty was attached to the murder of a slave
by his master; but if he were killed by any one else, the master could
recover his value, just as in case of damage done to a dog or a horse.
Slaves were not allowed to have fire-arms or other weapons in their
possession; “and whereas many negroes, under pretence of practising
physic, have prepared and exhibited poisonous medicines, by which
many persons have been murdered, and others have languished under
long and tedious indispositions, and it will be difficult to detect
such pernicious and dangerous practices if they should be permitted
to exhibit any sort of medicine,” it was enacted that any slave who
should prepare or administer any medicine whatsoever, save with the
full knowledge and consent of the master or mistress, should suffer
death.[160] The testimony of a slave could not be received in court
except when one of his own race was on trial for life; then, if he
should be found to testify falsely, he was to stand for an hour with
one ear nailed to the pillory, and then be released by slicing off the
ear; the same process was then repeated with the other ear, after which
the ceremony was finished at the whipping-post with nine-and-thirty
lashes on the bare back, “well laid on.”[161] Stealing a slave from
a plantation was a capital offence.[162] No master was allowed to
emancipate one of his slaves, except for meritorious services, in
which case he must obtain a license from the governor and council.
If a slave were set free without such a license, the church-wardens
could forthwith arrest him and sell him at auction, appropriating the
proceeds for the parish funds, and thereby lightening the taxes.[163]
When a license was granted, the master received the usual indemnity,
and by an act of 1699 the freedman was required to quit the colony
within six months;[164] for obviously the presence of a large number
of free blacks in the same community with their enslaved brethren
was a source of danger. They were apt, moreover, to become receivers
of stolen goods, and their shiftless habits made them paupers.[165]
Nevertheless there were some free negroes in the colony, and at one
time they even appear to have had the privilege of voting, for an act
of 1723 deprived them of it; but no free negroes, whether men or women,
were exempt from taxation.[166]
[Sidenote: Taking slaves to England.]
[Sidenote: Lord Mansfield’s decision.]
Since gentlemen from the North American colonies and from the West
Indies not unfrequently visited England, and sometimes remained
there for months or years, it was quite natural that they should
take with them household slaves to whose personal attendance they
were accustomed. In course of time the question thus arose whether
the arrival of a slave upon the free soil of England worked his
emancipation. According to Virginia law it did not.[167] The opinion
expressed in 1729 by Lord Talbot, the attorney-general, and supported
by Lord Hardwicke, agreed with the Virginia theory. These eminent
lawyers held that mere arrival in England was not enough to free a
slave without some specific act of emancipation, but Chief Justice
Holt expressed a contrary opinion. Meanwhile masters kept carrying
negroes to London until in 1764 the “Gentleman’s Magazine” asserted
(surely with wild exaggeration) that no less than 20,000 were domiciled
there. Escape was so easy for them that their owners felt obliged to
put collars on them, duly inscribed with name and address. In 1685
the “London Gazette” advertised Colonel Kirke’s runaway black boy,
upon whose silver collar the colonel’s arms and cipher were engraved;
in 1728 the “Daily Journal” informs us that a stray negro has on
his collar the inscription, “My Lady Bromfield’s black in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields;” and in the “London Advertiser,” 1756, a goldsmith in
Westminster announces that he makes “silver padlocks for Blacks’ or
Dogs’ collars.” Colonel Kirke and Lady Bromfield were not American
visitors, but residents in London, and there is evidence, not abundant
but sufficient, that negroes were now and then bought and sold there
for household service. When the forger John Rice was hanged at Tyburn
in 1763, his effects were sold at auction, and a black boy brought
£32. A similar sale at Richmond in 1771 was mentioned in terms of
severe condemnation by the “Stamford Mercury.”[168] However the English
people may have sanctioned the establishment of slavery beyond sea,
they were not disposed to tolerate it at home; and in the sixty years
withal since the treaty of Utrecht, the public conscience had grown
tender on the subject. The days of Clarkson and Wilberforce were at
hand. A cry was raised by the press, a test case was brought before
the King’s Bench, and in 1772 Lord Mansfield pronounced the immortal
decision that “as soon as a slave sets foot on the soil of the British
islands he becomes free.”
[Sidenote: Jefferson on slavery.]
It is not long after this that we find Thomas Jefferson--himself the
kindest of masters, and familiar with slavery in its mild Virginia
form--thus writing about it: “The whole commerce between master and
slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most
unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the
other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... The man must
be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such
circumstances.... With the morals of the people their industry also is
destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can
make another labour for him. This is so true that of the proprietors
of slaves a very small proportion, indeed, are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of the nation be thought secure when we have
removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people
that these liberties are of the gift of God? that they are not to be
violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just.”[169]
[Sidenote: Sexual immoralities.]
In no respect was the system of slavery more reprehensible than in
the illicit sexual relations that grew out of it. The extent of the
evil may be realized when we simply reflect that the numerous race
of mulattoes and quadroons did not originate from wedlock. In 1691
it was enacted that any white man or woman, whether bond or free,
intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, should be banished
for life. In 1705 the penalty was changed to fine and imprisonment,
and for any minister who should dare to perform the ceremony there
was prescribed a fine nearly equal to his whole year’s salary.[170]
Yet the “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” against which these
statutes were aimed, went on, unsanctioned by law and unblessed by
the church. Usually mulattoes were the children of negresses by white
fathers, but it was not always so. Some of the wretched women from
English jails seem to have had fancies as unaccountable as those of the
frail sultanas of the Arabian Nights. In such cases the white mother,
if free, was fined £15, or in default thereof was sold into servitude
for five years; if she were a bondwoman, the church-wardens waited for
her term of service to expire, and then sold her for five years; her
child was bound to service until thirty years of age.[171] The case of
the bastards of negresses was very simply disposed of by enacting that
the legal status of children was the same as that of their mother.[172]
This made them all slaves, from the prognathous and platyrrhine
creature with woolly hair to the handsome and stately octoroon, and
secured their labour to the master. At first the illicit relations
between masters and their female slaves were frowned at, and in some
instances visited with church discipline or punished by fines.[173] But
public opinion seems to have lost its sensitiveness in the presence
of a custom which lasted until slavery was abolished.[174] With the
signal advance in refinement which the nineteenth century ushered in,
there is reason to believe that in many a southern home there were
earnest hearts that deplored the dreadful evil, and welcomed at last
the downfall of the system that sustained it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Classes in Virginia society.]
Some writers divide Old Virginia society into four classes,--the great
planters, the small planters, the white servants and freedmen, and the
negro slaves. The division is sound, provided we remember that between
the two upper classes no hard and fast line can be drawn. Already
in England the classes of rural gentry and yeomen shaded into one
another; in Virginia both alike became land-holders and slave-owners,
they mingled together in society, and their families intermarried.
A typical instance is that of the parents of Thomas Jefferson. His
paternal ancestors were yeomanry who in Virginia developed into country
squires. The first Jefferson in Virginia was a member of the first
House of Burgesses in 1619; Thomas’s father, who was also a burgess and
county lieutenant, owned about thirty slaves. Thomas’s mother, Jane
Randolph, whose grandfather migrated to Virginia in 1674, belonged to a
family that had been eminent in England since the thirteenth century,
including among its members a baron of the exchequer, a number of
knights, a foreign ambassador, a head of one of the colleges at Oxford,
etc.
[Sidenote: Huguenots in tidewater Virginia.]
There can be no doubt that the white blood of tidewater Virginia was
English almost without admixture until the end of the seventeenth
century, and of the very slight admixture nearly all was from the
British islands. There was a desultory sprinkling of Protestant
Frenchmen, Walloons, and Dutch, scarcely appreciable in the mass of
the population. But after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in
1685, Virginia received a small part of the Huguenot exodus from
France. The largest company, more than seven hundred in number, led by
the Breton nobleman, Olivier, Marquis de la Muce, arrived in the year
1700, and settled in various places, more particularly at Monacan
Town in Henrico County. A part of this company were Waldenses from
Piedmont, who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and thence made their
way through Alsace and the Low Countries to England.[175] Other parties
came from time to time, adding to Virginia many estimable citizens
whom France could ill afford to lose. Among the Huguenot names in
Virginia, the reader will recognize Maury, Flournoy, Jouet, Moncure,
Fontaine, Marye, Bertrand, and others.[176] Dabneys (_D’Aubigné_) and
Bowdoins (_Baudouin_) came to Virginia as well as to Boston. Such was
the principal foreign admixture while Virginia was still tidewater
Virginia, before the crossing of the Blue Ridge. The advent of Germans
and Scotch-Irish will be treated in a future chapter.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Influence of the rivers upon society.]
[Sidenote: Some exports and imports.]
Having thus considered the composition of society in its different
strata, as connected with wholesale tobacco culture, let us observe
one of the most conspicuous results of this industry as influenced
by the physical geography of the country. One might suppose that the
necessity for exporting the enormous crops of tobacco would have
called into existence a large class of thriving merchants, who would
naturally congregate at points favourable for shipping, and thus give
rise to towns. In most countries that is what would have happened.
But the manner in which the Virginia planter disposed of his crops was
peculiar. Most of the large plantations lay on or near the wide and
deep rivers of that tidewater country;[177] and each planter would have
his own wharf, from which his own slaves might load the tobacco on to
the vessels that were to carry it to England. If the plantation lay at
some distance from a navigable river, the tobacco was conveyed to the
nearest creek and tied down upon a raft of canoes, and so floated and
paddled down stream until some head of navigation was reached, where a
warehouse was ready to receive it. The vessels which carried away this
tobacco usually paid for it in all sorts of manufactured articles that
might be needed upon the plantations. Every manufactured article that
required skill or nicety of workmanship was brought from England, in
ships of which the owners, masters, and crews were for the most part
either natives of the British islands or of New England. Such a ship
would unload upon the planter’s wharf some part of its motley cargo of
mahogany tables, chairs covered with russia leather, wines in great
variety from the Azores and Madeira,[178] brandy, Gloucester cheeses,
linens and cottons, silks and dimity, quilts and featherbeds, carpets,
shoes, axes and hoes, hammers and nails, rope and canvas, painters’
white lead and colours, saddles, demijohns, mirrors, books,--pretty
much everything.[179] If she came from a New England port she was
likely to bring salted cod and mackerel, with fragrant rum, either
out of the distilleries at Newport and Boston,[180] or imported from
Antigua or Jamaica. Sometimes the rum came from Barbadoes, along with
sugar and molasses, and occasionally ginger and lime-juice, in return
for which the ship often carried away some of the planter’s live hogs
or packed pork, as well as butter, and corn, and tanned leather. The
landing of rum was sometimes private and confidential, for there were
duties on it which lent a charm to evasion.
[Sidenote: Some domestic industries.]
It would be too much to say that there was no manufacturing done
in colonial Virginia. There were probably few if any plantations
where the spinning-wheel and hand-loom were not busy. Female slaves
and white servants wove coarse cloth and made it up into suits of
clothes[181] for people of their sort, and doubtless for some of the
small planters. Such artisans as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers,
shipwrights, tailors, tanners, and shoemakers were often to be found
among the indentured servants. Boys of this class were sometimes upon
their arrival made apprentices in these crafts. Occasionally negro
slaves became more or less skilled as workmen, especially as coopers
and joiners. There must always have been some demand for the labour
of white freedmen acquainted with any of the mechanical arts, and in
fact instances of free labourers in these departments are found. There
can be no doubt, however, that the style of work thus attained was apt
to be unsatisfactory; for we find such planters as Colonel Byrd and
Colonel Fitzhugh, late in the seventeenth century, sending to England
for skilled workmen, and offering to pay very high wages, on the ground
that it was wasting money to employ such workmen as were to be had in
the colony.[182]
[Sidenote: Beverley’s complaint against his countrymen.]
The historian Beverley, who sometimes indulged himself (like the late
Matthew Arnold) in upbraiding his fellow-countrymen for their own good,
says of the Virginians in 1705: “They have their Cloathing of all
sorts from _England_, as Linnen, Woollen, Silk, Hats, and Leather.
Yet Flax and Hemp grow no where in the World, better than there; their
Sheep yield a mighty Increase, and bear good Fleeces, but they shear
them only to cool them. The Mulberry-Tree, whose Leaf is the proper
Food of the Silk-worm, grows there like a Weed, and Silk-worms have
been observ’d to thrive extreamly, and without any hazard. The very
Furrs that their Hats are made of, perhaps go first from thence; and
most of their Hides lie and rot, or are made use of, only for covering
dry Goods, in a leaky House. Indeed some few Hides with much adoe
are tann’d, and made into Servants Shoes; but at so careless a rate,
that the Planters don’t care to buy them, if they can get others; and
sometimes perhaps a better manager than ordinary, will vouchsafe to
make a pair of Breeches of a Deer-Skin. Nay, they are such abominable
Ill-husbands, that tho’ their Country be over-run with Wood, yet they
have all their Wooden Ware from _England_; their Cabinets, Chairs,
Tables, Stools, Chests, Boxes, Cart-wheels, and all other things, even
so much as their Bowls, and Birchen Brooms, to the Eternal Reproach of
their Laziness.... Thus they depend altogether upon the Liberality of
Nature, without endeavoring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry.
They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and
almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I
should be asham’d to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen,
but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite
them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has
given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness
to forgive me.”[183]
[Sidenote: True state of the case.]
It was not, however, as Mr. Bruce reminds us, from any “inherent
repugnance” that Englishmen in Virginia did not take kindly to
manufactures, and perhaps the good Beverley’s reproachful tone is a
trifle overdone. When the planter could get sharp knives, well-made
boots, and fine blankets at his own wharf, simply by handing over
to the skipper a few hogsheads of tobacco, he was not greatly to be
blamed for preferring them to such dull knives, clumsy boots, and
coarse blankets as could be made by the workmen within reach. Many
inconveniences, however, grew out of the absence of local means for
supplying local needs, and I have little doubt that sundry trades and
crafts could have been made to flourish much better than they did, had
it not been for the baneful effects of a tobacco currency, which we
shall presently have to consider.
[Sidenote: Absence of town life.]
The most conspicuous result of the absorption of all activities in
tobacco-planting, and the absence of developed arts and trades, was the
non-existence of town life. At the beginning of the eighteenth century
there was hardly so much as a village in Virginia, unless we make an
exception in honour of Williamsburg, the new seat of government and of
the college. By the middle of the century Williamsburg contained about
200 houses, chiefly wooden, and its streets were unpaved. Richmond,
founded in 1737, had a population of 3,761 in the census of 1790.
The growth of Norfolk, founded in 1705, was exceptional. The trade
with the West Indies, for sugar, molasses, and rum, tended to become
concentrated there, and the proximity of North Carolina made it a mart
for lumber at a time when Virginia forests in the lower tidewater
region had been largely cleared away. Colonel Byrd in 1728 says of the
Norfolk people: “They have a pretty deal of lumber from the borderers
on the Dismal, who make bold with the king’s land thereabouts, without
the least ceremony.” Besides boards and shingles, they sent beef
and pork to the West Indies, and it was not unusual to see a score
of sloops and brigantines riding in the noble harbour. Under these
favourable circumstances the population of Norfolk had come by 1776 to
be about 6,000. At that time Philadelphia had some 35,000 inhabitants,
and New York 25,000, though the population of their two states taken
together scarcely equalled that of Virginia.
[Sidenote: Futile attempts to make towns by legislation.]
The lack of urban life was deplored by the legislators at Jamestown
and Williamsburg, and assiduous efforts were made to correct the
evil; but neither bounties nor orders to build were of avail. To make
towns on paper was as easy as to make a promissory note, but nobody
would go and settle in the towns. Most of the county seats consisted
simply of the court-house, flanked by the jail, the dismal country
inn, and the nondescript country “store,” where the roving peddler
sometimes replenished his pack on his route through the plantations.
Among the legislative acts designed to encourage the building of
towns, three were especially important. The act of 1662 ordered that
thirty-two brick houses should be erected at Jamestown, and forbade
the building or repairing of wooden houses there; all tobacco grown in
the three counties of James City, Charles City, and Surry was to be
sent to Jamestown and stored there for shipping, and the penalty for
disobedience of this order was a fine of 1,000 lbs. of tobacco; every
ship, moreover, ascending the river above Mulberry Island, must land
its cargo at Jamestown and nowhere else, under penalty of forfeiting
the cargo. Half of these fines was to be paid to the town, the other
half to the informer.[184] The statute of 1680, commonly known as the
Cohabitation Act, undertook in somewhat similar fashion to establish
a town in every county; and the attempt was renewed on a larger scale
in 1691.[185] But all these acts were either disregarded or suspended.
When the Surry planter could effect an exchange at his own wharf,
without incidental expense or risk, it was useless to command him to
load his crop on shallops and send it to Jamestown, with a charge for
freight, a chance of capsizing, and warehouse dues at the end of the
journey. The skipper withal had no wish to be saddled with port dues,
or to be hindered from stopping and trading wherever a customer hove
in sight. So skipper and planter had their way, and towns refused to
grow.[186] When Thomas Jefferson entered William and Mary College in
1760, a lad of seventeen years, he had never seen so many as a dozen
houses grouped together.
[Sidenote: The country store.]
The country store was an important institution in Old Virginia.
Under some conditions it would have formed a nucleus around which a
town would have been developed, but in Virginia the store seems to
have been regarded as a kind of rival against which the town could
not compete.[187] It furnished a number of petty centres which did
away with the need for larger centres. The store was apt to be an
appendage to a plantation, unless its size became such as to reverse
the relationship, after the manner of Dundreary’s dog. It might be a
room in a planter’s house, or it might be a detached barn like building
on the estate. Mr. Bruce tells us that to enumerate its contents would
be to mention pretty much every article for which Virginians had any
use. For example, the inventory of the Hubbard store in York County,
taken in 1667, “contained lockram, canvas, dowlas, Scotch cloth,
blue linen, oznaburg, cotton, holland, serge, kersey, and flannel in
bales, full suits for adults and youths, bodices, bonnets, and laces
for women, shoes, ... gloves, hose, cloaks, cravats, handkerchiefs,
hats, and other articles of dress, ... hammers, hatchets, chisels,
augers, locks, staples, nails, sickles, bellows, froes,[188] saws,
axes, files, bed-cords, dishes, knives, flesh-forks, porringers,
sauce-pans, frying-pans, gridirons, tongs, shovels, hoes, iron posts,
tables, physic, wool-cards, gimlets, compasses, needles, stirrups,
looking-glasses, candlesticks, candles, funnels, 25 pounds of raisins,
100 gallons of brandy, 20 gallons of wine, and 10 gallons of aqua vitæ.
The contents of the Hubbard store were valued at £614 sterling, a sum
which represented about $15,000 in our present currency.”[189] One can
imagine how dazzling to youthful eyes must have been the miscellaneous
variety of desirable things. Not only were the manufactured articles
pretty sure to have come from England, but everything else, to be
salable, must be labelled English, “insomuch that fanciers used to sell
the songsters unknown to England, if they sang particularly well, as
_English mocking-birds_.”[190]
[Sidenote: Roads]
We have seen how the rivers and creeks were used as highways of
traffic; for a long time they were the only highways, and the sloop
or the canoe was the only kind of vehicle, public or private, in
which it was possible to get about with ease and safety.[191] Until
after the middle of the eighteenth century there were but few roads
save bridle-paths, and such as there were became impassable in rainy
weather. There were also but few bridges, and these were very likely
to be unsound, while the ferry-boats were apt to be leaky. It was
often necessary for the traveller to swim across the stream, with a
fair chance of getting drowned, and more than a fair chance of losing
his horse. The course of the bridle-path often became so obscure that
it was necessary to blaze the trees. It was not uncommon for people
to lose their way and find themselves obliged to stay overnight in
the woods, perhaps with the howls of the wolf and panther sounding in
their ears. The highway robber was even a more uncomfortable customer
to meet than such beasts of prey; and in those days, when banking was
in its infancy and travellers used to carry gold coins sewed under the
lining of their waistcoats, the highwayman enjoyed opportunities which
in this age of railways and check-books are denied him. Nevertheless
crime was far less common than in England or France, and travelling
was much safer than one might suppose. This was true of the whole
colonial period. In 1777 a young Rhode Island merchant, Elkanah Watson,
armed with a sabre and pair of pistols, journeyed from Providence to
Charleston in South Carolina, with several hundred pounds sterling
in gold quilted into his coat. In seventy days he accomplished the
distance of 1,243 miles, partly on horseback and partly in a sulky,
without encountering any more serious mishaps than being arrested
for a British spy in Pennsylvania, and meeting a large bear in North
Carolina; and he has left us a narrative of his journey, which is as
full of instruction as of interest.[192]
[Sidenote: Tobacco as currency.]
The traveller in Old Virginia, however, was not likely to carry large
sums of money concealed on his person, for he dealt in a circulating
medium too bulky for that. In the course of this book we have had
frequent occasions to observe that the Virginian’s current money was
tobacco. The prices of all articles of merchandise were quoted in
pounds of tobacco. In tobacco taxes were assessed and all wages and
salaries were paid. This use of tobacco as a circulating medium and
as a standard of values was begun in the earliest days of the colony,
when coin was scarce, and the structure of society was simple enough
to permit a temporary return toward the primitive practice of barter.
Under such circumstances tobacco was obviously the article most sure to
be used as money. It was exchangeable for whatever anybody wanted in
the shape of service or merchandise, and it was easily procured from
the bountiful earth. But as time went on this ease of attainment made
it an extremely vicious currency. In the course of our narrative we
have encountered some of the disastrous financial and social results
that flowed from the use of so cheap a substitute for money. Many
reasons have been alleged for the scarcity of coin throughout the whole
colonial period in Virginia;[193] but assuredly the chief reason was
the fact that tobacco was currency. The bad money drove away the good
money, as it always does. There are indications that there was always a
small stock of coin in the colony, but it was hoarded or sent to other
colonies or to England in the settlement of trade balances. Yet it was
not easy to demonetize tobacco without a radical revolution in the
industrial system and in the commercial relations of the colony.
[Sidenote: Effect upon crafts and trades.]
The nature of the currency evidently had much to do with the ill
success of the attempts to encourage manufactures. The carpenter or
shoemaker, after doing his work, must wait for his pay until the year’s
crop of tobacco was gathered and cured. Meanwhile he had nothing to
live on unless he raised it for himself; he might either plant grain
and rear cattle, or else grow tobacco wherewith to buy things. But the
time consumed in these agricultural operations was time taken from his
handicraft. The evil was attacked by legislation. “In 1633 brickmakers,
carpenters, joiners, sawyers, and turners were expressly forbidden to
take part in any form of tillage.” In 1662 tradesmen and artisans were
exempted from all taxes except church-rates, on condition that they
should abstain from all interest, direct or indirect, in the growing of
tobacco. But the evil was not cured.[194]
[Sidenote: Effect upon planters’ accounts.]
Further disaster came from the fact that tobacco was a highly
speculative crop. The fluctuations in its value were liable to be great
and sudden, and they affected the price of every article that was
bought and sold throughout the colony. No one could estimate from one
year to another, with any approach to accuracy, what the purchasing
power of his income was going to be. The inevitable results of this
were extravagance in living and chronic debt. The planter was drawn
into a situation from which it was almost impossible to extricate
himself. “The system of keeping open accounts in London was calculated
to encourage extravagance; and these accounts were habitually
overdrawn. Many of the merchants even made it a rule to encourage this
indebtedness, so as to assure the continuance of their customers.
It gave them a certain advantage in all their dealings with the
planters.”[195] They charged nearly twice as much for their goods sent
to Norfolk or Williamsburg as for the same goods sent to New York.[196]
In all this they were aided by the Navigation Act.
[Sidenote: Hospitality.]
Extravagance in living was further stimulated by the regal hospitality
for which the great planters early became famous. Although the life
upon their estates was much more busy than some writers seem to
suppose, yet the drudgery of business did not consume all their time;
and in their rural isolation, with none of the diversions of town
life, the entertainment of guests by the month together was regarded
both as a duty and as a privilege; and the example set by the large
plantations was followed by the smaller. Even the keeper of an inn, if
he wished to make a charge for food and shelter, must notify the guest
upon his arrival, for a statute of 1663 declared that in the absence of
such preliminary understanding not a penny could be recovered from the
guest, however long he might have staid in the house.[197] As a rule,
no person whose company was at all desirable was allowed to stop at an
inn, for the neighbours vied with one another in offering hospitality.
Every planter kept open house, and provided for his visitors with
unstinted hand.
[Sidenote: Visit to a plantation; the negro quarter.]
Let us put ourselves into the position of one of these visitors,
and get some glimpses of life upon the old plantation. Our host we
may suppose to be a vestryman, justice of the peace, and burgess,
dwelling upon a plantation of five or six thousand acres, with his
next neighbours at a distance of two or three miles.[198] The space is
in great part cleared for the planting of vast fields of tobacco, but
here and there are extensive stretches of woodland and coppice, with
noble forest trees and luxuriant undergrowth, much rougher and wilder
than an English park. The cabins for slaves present the appearance of
a hamlet. These are wooden structures of the humblest sort, built of
logs or undressed planks, and afflicted with chronic dilapidation. An
inventory of 1697 shows us that the cabin might contain a bed and a
few chairs, two or three pots and kettles, “a pair of pot-racks, a
pot-hook, a frying-pan, and a beer barrel;” and advertisements for
runaways describe Cuffy and Pompey as clad in red cotton, with canvas
drawers, waistcoat, and wide-brimmed black hat. Their victuals, of
“hog and hominy” with potatoes and green vegetables, were wholesome
and palatable. If there were white servants on the estate, they were
commonly but not necessarily somewhat better housed and clothed.
[Sidenote: Other appurtenances.]
[Sidenote: The Great House.]