CHAPTER I: ENGLAND IN THE NEW WORLD 7_The Planters of Colonial Virginia

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_The Planters of Colonial Virginia_

_The_ PLANTERS OF COLONIAL VIRGINIA

By THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER

[Illustration]

_New York_

RUSSELL & RUSSELL

1959

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 59-11228

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

America since the days of Captain John Smith has been the land of hope

for multitudes in Europe. In many an humble home, perhaps in some

English village, or an Ulster farm, or in the Rhine valley, one might

find a family assembled for the reading of a letter from son, or

brother, or friend, who had made the great venture of going to the New

World. "Land is abundant here and cheap," the letter would state. "Wages

are high, food is plentiful, farmers live better than lords. If one will

work only five days a week one can live grandly."

In pamphlets intended to encourage immigration the opportunities for

advancement were set forth in glowing colors. In Virginia alone, it was

stated, in 1649, there were "of kine, oxen, bulls, calves, twenty

thousand, large and good." When the traveller Welby came to America he

was surprised to "see no misery, no disgusting army of paupers, not even

beggars;" while Henry B. Fearson noted that laborers were "more erect in

their posture, less careworn in their countenances" than those of

Europe.

In Virginia, as in other colonies, it was the cheapness of land and the

dearness of labor which gave the newcomer his chance to rise. The rich

man might possess many thousands of acres, but they would profit him

nothing unless he could find the labor to put them under cultivation.

Indentured workers met his needs in part, but they were expensive, hard

to acquire, and served for only four years. If he hired freemen he

would have to pay wages which in England would have seemed fantastic.

Thus the so-called servants who had completed their terms and men who

had come over as freemen found it easy to earn enough to buy small

plantations of their own. That thousands did so is shown by the Rent

Roll which is published as an appendix to this book. One has only to

glance at it to see that the large plantations are vastly outnumbered by

the small farms of the yeomen. It proves that Virginia at the beginning

of the eighteenth century was not the land of huge estates, worked by

servants and slaves, but of a numerous, prosperous middle class.

Owning plantations of from fifty to five hundred acres, cultivating

their fields of tobacco, their patches of Indian corn and wheat, their

vegetable gardens and orchards with their own labor or the labor of

their sons, the yeomen enjoyed a sense of independence and dignity. It

was their votes which determined the character of the Assembly, it was

they who resisted most strongly all assaults upon the liberties of the

people.

As the small farmer, after the day's work was over, sat before his

cottage smoking his long clay pipe, he could reflect that for him the

country had fulfilled its promise. The land around him was his own; his

tobacco brought in enough for him to purchase clothes, farm implements,

and household goods.

But he frowned as he thought of the slave ship which had come into the

nearby river, and landed a group of Negroes who were all bought by his

wealthy neighbors. If Virginia were flooded with slaves, would it not

cheapen production and lower the price of tobacco? Could he and his

sons, when they hoed their fields with their own hands, compete with

slave labor?

The event fully justified these fears. The yeoman class in Virginia was

doomed. In the face of the oncoming tide they had three alternatives--to

save enough money to buy a slave or two, to leave the country, or to

sink into poverty.

It was the acquiring of a few slaves by the small planter which saved

the middle class. Before the end of the colonial period a full fifty per

cent. of the slaveholders had from one to five only. Seventy-five per

cent. had less than ten. The small farmer, as he led his newly acquired

slaves from the auction block to his plantation may have regretted that

self-preservation had forced him to depend on their labor rather than

his own. But he could see all around him the fate of those who had no

slaves, as they became "poor white trash." And he must have looked on

with pity as a neighbor gathered up his meager belongings and, deserting

his little plantation, set out for the remote frontier.

It was one of the great crimes of history, this undermining of the

yeoman class by the importation of slaves. The wrong done to the Negro

himself has been universally condemned; the wrong done the white man has

attracted less attention. It effectively deprived him of his American

birthright--the high return for his labor. It transformed Virginia and

the South from a land of hard working, self-respecting, independent

yeomen, to a land of slaves and slaveholders.

_Princeton, New Jersey_ THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER

_August, 1957_

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: ENGLAND IN THE NEW WORLD 7