Penguin History of the United States of America (6 page)

This reform was at least as important as the other with which Sandys’ name is associated: the establishment, under the Company’s patronage, of the General Assembly of the colony, the Virginian parliament, in which representatives of the settlers – called, for this purpose, burgesses – met, from 1619 onwards, to discuss and pass upon their common affairs. The rise of this body was very swift. It took almost fewer years than the House of Commons took centuries to reach maturity. By 1635, in which year the burgesses deposed a Governor of Virginia, it had become the central institution of the colony. Such precocity demands explanation.

The fact is that it would have been impossible to govern the colony, once private enterprise and private landholding had been sanctioned, without machinery for consulting the colonists and obtaining their assent to proposed measures. The mutinous strain in the earliest settlers – men who were facing death and whose only hope lay in cooperation – has already been stressed. The same strain was to express itself again and again in Virginian history, right down to the Revolution, if not beyond.
⁸
The King had no army in Virginia, while the Virginians not only had arms but a very lively sense of their own interests. When in difficulty, they could always vanish for a time into the unknown wilderness. The assertion of authority by force was thus even more difficult than it was in England. Some machinery of consent, of compromise, was therefore a governmental necessity, and was early recognized as such, first by the royal Governors and then by the King
himself (in 1639). Such necessity would have made itself felt even without the rather weak English representative tradition, or the originality of Sir Edwin Sandys. But he and the Company deserve credit for being the first to accept the facts; for the machinery of consent is, of course, the very essence of the Western tradition of freedom, and was to have an extraordinary flowering on American soil. The root and stem of that flower were the institutions set up in Virginia and New England in the early seventeenth century.

The hard-won arts of survival on the frontier and the wise dispositions of the Company largely account, then, for the success of the third attempt to colonize Virginia. But not all the intelligence in the world can prevail without the means of success. And until 1612 it seemed at times as if there were no such means. It was not just that Virginia seemed fatally lacking in those resources which would guarantee a profit to the Company’s shareholders; it seemed lacking in the resources needed to support the colonists themselves. It was true that, given the fertility of the land, they might grow enough to feed and clothe themselves; but if subsistence farming was to be the destiny of Virginians, there was no sense in having come so far: it was available at home. Right until the end of the twentieth century, the chief lure of North America for prospective immigrants was the opportunity for a higher standard of living. So unless the colony could really promise such an opportunity, it would fail. And all promises would be delusory unless a way could be found by which Virginia could pay, with her exports, for the goods which she would for long be obliged to import. In the early seventeenth century these goods were almost everything, from books to whipsaws, from armour to vinegar, which the colonists could either need or desire.

John Smith and the Company alike tried to solve this problem by encouraging silk-manufacturing, glass-manufacturing, soap-manufacturing, the export of timber products, of grain, of wine, of anything but the one thing which proved to be the third necessity for the salvation of Virginia: tobacco. This they fiercely opposed, in the teeth of the colonists’ insistence on producing almost nothing else. For the dangers of an economy absolutely dominated by a single staple crop were as clear in the seventeenth century as they are nowadays. Dependence on one primary product leaves the producers at the mercy of the market, with its recurring gluts and lowered prices, and its recurring shortage of money. Primary producers are normally at the mercy of their customers anyway: but if they have diversified their products they can at least hope to live off the sales of the others when the sales of one – say, cocoa – have declined, in volume or in value. To these theoretical objections may be added the detail that the seventeenth-century world market was far from encouraging to the Virginians. Smoking was by no means a novel disease. Indians, of course, throughout both Americas, smoked. From them the habit spread to Portugal (1558), Spain (1559) and, through the ubiquitous sea-dogs, to England in 1565. Inevitably, it was Sir Walter Ralegh who made tobacco fashionable. He started to smoke after
the first Roanoke expedition and ‘took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold’. His example meant that his dread sovereign’s thunders against sotweed, as it was sometimes called, or ‘this chopping herb of hell’, were thunders in vain. John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s husband, the first to grow tobacco in Virginia (1612) and to ship it to England, was himself a habitual smoker. He can have been under little illusion that the Virginian leaf would find it easy to compete with West Indian, Spanish or even English-grown tobacco. And in fact by 1630 the Virginians had helped to cause a glut on the world’s market.

Rolfe and the others felt, however, that they had little choice. Tobacco could be sold at a profit, though the profit might be uncertain, irregular and low. Anyone could grow it. To the unskilled Virginians these two arguments were irresistible. They took the plunge, and soon the first great boom in American history was under way. At one stage even the streets of Jamestown were sown with tobacco; and the zeal to plant more and more greatly encouraged the spread of population up the James river and, in the thirties, up and down the coast, on every inlet between the river Potomac and the Dismal Swamp. This movement was in part caused by the fact that tobacco exhausted the soil in seven years, so that tobacco planters were constantly in search of new lands. This explains also the steady move westward of Virginians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the eventual ruin of Virginia when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state had run out of fresh land suitable for cultivation.

Thus the destiny of Virginia was fixed. Prices went down, production went up: in 1619 the colony produced 20,000 pounds of tobacco at three shillings a pound, in 1639, 1,500,000 pounds at threepence. A year later the population of the colony was over 10,000, making Virginia the largest English settlement (which it remained until the Revolution). Its life, whether economic or social, was dominated by a numerous yeoman-planter class: not until the next century was tobacco to support an aristocracy.

Before that time it had become plain that tobacco had settled Virginia’s fate in another fundamental matter. The history of agrarian society, until the coming of the machine age, was everywhere dominated by the tension between the desire of most men to be independent farmers and the power of a few men to compel them to be dependent labourers. From age to age, country to country, the upper hand lay now with one side, now with another, as geography, population and technological pressures determined. In Virginia the issue was long in doubt. On the one hand the most profitable growth of tobacco demanded, in the long run, large estates and cheap, plentiful labour. On the other hand the English population was very small, and every male member of it was determined to be, if not rich, then at least independent, through the cultivation of tobacco – if need be on plantations no bigger than could be worked by one family. This determination kept up the price of labour and held down the possible profits of tobacco, to the point, it might be argued, of endangering the colony’s survival. Various
remedies were tried, the most important being the system of indentures, by which servants were brought out from England at the planters’ expense, bound to service for a term of years, and then given their freedom and a little land. But indentures proved unsatisfactory: the servants had constantly to be replaced, were frequently disobedient and unreliable, and as frequently ran away and made good their escape.

However, a solution was found, and it may be wondered why it was not found sooner, as Europeans had been buying African slaves since the fifteenth century and carrying them to the Americas since early in the sixteenth. Sir John Hawkins had shipped slaves to the Spanish colonies in the 1560s and found an eager market for them. Land, staple crops, and cheap labour – the three essentials of what became the central economic institution of the New World, the plantation (a word whose very meaning narrowed to fit the new facts) – were in place in Spanish and Portuguese America by the mid-sixteenth century, but it took a long process of trial and error before their joint potential was realized, and it was only in 1600 or thereabouts that Africans in tens of thousands began to be imported annually to work the great estates of Brazil and the Caribbean. Sugar, eclipsing silver and gold, became the most lucrative commodity of Atlantic trade, but tobacco, cotton and dyestuffs also figured largely from the start. The English soon got the idea: in the 1640s, Barbados emerged as their first, immensely profitable, sugar colony. It is no credit to their memory that the slave-labour system, as they adapted it, was even crueller than the Hispanic variety, and was debased further by prejudice against people who were black.

Dutch traders brought Africans to Virginia for the first time in 1619, and more followed, in tiny numbers, over the next few decades. For the first two generations, Africans were treated, it seems, much like other indentured servants, even (in some cases) to the distribution of land to them when their time of service was up. One of them, Anthony Johnson, is recorded as a freeman owning cattle and 250 acres in 1650.
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Perhaps, while African-Americans were few, the Virginians did not think to treat them as anything other than fellow human beings. But after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 the planters could no longer be blind to the opportunities suggested by the example of the Caribbean sugar islands, which now took African slaves in huge numbers with correspondingly huge profits. The price of tobacco was still falling rapidly as new lands came into production, for instance in the colony of Maryland, founded in 1632 to the great indignation of the Virginians, who saw it as a rival (which indeed it was). Because sotweed was so cheap, and because of the growing prosperity of the English people at large, smoking became an ever more general habit in England;
¹⁰
the market was limitless, and the producers could make vast fortunes,
provided that they kept their costs down – their labour costs above all.

The turning point came with the first of the great American uprisings, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676. As leader of the poorer planters, Nathaniel Bacon, a distant relation of the great Francis, seized control of Virginia from the royal Governor, Sir George Berkeley, on the grounds that Berkeley opposed making war on the Susquehanna Indians and seizing their lands. Bacon and his following were true revolutionaries, planning to overturn the political and social structure of the colony, abolish the poll tax, and enlist poor freemen, indentured servants and African slaves in their forces. They burned Jamestown to the ground. But Bacon died of dysentery, and Berkeley then rallied enough strength to suppress the rebellion. To prevent any recurrence of these events, royal authority was placed firmly on the side of the richer settlers; their attempts to grab all the best land in Virginia were endorsed, and Africans were rapidly excluded from the privileges of civil society (if free) or thrust down into hopeless servitude (if slaves). A new gentry emerged, which quickly enriched itself by its effective monopoly of land, labour and political power. The price would be paid, for nearly two centuries, by the slaves. It was a tragic development, but given the combination of tobacco, a hierarchical social structure both in England and her colonies, and the greed of seventeenth-century Englishmen, it was probably inevitable.

Who would true Valour see

Let him come hither;

One here will Constant be,

Come Wind, come Weather.

There’s no
Discouragement
,

Shall make him once
Relent
,

His first avow’d
Intent
,

To be a Pilgrim
.

John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim’s Progress

Those that love their own chimney corner and dare not go far beyond their own towns’ end shall never have the honour to see the wonderful works of Almighty God.

The Reverend Francis Higginson, 1629

The accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558 brought with it what proved to be the decisive victory of Protestantism; but scarcely was it won when the word
Puritan
began to be heard, in allusion to a party within the national church which held that the work of reformation was not complete when the Pope had been rejected, the monasteries dissolved, the mass abolished and the Book of Common Prayer imposed.

Inevitably the authorities saw the existence of this party as a political problem. As has been stated,
¹
the Renaissance state existed to secure its subjects against civil war and invasion. The Tudor dynasty rammed home this point explicitly, endlessly. Anarchy, battle and usurpation had brought them the Crown of England; their propaganda against these evils – which found its most brilliant expression in certain plays of Shakespeare – was incessant. The Tudors also saw clearly that if subjects were left to themselves
they would make their sovereign’s religious opinions the touchstone of their loyalty. To monarchs convinced of their right and duty to rule it was intolerable that civil peace, their reigns, perhaps even their lives, should be at the mercy of turbulent fanatics. The inference was clear. Not only must religion teach the duty of obedience to the prince and submission to the social order over which he (or she) presided. The national church must be, for safety’s sake, of royal ordering both in form and doctrines; it must be subordinate to royal purposes. To Queen Elizabeth, at least, the rightness of the arrangement was clear. She was not, she knew, a demanding sovereign: she would make no windows into men’s souls. Let her subjects swear allegiance to her as Supreme Governor of the church and all would be well. It was her duty, it was her God-given exclusive privilege, to rule the realm, to take the decisions necessary for its safety and her own. Therefore to disobey her too conspicuously, or to question her decisions too publicly, or too frequently to demand more than she was prepared to give, was to verge on disloyalty, if not rebellion.