White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (27 page)

This new brand of planter arrived after 1630 and displaced the old pioneers – the ‘ancient planters’ – as the driving force of the Virginian economy. In parallel with their arrival in Virginia, other ambitious men were opening up the colony of Maryland on the eastern and northern shores of Chesapeake Bay.

Their use of labour was ruthless. This is evident from the truly staggering increases in productivity achieved in Virginia. After 1624, output per tobacco worker more than doubled, and then it doubled again, and doubled again. In the 1620s, the yield averaged 400 pounds of tobacco per worker. By the end of the century, it averaged 1,900 pounds. This does not appear to have been the result of the introduction of new technology or new equipment. In the 1660s, there were some 7,000 workers on Virginia’s plantations but only 150 ploughs between them.1 One is driven to the conclusion that workers achieved this fivefold increase in productivity due to the brutal pressure that was exerted upon them, day in day out, for decades. Edmund S. Morgan refers to the principal significance of indentured servitude being that it taught planters how to use violence to compel workers to work, thus setting a precedent for the violence of African slavery.2

Authority was not much interested in the welfare of servants.

The long-serving Governor of the colony Sir William Berkeley was among those who regarded them as scum. Sir William, who served from 1642 to 1652 and from 1660 to 1676, was an archetypal Cavalier. His bearing, attire, his language and his attitudes all reflected the court of Charles I. His ideal society was rooted in an older England, where rule was channelled through an aristocratic elite and there was no room for notions of universal liberty. A notorious statement he made in 1671 about education laid bare the kind of man he was:

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I thank God there are no free schools [in Virginia], nor printing, and I hope we shall not have [them] these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of government. God keep us from both.3

He was a planter himself, with two sizeable plantations. On one he built a splendid mansion called Green Springs, which his wife Lady Frances described as ‘the finest seat in America and the only tolerable place for a Governor’. Green Springs was the focal point of the Tidewater aristocracy. From here, Sir William and his lady presided over a social and political nexus in which rich planters’

families intermarried and the menfolk automatically secured the posts of power in the administration and the militia. Crucially, they packed the Governor’s council, the topmost body in the province. Members of this council had many privileges, including exemption from taxes. Another privilege, an absurdity to our eyes but presumably a mark of greatness then, was the right to gold braid on their clothes. The historian Theodore Allen dubbed this elite ‘the plantocracy’.4

Among notable figures whose family fortunes were founded in the Chesapeake during the time of Governor Berkeley was General Robert E. Lee, the revered Confederate leader in the American Civil War. His ancestor Richard Lee was one of the early Tidewater grandees. He was among a number of the English gentry connected to Governor Berkeley who were encouraged to try their luck in the colony. The Governor, it seems, brought Lee over to the colony and claimed a fifty-acre headright for importing him. Later, during the English Civil War, young Lee was sent on a mission to Europe. He returned with a shipload of provisions and took the opportunity to add to the cargo thirty-eight men and women whom he indentured to himself as servants. On arrival in the province, he claimed their headrights, 1,900 acres, and never looked back. He rose to be magistrate, burgess, member of the Governor’s council, colonel of militia and Secretary of State.

Future generations would be told that Colonel Lee was a 195

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benefactor of the poor who gave land away. A description of him in a book written by the Lee family after his death reads: He was a man of good stature, comely visage, and enterprising genius, a sound head, vigorous spirit and generous nature.

When he got to Virginia, which was at that time not much cultivated, he was so pleased with the country that he made large settlements there with the servants he had carried over; after some years, he returned to England, and gave away all the lands he had taken up, and settled at his own expense, to those servants he had fixed on them; some of whose descendants are now possessed of very considerable estates in that colony. After staying some time in England, he returned again to Virginia, with a fresh band of adventurers, all of whom he settled there.5

Judging from his will, if the Colonel did give anything away, he kept a lot more. When he died, Lee left one plantation in Virginia plus ten English servants and five negroes to his wife; a second plantation plus ten English servants, ten negroes and three islands in Chesapeake Bay to his eldest son; a third plantation with ten English servants and five negroes to a second son; and a fourth plantation – ‘Paradise plantation’ – plus an unspecified number of servants to another son; and two other plantations to other children.

The Lee empire was overshadowed by that founded by Colonel John Carter, who created the most successful dynasty on the Tidewater. The Carters, too, came from the ranks of England’s gentry. John Carter arrived in the province in the 1630s, reportedly with ‘considerable wealth’ and good connections. He acquired land on a peninsula between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers.

There, he carved out the Corotoman Plantation, enthusiastically using the headright system to expand his holdings. In one shipment, he landed eighty servants at Corotoman and headrights increased his holdings by 4,000 acres. With money went power.

Carter became a member of the Governor’s council and a colonel of the militia. Such men made the system their own. When one 196

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Carter servant was convicted of killing three hogs, a court ordered him to serve six extra years. When another Carter servant ran away for twenty-two days, the court accepted Carter’s claim that he had spent more than 1,300 pounds of tobacco finding the escaper. The court slapped on an extra term of fifteen months – almost twenty-two days for every one day away.

His son Robert, who was born at Corotoman in 1663, would outdo everyone, earning for himself the title ‘King’ Carter after accumulating 300,000 acres, branching out into heavy industry and textiles and becoming one of the most powerful men in England’s colonies. His status can be gleaned from the manner in which servants addressed him. One of his former servants, a Mary Harrison, wrote to him in what appears to be an attempt to buy her children’s freedom from the planter. She must have borne the children during her service with Carter, which meant that by law the boys automatically became the planter’s servants till they were twenty-one and any girls till they were eighteen. It is a begging letter that begins with clumsy audacity and then becomes servile.

She writes:

I was speaking to you concerning my two boys and your answer that you would consider about it. I should be glad to have an answer to it for I want to move this Fall nearer to my husband, and at the same time I should be glad to have my small children with me if your Highness pleases.

Mrs Harrison went on to ask about her ‘big children’, too: I should be glad to have them from your honour and to set your price on them what I am to pay a year, hoping your honour will not be too hard on me as I shall have rent to pay and then all to find in clothes, for it will always be my study to keep my payments good to you.6

What happened to Mary Harrison and her family is not known.

The Carters were not benevolent masters, however, and hung on to their servants as long as possible. One day, they would stun 197

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fellow planters by voluntarily freeing hundreds of slaves . . . but that was far into the future.

In the 1660s, the treatment of servants in some plantations was so notoriously harsh that planters in Virginia’s colonial assembly warned their fellow planters that fresh settlers would soon stop coming:

[The] barbarous usage of some servants by cruel masters is causing so much scandal and infamy to the country in general that people who would willingly adventure themselves hither are . . . thereof diverted and by that means the supplies of particular men and the well-being of His Majesty’s country very much obstructed.7

Two of the plantation scandals of the time, one in Maryland and one in Virginia, illustrate what the burgesses meant. The two planters involved could hardly have been more different. One was a hot-tempered illiterate, a drunkard who had somehow become a commissioner or magistrate as well as a substantial planter; the other was a well-heeled English gentleman, cool and calculating.

Both got away with murder.

The site of the first murder was the Crayford plantation on Love Island, Maryland. The owner was a militia captain called Thomas Bradnox, a successful planter since the 1650s but a man with a violent past. The Maryland state archive records that in his younger days Thomas Bradnox stood accused of ‘rebellion, sedition, rapine, thefts, robbery and other like felonious practices’ and was pardoned on three separate occasions.8 Why he got off, we don’t know. Bradnox was a drunkard yet he acquired 2,000 acres of land on Love Island, was made captain of the militia and became first a sheriff then a commissioner.

One morning in 1660, a young servant on the Crayford plantation, Thomas Jones, was found dead, apparently beaten to death. At the subsequent inquest, servant witnesses from the plantation described the dead youth as sickly and ill and continually abused by Captain Bradnox. It seems that Jones had been hit, starved and humiliated as Bradnox tried to force more work out of him. Among other 198

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things, the servant had been forced to drink his own urine. The last beating was administered by the planter just before Jones’s death.

Examined today, the evidence seems overwhelming but Bradnox was exonerated of any wrongdoing. The jury – which would have been made up mainly of landowners – decided that the ‘stripes’

given to the boy before he died were ‘not material’ and he had died of a fever brought on by dropsy or scurvy.

During the inquest, another of Bradnox’s servants, Sarah Taylor, gave evidence against her master. Taylor had run away several times after suffering Bradnox’s violence. After the inquest, Bradnox made her pay for speaking out.

He beat and abused Sarah endlessly. Once more, she fled the plantation. It was difficult enough for a man to travel on land through the Tidewater, let alone a woman, and Sarah didn’t get far. She was given shelter in a neighbouring plantation where a search party sent out by Bradnox tracked her down. They found her hiding under a bed. Hauled into court by Bradnox and found guilty of ‘desertion’, she was ordered to apologise on her knees to him. The kindly neighbour who had helped her also had to apologise to Bradnox. A cycle now developed of more beatings, more futile attempts to get away, followed by more beatings. It was finally brought to a close after someone persuaded magistrates to see the girl and examine her. A panel of three commissioners inspected the scars left on Sarah by the beatings she had suffered.

Having seen the evidence, the three commissioners freed her and cancelled her servitude.

Bradnox wasn’t finished. He complained that there had been a conspiracy to deprive him of his ‘property’, Sarah, and he appealed to the Governor of the colony to order her to be returned. Before the appeal was heard, Bradnox died but his wife carried on the fight to regain Sarah. Mistress Bradnox failed in this and in the end Sarah Taylor stayed free. However, the Governor decided that the planter’s widow should be compensated for the loss of the servant.

He ruled that the three commissioners who had freed Sarah should pay the widow the going price of a woman servant with several years to serve.

Shortly after the Bradnox case, the tide of abuse cases in 199

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neighbouring Virginia finally shamed the Virginia elite and it issued its warning about the ‘scandal and infamy’ cruel masters were causing the colony. The assembly followed that up by banning the private burial of servants on the grounds that on a number of occasions those burying them were thought ‘sometimes not undeservedly [as] being guilty of their deaths’.9

It must have been about this time that the body of the white youth described in our introduction was dumped in the cellar of a house in Annapolis under a pile of household rubbish. The manner of his burial and his sorry physical condition prompted anthropologists to suggest that he was a servant who had been thrown away with the rubbish to lie undiscovered for four centuries.

Measures were finally taken to improve the lot of servants in March 1662. The House of Burgesses ordered masters to provide all servants with ‘competent diet, clothing and lodging’ and not to ‘exceed the bounds of moderation in correcting them beyond the merit of their offences’. More striking still, servants were reminded that they had the right to complain. However, the cruelty continued.

Our second plantation scandal was one of the most notorious of the entire colonial period. The Henry Smith affair began in 1666 on the Oak Hall plantation in Accomack County, Virginia. The local Virginian historian, Jill Nock Jeffery, describes the case as having ‘all the elements of a modern-day crime thriller – kidnapping, adultery, rape and murder’.10 Beyond the salacious detail, there is no better illustration of the different ways servants could be degraded and abused.

Henry Smith’s origins are obscure. He appears to have been from the English gentry and to have arrived in Virginia with numerous servants in the early 1660s. Going by the experience of one skilled man whom Smith recruited, he made generous promises about allowing time off and other perks, all of which were forgotten on arrival. Smith emerged as a presence in Virginia in 1664, when, aged about thirty, he secured the first of a succession of headrights.