American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan

Author:Edmund S. Morgan [Morgan, Edmund S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2003-10-16T22:00:00+00:00

Although some of the new one-man households were doubtless headed by the sons of older families who had married and set up for themselves or by new immigrants who had come on their own, the majority probably consisted of men, with or without wives, who had formerly been servants. The increase in one-man households would seem to indicate that the freedmen were doing well, but if we dig a little deeper, a slightly different picture is uncovered. In Lancaster, of 247 servants who either are known to have become free or were legally entitled to freedom between 1662 and 1678, only 24 show up as householders by 1679 (after that date the lists are incomplete because of damage to the records).38 Lancaster in the seventeenth century was a rich man’s county, in the area between the York and the Potomac, where population and tobacco production were expanding most rapidly. But the figures suggest that it was not a land of opportunity for its newly freed servants.

Northampton County, on the Eastern Shore, was a poorer region, but even there, although a servant might make it into the ranks of householders, the odds were against it. From 1664 to 1677, of 808 non-householders who appear on any of the Northampton tithable lists, only 230 later appear as householders; and 88 men who appear as householders later appear as non-householders. Those who lost status, with a few known exceptions, were presumably freemen who had set up on their own and then had to give up and go back to work for someone else. Only 80 of the 329 white non-householders present in the years 1664–67 were still in the county in 1677; 49 of them had become householders, but 31 had still not made it.39

The tithable lists of Northampton and Lancaster argue that Virginia in the 1660s and 1670s furnished fewer opportunities to the poor than either we or seventeenth-century Englishmen may have supposed. A man who came to Virginia with nothing but the shirt on his back expected several years of servitude, but after that he expected something more of life in the New World. When he got to Virginia, however, he found that he might never make it out of the ranks of servants. If he did, it was not likely to be in one of the counties where rich land would insure him success. Land was still abundant but no longer free, except in areas where the danger from Indians or the lack of transportation for tobacco made it uninviting. Those who managed to set up on their own were likely to find themselves still paying tribute to their former masters in the form of rent, not to mention the tribute they paid in yearly poll taxes, export taxes, and fees, as well as the tribute exacted by the king in customs duties at London. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that Virginia’s freemen in these years were reputedly an unruly and discontented lot of men.

The distribution of discontent in Virginia, like the distribution of spoils, was uneven.

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