White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America by Don Jordan Michael Walsh

Author:Don Jordan, Michael Walsh [Don Jordan, Michael Walsh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: NYU Press, ISBN-13: 9780814742969
Published: 2008-04-18T21:13:35+00:00

In Virginia, more than 2,000 miles away from Barbados, most of the indigenous population had been cleared from the Tidewater, on the eastern shores of the Chesapeake, and the world of the Virginia grandee was being constructed. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, roots were laid down for an aristocracy that would dominate Virginia for 200 years. Men whose descendants would include some of America’s most revered leaders were busy building their fortunes – the first Washington, the first Maddison, the first Lee.

These big planters were concentrated along the necks of land between the four rivers of the Tidewater, where tens of thousands of acres had become personal fiefdoms. Each was a self-sufficient mini-colony with its own wharf, tobacco warehouse, forge and a village of wood-framed dormitories and dwellings where one man’s word was law.

The centrepiece of the mini-colony was the ‘big house’, the planter’s mansion. One of the first mansions, built in 1665, still stands. Known as Bacon’s Castle, after a man who would shake Virginia to the core, it is a brick Jacobean manor house with all the baroque trimmings you might find in England. As the years passed, such mansions would be replaced by still grander Georgian edifices, as the planter elite consciously projected itself as a natural aristocracy.

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It was not just their wealth that endowed them with superior pretensions. Many could claim an aristocratic lineage back in England. The typical grandee was the younger son of English gentry who arrived in the Chesapeake a wealthy, well-connected man already. Some historians argue that their attitudes to white servants and, later, to black slaves reflected the English aristocracy’s disdain for the servile classes.

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.

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