AMHS 3002y
February 9, 1998
Meeting # 6

Tobacco and the Resort to Slavery in the Chesapeake (and Carolinas)

EARLY AC HOMEPAGE | LECTURE NOTES

Slavery -- as it existed at the founding of the Republic in the 1780s

Blacks enslaved in substantial numbers by whites -- servitude lifetime and generational
Slaves not uncommonly in local majority…

Commercial traffic in slaves -- bought and sold by their white owners
Sold from the piers just off slave ships from Africa; brisk domestic trade as well

Arrangements codified by provincial and state laws
Provisions for slaves to have their freedom secured -- but occurrence unusual and not socially sanctioned

Sanctions against intermarriage/socializing on an equal basis/educating slaves to literacy

Slaves submit/selectively accommodate to these arrangements -- while developing "a world of their own"
Persistent family claims -- retention of some African culture -- adoption of Xianity…

To this extent, these arangements bespeak a regional institution -- a Southern/"peculiar institution"

How peculiar? Classical civilizations?

Africa?

Medieval Europe?

16^th/17^th C England?

Latin America?

North of Maryland?

The American Origins of Slavery --

1. Not encountered by first settlers -- not like the heat/ not like crabs/ not like rivers streaming westward..
2. Not brought in their bags/heads -- visions of a western passage/of an El Dorado/

• Calvinism/covenanting…racial arrogance

1. A subsequent invention -- developed over time to meet needs/serve purposes…

Not there -- no Africans north of Spanish Caribbean in 1607
-- English encountered Indians
Not a willing workforce -- could be pressed only so far and retaliated…
Soon viewed as better for being out of sight -- pushed beyond "the pale"

Not brought with them -- no previous experience with slavery
though plenty with bonded servitude -- renewable

Servants (white) with the first settlers in 1607-08

What did they have in mind as to their economic survival/well being??

Virginia a speculation in wake of international accord -- 1600 investors/quick killing anticipated
Drake's "Golden Hind" in 1570s -- 4600% in 18 months??

Permanently supplied from England by their employers -- The Virginia Company

Job to secure a military/privateering/extractive stronghold --

Clear from selection of Jamestown as their base -- deep water/but upriver from Chesapeake

• hard to approach from swampy side
• Could fend off both Spanish and Indians

First problems with neither -- with shortage of food and with disease -- both problems exacerbated by locale

Swamps malarial/not good for growing food/River brackish

Both hotter and colder than they expected -- latitude of Rome

Clear also from the skills available to settlement -- goldsmiths/perfumer/"gentlemen" and governors

John Smith emerges as natural leader -- a soldier and sailor // with good stomach // a diciplinarian

[The Admirable Crichton] -- survived first winter// put in charge

Left before the "starving time" of 1609-10 -- when 60 of 500 survive

On early Jamestown --> http://www.apva.org

Commercial arrangements not working out -- Virginia Company selling its investment…
Offering land to settlers to come -- to stay on

Later gave "employees" /soldiers some considerable rights of self-determination

House of Burgesses (1619)

Two other intervening events --

1. Introduction of tobacco into Virginia in 1612 or so -- John Rolfe // tobacco plants from West Indies
   First export of Virginia tobacco to England in 1614;
   English encountered tobacco in 1580s -- growing market by 1610
2. Virginia has a "Return" -- something of value from the Americas that Europe might pay for and thereby sustain an English settlement premised on commercial attivity (not on the achievement of religious liberty // or even on familial self-sufficiency)

   Virginians overwhelmingly "risk-taking" adventurers -- GUYS -- 1607 -- lawn bowling/cruising the rivers

   Officers Club/locker room mentality -- and about as unchurched as could be….

   The Return -- tobacco-- and its distinctive characteristics

3. Labor-intensive cultivation -- one adult three acres (Barnard campus = 5 acres)
   but doesn't require much equipment; semi-cleared land OK
4. Exhaustive of soil in which its planted -- cleared land -- 3 years in cultivation -- 20 years fallow
   available land for each laborer -- 20 acres (with 17 sitting out)
5. Has no nutritional value -- can not sustain its producers -- can't eat the excess
6.  
7. Requires a large market -- but not necessarily one close at hand (milk/muffins)
8. Requires minimal processing once removed from fields -- layered on flats in a barn
   different from salting fish // distilling corn/rye// processing wheat
9. Has good shelf characteristics -- can be shipped across the ocean with minimal risk
10. Transhipment at farm/plantation's fronting on tidal river
11. Planter need not be in processing/shipping/marketing/insuring businesses if he doesn't want to be
12. No need for cities with ships coming to your own plantation slip -- Chesapeake-bound ships carrying what planters wanted from Europe -- bought on credit line backed by tobacco agreements…

Where the bodies to do the work?

• Indians not about to, thanks…
• Englishmen induced to come, but "sweeteners" needed
• English/bonded servants -- but would soon be on their own

1619 -- Dutch ship brings 20 Negroes to Jamestown -- spillover from West Indies??

Africans the ultimate solution -- but only slowly being resorted to

1650s -- White population in Virginia -- 20,000 Africans -- < 500

Africans mostly listed as "servants" -- some clearly on their own -- some landowners (Eastern Shore)
-- some had black servants of their own

1660s -- legal enactments codifying social norms that Africans were enslavable, whites were not;

legislation dealing with sales/runaways/rights before the law/…

Late 17^th C -- Slowdown in white migration following on drop in tobacco prices -- harder to get into business

1676 -- Bacon's Rebellion -- Class conflict among Virginia whites -- resolved by according marginal whites more political status// making solid the social/economic degradation of blacks

William Byrd (1674-

Growing dependence upon involuntary slave labor -- by 1700 -- Va. + 60,000 (20,000 black slaves)

Initially growth by importing slaves -- later, by natural reproduction

Maryland -- somewhat less %

South Carolina -- substantially more

North Carolina -- more like Virginia

Georgia not founded until 1730s --

Thomas Jefferson born in 1743 -- 3^rd generation Virginians (of the 1670s FFVs -- Randolphs)
First and last a tobacco planter -- early on and thereafter increasingly in debt to his Scottish tobacco factors; upon his death owned 200 slaves - sold to reduce the debt transferred to his children…

His NSVirginia (1780) -- an articulate rendering of the region's conventional wisdom, diluted only a bit by TJ's familiarity with Enlightenment thought http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jevifram.htm

The virtues of the rural life// of farming
The evils of urban life
Two cheers for the Indians/Logan -- as prior occupants of what's now ours (contra-degeneracy arguments)
The obligations of superior whites to be protective of inferior blacks
But wouldn't it have been better if we never resorted to them -- or that, somehow, they might go away??

To which we have as a sample rejoinder -- Olaudah Equiano -- (b. 1740// in English America 1756-66)

Not as a plantation slave -- but a skilled seaman/navigator by his master's side

An Interesting Narrative (1789)

EARLY AC HOMEPAGE | LECTURE NOTES