“Forcing people into docility requires control of punishment,
which requires a monopoly on the use of force.
Ultimately it requires the punishing institutions
that only a state has the power to provide.”
Pem Davidson Buck, 2019
When the English privateer, The White Lion offloaded “20 and odd negroes” in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, John Rolphe, Pocahontas’ husband, wrote it down in his diary. Some historians celebrate that as the origins of slavery in North America. Part 1 cracked that myth and pushed documented African presence on the continent back over a century, slave and free.
Tobacco had gone gold for the fledgling colony in 1609 when Rolphe brought primo seeds from Bermuda. Exports of the ‘filthy weed’ rose like smoke over the next decades. It was used for all transactions and required fertile land and hard labor.
White orphans and debtors from England were being shipped over in increasing numbers from early on, bonded as “indentured servants’ for 4-9 years, children until age 24, a lifetime for most, the death rate was so high.
Indentures were classified as chattel, property that could be sold or inherited. They were essentially white slaves from England, phasing out the economic waste in hanging every common criminal. They could be worked to death for landowners in the colonies, from sugar estates in the West Indies, to tobacco, indigo or rice plantations to the north. Notorious prisoners could still be disemboweled and quartered for public edification.
Planters who paid their own passage to Virginia were given 100 acres with an additional 50 acres for every pauper paid for, a ‘headright.’ More heads, more land. Royal favorites were awarded tens, even hundreds of thousands of acres, providing rents from tenant farmers or mortgaged sales.
In 1620, fifty seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides” were shipped over and sold as wives, unless deemed “corrupted.” One hundred and fifty pounds of cured tobacco leaf, one per customer, paid for proper Church of England marriage to civilize the men as master of their wife. Two hundred head of cattle were shipped with them. No limits on purchases.
White servants were described with less flattering terms than the cows or wives. They were "monsters living in caves" around London, "ye scum of the country", “insects swarming” the slums, "offscourings of society”, annoying their betters in the streets and courts. The plague of poverty was punished by brandings, ear borings, and weekly hangings. Shiftless vagrants roaming the country in search of work or food could be branded with a V and enslaved.
Peasants evicted from their ancestral manors, barred from the enclosing commons, disbanded soldiers and escaped sailors swelled their ranks. They could be sentenced or kidnapped, sold off as children of debtors. The waste of England could become the manure of the New World, their young bred up to be soldiers and sailors, a reserve army for future wars if they lived.
These virtual slaves ferried from Britain worked side by side in the tobacco fields and barns with negro slaves imported from Africa and natives enslaved by Indian allies. The class system worked out over the previous six hundred years in the Mother Country was being cemented in the New World, with a tricolor, white, red and black work force.
Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 is said by some historians, the seed for American Independence a century later and a watershed in the racial divide in America. Nathaniel Bacon was a minor aristocrat who demanded that Governor Berkeley attack the Susquehanna Indians for butchering pioneer families carving into their hunting lands on Virginia’s western frontier. Failing that, he appealed to the meanest sort to march on Jamestown.
Eighty percent of servants died before contracts expired or remained laborers afterwards. One-third of “freeholders” were barely free of starvation. Servants and slaves were promised their freedom. Small landholders owing high taxes that paid for mud forts to protect the largest plantations and a governor’s mansion rivaling an earl’s, joined in.
The elite planters had been exempted from taxes three years before, while free men without property were denied the vote in 1670. Freedom to seize the property of ‘land lopers’, who’d lopped off huge tracts of land through their political connections, was the lure. They also wanted to seize more Indian lands. Not unlike the American Revolution, except for the freed slave thing.
Bacon was given military command by the chastened governor, and his men terrorized all Indian villages, including English allies. A new election was held with free male suffrage and replaced the parliament with a majority of liberals. They voted to replace tobacco taxes by selling captured Indians as slaves. The governor rebelled and Bacon burned Jamestown before dying of dysentery.
The militia, fortified by British ships, defeated the disintegrating rebels. Some mutineer leaders were executed, including the husband of Lydia Chisman, who offered her own life in exchange for his, for she had urged him to fight. Other wives were propagandist gossipers to support the rebellion, while a ‘white apron’ phalanx of wealthy wives were herded as hostage shields for Bacon's men digging siege trenches. Peace was restored by the governor’s replacement by the crown, and the naval commander showing mercy to the wives and most of the men.
There were only 1,000 negro slaves in the colony at the time, while over half the population of 30,000 were unfree. Most did not join the Revolution. Bacon’s army was two-thirds servants and slaves, mostly whites. Four hundred held out after surrender, battling for Liberty, while the final 100, with 80 negroes, were only captured through trickery under truce and promises of freedom.
The theory is, this motley army frightened the ruling class, which began passing legislation to legally widen the black and white abyss. The elite invented a white identity, separate from class, to prevent rainbow coalitions of the more numerous laborers without property and poor landholders. Emerging color codes divided the poorest classes into races.
Red, black and white heads of rebels were impaled as warnings in the colonies before, while both races were roasted over open fires, flayed and castrated in the North and South afterwards. Land ownership was limited to whites in 1675, so whiteness preceded Bacon, as negro, Spanish for black did, but laws defining the differences in the North American colonies, accelerated after the rebellion.
Whites could not be enslaved, merely worked to death during their contracted labor, extended for infractions. They could own possessions, including guns, testify against other whites in court and whip blacks, unless it was another’s property. Children of negro slave mothers were born enslaved, even if their father was the white master. White women were punished for having sex with black men, to prevent free “mulattoes” of various hues.
However, the class system was directly imported from ye Olde England. Colonial gentlemen were born to the saddle, rode around their estates after a morning julep of cane sugar sweetened rum. Surveys his stock, bonded humans and free ranging cattle. Breakfast served with hard cider, afternoon toddies before dinner at two, the rest of the day in ‘stupefaction’, rousing himself for a spell of gambling, dancing and wenching into the night, ending it so “egregiously drunk” his wife sent the slaves to carry him home.
For a class that rarely lifted a hand in labor, they were remarkably disdainful of lazy, shiftless, poor whites, who drank just as much if available. Little wonder they feared revolution.
It came from a different coalition in the South Carolina colony. The native tribes were supplying hundreds of thousands of deer skins to the international trade through Charleston, and African blacks were used as intermediaries and translators. The Yamasee Indians hated the English they traded with, although they lusted after their goods. They hired out as guides, native slavers from distant tribes, and recapturing escaped black slaves. They also told black slaves that the Spanish granted freedom to any negroes who could reach St. Augustine in La Florida.
By 1715 they had formed an alliance with almost all tribes north of St. Augustine to drive the British out in the Yamasee War. “Francisco”, an African slave, escaped and fought with them for three years, along with other blacks, yet white colonists were fined if their negro slaves were not armed and mustered during attacks. African slaves fought with the English and encroaching Creek Indians against confederated indigenous tribes and escaped slaves. Yamasee forces almost took the province but for reinforcements from Virginia and North Carolina.
Ten African men were recorded as arriving in St. Augustine in 1724. “Francisco” was held as property of Mad Dog, a Yamasee war chief, who sold him to the Spanish governor who named him. The Governor sold the other slaves locally and used that money to reimburse the English threatening to invade and seize their property. Francisco was commissioned for building and defending Fort Mose´ a decade later, the first free African town in North America, just north of St. Augustine.
The Stono Rebellion was a more frightful nightmare to white elites. This was led by slaves, ‘fresh from Africa’ in 1739 in South Carolina. Their leader, Cato marched Kongolese warriors from the Stono River into Charles Town. They broke into a gun store, killed shopkeepers and residents in their homes. He spared an innkeeper, because he was a "good man and kind to his slaves."
“Liberty” they shouted as they marched to St. Augustine. The first American revolution against the hated English despots. A mounted South Carolina militia pursued them to a pitched battle. Some escaped the slaughter, but most were executed; captives were sold to the West Indies. The South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted slave assembly, education, and movement, with a 10-year moratorium against importing African slaves, considered more rebellious.
They also established penalties against harsh treatment of slaves. Possibly the origin of the happy slave myth. There were comparatively good and kind masters, but there had to be evil and cruel ones to compare. The Caribbean island sugar plantations were virtual charnel houses of dead slaves. It’s easier to lose your freedom than to regain it, in a fixed system.
Drawing from
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg (Viking, 2016)
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen Ambrose, (Touchstone, 1996)
The Punishment Monopoly, Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States, Pem Davidson Buck (Monthly Review Press, 2019)