Chapter XIV: Society in the Old Dominion (1)

[Sidenote: Tobacco and liberty.]

A learned son of Old Virginia, who is fond of wrapping up a bookful of meaning in a single pithy sentence, has declared that “a true history of tobacco would be the history of English and American liberty.” This remark occurs near the beginning of Mr. Moncure Conway’s dainty volume printed for the Grolier Club, entitled “Barons of the Potomack and the Rappahannock.” When construed liberally, as all such sweeping statements need to be, it contains a kernel of truth. It was tobacco that planted an English nation in Virginia, and made a corporation in London so rich and powerful as to become a formidable seminary of sedition: it was the desire to monopolize the tobacco trade that induced Charles I. to recognize the House of Burgesses; discontent with the Navigation Act and its effect upon the tobacco trade was potent among the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion; and so on down to the eve of Independence, when Patrick Henry won his first triumph in the famous Parson’s Cause, in which the price of tobacco furnished the bone of contention, the Indian weed has been strangely implicated with the history of political freedom.

Furthermore, when we reflect upon the splendid part played by Virginia in winning American independence and bringing into existence the political framework of our Federal Republic; when we recollect that of the five founders of this nation who were foremost in constructive work--Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Marshall--four were Virginians,--it becomes interesting to go back and study the social features of the community in which such leaders of men were produced. The economic basis of that community was the cultivation of tobacco on large plantations, and from that single economic circumstance resulted most of the social features which we have now to pass in review.

[Sidenote: Rapid growth of tobacco culture.]

[Sidenote: Attempts to check it.]

We have seen in a previous chapter how important was the cultivation of tobacco in setting the infant colony at Jamestown upon its feet in 1614 and the following years. In the rapid development of the colony during the reign of Charles I. other kinds of agriculture thrived, there were good crops of wheat, and Indian corn was exported. But tobacco culture increased rapidly and steadily until in the latter part of the century it nearly extinguished all other kinds of activity, except the raising of domestic animals and vegetables needed for food. Long before this result was reached, the tendency was deplored by the colonists themselves. To use a modern political phrase, it was “viewed with alarm.” This is quite intelligible. “We know now that tobacco, though not strictly a necessary of life, is one of those articles whose consumption may be looked on as certain and permanent. In the seventeenth century, men could hardly be blamed if they regarded the use of tobacco as a precarious fashion.”[123] It was also felt that in case of war it would be dangerous for Virginia to be forced to rely upon importing the manufactured necessaries of life. Moreover, the absorption of the colony’s industry in the production of a single staple made it especially easy for the home government to depress that industry by stupid legislation, as in the reign of Charles II., when the Navigation Act so seriously diminished the purchasing power of tobacco. For these various reasons many attempts were made to check the cultivation of the Indian weed. The legislation of the seventeenth century was full of instances. It was attempted to establish rival industries and to produce silk, cotton, and iron; laws were made forbidding any planter to raise more than 2,000 plants in one year’s crop, and so on. All such attempts proved futile; in spite of everything that could be done, tobacco drove all competitors from the field.

[Sidenote: Need for cheap labour.]

[Sidenote: Indented white servants.]

This tobacco was generally cultivated upon large estates. The policy of making extensive grants of land as an inducement to settlers was begun at an early date, and all that was needed to develop the system was an abundance of cheap labour. English yeomanry, such as came to New England, was too intelligent and enterprising to furnish the right sort. English yeomanry, coming to Virginia, came to own estates for itself, not to work them for others. It soon became necessary to have recourse to servile labour. We have seen negro slaves first brought into the colony from Africa in 1619, but their numbers increased very slowly, and it was only toward the end of the century that they began to be numerous. In the early period the demand for servile labour was supplied from other sources. Convicted criminals were sent over in great numbers from the mother country, as in later times they were sent to Botany Bay. On their arrival they were indented as servants for a term of years. Kidnapping was also at that time in England an extensive and lucrative business. Young boys and girls, usually but not always of the lowest class of society, were seized by press-gangs on the streets of London and Bristol and other English seaports, hurried on board ship, and carried over to Virginia to work on the plantations or as house servants. These poor wretches were not, indeed, sold into hopeless slavery, but they passed into a state of servitude which might be prolonged indefinitely by avaricious or cruel masters. The period of their indenture was short,--usually not more than four years; but the ordinary penalty for serious offences, such as were very likely to be committed, was a lengthening of the time during which they were to serve. Among such offences the most serious were insubordination or attempts to escape, while of a more venial character were thievery, or unchaste conduct,[124] or attempts to make money on their own account. Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an indented servant came to his death from prolonged ill-usage, or from excessive punishment, or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to get a verdict against the master. In those days of frequent flogging, the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less compunction than upon the purchased slave; and in general the condition of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the latter, save that the servitude of the negro was perpetual, while that of the white man was pretty sure to come to an end. For him, Pandora’s box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.

[Sidenote: Notion that Virginians are descended from convicts.]

In England the notion presently grew up that the aristocracy of Virginia was recruited from the ranks of these kidnapped paupers and convicts. This impression may have originated in statements, based upon real but misconstrued facts, such as we find in Defoe’s widely read stories, “Moll Flanders”[125] and “Colonel Jack.” So, too, in Mrs. Aphra Behn’s comedy, “The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia,” one of the personages, named Hazard, sails to Virginia, and on arriving at Jamestown suddenly meets an old acquaintance, named Friendly, whereupon the following conversation ensues:--

_Hazard._ This unexpected happiness o’erjoys me. Who could have imagined to have found thee in Virginia?...

_Friendly._ My uncle dying here left me a considerable plantation.... But prithee what chance (fortunate to me) drove thee to this part of the New World?

_Hazard._ Why, ’faith, ill company and that common vice of the town, gaming.... I had rather starve abroad than live pitied and despised at home.

_Friendly._ Would [the new governor] were landed; we hear he is a noble gentleman.

_Hazard._ He has all the qualities of a gallant man. Besides, he is nobly born.

_Friendly._ This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of whom have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honour and Right Worshipful, and possess all places of authority.[126]

[Sidenote: Malachy Postlethwayt.]

[Sidenote: Dr. Johnson.]

It is not only in novels and plays, however, that we encounter such statements. Malachy Postlethwayt, author of several valuable and scholarly treatises on commerce, tells us: “Even your transported felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and improvement, and (which is best of all) to honesty, become rich, substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates, officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good estates.”[127] Either from the study of Postlethwayt, or perhaps simply from reading “Moll Flanders,” we may suppose that Dr. Johnson got the notion to which he gave vent in 1769 when quite out of patience because the ministry seemed ready to make some concessions to the Americans. “Why, they are a race of convicts,” cried the irate doctor, “and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!”[128] Thus we witness the progress of generalization: first it is some Virginians that are jail-birds, or offspring of jail-birds, then it is all Virginians, finally it is all Americans. A few years ago, in the time of our Civil War, one used to find this grotesque notion still surviving in occasional polite statements of European newspapers, informing their readers that the citizens of the United States are the “offspring of the vagabonds and felons of Europe.”[129]

[Sidenote: The real question.]

The statement of the worthy Postlethwayt seems based partly on observation, partly on information, and has unquestionably been the source of inferences much more sweeping than facts will sustain. In order to arrive at clear views of the subject, we must distinguish between two questions:--

1. What sort of people, on the whole, were the indented white servants in Virginia?

2. How far did they ever succeed, as freedmen, in attaining to high social position in the colony?

[Sidenote: Redemptioners.]

In answering the first question, a mere reference to “felons” and “convicts” will carry us but little way. A considerable proportion of the indented white servants were poor but honest persons who sold themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the passage-money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over the passenger to be the planter’s servant until the debt was wiped out. Indented servants of this class were known as “redemptioners,” and many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character. Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand for any kind of servile labour was but small.

[Sidenote: Punishments for crime.]

Again, among the transported convicts were many who had been sentenced to death for what would now be considered trivial offences; the poor woman who stole a joint of meat to relieve her starving children was not necessarily a hardened criminal, yet if the price of the joint were more than a shilling she incurred the death penalty. For counterfeiting a lottery ticket, or for personating the holder of a stock and receiving the dividends due upon it, the punishment was the same as for wilful murder.[130] The favourite remedy prescribed in law was the gallows, as in medicine the lancet. Yet many judges and officers of state were conscious of the excessive severity of the system, and welcomed the device of sending the less hardened offenders out of the kingdom instead of putting them to death. There is reason for believing that murderers, burglars, and highwaymen continued to be summarily sent to Tyburn, while for offences of a lighter sort and in cases with extenuating circumstances the death penalty was often commuted to transportation. As a rule it was not the worst sort of offenders who were sent to the colonies.

[Sidenote: Number and distribution of convicts.]

The practice of sending rogues beyond sea began soon after the founding of Virginia, and continued until it was cut short in America by the War of Independence; thereafter the Australasian colonies were made a receptacle for them until the practice came to an end soon after the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated that between 1717 and 1775 not less than 10,000 “involuntary emigrants” were sent from the Old Bailey alone;[131] and possibly the total number sent to America from the British islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have been as high as 50,000.[132] In the lists of such offenders their particular destinations are apt to be very loosely and carelessly indicated; the name Virginia, for example, is often used so vaguely as to include the West Indies.[133] The destinations most commonly specified are Virginia, Maryland, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, but it is certain that all English colonies outside of New England received considerable numbers of convicts. Very few were brought to New England, because the demand for such labour was less than elsewhere, and therefore the prisoners would not fetch so high a price.[134] Stringent laws were made against bringing in such people. In 1700 Massachusetts enacted that every master of a ship arriving with passengers must hand to the custom-house officer a written certificate of the “name, character, and circumstances” of each passenger, under penalty of a fine of £5 for every name omitted; and the custom-house officer was obliged to deliver to the town clerk the full list of names with the accompanying certificates.[135] The existence of this wholesome statute indicates that undesirable persons had been brought into the colony; and the reënactment of it in 1722, with the fine raised from £5 to £100, is clear proof that the nuisance was not yet abated. Nevertheless, partly because of such vigilant measures of prevention, but much more because of the economic reason above alleged, the four New England colonies received but few convicts.

[Sidenote: Prisoners of war.]

A very different class of transported persons consisted of those who were not criminals at all, but merely political offenders, or even prisoners of war. For example, of the Scotch prisoners taken at Dunbar in 1650, Cromwell sent about 150 to Boston. The next year orders were issued for sending 1,610 of the Worcester captives to Virginia, but very few of them seem to have arrived there.[136] In 1652 a party of 272 men captured at Worcester were landed in Boston, but so small was the demand for their labour that they were soon exported southward,--perhaps to the West Indies in exchange for sugar or rum. After the restoration of the monarchy so many non-conformists were sold into servitude in Virginia as to lead to an insurrection in 1663, followed by legislation designed to keep all convicts out of the colony.[137] On the whole, the number of political offenders brought to those colonies that have since become the United States was certainly much smaller than the number of criminal convicts, while the latter were in all probability much less numerous than the redemptioners. During the seventeenth century the demand for wholesale servile white labour was much greater in Virginia and Maryland than elsewhere, and there are many indications that they received more convicts and redemptioners than the other colonies. In the eighteenth century, however, the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, probably received at least as large a share.

[Sidenote: Careers of white freedmen.]

[Sidenote: Representative Virginia families are not descended from white freedmen.]

Our survey shows that in the class of indented white servants there was a wide range of gradation, from thrifty redemptioners[138] and gallant rebels at the one extreme down to ruffians and pickpockets at the other. Bearing this in mind, we come to our second question, How far did white freedmen succeed in attaining to high social position in such a colony as Virginia? There is no doubt that, as Postlethwayt declares, some of the best of them did work their way up to the ownership of plantations. In the seventeenth century they were occasionally elected to the House of Burgesses. The composition of that assembly for 1654 affords an interesting example. One of the two members for Warwick was the worthy Samuel Mathews, soon to be elected governor; and one of the four members for Charles City was Major Abraham Wood, who, as a child of ten years, had been brought from England in 1620, and had been a servant of Mathews. John Trussel, the member for Northumberland, and William Worlidge, one of the two members for Elizabeth City, had been servants brought over in 1622, aged respectively nineteen and eighteen.[139] Whether these lads had been offenders against the law does not appear, nor do we know whether the child had come with parents not mentioned, or as the victim of kidnappers. We only know that all three were servants,[140] and, if the word is to be understood in the ordinary sense, it was much to their credit that they rose to be burgesses. Cases of ordinary indented servants thus rising were certainly exceptional in the seventeenth century, and still more so in the eighteenth. Nothing can be more certain than that the representative families of Virginia were not descended from convicts, or from indented servants of any sort. Although family records were until of late less carefully preserved than in New England, yet the registered facts abundantly prove that the leading families had precisely the same sort of origin as the leading families in New England. For the most part they were either country squires, or prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds; and alike in Virginia and in New England there was a similar proportion of persons connected with English families ennobled or otherwise eminent for public service.

[Sidenote: Some white freedmen became small proprietors.]

As for the white freedmen, those of the better sort often acquired small estates, while some became overseers of white servants and black slaves. The kind of life which they led is described in Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” with that great writer’s customary minuteness of information. The class of small proprietors always remained in Virginia, and included many other persons beside freedmen. With the increasing tendency toward the predominance of great estates in tidewater Virginia, there was a tendency for the smaller proprietors to move westward into the Piedmont region or southward into North Carolina, as will appear in the next chapter.

[Sidenote: Some became “mean whites.”]

While it was true that “the convicts ... sometimes prove very worthy creatures and entirely forsake their former follies,”[141] it was also true that many of them “have been and are the poorest, idlest, and worst of mankind, the refuse of Great Britain and Ireland, and the outcast of the people.”[142] These degraded freedmen were apt to be irreclaimable vagabonds. According to Bishop Meade, they gave the vestrymen a great deal of trouble. “The number of illegitimate children born of them and thrown upon the parish led to much action on the part of the vestries and the legislature. The lower order of persons in Virginia in a great measure sprang from those apprenticed servants and from poor exiled culprits. It is not wonderful that there should have been much debasement of character among the poorest population, and that the negroes of the first families should always have considered themselves a more respectable class. To this day [1857] there are many who look upon poor white folks (for so they call them) as much beneath themselves; and, in truth, they are so in many respects.”[143] Indeed, the fact that manual labour was a badge of servitude, while the white freedmen of degraded type were by nature and experience unfitted to perform any work of a higher sort, was of itself enough to keep them from doing any work at all, unless driven by impending starvation. As manual labour came to be more and more entirely relegated to men of black and brown skins, this wretched position of the mean whites grew worse and worse. The negro slave might take a certain sort of pride in belonging to the grand establishment of a powerful or wealthy master, and from this point of view society might be said to have a place for him, even though he possessed no legal rights. There was no such haven of security for the mean whites. If the negro was like a Sudra, they were simply Pariahs. Crimes against person and property were usually committed by persons of this class. They were loungers in taverns and at horse-races, earning a precarious livelihood, or violent death by gambling and thieving; or else they withdrew from the haunts of civilization to lead half-savage lives in the backwoods. In these people we may recognize a strain of the English race which has not yet on American soil become extinct or absorbed. There can be little doubt that the white freedmen of degraded type were the progenitors of a considerable portion of what is often called the “white trash” of the South. Originating in Virginia and Maryland, the greater part of it seems to have been gradually sifted out by migration to wilder regions westward and southward, much to the relief of those colonies. As to the probable manner of its distribution, something will be said in the next chapter.

[Sidenote: Development of negro slavery; treaty of Utrecht.]

[Sidenote: Anti-slavery sentiment in Virginia.]

Long before the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia and Maryland had begun to protest against the policy of sending criminals from England,[144] and as negro slaves became more numerous white servitude was greatly diminished. The rapid increase of negroes began toward the end of the century, and an immense impetus was given it by the _asiento_ clause of the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By way of indemnifying herself for the cost of the War of the Spanish Succession, victorious England bade Spain and France keep their hands off from Africa, while she monopolized for herself the slave-trade. We are reminded by Mr. Lecky that this was the one clause in the treaty that seemed to give the most general satisfaction; and while an eminent prelate affixed his name to the treaty and a magnificent _Te Deum_ by Handel was sung in the churches, it occurred to nobody to denounce as unchristian a national scheme for kidnapping thousands of black men and selling them into slavery.[145] Before 1713 the part which English ships had taken in the slave-trade was comparatively small; and it is curious now to look back and think how Marlborough and Eugene at Blenheim were unconsciously cutting out work for Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg. In 1700 there were probably 60,000 Englishmen and 6,000 negroes in Virginia; by 1750 there were probably 250,000 whites and 250,000 blacks, while during that same half century the peopling of the Carolinas was rapidly going on.[146] This portentous increase of the slave population presently began to awaken serious alarm in Virginia. Attempts were made to restrict the importation of negroes, and at the time of the Revolutionary War the humanitarian spirit of the eighteenth century showed itself in the rise of a party in favour of emancipation. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson announced the principle upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860, the prohibition of slavery in the national domain; Jefferson attempted to embody this principle in an ordinance for establishing territorial government west of the Alleghanies. In 1787 George Mason denounced the “infernal traffic” in flesh and blood with phrases quite like those which his grandchildren were to resent when they fell from the lips of Wendell Phillips. The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the abolition of the African slave-trade in 1808 had increased the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the very idea of emancipation faded out of memory.

[Sidenote: Theory that negroes were non-human.]

I have already remarked upon the approval with which negro slavery was by many people regarded in the days of Queen Elizabeth. To bring black heathen within the pale of Christian civilization was deemed a meritorious business.[147] But there were people who took a lower and coarser view of the matter. They denied that the negro was strictly human; it was therefore useless to try to make him a Christian, but it was right to make him a beast of burden, like asses and oxen.[148] This point of view was illustrated in the remark made by a lady of Barbadoes, noted for her exemplary piety, to Godwyn, the able author of “The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate;” she told him that “he might as well baptize puppies as negroes.”[149] This line of thought was pursued to all sorts of grotesque conclusions. Some held that mulattoes were made half human by the infusion of white blood, and might accordingly be baptized. Others deemed it poor economy to baptize the slave, since it would be incumbent on the master to feed Christians better than heathen, and so flog them less. And there were yet others who had heard the doctrine that Christians ought not to be held in bondage, and feared lest baptism should be judged equivalent to emancipation.[150] This notion was at first so prevalent in Virginia that in 1667 it was enacted: “Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly and the authority thereof, that the conferringe of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though, slaves, or those of greater growth if capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.”[151]

[Sidenote: Negroes as real estate.]

During the seventeenth century the slave was regarded as personal property, but a curious statute of 1705 declared him to be for most purposes a kind of real estate. He could be sold, however, without the registry of a deed; he could be recovered by an action of trover; and he was not reckoned a part of the property qualification which entitled his master to the political privileges of a freeholder.[152]

[Sidenote: Taxes on slaves.]

In the system of taxation white servants and negro slaves played an important part. The primary tax upon all landholders was the quit-rent of a shilling for every fifty acres, payable at Michaelmas. This quit-rent was at first collected in the name of the Company, but after 1624 in the King’s name; and the proceeds were devoted to various public uses. It was always an unpopular tax, inasmuch as there was no feasible way (as now-a-days with our blessed tariffs) of making dullards believe that “the foreigner paid it,” and there were frequent complaints of delinquency. Another tax was the duty of two shillings upon every hogshead of tobacco exported. A third was the tax upon slaves and servants. At the close of the seventeenth century adult negroes were valued at from £25 to £40, and children at £10 or £12; there seems to have been little if any difference between the prices of men and women.[153] The taxation of slave property was equitable, inasmuch as it bore most heavily upon those best able to pay.

[Sidenote: Treatment of slaves.]

It is generally admitted that the treatment of slaves by their masters was mild and humane. There were instances of cruelty, of course. Cruelty forever lurks as a hideous possibility in the mildest system of slavery; it is part of its innermost essence. In every community there are brutes unfit to have the custody of their fellow-creatures. Such a ruffian was the Rev. Samuel Gray, who had his runaway black boy tied to a tree and flogged to death. Separation of families also occurred, though much less frequently than in later times. But cases of cruelty were on the whole rare. The cultivation of tobacco was not such a drain upon human life as the cultivation of sugar in the West Indies, or the raising of indigo and rice in South Carolina. It created a kind of patriarchal society in which the master felt a genuine interest in the welfare of his slaves. “The solicitude exhibited by John Page of York was not uncommon: in his will he instructed his heirs to provide for the old age of all the negroes who descended to them from him, with as much care in point of food, clothing, and other necessaries as if they were still capable of the most profitable labour.”[154] The historian, Robert Beverley, writing in 1705, tells us that “the male servants and the slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground, in sowing and planting corn, tobacco, etc. Some distinction indeed is made between them in their clothes and food; but the work of both is no other than what the overseers, the freemen, and the planters themselves do.... And I can assure you with a great deal of truth that generally their slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandmen and day-labourers in England.” As for cruelty, he exclaims, with honest fervour, “no people more abhor the thoughts of such usage than the Virginians, nor take more precaution to prevent it.”[155]

[Sidenote: Fears of insurrection.]

[Sidenote: Cruel laws.]

Nevertheless, a state of enforced servitude is something which human nature does not willingly endure. A slave-holding community must provide for catching runaways and suppressing or preventing insurrections. It is one of the remarkable facts in American history that there have been so few insurrections of negroes. There have been, however, occasional instances and symptoms which have kept slave-owners in dread and given rise to harsh legislation. In 1687 a conspiracy among the blacks on the Northern Neck was detected just in time to prevent the explosion.[156] In 1710 a similar plot in Surry County was betrayed by one of the conspirators, whom the assembly proceeded to reward by giving him his freedom with permission to remain in the colony.[157] The fears engendered by such discoveries are revealed in the statute book. Slaves were not allowed to be absent from their plantations without a ticket-of-leave signed by their master. The negro who could not show such a passport must receive twenty lashes, and was liable to be treated as a fugitive or “outlying” slave. Such runaways were formally outlawed; a proclamation issued by two justices of the peace was read on the next Sunday by the parish clerk from the door of every church in the county, after which anybody might seize the fugitive and bring him home, or kill him if he made any resistance. In the latter event the master was indemnified from the public funds. At the discretion of the county court, such mutilation might be inflicted upon the outlying negro as to protect white women against the horrible crime which then as now he was prone to commit.[158] In 1701 we find an act of the assembly directed against “one negro man named Billy,” who “has severall years unlawfully absented himselfe from his masters services, lying out and lurking in obscure places, ... devouring and destroying stocks and crops, robing the houses of and committing and threatening other injuryes to severall of his majestye’s good and leige people.” It was enacted that whosoever should bring in the said Billy alive or dead should receive a thousand pounds of tobacco in reward, and if dead, his master’s loss should be repaired with four thousand pounds. Anybody who should aid or harbour Billy was to be adjudged guilty of felony.[159] No penalty was attached to the murder of a slave by his master; but if he were killed by any one else, the master could recover his value, just as in case of damage done to a dog or a horse. Slaves were not allowed to have fire-arms or other weapons in their possession; “and whereas many negroes, under pretence of practising physic, have prepared and exhibited poisonous medicines, by which many persons have been murdered, and others have languished under long and tedious indispositions, and it will be difficult to detect such pernicious and dangerous practices if they should be permitted to exhibit any sort of medicine,” it was enacted that any slave who should prepare or administer any medicine whatsoever, save with the full knowledge and consent of the master or mistress, should suffer death.[160] The testimony of a slave could not be received in court except when one of his own race was on trial for life; then, if he should be found to testify falsely, he was to stand for an hour with one ear nailed to the pillory, and then be released by slicing off the ear; the same process was then repeated with the other ear, after which the ceremony was finished at the whipping-post with nine-and-thirty lashes on the bare back, “well laid on.”[161] Stealing a slave from a plantation was a capital offence.[162] No master was allowed to emancipate one of his slaves, except for meritorious services, in which case he must obtain a license from the governor and council. If a slave were set free without such a license, the church-wardens could forthwith arrest him and sell him at auction, appropriating the proceeds for the parish funds, and thereby lightening the taxes.[163] When a license was granted, the master received the usual indemnity, and by an act of 1699 the freedman was required to quit the colony within six months;[164] for obviously the presence of a large number of free blacks in the same community with their enslaved brethren was a source of danger. They were apt, moreover, to become receivers of stolen goods, and their shiftless habits made them paupers.[165] Nevertheless there were some free negroes in the colony, and at one time they even appear to have had the privilege of voting, for an act of 1723 deprived them of it; but no free negroes, whether men or women, were exempt from taxation.[166]

[Sidenote: Taking slaves to England.]

[Sidenote: Lord Mansfield’s decision.]

Since gentlemen from the North American colonies and from the West Indies not unfrequently visited England, and sometimes remained there for months or years, it was quite natural that they should take with them household slaves to whose personal attendance they were accustomed. In course of time the question thus arose whether the arrival of a slave upon the free soil of England worked his emancipation. According to Virginia law it did not.[167] The opinion expressed in 1729 by Lord Talbot, the attorney-general, and supported by Lord Hardwicke, agreed with the Virginia theory. These eminent lawyers held that mere arrival in England was not enough to free a slave without some specific act of emancipation, but Chief Justice Holt expressed a contrary opinion. Meanwhile masters kept carrying negroes to London until in 1764 the “Gentleman’s Magazine” asserted (surely with wild exaggeration) that no less than 20,000 were domiciled there. Escape was so easy for them that their owners felt obliged to put collars on them, duly inscribed with name and address. In 1685 the “London Gazette” advertised Colonel Kirke’s runaway black boy, upon whose silver collar the colonel’s arms and cipher were engraved; in 1728 the “Daily Journal” informs us that a stray negro has on his collar the inscription, “My Lady Bromfield’s black in Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” and in the “London Advertiser,” 1756, a goldsmith in Westminster announces that he makes “silver padlocks for Blacks’ or Dogs’ collars.” Colonel Kirke and Lady Bromfield were not American visitors, but residents in London, and there is evidence, not abundant but sufficient, that negroes were now and then bought and sold there for household service. When the forger John Rice was hanged at Tyburn in 1763, his effects were sold at auction, and a black boy brought £32. A similar sale at Richmond in 1771 was mentioned in terms of severe condemnation by the “Stamford Mercury.”[168] However the English people may have sanctioned the establishment of slavery beyond sea, they were not disposed to tolerate it at home; and in the sixty years withal since the treaty of Utrecht, the public conscience had grown tender on the subject. The days of Clarkson and Wilberforce were at hand. A cry was raised by the press, a test case was brought before the King’s Bench, and in 1772 Lord Mansfield pronounced the immortal decision that “as soon as a slave sets foot on the soil of the British islands he becomes free.”

[Sidenote: Jefferson on slavery.]

It is not long after this that we find Thomas Jefferson--himself the kindest of masters, and familiar with slavery in its mild Virginia form--thus writing about it: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion, indeed, are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of the nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”[169]

[Sidenote: Sexual immoralities.]

In no respect was the system of slavery more reprehensible than in the illicit sexual relations that grew out of it. The extent of the evil may be realized when we simply reflect that the numerous race of mulattoes and quadroons did not originate from wedlock. In 1691 it was enacted that any white man or woman, whether bond or free, intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, should be banished for life. In 1705 the penalty was changed to fine and imprisonment, and for any minister who should dare to perform the ceremony there was prescribed a fine nearly equal to his whole year’s salary.[170] Yet the “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” against which these statutes were aimed, went on, unsanctioned by law and unblessed by the church. Usually mulattoes were the children of negresses by white fathers, but it was not always so. Some of the wretched women from English jails seem to have had fancies as unaccountable as those of the frail sultanas of the Arabian Nights. In such cases the white mother, if free, was fined £15, or in default thereof was sold into servitude for five years; if she were a bondwoman, the church-wardens waited for her term of service to expire, and then sold her for five years; her child was bound to service until thirty years of age.[171] The case of the bastards of negresses was very simply disposed of by enacting that the legal status of children was the same as that of their mother.[172] This made them all slaves, from the prognathous and platyrrhine creature with woolly hair to the handsome and stately octoroon, and secured their labour to the master. At first the illicit relations between masters and their female slaves were frowned at, and in some instances visited with church discipline or punished by fines.[173] But public opinion seems to have lost its sensitiveness in the presence of a custom which lasted until slavery was abolished.[174] With the signal advance in refinement which the nineteenth century ushered in, there is reason to believe that in many a southern home there were earnest hearts that deplored the dreadful evil, and welcomed at last the downfall of the system that sustained it.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Classes in Virginia society.]

Some writers divide Old Virginia society into four classes,--the great planters, the small planters, the white servants and freedmen, and the negro slaves. The division is sound, provided we remember that between the two upper classes no hard and fast line can be drawn. Already in England the classes of rural gentry and yeomen shaded into one another; in Virginia both alike became land-holders and slave-owners, they mingled together in society, and their families intermarried. A typical instance is that of the parents of Thomas Jefferson. His paternal ancestors were yeomanry who in Virginia developed into country squires. The first Jefferson in Virginia was a member of the first House of Burgesses in 1619; Thomas’s father, who was also a burgess and county lieutenant, owned about thirty slaves. Thomas’s mother, Jane Randolph, whose grandfather migrated to Virginia in 1674, belonged to a family that had been eminent in England since the thirteenth century, including among its members a baron of the exchequer, a number of knights, a foreign ambassador, a head of one of the colleges at Oxford, etc.

[Sidenote: Huguenots in tidewater Virginia.]

There can be no doubt that the white blood of tidewater Virginia was English almost without admixture until the end of the seventeenth century, and of the very slight admixture nearly all was from the British islands. There was a desultory sprinkling of Protestant Frenchmen, Walloons, and Dutch, scarcely appreciable in the mass of the population. But after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Virginia received a small part of the Huguenot exodus from France. The largest company, more than seven hundred in number, led by the Breton nobleman, Olivier, Marquis de la Muce, arrived in the year 1700, and settled in various places, more particularly at Monacan Town in Henrico County. A part of this company were Waldenses from Piedmont, who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and thence made their way through Alsace and the Low Countries to England.[175] Other parties came from time to time, adding to Virginia many estimable citizens whom France could ill afford to lose. Among the Huguenot names in Virginia, the reader will recognize Maury, Flournoy, Jouet, Moncure, Fontaine, Marye, Bertrand, and others.[176] Dabneys (_D’Aubigné_) and Bowdoins (_Baudouin_) came to Virginia as well as to Boston. Such was the principal foreign admixture while Virginia was still tidewater Virginia, before the crossing of the Blue Ridge. The advent of Germans and Scotch-Irish will be treated in a future chapter.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Influence of the rivers upon society.]

[Sidenote: Some exports and imports.]

Having thus considered the composition of society in its different strata, as connected with wholesale tobacco culture, let us observe one of the most conspicuous results of this industry as influenced by the physical geography of the country. One might suppose that the necessity for exporting the enormous crops of tobacco would have called into existence a large class of thriving merchants, who would naturally congregate at points favourable for shipping, and thus give rise to towns. In most countries that is what would have happened. But the manner in which the Virginia planter disposed of his crops was peculiar. Most of the large plantations lay on or near the wide and deep rivers of that tidewater country;[177] and each planter would have his own wharf, from which his own slaves might load the tobacco on to the vessels that were to carry it to England. If the plantation lay at some distance from a navigable river, the tobacco was conveyed to the nearest creek and tied down upon a raft of canoes, and so floated and paddled down stream until some head of navigation was reached, where a warehouse was ready to receive it. The vessels which carried away this tobacco usually paid for it in all sorts of manufactured articles that might be needed upon the plantations. Every manufactured article that required skill or nicety of workmanship was brought from England, in ships of which the owners, masters, and crews were for the most part either natives of the British islands or of New England. Such a ship would unload upon the planter’s wharf some part of its motley cargo of mahogany tables, chairs covered with russia leather, wines in great variety from the Azores and Madeira,[178] brandy, Gloucester cheeses, linens and cottons, silks and dimity, quilts and featherbeds, carpets, shoes, axes and hoes, hammers and nails, rope and canvas, painters’ white lead and colours, saddles, demijohns, mirrors, books,--pretty much everything.[179] If she came from a New England port she was likely to bring salted cod and mackerel, with fragrant rum, either out of the distilleries at Newport and Boston,[180] or imported from Antigua or Jamaica. Sometimes the rum came from Barbadoes, along with sugar and molasses, and occasionally ginger and lime-juice, in return for which the ship often carried away some of the planter’s live hogs or packed pork, as well as butter, and corn, and tanned leather. The landing of rum was sometimes private and confidential, for there were duties on it which lent a charm to evasion.

[Sidenote: Some domestic industries.]

It would be too much to say that there was no manufacturing done in colonial Virginia. There were probably few if any plantations where the spinning-wheel and hand-loom were not busy. Female slaves and white servants wove coarse cloth and made it up into suits of clothes[181] for people of their sort, and doubtless for some of the small planters. Such artisans as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers, shipwrights, tailors, tanners, and shoemakers were often to be found among the indentured servants. Boys of this class were sometimes upon their arrival made apprentices in these crafts. Occasionally negro slaves became more or less skilled as workmen, especially as coopers and joiners. There must always have been some demand for the labour of white freedmen acquainted with any of the mechanical arts, and in fact instances of free labourers in these departments are found. There can be no doubt, however, that the style of work thus attained was apt to be unsatisfactory; for we find such planters as Colonel Byrd and Colonel Fitzhugh, late in the seventeenth century, sending to England for skilled workmen, and offering to pay very high wages, on the ground that it was wasting money to employ such workmen as were to be had in the colony.[182]

[Sidenote: Beverley’s complaint against his countrymen.]

The historian Beverley, who sometimes indulged himself (like the late Matthew Arnold) in upbraiding his fellow-countrymen for their own good, says of the Virginians in 1705: “They have their Cloathing of all sorts from _England_, as Linnen, Woollen, Silk, Hats, and Leather. Yet Flax and Hemp grow no where in the World, better than there; their Sheep yield a mighty Increase, and bear good Fleeces, but they shear them only to cool them. The Mulberry-Tree, whose Leaf is the proper Food of the Silk-worm, grows there like a Weed, and Silk-worms have been observ’d to thrive extreamly, and without any hazard. The very Furrs that their Hats are made of, perhaps go first from thence; and most of their Hides lie and rot, or are made use of, only for covering dry Goods, in a leaky House. Indeed some few Hides with much adoe are tann’d, and made into Servants Shoes; but at so careless a rate, that the Planters don’t care to buy them, if they can get others; and sometimes perhaps a better manager than ordinary, will vouchsafe to make a pair of Breeches of a Deer-Skin. Nay, they are such abominable Ill-husbands, that tho’ their Country be over-run with Wood, yet they have all their Wooden Ware from _England_; their Cabinets, Chairs, Tables, Stools, Chests, Boxes, Cart-wheels, and all other things, even so much as their Bowls, and Birchen Brooms, to the Eternal Reproach of their Laziness.... Thus they depend altogether upon the Liberality of Nature, without endeavoring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham’d to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.”[183]

[Sidenote: True state of the case.]

It was not, however, as Mr. Bruce reminds us, from any “inherent repugnance” that Englishmen in Virginia did not take kindly to manufactures, and perhaps the good Beverley’s reproachful tone is a trifle overdone. When the planter could get sharp knives, well-made boots, and fine blankets at his own wharf, simply by handing over to the skipper a few hogsheads of tobacco, he was not greatly to be blamed for preferring them to such dull knives, clumsy boots, and coarse blankets as could be made by the workmen within reach. Many inconveniences, however, grew out of the absence of local means for supplying local needs, and I have little doubt that sundry trades and crafts could have been made to flourish much better than they did, had it not been for the baneful effects of a tobacco currency, which we shall presently have to consider.

[Sidenote: Absence of town life.]

The most conspicuous result of the absorption of all activities in tobacco-planting, and the absence of developed arts and trades, was the non-existence of town life. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was hardly so much as a village in Virginia, unless we make an exception in honour of Williamsburg, the new seat of government and of the college. By the middle of the century Williamsburg contained about 200 houses, chiefly wooden, and its streets were unpaved. Richmond, founded in 1737, had a population of 3,761 in the census of 1790. The growth of Norfolk, founded in 1705, was exceptional. The trade with the West Indies, for sugar, molasses, and rum, tended to become concentrated there, and the proximity of North Carolina made it a mart for lumber at a time when Virginia forests in the lower tidewater region had been largely cleared away. Colonel Byrd in 1728 says of the Norfolk people: “They have a pretty deal of lumber from the borderers on the Dismal, who make bold with the king’s land thereabouts, without the least ceremony.” Besides boards and shingles, they sent beef and pork to the West Indies, and it was not unusual to see a score of sloops and brigantines riding in the noble harbour. Under these favourable circumstances the population of Norfolk had come by 1776 to be about 6,000. At that time Philadelphia had some 35,000 inhabitants, and New York 25,000, though the population of their two states taken together scarcely equalled that of Virginia.

[Sidenote: Futile attempts to make towns by legislation.]

The lack of urban life was deplored by the legislators at Jamestown and Williamsburg, and assiduous efforts were made to correct the evil; but neither bounties nor orders to build were of avail. To make towns on paper was as easy as to make a promissory note, but nobody would go and settle in the towns. Most of the county seats consisted simply of the court-house, flanked by the jail, the dismal country inn, and the nondescript country “store,” where the roving peddler sometimes replenished his pack on his route through the plantations. Among the legislative acts designed to encourage the building of towns, three were especially important. The act of 1662 ordered that thirty-two brick houses should be erected at Jamestown, and forbade the building or repairing of wooden houses there; all tobacco grown in the three counties of James City, Charles City, and Surry was to be sent to Jamestown and stored there for shipping, and the penalty for disobedience of this order was a fine of 1,000 lbs. of tobacco; every ship, moreover, ascending the river above Mulberry Island, must land its cargo at Jamestown and nowhere else, under penalty of forfeiting the cargo. Half of these fines was to be paid to the town, the other half to the informer.[184] The statute of 1680, commonly known as the Cohabitation Act, undertook in somewhat similar fashion to establish a town in every county; and the attempt was renewed on a larger scale in 1691.[185] But all these acts were either disregarded or suspended. When the Surry planter could effect an exchange at his own wharf, without incidental expense or risk, it was useless to command him to load his crop on shallops and send it to Jamestown, with a charge for freight, a chance of capsizing, and warehouse dues at the end of the journey. The skipper withal had no wish to be saddled with port dues, or to be hindered from stopping and trading wherever a customer hove in sight. So skipper and planter had their way, and towns refused to grow.[186] When Thomas Jefferson entered William and Mary College in 1760, a lad of seventeen years, he had never seen so many as a dozen houses grouped together.

[Sidenote: The country store.]