Rivers and Foyle had been arrested for running guns for Charles Stuart and imprisoned in the aftermath of the Salisbury rising of 1654. They protested their treatment as unbecoming “freeborn Englishmen” because they were never given a proper trial and were arbitrarily jailed for a year. They were then snatched from their prisons and hurried to Plymouth, where they were thrown aboard a deep-sea vessel. As the goods and chattels of the merchant and M. P. Martin Noell, they were locked belowdecks with the horses. Rivers and Foyle did not say how many of their fellow white slaves had died, been sewn into canvas coffins, and been thrown over the side of the ship, but if the voyage was typical, the number would have been between eight and fourteen. After several weeks the prisoners arrived in Barbados and were sold to the “most inhuman and barbarous persons, for one thousand five hundred and fifty pound weight of sugar a-piece, more or less, according to their working faculties.” The slaves were forced to work, “grinding at the mills and attending at the furnace” or digging in the fields side by side with other slaves from England, Ireland, Scotland, America, and Africa.71 They lived in pigsties, they ate potatoes and drank potato water, they were whipped, they were bought and sold. Their petition implied that there were human rights against such exploitation.72
The petition provoked a heated and disingenuous debate. The M. P.’s knew that the petitioners were little different from the thousands of English men and women who had been spirited away over the previous thirty years. Noell, who had spirited many of them, was forced to admit, “I trade into those parts,” but he hastened to defend the planter class in Barbados by saying, falsely, that the work on the sugar plantations was not as hard as represented and, truly, that the island was “as grateful to you for trade as any part of the world.” He tried to lessen the impact of the petition by denying the historic importance of indentured servants in building the plantation system and by interjecting racial distinctions: in Barbados, he reassured Parliament, “the work is mostly carried on by the Negroes.”73
Some in Parliament treated the petition politically, as a royalist issue. But Sir Henry Vane, the millennialist radical who had supported Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian Controversy in Boston in 1636–37, announced, “I do not look on this business as a Cavalierish business; but as a matter that concerns the liberty of the free-born people of England.” Arthur Annesley added, “I am sorry to hear Magna Charta moved against this House. If he be an Englishman, why should he not have the benefit of it?”74 Several M. P.’s began to define English freedom against African slavery. Edward Boscawen, who had invested in the successful campaign to capture Jamaica from Spain in 1655, explained that “you have Paul’s case before you. A Roman ought not to be beaten.” By this he meant that Englishness should be a global citizenship that protected its owners against violence. If Parliament failed to act on the petition, he solemnly explained, “our lives will be as cheap as those negroes.” Sir Arthur Hesilrige “could hardly hold weeping” when forced to think of Englishmen working alongside Africans. As the universalist claims of revolution shrank to a narrow, racialist nationalism, a few still clung to broader ideals. Sir John Lenthall worried, “I hope it is not the effect of our war to make merchandize of men.” Thomas Gewen complained, “I would not have men sold like bullocks and horses. The selling of a man is an offence of a high nature.” Major John Beake summarized the point: “Slavery is slavery, as well in a Commonwealth as under another form.”75
It was a decisive moment, as explained by Hilary McD. Beckles: “Parliament felt that the Barbadians, and other West Indians, did not really need white labour any more—black slavery was fully established and proven to be very profitable.” Meanwhile, military labor in the metropolis was proving itself to be troublesome again. Soon after the debate, the common soldiers of the New Model Army again grew mutinous and again elected agitators to represent them. The specter of Putney began to haunt the propertied; this time, they restored the monarchy.76 Once back in power, the royalists acted out their conception of the “rights of the free-born Englishman” by organizing repression, including exemplary hangings, against the very people who had developed the discourse in the first place. The New Englander Thomas Venner led Fifth Monarchist workers into battle against the king in 1661, chanting, “King Jesus and the heads upon the gates”—meaning the heads of the executed regicides.77 Venner himself was caught, hanged, and drawn and quartered, his head stuck up in public. Hydra decapita.
The development of the English doctrine of white supremacy thus occurred in the context of counterrevolution, the restoration of the monarchy, and the advance of the slave trade. England’s rulers, led and inspired by Rupert and Holmes, began to discuss writing a new charter for the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa and waging war against the Dutch for control of the West African man-trade.78 The meaning of the expression “free-born Englishman” could never thereafter be entirely innocent or hopeful for most of the people of the world. The repression of the Restoration completed the radical diaspora. Regicides stowed away for America and Europe; Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians disappeared overseas. Edward Burrough, the Quaker, told Charles II, “If you should destroy these vessels, yet our principles you can never extinguish, but they will live for ever and enter into other bodies to live and act and speak.”79 Hydra redux.
VIRGINIA, 1663–1676
In September 1663 a group of laborers in Poplar Spring (Gloucester County), Virginia, met secretly at midnight in a house in the woods. They plotted to seize arms and a drum, to march from house to house, appeal to others in bondage, and then demand their freedom from the governor. Several of the rebels had worn the red shirt of the New Model Army; some had been Fifth Monarchists, others Muggletonians. At the Restoration they had been sentenced to servitude and shipped to Virginia. They now aimed to capitalize on widespread labor discontent within the plantation system, planning to overthrow the governor and set up an independent commonwealth. An informer betrayed the plot. Four were hanged, and five transported. The planters determined that the day of the rising, September 13, should be commemorated as an annual holy day.80 Revolutionary antinomianism had reared its head in the tobacco fields.
The early Chesapeake tobacco proletariat consisted of Newgateers, Quakers, renegades, sailors, soldiers, Nonconformists, servants, and slaves.81 In 1662 the House of Burgesses erected whipping posts and granted masters the legal right to beat their servants. Complaining of the “audatious unrulines of many stubborne and incorrigible servants resisting their masters and overseers,” they promised beatings and extra service to anyone who laid violent hands on his or her master, mistress, or overseer. Summarizing the rising tensions on Virginia’s eastern shore, Douglas Deal writes that “physical violence, verbal abuse, work slowdowns, sabotage, and running away by servants all became much more common after 1660.”82 As in Barbados, servants and slaves often ran away together, prompting repressive, deliberately divisive legislation in 1661 and 1662 that made the servant responsible for the time that the slave was away from his master. In 1664 Maryland’s rulers passed an act against Englishwomen who were “forgetfull of their free condition and to the disgrace of the Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves by which alsoe divers suites may arise touching the Issue of such women and a great damage doth befall the Masters.” Virginia’s big men worried in 1672 that servants would “fly forth and joyne” with slaves in maroon communities. The House of Burgesses banned the entry of Quakers into the colony, called for the imprisonment of those already there, and forbade their meetings and publications. George Wilson, a former soldier in the New Model Army who in early 1662 was chained to a post with an Indian in a stinking prison in Jamestown, denounced the cruelty and oppression of a “Company of Lazy and Leud people who not Careing to worke feed upon the Swete and Labour” of others. Wilson organized interracial gatherings at which women preached heretical doctrine. The big planters attacked interracial cooperation except where it was necessary for the production of tobacco.83
The res
istance of plantation workers exploded in 1675–76 in Bacon’s Rebellion, which was actually two distinct uprisings. The first, beginning in late 1675, was a war for land by freedmen and small farmers against Indians and a portion of the colonial ruling class in Virginia. The second, beginning in September 1676, was a war against slavery, waged by servants and slaves who entered the fray after being promised their freedom by Nathaniel Bacon in exchange for military service against the forces of the Virginia governor, Berkeley. By late September, the rebel army was “sum’d up in freemen, searvants, and slaves; these three ingredience being the Compossition of Bacon’s Army.” Many of Bacon’s other followers, especially those who were masters, soon deserted him.84 But if the freeing of servants and slaves cost Bacon support from one quarter, it increased it from another, as poor, rugged fellows flocked to him from all around the colony. Strange News from Virginia, published in London in 1677, noted that Bacon’s forces consisted of “Runnagado English” along with slaves and servants. The poet Andrew Marvell heard from a ship’s captain that Bacon entered Jamestown “having first proclaim’d liberty to all servants and Negroes.”85 This was the language of jubilee.
The abolitionists burned Jamestown and looted the estates of Berkeley’s supporters. When Thomas Grantham began to negotiate on behalf of the king the final settlement of the conflict in January 1677, he faced four hundred armed English and African servants and slaves; he promptly tried to divide them by offering a better deal to the servants. Some accepted the deal and went home; others deserted to Roanoke; still others wanted to fight on. Eighty slaves and twenty servants remained in arms, prompting Grantham to make repeated, though treacherous, promises of freedom. After the still-armed rebels boarded longboats to make their escape, he turned a ship’s cannon on them, forcing them to surrender and to suffer reenslavement.86
Bacon was denounced as a Leveller, and his followers as antinomians. In her play The Widow Ranter, or a History of Bacon in Virginia (1690), Aphra Behn suggested the influence of the Ranters upon events in Virginia, seeing revolutionary continuity in the colony’s seventeenth-century rebellions. She may have based the character of the Widow Ranter on any of a number of female rebels, including the prostitutes who chose to die alongside the soldiers.87 Contemporaries saw in Bacon’s army the fearful monstrosity theorized a half century earlier by Francis Bacon. Colonel Edward Hill lamented the many “brave, wise, just & inocent good men that have fallen under the lash of that hidra the vulgar,” while Governor Berkeley wrote in June 1676 that a “monstrous number of the basest of the People” had declared for Bacon, who himself was another Masaniello. Virginia’s rulers executed twenty-three rebels.88
The uprising of the plantation workers in 1675–76 shaped the subsequent evolution of the Chesapeake. Immediately after the rebellion ended, the planters charged the governor with restraining “any inhumane severity which by ill masters or overseers may be used toward Christian servants.” The self-conscious segmentation of the plantation proletariat became even more evident in legislation of 1682, providing that “all servants not being christians, being imported into this country by shipping” (i.e., Africans) should be slaves for life, while those who came by land (Indians) should be servants for twelve years. European servants continued to serve only four to five years. Virginia’s big planters began to substitute African slaves for European indentured servants,89 a development that changed indentured servitude in the Chesapeake as it had done in Barbados. Fewer indentured servants were imported, and those who were tended to be given skilled supervisory and policing positions. Beginning in the late 1670s legislation was enacted throughout the British American plantation colonies to encourage and protect “Christian”—increasingly “white”—colonists.90
By the 1670s antinomians were tolerated by the big planters only if they distanced themselves from the experiences of plantation labor and acted the now important part of the “white” colonist, serving in the militia to defend the colony against rebellious slaves. George Fox soothed Barbadian slaveowners by explaining in 1671 that slave revolt was “a thing we do abhor and detest.” If the first defeat of antinomianism in the English Revolution had helped to secure the slave trade and accelerate the growth of capitalism, its second defeat, in America, helped to secure the plantation as a foundation of the new system. The Chesapeake’s “unruly home spirits” slowly changed their colors, from motley to black, and by 1680 the day of the indentured servant and the antinomian as primary revolutionary forces in the Atlantic had passed. The planters’ fear of multiracial rebellion was replaced by fear of the slave revolt, as expressed in two acts aimed at preventing “Negro insurrections,” passed in 1680 and 1682. The transition was completed with “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (1705), which guaranteed the rights of servants and defined slaves as a form of property that would constitute the basis of production in Virginia.91
The plantation was thus made fast in Virginia and Maryland by the late 1670s, but alternatives remained, one of them especially close at hand. Some who fled slavery recovered the commons in Roanoke, located in the Albemarle Sound. To the dismal swamp flew European and African American slaves (with and without indentures), felons, landless paupers, vagabonds, beggars, pirates, and rebels of all kinds, who beginning in the 1640s lived there under the protection of the Tuscarora Indians. They all fished, hunted, trapped, planted, traded, intermarried, and formed what their main chronicler, Hugo Learning, has called a Mestizo culture. The members of the community included Nathaniel Batts, who was also known as Secotan, war chief of the Tuscarora Empire and member of the Grand Council of the Tuscaroras; African-Americans Thomas Andover (pilot) and Francis Johnson (coastal wrecker); and John Culpeper, who had left Charleston, South Carolina, because “he was in danger of hanging for laying the design and indeavouring to sett the poore people to plunder the rich.” Culpeper had also taken part in Bacon’s Rebellion and yet another rising in New England before returning to Roanoke to lead armed mobs of former plantation workers, sailors, “Indians, Negros, and women” against the effort to establish proprietary government in 1677. The people of Roanoke, known for their “enthusiasm,” opposition to oaths, anticlericalism, emphasis on the “inner light,” and devotion to “liberty of conscience,” were antinomian and abolitionist, calling for an end to slavery as early as 1675. The very existence of the multiethnic maroon state was a threat to Virginia, whose governor worried that “hundreds of idle debtors, theeves, Negros, Indians, and English servants will fly” to the liberated zone and use it as a base for attacks on the plantation system. It would take years for the colonial authorities to tame Roanoke and to constitute North Carolina as an official colony, after which the struggle for the commons would shift to the seas, with sailors and pirates the new maroons.92
The defeat of the servants and slaves and the recomposition of the plantation proletariat coincided with the origins of scientific racism. The cartographer and physician William Petty weighed the matter in The Scale of Creatures (1676): “There seem to be several species even of human beings,” he wrote. “I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned Africans in colour . . . but also . . . in natural manners and in the internal qualities of their minds.” Following Francis Bacon, he was developing a new discourse, an ideological racism different in tone and methods from the racial prejudice of the overseer with a whip or the bully on the deck. The biological excuse for white supremacy would be refined by the English philosophers Locke and Hume and by English biologists, but there was nothing inevitable about its development, for alternative approaches existed even in England. In 1680 Morgan Godwyn, for example, explained the doctrine of Negro inferiority by refusal of work: “Surely Sloth and Avarice have been no unhandy Instruments and Assistants to midwife it into the World, and to Foster and Nurse it up.” Earlier still, in April 1649, Winstanley wrote, “As divers members of our human bodies make but one body perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind,” and noted again in Augus
t of the same year that the Earth was a common treasury “for whole mankind in all his branches, without respect of persons.”93
THE COMMONS OR SLAVERY
Gerard Winstanley was the most articulate voice of revolution during the late 1640s. He opposed slavery, dispossession, the destruction of the commons, poverty, wage labor, private property, and the death penalty. He was not the first person to come up with a rational plan for social reconstruction, but he was, as Christopher Hill has noted, the first to express such a plan in the vernacular and to call on a particular social class—the common people—to put it into action.94 How he came to these beliefs is revealed by his experience at the beginning of the revolutionary decade, when he worked as a cloth merchant and fell victim to fraud. At a time when the cloth industry was collapsing, Winstanley personally lost £274 and was reduced to parochial charity. He thus had a hard-won, bitter knowledge of the “theeving art of buying and selling.” R.J. Dalton has argued in a carefully researched article that this fraud was the “single most influential [experience] of Winstanley’s life; without it he might never have developed his communist ideology.”95
The man who defrauded Winstanley was Matthew Backhouse, the same slave-trading merchant who sailed aboard the Friendship to the river Gambia in 1651. Backhouse was experienced in the trade, as a decade earlier he had fraudulently gathered an operating capital of roughly seven hundred pounds from Winstanley and others “before embarking on a preplanned voyage to the Guinea coast of west Africa.” Cloth, he knew, was in demand in Africa; slaves, he knew, were in demand in Barbados. After the repression of the radicals by Cromwell and the Parliamentarians in early 1649, Backhouse returned to England and renewed his relationship with the reconstituted Guinea Company, signing a five-year contract with the new merchants that led to the voyage of 1651. Backhouse had dispossessed Winstanley in 1641, pushing him toward antinomianism and communism. If Winstanley, like Rainborough at Putney in 1647, expressed a revolutionary vision of a future without slavery, Backhouse, like Ireton, helped to put into practice that vision’s counterrevolutionary opposite.
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 16
