by Hugh Brogan
Thus the destiny of Virginia was fixed. Prices went down, production went up: in 1619 the colony produced 20,000 pounds of tobacco at three shillings a pound, in 1639, 1,500,000 pounds at threepence. A year later the population of the colony was over 10,000, making Virginia the largest English settlement (which it remained until the Revolution). Its life, whether economic or social, was dominated by a numerous yeoman-planter class: not until the next century was tobacco to support an aristocracy.
Before that time it had become plain that tobacco had settled Virginia’s fate in another fundamental matter. The history of agrarian society, until the coming of the machine age, was everywhere dominated by the tension between the desire of most men to be independent farmers and the power of a few men to compel them to be dependent labourers. From age to age, country to country, the upper hand lay now with one side, now with another, as geography, population and technological pressures determined. In Virginia the issue was long in doubt. On the one hand the most profitable growth of tobacco demanded, in the long run, large estates and cheap, plentiful labour. On the other hand the English population was very small, and every male member of it was determined to be, if not rich, then at least independent, through the cultivation of tobacco – if need be on plantations no bigger than could be worked by one family. This determination kept up the price of labour and held down the possible profits of tobacco, to the point, it might be argued, of endangering the colony’s survival. Various remedies were tried, the most important being the system of indentures, by which servants were brought out from England at the planters’ expense, bound to service for a term of years, and then given their freedom and a little land. But indentures proved unsatisfactory: the servants had constantly to be replaced, were frequently disobedient and unreliable, and as frequently ran away and made good their escape.
However, a solution was found, and it may be wondered why it was not found sooner, as Europeans had been buying African slaves since the fifteenth century and carrying them to the Americas since early in the sixteenth. Sir John Hawkins had shipped slaves to the Spanish colonies in the 1560s and found an eager market for them. Land, staple crops, and cheap labour – the three essentials of what became the central economic institution of the New World, the plantation (a word whose very meaning narrowed to fit the new facts) – were in place in Spanish and Portuguese America by the mid-sixteenth century, but it took a long process of trial and error before their joint potential was realized, and it was only in 1600 or thereabouts that Africans in tens of thousands began to be imported annually to work the great estates of Brazil and the Caribbean. Sugar, eclipsing silver and gold, became the most lucrative commodity of Atlantic trade, but tobacco, cotton and dyestuffs also figured largely from the start. The English soon got the idea: in the 1640s, Barbados emerged as their first, immensely profitable, sugar colony. It is no credit to their memory that the slave-labour system, as they adapted it, was even crueller than the Hispanic variety, and was debased further by prejudice against people who were black.
Dutch traders brought Africans to Virginia for the first time in 1619, and more followed, in tiny numbers, over the next few decades. For the first two generations, Africans were treated, it seems, much like other indentured servants, even (in some cases) to the distribution of land to them when their time of service was up. One of them, Anthony Johnson, is recorded as a freeman owning cattle and 250 acres in 1650.9 Perhaps, while African-Americans were few, the Virginians did not think to treat them as anything other than fellow human beings. But after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 the planters could no longer be blind to the opportunities suggested by the example of the Caribbean sugar islands, which now took African slaves in huge numbers with correspondingly huge profits. The price of tobacco was still falling rapidly as new lands came into production, for instance in the colony of Maryland, founded in 1632 to the great indignation of the Virginians, who saw it as a rival (which indeed it was). Because sotweed was so cheap, and because of the growing prosperity of the English people at large, smoking became an ever more general habit in England;10 the market was limitless, and the producers could make vast fortunes, provided that they kept their costs down – their labour costs above all.
The turning point came with the first of the great American uprisings, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676. As leader of the poorer planters, Nathaniel Bacon, a distant relation of the great Francis, seized control of Virginia from the royal Governor, Sir George Berkeley, on the grounds that Berkeley opposed making war on the Susquehanna Indians and seizing their lands. Bacon and his following were true revolutionaries, planning to overturn the political and social structure of the colony, abolish the poll tax, and enlist poor freemen, indentured servants and African slaves in their forces. They burned Jamestown to the ground. But Bacon died of dysentery, and Berkeley then rallied enough strength to suppress the rebellion. To prevent any recurrence of these events, royal authority was placed firmly on the side of the richer settlers; their attempts to grab all the best land in Virginia were endorsed, and Africans were rapidly excluded from the privileges of civil society (if free) or thrust down into hopeless servitude (if slaves). A new gentry emerged, which quickly enriched itself by its effective monopoly of land, labour and political power. The price would be paid, for nearly two centuries, by the slaves. It was a tragic development, but given the combination of tobacco, a hierarchical social structure both in England and her colonies, and the greed of seventeenth-century Englishmen, it was probably inevitable.
4 The Planting of New England 1604-c. 1675
Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There’s no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow’d Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Those that love their own chimney corner and dare not go far beyond their own towns’ end shall never have the honour to see the wonderful works of Almighty God.
The Reverend Francis Higginson, 1629
The accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558 brought with it what proved to be the decisive victory of Protestantism; but scarcely was it won when the word Puritan began to be heard, in allusion to a party within the national church which held that the work of reformation was not complete when the Pope had been rejected, the monasteries dissolved, the mass abolished and the Book of Common Prayer imposed.
Inevitably the authorities saw the existence of this party as a political problem. As has been stated,1 the Renaissance state existed to secure its subjects against civil war and invasion. The Tudor dynasty rammed home this point explicitly, endlessly. Anarchy, battle and usurpation had brought them the Crown of England; their propaganda against these evils – which found its most brilliant expression in certain plays of Shakespeare – was incessant. The Tudors also saw clearly that if subjects were left to themselves they would make their sovereign’s religious opinions the touchstone of their loyalty. To monarchs convinced of their right and duty to rule it was intolerable that civil peace, their reigns, perhaps even their lives, should be at the mercy of turbulent fanatics. The inference was clear. Not only must religion teach the duty of obedience to the prince and submission to the social order over which he (or she) presided. The national church must be, for safety’s sake, of royal ordering both in form and doctrines; it must be subordinate to royal purposes. To Queen Elizabeth, at least, the rightness of the arrangement was clear. She was not, she knew, a demanding sovereign: she would make no windows into men’s souls. Let her subjects swear allegiance to her as Supreme Governor of the church and all would be well. It was her duty, it was her God-given exclusive privilege, to rule the realm, to take the decisions necessary for its safety and her own. Therefore to disobey her too conspicuously, or to question her decisions too publicly, or too frequently to demand more than she was prepar
ed to give, was to verge on disloyalty, if not rebellion.
Unfortunately many Englishmen and Englishwomen did demand more. Protestantism had a built-in democratic tendency in that it encouraged the literate to search the Scriptures for themselves and act in the light of what they found there. Thus strengthened by what they took to be God’s word, the Puritans frequently refused to conform their conduct to the Queen’s views: some of them dared to rebuke her to her face. Nor was even she wholly reasonable, consistent or realistic. Her own religious tastes (it would probably be excessive to speak of her convictions) were conservative, and as her reign continued she gradually found bishops who, sharing them, were happy to attempt to force them on her subjects. Hence the promotion to Canterbury of the bullying Whitgift and to London of the policeman-like Bancroft. Furthermore Elizabeth, like almost everyone else, clung to the old medieval dream of religious unity. The Church of England must be the Church of all Englishmen: the whole nation at prayer. She would not admit that the ideals of uniformity and comprehensiveness were at war with each other, but even in her lifetime Archbishop Whitgift’s conservatism and rigidity drove many of the devout to ‘separate’ from the sinful national church – to resign from it, as it were, and organize little ‘separatist’ churches of their own (they were called ‘conventicles’). Bishops grew more and more unpopular; and in the seventeenth century the ideal of a comprehensive national church crashed to the ground, bringing the dream of national religious uniformity (whether episcopalian or presbyterian) to ruin with it.
At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the Puritans were, in a sense, no less (and no more) than the Protestant party itself. They saw that the country was still for the most part either Catholic or indifferent. Their business was to bring the full Reformation to pass; to achieve the conversion of England. For years and years they tried to persuade their Queen to join them in the work by reorganizing the church on presbyterian lines and by using her unquestioned right to compel her subjects to be saved. They quite agreed with her that a uniform, all-embracing national church was demanded by both reason and religion; only it must be governed on the lines that Calvin inferred from the Bible. Elizabeth, however, steadily refused to co-operate. So the Puritans were compelled, after some nasty brushes with the law, to turn from political to purely pastoral labours. As they were not to have the chance to compel their countrymen to come in, they tried to preach them in. By 1603 they were succeeding spectacularly.
The English Reformation had many causes, but its soul was the desire to renew the Christian life of the people, and Puritanism was that soul’s instrument. Episcopacy was resisted because it acted as an umbrella for such abuses as pluralism, non-resident clergy, corrupt church courts and a ‘dumb dog’, non-preaching, unlearned ministry, all of which came between the English and the good news of salvation. Even before their rebuff at the Queen’s hands the Puritan ministers had shown themselves adept at pastoral work; thereafter they moved through the land, devoted to uprooting sin from the hearts of the congregations. Their chief tool was the sermon. It had played little part in pre-Reformation church life. Now a conscientious minister would expect to have to preach once every day, and at least twice on the Sabbath; and preaching was extraordinarily popular. It was something new, and people flocked to hear good speakers – so much so that ‘gadding about to sermons’ was a vice much denounced by the conservative.2 But the godly had the last word. Serious and intelligent, they had an influence on their communities out of all proportion to their numbers, though those increased rapidly. Like young Siegfried with the broken sword Nothung, the Puritans ground down the English soul to powder and then re-forged it to heroic temper. Nor is this only metaphor. The central Puritan experience was that of conversion, when a man’s sins ‘came upon him like armed men, and the tide of his thoughts was turned’. Conversion struck in many ways, as we learn from the innumerable fragments of autobiography left us: from a tract sold by a pedlar, from an insult hurled by a woman in the street (thus ‘drunken Perkins’ became ‘painful Perkins’, a celebrated preacher) – most usually from some ‘affectionate’ sermon. Conversion was the moment when God’s grace entered the soul and began the work of its redemption. It was a moment predestined from Creation, as St Paul taught:3 ‘Whom he did predestinate, them he also called;’ it was the moment when Hell’s gates closed: ‘Whom he called, them he also justified;’ the moment when the doors of the Celestial City opened: ‘Whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ It was a moment that enlightened and rejoiced the lives of tens of thousands of plain people. It assured them that although life would continue to daunt them with its problems and temptations, they had only to fight ceaselessly against sin within them and without them, and whatever wounds they took in the battle, victory was sure.4
It is easy to mistake the nature of this Puritanism. The word today generally connotes a loveless respectability, a Philistine narrowness, Biblical idolatry or a neurotic hatred of other people’s pleasures. ‘Show me a Puritan,’ said H. L. Mencken, ‘and I’ll show you a son-of-a-bitch.’ But while it would be absurd to deny that a certain censoriousness was present in Puritanism from the start, it would be equally absurd to let the degenerate aspect it wears today conceal the splendours of its prime. Certain of their salvation, the best Puritans were brave, cheerful, intelligent and hard-working. One of their preachers urged them to be ‘merry in the Lord, and yet without lightness; sad and heavy in heart for their own sins, and the abominations of the land, and yet without discouragement or dumpishness’. The quality of Puritan piety is best savoured in The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan, the old Ironside, knew how to make his simple image – one that had long been dear to Puritans, indeed to all Englishmen: Hakluyt’s continuator called his book Purchas, His Pilgrims5 – of life as a journey and a battle, not only true, but startlingly important. It is easy, reading Bunyan, to feel what immense strength those of his faith derived from their belief that the promises Christ made were literally true. For them, the trumpets were sure to sound on the other side.
What could kings, queens and archbishops do against such people? Very little; and for the most part they prudently attempted less. Puritanism was left to seep peacefully through England. But after the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 Policeman Bancroft, now Archbishop of Canterbury, was unwise enough to attempt a little persecution. ‘Apparitors and pursuivants and the commissary courts’ – the whole detested machinery of ecclesiastical officialdom – were turned against those, within and without the church, who were less than perfect conformists to the officially prescribed practices; among them a little band of Separatists living in villages on the borders of Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The leaders of this conventicle were educated, but its members were for the most part lowly, sincere, literate but otherwise untutored folk. Their irregular piety was thus doubly offensive to the authorities, with their memories of Tyler, Cade and Kett.6
So
some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood.7
Understandably, these religious Lincolnshire poachers decided to emigrate. With some difficulty in 1607 and 1608 they slipped over in groups to Holland, ‘where they heard was freedom of religion for all men’, led by Pastor Robinson and Elder William Brewster.
Robinson and Brewster took their followers to Leyden, where with much difficulty they scratched a living for the next ten years or so. But Leyden could not be a permanent resting-place. There was a danger of Spanish conquest; the prospect of continuing grinding poverty was a discouragement; the children of these resolute English threatened to turn Dutch, not only as to language, which was bad enough, but as to religion, which was far worse (for the Dutch, though Calvinists, refused to keep a properly gloomy Sabbath). Finally, there seemed to be small chance in Leyden of achieving that really remarkable labour for God of which the m
ore ardent Separatists dreamed, hemmed in as they were by the world. It would be better to move on again. Where to? England was still closed, its churches, for the most part, corrupt. Their minds began to turn to ‘some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America’.
It was not really surprising. The idea of a religious refuge across the water was tolerably obvious. The French Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, had sent a party to settle in Florida as early as 1560 (though as the Separatists knew, it had been speedily snuffed out by the Spaniards). More particularly, the exiles were by no means cut off from English news, and these were the great years of the Virginia adventure, as we have seen. The Virginia Company of London, in its quest for funds, was advertising itself far and wide. John Smith was still busy. In 1612 he published his map of Virginia, ‘with a description of its Commodities, People, Government, and Religion’. In 1614 he was employed by the Company to explore the North Atlantic coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. He learned enough to make another good map, to give the region a name, New England, and to begin a lengthy literary campaign extolling the excellences of those parts for settlement: thus in 1616 he published his Description of New England and in 1620 his New England Trials.8 In fact he became a full-fledged ‘booster’, a type we have met before and will again. Nevertheless, the Captain, as was his habit, told few lies, in spite of his enthusiasm. He could truthfully boast, for example, that
