Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Be it therefore ordered and enacted that …

  (2) whatsoever person or persons shall, from henceforth upon any occasion of offense or otherwise, in reproachful manner or way declare, call or denominate any person or persons whatsoever inhabiting, residing, trading, or commercing within this province an Heretic, Schismatic, Idolator, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Popish Priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist, or any other name or term in a reproachful manner relating to matters of religion, shall, for every such offense forfeit and lose the sum of ten shillings sterling [half to the victim, the other half to the Proprietor].

  (4) And whereas the enforcing of conscience in matters of religion has frequently [proved] of dangerous consequence in those commonwealths where it has been practised; and for the more quiet and peacable government of this province and the better to preserve mutual love and amity amongst the inhabitants thereof. Be it therefore also by the Lord Proprietary, with the advice and consent of this Assembly, ordained and enacted … that no person or persons whatsoever within this province … professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall, from henceforth, be any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion, nor in the free exercise thereof within this province or the islands thereunto belonging, nor any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his or her consent … [Offenders to pay treble damages to the wronged party or suffer a severe whipping and imprisonment at the discretion of the Proprietor.]

  During the mid-1640s Maryland's population had fallen to under 400. Thereafter it grew, as immigrants attracted by Baltimore's liberal land policy flowed in from Virginia as well as from England. In 1640 the legislature provided that on completion of their service, all male servants were to receive three barrels of corn, a new outfit of clothes, some tools, and 50 acres of land. This headright was later confirmed by Baltimore in 1648. Land remained more readily available here than in Virginia, but Maryland society was to develop along similar lines.

  Maryland was no paradise for servants. Both males and females were expected to work long hours in the field, on the farm, or in the household, being constantly at the call of their masters and mistresses, whose main aim was the extraction of productive labor. Those who ran away could expect to do extra time, as could women servants who became pregnant. Despite various laws, beatings were common, diet was rarely sufficient, clothing and housing were frequently inadequate, and medical attention was negligible. A wasting sickness like malaria was often mistaken for laziness; and because sickness meant that someone else had to do that person's job, bullying by fellow servants, overseers, and masters was common. Not surprisingly, 40 percent did not survive their four- to five-year indentures. Those who did, who wished to become planters, still had to pay the surveyor's fees and register their land, as well as buy essential items to get their farms established. Such an outlay being initially beyond the means of most servants, the usual options were to continue as laborers or to lease some land, possibly on a sharecropping basis. But wages were high, as the price of tobacco rose during the 1650s, so many servants, perhaps as many as half of those attaining their freedom, did acquire their own farms in time, though some took as long as 12 years to become freeholders. In one respect the 1650s was a golden period for servants, there being no elite other than the proprietor and a few gentry. Never again were social classes to be so fluid.12

  Like Virginia, Maryland had an overwhelmingly male social structure, the ratio in the earliest years being perhaps six males to every female. Male servants were preferred, since they were generally physically more capable of performing the exhausting tasks of clearing the land, working the soil, and erecting houses and barns. The social consequences of this imbalance between the sexes were enormous. For men it meant a late marriage and little family life. As late as the 1680s, perhaps 30 percent of men never married. Immigrant women, too, married relatively late, after serving their indentures, although they generally had a choice of suitors. Remarriage was also much easier if a partner died. Some women, blessed with exceptional health, married three or four times. Still, the relatively low marriage rate combined with the late age of marriage contributed to low fertility rates, and Maryland's population was able to grow only by means of constant immigration.

  Another factor inhibiting family life was the high mortality rate among both men and women. Only one-third of marriages lasted more than 10 years. As a consequence, 20 percent of all children were orphaned by age 12, and most experienced the death of one parent before their majority. This led to the establishment of special orphan courts, something quite unknown in England. Thus stable family life was virtually impossible, and few enjoyed the kinship patterns which prevailed in New England. One compensation was that children came into their inheritances early and could marry without parental constraint. Women, too, benefited, as their scarcity allowed them to insist on better marriages.13 Of course families of a kind did exist. Surviving parents usually remarried, creating a new type of family, comprising half-brothers and half-sisters, stepfathers and stepchildren. Although such unions created problems of inheritance and emotional adjustment, they often fostered a sense of community, love, and affection.

  Much as the settlers moving into Maryland had dashed Baltimore's hopes for a Catholic colony, so too did they thwart his plans to create a stable society of manor lords and tenants. Once they could save enough money, freed servants left the manors to buy their own land. Only one manor, St. Clements, owned by Thomas Gerard, was still functioning in 1660, with 16 tenants and nine freeholders. Before long, the powers which had been given to manor lords were instead transferred to county courts and local parishes on the English model, although one or two manors continued to function.

  Indeed Maryland was increasingly adopting the appearance of its neighbor to the south in many other respects, having the same pyramidal social structure of newly rich gentry planters (who dominated the assembly and ran the county courts), along with yeoman farmers, dependent tenants, and indentured servants. As in Virginia, the attraction for immigrants was the possibility of one day owning one's own land, a virtually unimaginable prospect for poor men who stayed in England.

  As in Virginia, the presence of Indians within the English settler community was rare, for though the government maintained amicable relationships with their native neighbors, Indian towns were located well outside the boundaries of the English settlements. Another similarity between Virginia and Maryland was the presence of a small number of Africans – around 100, mostly coming from Virginia. As in Virginia, their status was unclear until after 1660. Thus, whatever the initial differences, the two Chesapeake societies were rapidly converging in their economic and social, if not their political, structures.

  4 English Colonies in the West Indies

  While Maryland was struggling to establish itself on a stable footing, English investors had already begun to achieve considerable success with another series of colonial ventures in the Atlantic, this time not in mainland North America but in the West Indies (also called the Caribbean). The earliest English colonies here had been a series of semipermanent privateering bases established between 1604 and 1619, strategically located in Guiana and the islands of the Lesser Antilles where they were close enough to shipping routes for occasional raids on Spanish treasure ships. These were unstable, violent places, subject to attacks by Spanish, Portuguese, and sometimes Dutch vessels, and riven by conflicts with local Indians. By 1624, though, it was becoming clear to English investors that agricultural colonies held greater long-term promise for producing returns on colonial ventures than did bases for privateers. In that year a small group of English colonists brought by the English promoter Sir Thomas Warner to the thinly populated island of St. Christopher (later called St. Kitts) managed to create a permanent colony. It would soon be followed by colonies in Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), and Montserrat (1632).r />
  Map 6 The English West Indies, 1660.

  The most successful of these West Indian colonies before 1660 was Barbados, located far enough away from the Spanish to make it relatively safe from attack. Here, the local Carib Indian population had mostly died out by the time the colony was founded in 1627, simplifying the promoters' efforts to establish an agricultural settlement. Investors in the Barbados venture offered settlers grants of land in exchange for quitrents, which the settlers cleared and farmed using indentured laborers, mostly from England, Scotland, and Ireland. During the colony's earliest years, producing tobacco was profitable enough to attract thousands of young, single, mostly male servants who hoped to earn enough to buy small plots of land and become yeoman farmers once they had finished their terms of service. The lure of becoming a tobacco planter in the English West Indies was great. Once they arrived, however, young men soon learned that the reality of life in Barbados was not what they had expected. Survival rates were even lower here than on the mainland, and the settler population grew only because of the constant inflow of new immigrants. Nevertheless, immigration continued. More young English settlers went to the Caribbean islands during the seventeenth century than all of the English settlers to the North American mainland combined.14

  English planters in Barbados, like settlers in all of the other English agricultural colonies, seem to have regarded the right to an assembly as a key privilege of property ownership, and engaged in the same kinds of struggles to control political authority in Barbados as did landowners in the other English American colonies. From 1629 onward the colony was organized, like Maryland, as a proprietary colony. The Crown granted land and governing authority to a favored courtier, the earl of Carlisle, who then appointed a governor to administer the colony and collect quitrents from the settlers. In 1639 the planters insisted that the governor convene an assembly to represent them. And just as in other English colonies, the assembly won the right to control local taxes and allocate revenues, while the governor and his council retained the power to veto their decisions.

  During the 1640s the introduction of a new cash crop began to transform the lives and economic fortunes of Barbadian planters. A fall in the price of tobacco had made its production considerably less profitable in the late 1630s. Barbadian planters began to experiment with cotton, without much success, until Dutch merchants visiting the island provided technological assistance as well as loans for the planters to begin shifting their land to sugar cane production.15 Continental Europeans had become regular consumers of sugar, but a disruption in the supply of Brazilian sugar caused by political instability allowed Dutch merchants to sell as much sugar as the Barbados planters were able to produce. Meanwhile English consumers seemed eager to try the sweet crystals and use them for baking, brewing, and making confections. The growing demand for sugar generated a sugar planting frenzy on the island in the mid-1640s. Yet the profits of sugar were not equally shared. In order to be profitable, sugar production required fairly large plantations as well as capital investments in refining equipment and labor. Absentee investors and more prosperous planters who could afford the investment reaped huge rewards from sugar production. Meanwhile, the price of land on the island boomed, and indentured servants found themselves unable to purchase land once they had been freed from their terms of service.

  Planters needed a large supply of labor to produce the profits that sugar cultivation promised. As Barbados became a less attractive destination for servants, planters found the supply of voluntary settlers drying up, and instead looked for sources of coerced labor to meet their demands. Thousands of transported convicts as well as prisoners taken during various rebellions were shipped to Barbados during the early years of the English Civil War. But when critics at home began to express misgivings about selling white Englishmen into servitude, planters again sought new sources of coerced labor. Once again, Dutch merchants provided a solution that served both their interests and those of the planters.

  By the 1640s Dutch traders were competing with great success against Portuguese traders in carrying slaves from Africa to Brazil. In 1646, during a period of political instability in Brazil, Dutch traders began offering their slave cargos to Barbadian planters on credit and at low prices. English planters turned eagerly to African slaves, whose foreignness made them easier to exploit than poor Englishmen. By 1655, there were more than 20,000 enslaved Africans on the island, along with about 23,000 white settlers.

  The growth of sugar production transformed the economy and society of Barbados. Over time the planter class grew smaller and wealthier, buying up the best land. Poor planters were largely squeezed out. In time, the flow of poor white servants into Barbados shrank to a trickle. Meanwhile, African slaves were imported so rapidly that the tiny island soon became the most heavily populated English colony in the Americas – as well as the first majority black society in the English empire. By 1673, the colony's population stood at 33,000 enslaved Africans and 21,000 whites. Instead of a society in which slavery was just one form of labor, Barbados had developed into a “slave society,” in which slavery was the main source of labor.

  By the mid-1650s, the promise of colonies in the West Indies had become clear. Barbados was now the most profitable of England's colonies, with an output rivalling that of Brazil, the world's largest sugar producer at the time. More sugar colonies would follow. During a naval campaign against the Spanish in 1655, the English navy seized control of the much larger West Indian island of Jamaica and opened the island to English investment. Although investments were initially diversified (including cattle ranching and piracy), the promise of sugar loomed in the island's future. By the eighteenth century Jamaica had overtaken Barbados to become England's pre-eminent sugar producer. Together, the two colonies were extraordinarily profitable.

  The slave system being developed by English planters in Barbados (and simultaneously by French planters in the West Indian islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe) was as cruel and exploitative as any system of labor the world had yet seen. The potential of sugar production to produce enormous profits created incentives for planters to demand maximum labor from their workers, with little concern for their health or safety. Techniques to force slaves to work more rapidly and for longer hours had been initiated in Brazil, which had a mixed labor force of slaves, Indians, and salaried white workers. These techniques were now refined in the Caribbean, where planters relied mostly on imported African slave laborers towards whom they had little sense of moral obligation.16 Slaves in the West Indies were worked in gangs, clearing, tilling, planting, hoeing, and harvesting the cane. Once the cane was harvested, it had to be processed in sugar mills that operated 24 hours a day during the six- to seven-month harvest season. Inside the mills workers faced the constant danger of losing hands or arms in the rolling machinery, or being burned by boiling liquid sugar. Slaves were kept at work for shifts as long as 18 hours a day. Because the profits to be made from sugar were so great, planters devoted few resources to food production, and slaves were chronically malnourished. Enslaved women were not allowed enough time to nurse their infants. Slaves who resisted their owners' demands were brutally punished with floggings and various other forms of physical degradation, including rape.

  As Barbadian planters became increasingly dependent on African slaves, they began to pass laws to secure their rights to slave property, as well as to control the Africans who were coming to outnumber them. In 1661 the Barbados Assembly passed its first slave code, offering extensive legal protections to the owners of slaves. Among other provisions, they obtained a guarantee that a planter or overseer who mutilated or killed his slave in the course of punishment was exempt from legal sanction for his actions. Over time the local government developed other mechanisms for controlling the enslaved population, including the deployment of militias to police slaves' activities, a system requiring passes for slaves to leave their home plantations, the use of capital punishment in case of rebellion, and new legal rules which
had the effect of turning slaves into commodities, with virtually no legal rights. Barbados was quickly developing a social system quite different from those of early Virginia or New Netherland. Its legal rules would effectively prevent enslaved Africans from becoming integrated into the European community by asserting their rights through the courts, being baptized, or earning their freedom. They would be slaves for life, subjected to greater exploitation, harsher discipline, and more vicious degradation than workers in any of the English, Dutch, or French colonies in North America thus far.

  Not surprisingly, living under these conditions without any institutions to protect them, African slaves in Barbados died at a horrific rate. Malnourished, they fell victim to diseases. Birth rates remained chronically low, for although African women survived at a high enough rate to create an even sex ratio by the end of the seventeenth century, their poor nutrition and punishing work routines inhibited fertility. Far more adult slaves were dying than babies were being born.

  The profits being generated by this system were enormous. Sugar went to Europe where it was sold at a high price to eager consumers. Planters needed a constant supply of new slaves from Africa to keep their plantations and sugar mills in operation. And yet much of the profits being produced by the trade in sugar and slaves were going to Dutch merchants, whose ships carried most of the sugar from the West Indies to Europe, and slaves from Africa to the West Indies. This fact escaped the attention of neither English merchants, nor the English government.