Colonial America
Page 25
To ensure that aristocrats and landed gentlemen could exert sufficient influence to guarantee social stability, the Fundamental Constitutions created a pyramidal landholding structure. Carolina was to be divided into two provinces, Albemarle and Clarendon, each comprising a number of counties. Each proprietor would own 12,000 acres in every county. Next in rank would be a landgrave, who would possess four baronies of 12,000 acres each, followed by two caciques, holding two baronies apiece. The landgraves and caciques would constitute the nobility. After them would come the lords of the manor, each with 3,000 to 12,000 acres, followed by the rest of the freeholders, who collectively would own three-fifths of the land.
Shaftesbury and Locke were seemingly influenced here by the writings of James Harrington, who argued that the English Civil War had occurred because of an imbalance between the landed classes, though Harrington favored the gentry and yeomanry over the aristocracy or monarchy as bulwarks of stability. Shaftesbury and Locke apparently believed that their pyramidal structure would achieve the same effect, creating a gentry along with a large yeoman class whose members would share a commitment to upholding property rights.7
The authors realized that the Fundamental Constitutions could not be implemented immediately in an infant colony. Accordingly they issued a set of temporary laws, restricting the initial size of the baronies until enough settlers had arrived to make the scheme workable. The expectation was that each barony would contain between 15 and 30 persons within seven years.
The first batch of settlers left England in August 1669 in three ships, financed by a contribution of £500 from each proprietor. They arrived off the Ashley River in April 1670, after journeying by way of Barbados where additional settlers were recruited. An immediate start was made clearing a site on the south bank for the building of a stockade around the principal settlement of Charles Town. Two years later the settlement had 271 men and 69 women, but this number was not nearly enough to implement the Fundamental Constitutions, since there were as yet no caciques or lords of the manor and only one landgrave – Sir John Yeamans, the governor. Nevertheless, Yeamans summoned the first parliament in July 1671 and began implementing a survey. Squares of 12,000 acres were marked along the Ashley River: six for the people, two for the proprietors, and two for the nobility.
From the start, the plan was unworkable. A number of landgraves and caciques were created, but most grantees lacked sufficient labor or capital to develop agricultural enterprises on a large scale. In 1682 all free inhabitants were promised a headright of 50 acres, including servants on the expiry of their service. The only charge would be a quitrent of one penny an acre. Yet most settlers resented paying even this, given that the proprietors were absentee landlords, and responded by refusing to take the oath acknowledging the Fundamental Constitutions.8
Finding a profitable commodity around which to build the colony was a major challenge. Silk, olives, oranges, wine, and cotton all were tried without success. A few individuals prospered raising cattle and hogs, which they could sell to planters and pirates in the Caribbean. Corn, peas, lumber, tar, and pitch could also be profitably sold. The Barbadians had brought some African slaves with them, assuming from the outset that slave labor would be their primary labor source. However, without a profitable commodity to justify their purchase and transportation costs, Africans were not imported in large numbers. Those who lived in the colony generally worked as cowboys or farmhands, and had considerable freedom compared to slaves in the Caribbean. The proprietors' hopes of a stable society of planters growing exotic export commodities appeared to have stalled.
To sustain their economy, the settlers instead took advantage of the local Indians' willingness to trade. The area was rich in game, especially deer. Some local Indians had already begun trading with settlers from Virginia, obtaining European trade goods in exchange for deerskins – and more ominously, captives from other tribes whom they sold as slaves, either to Caribbean planters or to other colonists on the mainland. The proprietors sought to prohibit settlers from engaging in trade, arguing that an unlicensed trade would alienate the Westos, a small tribe living in the area whose friendship was essential to the colony. The proprietors also ordered the governor and parliament to ban the enslavement of Indians.
The proprietors' edicts went unheeded. The governor and parliament objected that the proprietors were trying to engross the one profitable activity in Clarendon province. For their part, the governor and parliament prohibited ordinary settlers from engaging in trade with the Indians, but indulged in it themselves, especially in the sale of Indian captives as slaves. The result of this conflict between the proprietors and the officials they had appointed to govern on their behalf was to encourage wild, unregulated competition in the Indian trade, with tragic consequences for the Indians. The parliamentary faction initially encouraged members of a small local tribe called the Cusabos to make war on the more powerful Westos. But after achieving a settlement in that conflict, they encouraged the Westos to capture and enslave the Cusabos, as well as other tribes in the region. Meanwhile settlers excluded from the slave trade simply began trading with other nations hostile to the Westos. After the Westos' defeat in 1680, the parliamentary faction began trading with the Savannah people (over the objection of the proprietors).
Parliamentary opposition to the will of the proprietors came mostly from Barbadians, men who had come to Carolina not to advance some utopian vision but to get rich. Yeamans himself was typical of their kind – aggressive, resourceful, and determined to make his fortune. The proprietors lacked the political will to stop them. Significantly, instead of persisting in their efforts to ban the Indian slave trade, in 1683 the proprietors called for the creation of a licensing system to verify that captives being sold as slaves had been taken lawfully, in wars the English considered to be just. The result of the licensing system, in the long run, was not to curtail the trade, but rather to encourage settlers to pay Indians to start wars so they could obtain more slaves.9
In 1680 the main settlement – hereafter referred to as Charleston – was moved to the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, a much healthier site open to the Atlantic breezes. The population of Charleston at this time was about 300. It remained a small struggling outpost. The colony's settlers experimented with different types of food production, raising corn as well as other crops, along with hogs and cattle. Hogs and cattle did particularly well, since they did not have to be killed in winter, and planters from Clarendon County could export them to the West Indies, where the Barbadians exchanged their provisions for sugar. With so much to be gained from the Indian trade in deerskins and slaves, the search for a staple crop was not urgent.
Nevertheless, investors continued to look for alternative ways to make money. Exports of lumber and naval stores were clearly growing by 1690. In addition, between 1690 and 1700 they began to develop a new staple crop: rice. Sometime in the 1670s, a few individuals had apparently experimented with cultivating rice, and by the 1690s planters were beginning to grow the crop for export. Historians disagree about who was most responsible for this development. Some argue that the first cultivators of rice were probably West African slaves growing the grain for their own consumption, after it had been brought on an African slave ship. People from certain regions of West Africa had a great deal of experience with rice cultivation in swampy lowlands. Other historians believe it more likely that white South Carolinian planters experimented with rice cultivation first, then ordered African slaves to begin growing the plant on a regular basis. Given the nature of the evidence it may never be possible to pinpoint the precise origins of rice in the Carolina low country, but it is clear that by 1699 South Carolina planters had begun to export a substantial quantity of rice, using African slave labor. Over the next few decades, South Carolina's economy would increasingly rely on imported African slaves to grow and process rice for export. By 1720 rice had become its main staple commodity.10
If the province of Clarendon took some t
ime to develop a stable economy and become profitable to the proprietors, Albemarle to the north took even longer. Beginning in 1664, Governor Berkeley of Virginia had sought to control the area, and issued a number of permits guaranteeing the holders their lands on the same terms as in Virginia. Other settlers simply bought titles from the local inhabitants without regard to the proprietors' rights. To prevent further chaos, in 1667 the Carolina proprietors nominated a governor with instructions to appoint a surveyor to sell lands, reserving to the proprietors a quitrent of one halfpenny an acre and 50 percent of all precious metals. Freedom of conscience was guaranteed and an assembly was to be created, with the sole right to raise taxes and to make laws, provided they were consistent with the laws of England and did not contravene the interests of the proprietors. Although the proprietors expected Albemarle to conform to the Fundamental Constitution, it soon became clear that Albemarle was too remote to offer much profit and the proprietors concentrated their limited resources on Clarendon instead.
Since most of Albemarle's settlers were from Virginia, it quickly took on the appearance of that colony. The settlement's main activity was subsistence farming, supplemented by the production of a little surplus tobacco and corn, which were sold to passing New England traders. Albemarle itself had little institutional cohesion, since it contained no towns and few churches. The governor on Roanoke Island had to shift for himself with the aid of a motley council. The one institution which did thrive was the assembly, because the inhabitants were familiar with Virginia's House of Burgesses.
The settlers in general quite failed to comprehend the proprietary system, except to recognize that it was incompatible with their existing land titles. They also resented the demand for quitrents and were further irritated by the passage of the 1673 Navigation Act, which threatened to stifle the province's small trade. The result was a climate of instability.
The governor in 1673 was John Jenkins, one of the early settlers from Virginia. He and other leading planters, notably John Culpepper and George Durant, were especially unhappy about the new trade laws. This group was opposed by another faction, led by Thomas Miller and Thomas Eastchurch, which succeeded in persuading the proprietors to transfer authority to them by appointing them governor and collector of customs. Miller's faction then began confiscating his opponents' property as punishment for contravening the 1673 act, provoking an uprising by Culpepper's faction in December 1677. Miller was seized, while Culpepper, with the support of the assembly, established his own government before going to England to defend his actions.
Since Culpepper and his followers had not overtly challenged the authority of the king or the proprietors, they were exonerated, and calm returned to the province. But the incident underlined the weakness of proprietary government. It was the proprietors' poor judgment in appointing Jenkins and Miller which had sparked off the trouble in the first place. Then they had passively watched as the struggle unfolded. Mercifully, bloodshed had been avoided, a remarkable achievement in light of the fact that Virginia to the north had just emerged from a bloody civil war.
1. The term “mercantilism” was first used by Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations, published, ironically, in 1776. Before this, contemporaries referred either to the navigation laws, plantation duties, or acts of trade. Historians, following Smith, have traditionally seen mercantilism as a monolithic system with a coherent philosophy. However, as Joyce Oldham Appleby shows in Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), English economic thought was anything but coherent during the seventeenth century. Arguments favoring free trade were common before the 1670s and it was only at the end of the century that theorists began to advocate restrictions on the outflow of gold and silver. Heretofore, regulation was largely the result of uncoordinated pressure, often from competing interest groups. Among these were a group of new merchants who pressed for trade regulations to promote their interests against the Dutch, and government officials who sought new sources of revenue. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, 1993), and Michael Braddick, Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996).
2. On the decline in Dutch women's legal status under English law, see David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca, 1992) and Deborah Rosen, “Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York,” William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (2003), 355–82.
3. The correspondence is published in Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen, eds, The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis of 1689 (Chapel Hill, 1964).
4. While past historians have tended to emphasize the expansion of individual rights and liberties created by these political reforms, recent studies, often benefiting from their authors' ability to use sources written in Dutch, have shown that the imposition of English law created losses as well as gains. On the trauma of the English takeover for an ordinary Dutchman, see Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, 1999). Studies emphasizing the declining status of Dutch women are cited above, in n. 2.
5. For further information on Anglo-Spanish relations at this time, see Chapter 15, section 1.
6. For this emphasis on the proprietors' idealized vision of a stable, rural society, see S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
7. For the full text of the Fundamental Constitutions, see Kavenagh, Documentary History, Vol. 3, 1761–74. Harrington's book Oceana was first published in 1656.
8. The settlers' attitude stymied the whole scheme, since the proprietors had accepted that their system of government could be considered lawful only after it had been ratified by the people as part of an original compact. This provision foreshadowed Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690) in which he argued that government must be based on a contract reflecting the consent of the people.
9. Historians once treated the Indian slave trade as tragic but incidental to the long-term development of Carolina's economy. Recent work, however, suggests it played a central role in ensuring Carolina's eventual success, providing the main source of capital necessary to develop a plantation economy. On the slave trade and its importance, see Allan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, 2002).
10. The theory that African slaves played a major role in the introduction of rice cultivation was advanced by Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), and further developed by Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981), and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origin of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Some historians have recently challenged the “black rice” thesis, arguing on the basis of demographic evidence about the origins of slaves that it was unlikely for a group of skilled rice-growing slaves to have arrived in South Carolina from the main rice-cultivating regions of West Africa between 1671 and 1700. See David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1329–58. This argument is challenged by Gwendolyn Hall, “Africa and Africans in the African Diaspora: The Uses of Relational Databases,” American Historical Review, 115 (2010), 136–50. S. Max Edelson, “Beyond Black Rice: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture,” American Historical Review, 115 (2010), 125–35, argues that the introduction of rice may be best understood as the product of informal exchanges between Africans and Englishmen in an undeveloped frontier economy.
Chapter 7
The Later Years of Charles II
1660 Sir William
Berkeley is restored as governor of Virginia.
1662 The Congregational Church agrees to the Half-Way Covenant.
1673 Virginia land rights are awarded to Lords Culpepper and Arlington. The Lawne's Creek protest takes place.
1675 King Philip's (Metacom's) War breaks out in New England; Northfield is abandoned. The Privy Council sets up a committee for supervising the colonies. Englishmen attack Doegs and Susquehannocks in the Chesapeake.
1676 Bacon's Rebellion is quashed. King Philip is defeated. William Penn and other Quakers purchase West New Jersey.
1679–81 In the Exclusion crisis in England the Whigs attempt to bar James, duke of York from the succession.
1680 New Hampshire becomes a royal colony.
1681 Penn is granted a charter to establish Pennsylvania. Edward Randolph is appointed customs collector for New England.
1682 Philadelphia is founded.
Plant cutter riots break out in Gloucester County, Virginia.
1686 The first German Pietists arrive in Pennsylvania.
1689 The Keithian Schism divides Quakers in Pennsylvania.
1 Virginia: Bacon's Rebellion and Its Aftermath
Thanks to their achievement of economic self-sufficiency, guarantees of voting rights to freemen, and (after 1646) the defeat of the Powhatan Indians, English settler societies in the Chesapeake had survived and begun at last to generate revenue for the English Crown. Yet these successes did not yet mean that social and political stability had been achieved. Tensions continued to erupt during much of the seventeenth century between the settlers and the native peoples upon whose lands they had encroached. Meanwhile new conflicts developed between ordinary settlers and governing elites, and structural problems with colonial governing systems often prevented those conflicts from being resolved. In 1676 these sources of tension came together to produce one of the most dramatic uprisings in the colonies in England's oldest, most valuable, and loyal colony, Virginia.