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American Negro Slavery. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
Читать онлайн.Название American Negro Slavery
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isbn 4057664098917
Автор произведения Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
To establish a firmer control, Sir Thomas Dale was sent out in 1611 as high marshal along with Sir Thomas Gates as governor. Both of these were men of military training, and they carried with them a set of stringent regulations quite in keeping with their personal proclivities. These rulers properly regarded their functions as more industrial than political. They for the first time distributed the colonists into a series of settlements up and down the river for farming and live-stock tending; they spurred the willing workers by assigning them three-acre private gardens; and they mercilessly coerced the laggard. They transformed the colony from a distraught camp into a group of severely disciplined farms, owned by the London Company, administered by its officials, and operated partly by its servants, partly by its tenants who paid rent in the form of labor. That is to say, Virginia was put upon a schedule of plantation routine, producing its own food supply and wanting for the beginning of prosperity only a marketable crop. This was promptly supplied through John Rolfe's experiment in 1612 in raising tobacco. The English people were then buying annually some £200,000 worth of that commodity, mainly from the Spanish West Indies, at prices which might be halved or quartered and yet pay the freight and yield substantial earnings; and so rapid was the resort to the staple in Virginia that soon the very market place in Jamestown was planted in it. The government in fact had to safeguard the food supply by forbidding anyone to plant tobacco until he had put two acres in grain.
When the Gates-Dale administration ended, the seven year period from 1609 was on the point of expiry; but the temptation of earnings from tobacco persuaded the authorities to delay the land dividend. Samuel Argall, the new governor, while continuing the stringent discipline, robbed the company for his own profit; and the news of his misdeeds reaching London in 1618 discredited the faction in the company which had supported his régime. The capture of control by the liberal element among the stockholders, led by Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton, was promptly signalized by measures for converting Virginia into a commonwealth. A land distribution was provided on a generous scale, and Sir George Yeardley was dispatched as governor with instructions to call a representative assembly of the people to share in the making of laws. The land warrants were issued at the rate of a hundred acres on each share of stock and a similar amount to each colonist of the time, to be followed in either case by the grant of a second hundred acres upon proof that the first had been improved; and fifty acres additional in reward for the future importation of every laborer.
While the company continued as before to send colonists on its own account, notably craftsmen, indigent London children, and young women to become wives for the bachelor settlers, it now offered special stimulus to its members to supplement its exertions. To this end it provided that groups of its stockholders upon organizing themselves into sub-companies or partnerships might consolidate their several grants into large units called particular plantations; and it ordered that "such captaines or leaders of perticulerr plantations that shall goe there to inhabite by vertue of their graunts and plant themselves, their tenants and servants in Virginia, shall have liberty till a forme of government be here settled for them, associatinge unto them divers of the gravest and discreetes of their companies, to make orders, ordinances and constitutions for the better orderinge and dyrectinge of their servants and buisines, provided they be not repugnant to the lawes of England."[3]
[Footnote 3: Records of the Virginia Company of London, Kingsbury ed. (Washington, 1906), I, 303.]
To embrace this opportunity some fifty grants for particular plantations were taken out during the remaining life of the London Company. Among them were Southampton Hundred and Martin's Hundred, to each of which two or three hundred settlers were sent prior to 1620,[4] and Berkeley Hundred whose records alone are available. The grant for this last was issued in February, 1619, to a missionary enthusiast, George Thorpe, and his partners, whose collective holdings of London Company stock amounted to thirty-five shares. To them was given and promised land in proportion to stock and settlers, together with a bonus of 1500 acres in view of their project for converting the Indians. Their agent in residence was as usual vested with public authority over the dwellers on the domain, limited only by the control of the Virginia government in military matters and in judicial cases on appeal.[5] After delays from bad weather, the initial expedition set sail in September comprising John Woodleaf as captain and thirty-four other men of diverse trades bound to service for terms ranging from three to eight years at varying rates of compensation. Several of these were designated respectively as officers of the guard, keeper of the stores, caretaker of arms and implements, usher of the hall, and clerk of the kitchen. Supplies of provisions and equipment were carried, and instructions in detail for the building of houses, the fencing of land, the keeping of watch, and the observances of religion. Next spring the settlement, which had been planted near the mouth of the Appomattox River, was joined by Thorpe himself, and in the following autumn by William Tracy who had entered the partnership and now carried his own family together with a preacher and some forty servants. Among these were nine women and the two children of a man who had gone over the year before. As giving light upon indented servitude in the period it may be noted that many of those sent to Berkeley Hundred were described as "gentlemen," and that five of them within the first year besought their masters to send them each two indented servants for their use and at their expense. Tracy's vessel however was too small to carry all whom it was desired to send. It was in fact so crowded with plantation supplies that Tracy wrote on the eve of sailing: "I have throw out mani things of my own yet is ye midill and upper extre[m]li pestered so that ouer men will not lie like men and ye mareners hath not rome to stir God is abel in ye gretest weknes to helpe we will trust to marsi for he must help be yond hope." Fair winds appear to have carried the vessel to port, whereupon Tracy and Thorpe jointly took charge of the plantation, displacing Woodleaf whose services had given dissatisfaction. Beyond this point the records are extremely scant; but it may be gathered that the plantation was wrecked and most of its inhabitants, including Thorpe, slain in the great Indian massacre of 1622. The restoration of the enterprise was contemplated in an after year, but eventually the land was sold to other persons.
[Footnote 4: Records of the Virginia Company of London, Kingsbury ed. (Washington, 1906), I, 350.]
[Footnote 5: The records of this enterprise (the Smyth of Nibley papers) have been printed in the New York Public Library Bulletin, III, 160–171, 208–233, 248–258, 276–295.]
The fate of Berkeley Hundred was at the same time the fate of most others of the same sort; and the extinction of the London Company in 1624 ended the granting of patents on that plan. The owners of the few surviving particular plantations, furthermore, found before long that ownership by groups of absentees was poorly suited to the needs of the case, and that the exercise of public jurisdiction was of more trouble than it was worth. The particular plantation system proved accordingly but an episode, yet it furnished a transition, which otherwise might not readily have been found, from Virginia the plantation of the London Company, to Virginia the colony of private plantations and farms. When settlement expanded afresh after the Indians were driven away many private estates gradually arose to follow the industrial routine of those which had been called particular.
The private plantations were hampered in their development by dearth of capital and labor and by the extremely low prices of tobacco which began at the end of the sixteen-twenties as a consequence of overproduction. But by dint of good management and the diversification of their industry the exceptional men led the way to prosperity and the dignity which it carried. Of Captain Samuel Matthews, for example, "an old Planter of above thirty years standing,"