USA > Virginia > The planters of colonial Virginia > Part 7
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The colonists found an able defender in the merchant John Bland. In a Remonstrance addressed to the King this man set forth with remarkable clearness the evils which would re- sult from the Navigation Acts, and pleaded for their repeal. The Hollander was already beginning to plant tobacco, he said, and would soon be able to supply all his needs at home. "Will he, after accustomed to the tobacco of his own growth," he asked, "ever regard that which is in Virginia? Will he ever afterwards be induced to fetch it thence, when he finds his profit nigher at home? Will he ever buy that of us, when by passing so many hands, and so much charge contracted thereon, is made so dear, that he can have it cheaper in his own territories? (Surely no.) Therefore it clearly appears, that being so, of necessity we must lose that Trade and Com- merce."
"If the Hollanders must not trade to Virginia, how shall the Planters dispose of their Tobacco? The English will not buy it, for what the Hollander carried thence was a sort of tobacco not desired by any other people, nor used by us in England but merely to transport for Holland. Will it not then perish on the Planters hands? . . . Can it be believed that
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from England more ships will be sent than are able to bring thence what tobacco England will spent? If they do bring more, must they not lose thereby both stock and Block, prin- ciple and charges? The tobacco will not vend in England, the Hollanders will not fetch it from England; what must become thereof ? . . . Is not this a destruction to the commerce? For if men lose their Estates, certainly trade cannot be encreased."8
The enforcement of the trade laws was indirectly the cause of still another misfortune to the colonies, for the two wars with Holland which grew out of it reacted disastrously upon their trade. In fact, on each occasion the small stream of tobacco which had trickled over the dam of restrictions into foreign countries was for a time almost entirely cut off. Not only did the tobacco exports to Holland itself come to an end, but the Dutch war vessels played havoc with the trade between England and other countries and even between England and her colonies.
The loss of their foreign exports was calamitous to the planters. Had the demand for tobacco been more elastic, the consequences might not have been so fatal, for declining prices would have stimulated consumption and made it possible for England to absorb most of the output. But the duty kept up the price and the result was a ruinous glut in the English market. Tobacco sufficient for a continent poured into the kingdom, where since the normal outlet was blocked by the half penny a pound on re-exported leaf, it piled up uselessly.
The effect upon prices was immediate. The planters were forced to take for their crops half of what they had formerly received and had reason for rejoicing if they could dispose of it at all. In 1662 Governor Berkeley and other leading citi- zens stated that the price of tobacco had fallen so low that it would not "bear the charge of freight and customs, answer the adventure, give encouragement to the traders and sub-
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sistence to the inhabitants."9 In 1666 Secretary Thomas Ludwell told Lord Arlington that tobacco was "worth noth-
ing." .">10 Later in the same year the planters complained that the price was so low that they were not able to live by it.11 "For the merchants, knowing both our necessities and the un- consumable quantities of tobacco we had by us," they said, "gave us not the twentieth part of what they sold it for in England."12 Tobacco had so glutted the markets, it was de- clared, and brought the planter so small a return, that he could "live but poorly upon it." In fact, the merchants in 1666 had left the greater part of the two preceding crops upon their hands.13
"Twelve hundred pounds of tobacco is the medium of men's crops," wrote Secretary Ludwell to Lord John Berkeley in 1667, "and half a penny per pound is certainly the full medium of the price given for it, which is fifty shillings out of which when the taxes . . . shall be deducted, is very little to a poor man who hath perhaps a wife and children to cloath and other necessities to buy. Truly so much too little that I can at- tribute it to nothing but the great mercy of God . .. that keeps them from mutiny and confusion."14 The following year he wrote in similar vein. The market was glutted; a third of the planters' tobacco was left on their hands; the rest sold for nothing.15
The Governor and Council declared that the merchant "al- lows not much above a farthing a pound for that which the planter brings to his door. And if there shall be any amongst us who shall be able to ship his tobacco on his own account, it will be at such a rate as the tobacco will never repay him, since they are inforced to pay from £12 to £17 per ton freight, which usually was but at seven pounds."16 "A large part of the people are so desperately poor," wrote Berkeley in 1673, "that they may reasonably be expected upon any small ad-
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vantage of the enemy to revolt to them in hopes of bettering their condition by sharing the plunder of the colony with them."17 That matters had not changed in 1681 is attested by the statement of the Council that the impossibility of dis- posing of their tobacco without a heavy loss overwhelmed both Virginia and Maryland, and brought upon them a "vast poverty and infinite necessity."18 "The low price of tobacco staggers the imagination," Lord Culpeper wrote to Secretary Coventry, "and the continuance of it will be the speedy and fatal ruin of this noble Colony."19
These distressing conditions bore with telling weight upon the small planters. The margin of profit which formerly had made it possible for the freedman to advance rapidly was now wiped out entirely and the poor man found it impossible to keep out of debt. In 1668 Secretary Ludwell declared that no one could longer hope to better himself by planting to- bacco.20 Eight years later Nathaniel Bacon, in justifying his rebellion declared that the small farmers were deeply in debt and that it was "not in the power of labor or industry" to extricate them.21 "The poverty of Virginia is such," said a certain John Good in 1676, "that the major part of the in- habitants can scarce supply their wants from hand to mouth, and many there are besides can hardly shift without supply one year." ''22 In 1673 the Governor and Council reported that of the planters, "at least one third are single persons (whose labor will hardly maintain them) or men much in debt," who might reasonably be expected to revolt to the Dutch upon any small advantage gained by them.23 In 1680 they again re- ported that "the indigency of the Inhabitants is such that they are in noe manner capacitated to support themselves."24 Three years later they wrote that "the people of Virginia are generally, some few excepted, extremely poor, not being able to provide against the pressing necessities of their families."25
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Despite this repeated and explicit testimony of the misery and poverty of the colony during this period, which resulted from the stagnation of the tobacco market after the passage of the Navigation Acts, the surprising statement is made by Mr. George Lewis Beer, in The Old Colonial System, that England's trade restrictions had nothing to do with Bacon's Rebellion. "It has been at various times contended," he says, "that the uprising was, in part at least, one against the laws of trade and navigation. If there had existed in Virginia any widespread and well defined feeling of antagonism to these laws, it would unquestionably have found expression in the county grievances. Most of these reports were drawn up in a number of articles, and in all there were nearly two hundred of such separate subdivisions, yet only three of this number refer in any way to these statutes. There is no valid reason for assuming that the commercial system played any part whatsoever, or was in any degree, an issue, in the upheaval of 1676."26
If by this statement it is meant that Bacon and his men did not rebel in order to force the repeal of the Navigation Acts, or even that they did not have the acts in mind at the time, there are many students of Virginia history who will agree with it. But if Mr. Beer means that these laws, with their baleful effect upon the prosperity of Virginia, did not produce the conditions fundamental to the rising, he is certainly wrong. The evidence is overwhelming.
Surely no one will deny that misery, poverty and nakedness are breeders of sedition. Had it not been for the Navigation Acts there would not have been so many desperate persons in Virginia ready at any excuse to fly in the face of the Govern- ment. Bacon's men were just the type of miserably poor free- men that Berkeley several years before had feared would rebel. He himself, in his proclamation of Feb. 10, 1677, spoke of
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them as "men of mean and desperate fortunes."27 William Sherwood called the rebels rude and indigent persons, allud- ing to them as "tag, rag and bobtayle."28 Over and over again they are described as the multitude, the rabble, the skum.
Exception must be taken also to the statement that had there existed in Virginia any well-defined feeling of antagon- ism to the Navigation Acts it would have found expression in the county grievances. It should be remembered that these reports had been called for by the commissioners sent over by Charles II to investigate the troubles. The men who drew them up occupied the position of defeated rebels, and the grievances were primarily a list of excuses for their treason. They all stood trembling for their property, if they had any, and for their miserable lives. The memory of the fate of Drummond and Bland and Arnold and many others of their fellow rebels was fresh in their minds. It is not reasonable to suppose that they would tell the King that they had risen in arms against his authority in order to secure the overthrow of laws which his Majesty considered of such vital importance, laws which concerned intimately the royal revenue. Such a declaration would not have seconded successfully their plea for mercy. This is made amply clear by the reception accorded one of the few complaints which did actually touch the Navi- gation Acts. The commissioners report it to the King as "an extravagant request for liberty to transport their tobacco to any of his Majesty's plantations without paying the imposts, payable by act of Parliament, etc. This head is wholly muti- nous-to desire a thing contrary to his Majesty's royal pleas- ure and benefit and also against an act of Parliament."29
Despite the obviously ruinous effects of the Navigation Acts upon Virginia, Mr. Beer makes the assertion that there was no very serious and general opposition to them in Virginia. "Apart from the criticisms of Bland and Berkeley," he says,
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"there was virtually no complaint against the system of trade enjoined by the Navigation Acts. While the Barbados As- sembly and that colony's governors were vociferous in their protests, the Virginia legislature remained strangely mute."30
This silence on the part of the Virginia Assembly can by no means be interpreted as an indication that the people of the colony felt the Navigation Acts to be equitable and not in- jurious to their interests. It meant only that no Assembly under Sir William Berkeley would dare protest against an act which had received the royal sanction. That would have seemed the veriest treason to the fiery old loyalist. And the Assembly was entirely under Sir William's control. The mem- bers of both Houses were his creatures and his henchmen. Over and over again it is testified that the Assembly did noth- ing more than register his will.31 If then it did not pro- test, it was because Sir William did not wish it to protest.
But this does not prove that the planters were not angered and alarmed at the stringent acts. That they considered them baleful is amply proved by their continuous complaints of the economic ruin which had overtaken the colony. The method they chose of combatting the trade laws, a method apt to be far more effective than the angry protests of the Barbados Assembly, was to send the Governor to England to use his influence at Court to have the acts modified or repealed. And Berkeley did what he could. While in England he wrote a paper called A Discourse and View of Virginia, which he hoped would induce the Government to change its policy in regard to the colonies. "Wee cannot but resent," he said, "that 40,000 people should be impoverished to enrich little more than 40 merchants, who being the whole buyers of our tobacco, give us what they please for it. And after it is here sell as they please, and indeed have 40,000 servants in us at cheaper rates, than other men have slaves, for they find them
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meat and drink and clothes. We furnish ourselves and their seamen with meat and drink, and all our sweat and labor as they order us, will hardly procure us coarse clothes to keep us from the extremities of heat and cold."32 That Sir William was but the mouthpiece of the colony in this protest there can be no doubt.
But his pleadings were in vain. England would not change the laws which were the expression of her settled colonial policy. The planters must adjust themselves to changed con- ditions no matter how bitter was the experience. Sir Wil- liam was told to go home to report to the Virginians that they need not kick against the pricks, but that England would be most pleased could they turn from the all-absorbing culture of tobacco to the production of the raw materials she so greatly desired. And Berkeley did return determined to exert every effort to lead the colonists into new prosperity by inducing them to devote a part of their energies to basic commodities. In fact he promised that in seven years he would flood the British market with new Virginia goods.33
Although he set to work with his accustomed vigor to make good this boast, he met with but scant success. Lack of effi- cient and skilled labor, high wages, and not very favorable natural conditions, made it impossible for him to compete with the long-established industries of Europe. After a few years all attempts to make silk and potash and naval stores were abandoned, and the planters continued to put their trust in tobacco.
That Berkeley was never persuaded that the Navigation Acts were just or beneficial is shown by his answer to the query of the Lords of Trade in 1671, when they asked him what impediments there were to the colony's trade. "Mighty and destructive," he replied, "by that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having any commerce with any na-
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tion in Europe but our own, so that we cannot add to our plantation any commodity that grows out of it . . . for it is not lawful for us to carry a pipe-staff or a bushel of corn to any place in Europe out of the King's dominions. If this were for his Majesty's service or the good of his subjects we should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it. But on my soul it is the contrary of both."35
Nor is this the only direct testimony that the colonists were filled with bitterness against the Navigation Acts. In 1673, during the war with Holland, Sir John Knight declared that "the planters there do generally desire a trade with the Dutch and all other nations, and speak openly there that they are in the nature of slaves, so that the hearts of the greatest part of them are taken away from his Majesty and consequently his Majesty's best, greatest and richest plantation is in danger, with the planters' consent, to fall into the enemy's hands, if not timely prevented."36 This is corroborated by the Council itself, in an official letter to the King. "For in this very con- juncture had the people had a distasteful Governor," they wrote, "they would have hazarded the loss of this Country, and the rather because they doe believe their Condicon would not be soe bad under the Dutch in Point of Traffique as it is under the Merchants who now use them hardly, even to extremity."37
It is evident, then, that throughout the entire reign of Charles II the unhappy effects of the trade restrictions made of Virginia, which formerly had been the land of opportunity for the poor man, a place of suffering, poverty and discontent. The indentured servant who came over after 1660 found con- ditions in the colony hardly more favorable for his advance- ment than in England. The price of tobacco was now so low that it was not possible for a man, by his unassisted efforts, to make a profit by its cultivation. If Thomas Ludewell is cor- rect in estimating the return from the average crop at fifty
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shillings, the lot of the poor man must have been hard indeed. Hungry he need not be, for food continued to be abundant and easy to obtain, but of all that the merchants gave him in re- turn for his tobacco-clothing, farm implements, household furnishings-he had to content himself with the scantiest sup- ply. And only too often his pressing needs brought him into hopeless debt. As for imitating his predecessors of the earlier period in saving money, purchasing land and servants and becoming a substantial citizen, the task was well nigh impos- sible of accomplishment.
It would be expected, then, that even the most exhaustive investigation could reveal but a few indentured servants, com- ing over after 1660, who succeeded in establishing themselves in the Virginia yeomanry. And such, indeed, is the case. Fortunately we have at hand for the period in question the means of determining this matter with an exactness impos- sible for the first half of the century. Nicholson's rent roll of 1704 supplies a complete list, with the exception of those in the Northern Neck, of every landowner in Virginia. At the same time we have in the Land Office at Richmond, the names of many thousands of persons listed as headrights, constituting almost all the immigrants who came in during the years from 1666 to the end of the century. Thus by comparing the two lists and trying to identify on the rent roll the names found in the patents, it is possible to fix the proportion of servants who won for themselves at this time places among the landowning class.
Selecting the year 1672 as typical of the Restoration period, we find that an examination of 672 of the names which are listed as headrights, eleven only can be identified with any de- gree of certainty upon the rent roll. Of 1116 names examined in the years from 1671 to 1674 inclusive, only 26 are positively those of persons listed as landowners in 1704. After making
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due allowance for the fact that uncertainty exists in a number of other cases, and that some who prospered must have died in the intervening years, it is safe to say that not more than five or six per cent of the indentured servants of this period succeeded in establishing themselves as independent planters.
These conclusions are borne out by the slowness with which the population increased during the years following the pas- sage of the Navigation Acts. In the Commonwealth period the colony had advanced by leaps and bounds, and the inhabi- tants, estimated at 15,000 in 1649,38 were placed by Berkeley thirteen years later at 40,000.39 Under the system which ex- isted during these years, when the colonists enjoyed a compar- atively free trade, the population had tripled. But after 1660, while the Virginia tobacco was dumped upon the restricted English market and prices fell lower and lower, no such rapid growth is noted. In 1671, nine years after his first estimate, Governor Berkeley still placed the population at 40,000.40 And even if we accept the statement of the Virginia agents sent to England to secure a charter for the colony that in 1675 the number of inhabitants was 50,000, it is evident that some pernicious influence was at work to retard the development of England's most important American province.41 A drop in the rate of increase from 200 per cent during the thirteen years prior to 1662, to 25 per cent in the thirteen years fol- lowing, is a clear index to the startling change brought about in the colony by the British trade regulations.
These figures are the more significant in that there was no appreciable slackening of the stream of servants. It is prob- able that in the period from 1662 to 1675, which marked this estimated increase of 10,000 persons, fully 20,000 immigrants had come to the colony.42 The patent rolls for 1674 alone give the names of 1931 headrights, and this year is by no means exceptional. No wonder Edward Randolph was sur-
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prised at the smallness of the population and wrote to the Board of Trade that it should be investigated why Virginia had not grown more, "considering what vast numbers of ser- vants and others had been transported thither."43
But Randolph failed to realize that it is not the volume of immigration but the number of people a country will support which in the end determines the size of the population. It was not enough to pour into the colony tens of thousands of poor settlers; opportunity had also to be afforded them for earn- ing an adequate living. And this opportunity, because of the enforcement of the Navigation Acts and the consequent ruin of trade, they did not have in Virginia. Throughout the Restoration period not more than forty or fifty thousand people could exist upon the returns from the tobacco crop, and beyond that the population could hardly rise. If more poured in, they must of necessity live in misery and rags, or migrate to other colonies where more favorable conditions existed.
We are not at present concerned with what become of this surplus population, but only with the fact that the Navigation Acts brought to a dead halt the process of moulding freedmen and other poor settlers into a prosperous yeomanry. By the year 1660 this class seems to have reached its highest develop- ment, and had a rent roll of land owners been drawn up at that date it would doubtless have shown almost as many names as that of 1704. In fact it is fortunate that in the bitter years from 1660 to 1685 it did not succumb entirely. With the price of tobacco so low that no profit was to be derived from it, with his family in rags, the small planter might well have sold his land to his more wealthy neighbor and joined the newly freed servants in moving on to western Carolina or to the northern colonies.
In fact it is an indication of the solid character of the Vir-
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ginia yeomanry that it survived to enter the Eighteenth cen- tury, that under Andros and Nicholson as well as under Sir William Berkeley it was the soundest element in the life of the colony. Had it not been for the crowning misfortune of the introduction of great swarms of negro slaves, sooner or later it would have come once more into its own, would have carved out for itself a new prosperity, would have filled Vir- ginia from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies.
CHAPTER VI
THE YEOMAN IN VIRGINIA HISTORY
PERHAPS it would have been impossible for the Virginia yeo- man to survive the dark days of the Restoration period had it not been for the fact that in the matter of his food supply he was independent of England and her vexatious trade restric- tions. He might be in rags, but there was no reason why he should ever feel the pangs of hunger. Seldom in any climate, in any age has food existed in such extraordinary variety and in such lavish abundance.
Almost every planter, even the poorest, was possessed of cattle. The Perfect Discription states that in 1649 there were in the colony "of Kine, Oxen, Bulls, Calves, twenty thousand, large and good."1 Fifteen years later the number had in- creased to 100,000.2 Many a little farmer, too poor to afford the help of a servant or a slave, had cattle more than sufficient for his every need. John Splitimber, a planter of meagre means, died in 1677 owning eight cows and one bull.3 John Gray, whose entire personal estate was valued only at 9,340 pounds of tobacco, possessed at his death six cows, six calves, two steers and one heifer.4 The inventory of the goods of Richard Avery, another poor planter, shows three steers, one heifer, three small cattle and one calf.5 The yeoman not only secured from these animals a goodly supply of beef, but milk in abundance from which he made butter and cheese. The steers he used as beasts of burden.
The meat which most frequently appeared upon the table of the poor man was that of swine. The planter marked his hogs and turned them loose in the woods to feed upon roots
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and acorns. On the other hand, sheep did not multiply in the colony, for the woods were not suited for their maintenance, and those areas which had been cleared of trees could more profitably be utilized for agriculture than for pasture lands. Mutton was a rare delicacy even with the well-to-do.6
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