Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

I

Those who looked to America for great financial profit or immediate political advantage were disappointed. The seventeenth century had run half its course before the colonies became an important asset to the English Government: no gold came from them to enrich its treasury, few supplies to furnish its navy, while the revenue, derived from its slowly growing trade was insignificant. Equally deceptive was the New World as a field for corporate exploitation. The sagacity of Thomas Smythe and the idealism of Edwin Sandys were alike unavailing. Before the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624 it had sunk nearly two hundred thousand pounds in its venture "withoutt returne either of profitt or of any part of the principall"; and in 1660 Lord Baltimore, whose colony was well established, was himself living in straitened circumstances.

Yet within sixty years after the Susan Constant entered the James River, seven colonies were firmly planted on the coast of North America: Virginia and Maryland to the south; Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, Connecticut and Rhode Island, in New England; and between the two groups of English settlements was the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the Hudson. Within the limits of these colonies dwelt a population of more than seventy thousand people, economically self-sufficing, possessed of well-defined political institutions and clearly marked types of social and intellectual life. The English migration and the founding of the English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in America were different from those which statesmen and traders had imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the wilderness, and by the wilderness itself—the circumstances which, in the new country, closed them round.

The motives which induced many Englishmen to come to America in the seventeenth century must be sought in the profound social changes occurring in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts. The high hopes with which the Virginia Company looked forward to successful colonization were partly inspired by the prevailing belief that England was overpopulated. There was much to justify the belief. The reign of Elizabeth witnessed a striking increase in the number of unemployed, the poverty-stricken, and the vagabond. The destruction of the monasteries left the poor and defenseless without their accustomed sources of relief; while steadily rising prices, due partly to the increased supply of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves, "rogues and sturdy beggars."

That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful colonization, said the author of Nova Britannia in 1609, but two things are essential, people and money; and "for the first wee need not doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions." Yet for more than a decade one of the chief difficulties of the Virginia Company was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had "to take any that could be got of any sort on any terms." Little wonder that the colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the regulations of martial law.

The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock régime; for "when our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how." The first step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir Thomas Dale "allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of farms." It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most honest men, when working for the company, "would take so much pains in a weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day." The first general distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the "head right" was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one to five shillings was usually sufficient to secure title to fifty acres, and in 1705 the practice was legalized. Titles so secured were burdened with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never paid.

A greater incentive to settlement than free land was the discovery of a crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been anticipated, and in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing the leaf, sold a cargo of native tobacco in London at a profit, the future of Virginia was assured. Neither the plans of the company nor the scruples of the king could prevail against the force of economic self-interest. Twenty thousand pounds were exported in 1619, forty thousand in 1622, sixty thousand in 1624. Tobacco became at once, and in spite of long opposition on the part of the home Government remained, the chief enterprise of the colony. Virginia was founded on tobacco, and like the other Southern colonies, sacrificed everything to the raising of her most important commodity; and for Virginia, as for the other Southern colonies, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of her great staple were of determining influence in the development of her social institutions.

Those who were interested in the Virginia Company loudly proclaimed that the recall of the charter would ruin the colony. But it was population, rather than corporate or royal control, that Virginia needed, and the profits from tobacco proved a more powerful incentive to large families and immigration than all the efforts of king or company. Within a decade after 1624 the number of settlers increased from 1232 to 5000. In 1649 the population had reached 15,000, and in 1670 it stood at 38,000. Land was virtually free to those who could pay for the cost of clearing, and the rich soil of the tide-water bottoms assured an easy living and the prospect of accumulating a competence. As the conditions of life grew easier, the Virginians, with the true instinct of frontiersmen, described America as God's country, abounding in every good thing: "Seldom any that hath continued in Virginia any time will or do desire to live in England, but put back with what expedition they can." The glowing accounts which reached England appealed to those of every class whose straitened circumstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and whose children would always remain yeomen; the lawyer and the physician, the merchant and the clergyman, ambitious to become landowners and play the gentleman; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were no assured avenues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World. Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of economic and social enfranchisement.

Since the main road to wealth and influence in Virginia was the raising of tobacco, every emigrant with capital to invest at once became a landowner; and the conditions of tobacco-planting disposed him to enlarge his estate as rapidly as possible. It is true that one advantage of tobacco over other products was its high acreage value. But the price ordinarily was low, and many acres were necessary for large net returns. Besides, the soil was soon exhausted, so that the successful planter found it necessary to be always acquiring new land in order to let the old lie fallow. It thus happened that, in spite of the cost of clearing and the danger from the Indians, Virginia was not settled, as its founders had intended, in compact towns modeled upon the English borough, but in widely separated plantation groups, stretching far up on both sides of the James River. The average size of patents granted before 1649 was about four hundred and fifty acres; in the period between 1666 and 1679 the average had risen to nearly nine hundred, while there were ten patents ranging from ten to twenty thousand acres each. By 1685 a total population not exceeding that of the London parish of Stepney had acquired title to an area as large as all England.

For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was essential. In Virginia, and in all the Southern colonies with the exception of North Carolina, there accordingly existed, side by side with the landowning planter class, and sharply distinct from it, a servile laboring class which formed a large part of the total population. In 1619, we are told, "came a Dutch man of war with 20 negars." The ship was probably English rather than Dutch. In either case the circumstance marks the beginning of African slavery in the English continental colonies; but the importation of slaves was slight until the close of the century, and the laborers who cleared the forests and worked the fields were largely supplied by contract, and were known as "servants." The servant was a person bound over for a term of years to the planter who paid his transportation or purchased the contract right from its original owner. The term of service varied from two to seven years, at the expiration of which the servant became a freeman. Ex-servants sometimes migrated to other colonies, notably to North Carolina after the foundation of that colony, or in the next century to the up-country beyond the "fall line"; but many became renters or tenants on the estates of the large planters, or in time became planters themselves. The servant class included some condemned criminals and political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the almshouses, or the London streets. They were the unfortunate and the dispossessed rather than the vicious—men who were vagabonds because there was nothing for them to do, or petty thieves because they were starving. They were, none the less, an inferior and a servile class. The colonial law made no great distinction between the servant for life and the servant for a term of years; during the term of his indenture, the latter was subject to his master, driven and whipped like the negro slave with whom he worked and ate and with whom he was classed.