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," whose establishment was at Blunt Point on the lower James, it was written in 1648: "He hath a fine house and all things answerable to it; he sowes yeerly store of hempe and flax, and causes it to be spun; he keeps weavers, and hath a tan-house, causes leather to be dressed, hath eight shoemakers employed in this trade, hath forty negroe servants, brings them up to trades in his house: he yeerly sowes abundance of wheat, barley, etc. The wheat he selleth at four shillings the bushell; kills store of beeves, and sells them to victuall the ships when they come thither; hath abundance of kine, a brave dairy, swine great store, and poltery. He married the daughter of Sir Tho. Hinton, and in a word, keeps a good house, lives bravely, and a true lover of Virginia. He is worthy of much honour."[6] Many other planters were thriving more modestly, most of them giving nearly all their attention to the one crop. The tobacco output was of course increasing prodigiously. The export from Virginia in 1619 had amounted to twenty thousand pounds; that from Virginia and Maryland in 1664 aggregated fifty thousand hogsheads of about five hundred pounds each.[7]
[Footnote 6: A Perfect Description of Virginia (London, 1649), reprinted in Peter Force Tracts, vol. II.]
[Footnote 7: Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth
Century (New York, 1896), I, 391.]
The labor problem was almost wholly that of getting and managing bondsmen. Land in the colony was virtually to be had for the taking; and in general no freemen arriving in the colony would engage for such wages as employers could afford to pay. Workers must be imported. Many in England were willing to come, and more could be persuaded or coerced, if their passage were paid and employment assured. To this end indentured servitude had already been inaugurated by the London Company as a modification of the long used system of apprenticeship. And following that plan, ship captains brought hundreds, then thousands of laborers a year and sold their indentures to the planters either directly or through dealers in such merchandize. The courts took the occasion to lessen the work of the hangman by sentencing convicts to deportation in servitude; the government rid itself of political prisoners during the civil war by the same method; and when servant prices rose the supply was further swelled by the agency of professional kidnappers.
The bondage varied as to its terms, with two years apparently the minimum. The compensation varied also from mere transportation and sustenance to a payment in advance and a stipulation for outfit in clothing, foodstuffs and diverse equipment at the end of service. The quality of redemptioners varied from the very dregs of society to well-to-do apprentice planters; but the general run was doubtless fairly representative of the English working classes. Even the convicts under the terrible laws of that century were far from all being depraved. This labor in all its grades, however, had serious drawbacks. Its first cost was fairly heavy; it was liable to an acclimating fever with a high death rate; its term generally expired not long after its adjustment and training were completed; and no sooner was its service over than it set up for itself, often in tobacco production, to compete with its former employers and depress the price of produce. If the plantation system were to be perpetuated an entirely different labor supply must be had.
"About the last of August came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars." Thus wrote John Rolfe in a report of happenings in 1619;[8] and thus, after much antiquarian dispute, the matter seems to stand as to the first bringing of negroes to Virginia. The man-of-war, or more accurately the privateer, had taken them from a captured slaver, and it seems to have sold them to the colonial government itself, which in turn sold them to private settlers. At the beginning of 1625, when a census of the colony was made,[9] the negroes, then increased to twenty-three in a total population of 1232 of which about one-half were white servants, were distributed in seven localities along the James River. In 1630 a second captured cargo was sold in the colony, and from 1635 onward small lots were imported nearly every year.[10] Part of these came from England, part from New Netherland and most of the remainder doubtless from the West Indies. In 1649 Virginia was reckoned to have some three hundred negroes mingled with its fifteen thousand whites.[11] After two decades of a somewhat more rapid importation Governor Berkeley estimated the gross population in 1671 at forty thousand, including six thousand white servants and two thousand negro slaves.[12] Ere this there was also a small number of free negroes. But not until near the end of the century, when the English government had restricted kidnapping, when the Virginia assembly had forbidden the bringing in of convicts, and when the direct trade from Guinea had reached considerable dimensions, did the negroes begin to form the bulk of the Virginia plantation gangs.
[Footnote 8: John Smith Works, Arber ed., p. 541.]
[Footnote 9: Tabulated in the Virginia Magazine, VII, 364-367.]
[Footnote 10: Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, II, 72-77.]
[Footnote 11: A New Description of Virginia (London, 1649).]