CHAPTER ONE PLACES OF LABOR'S "HARD USAGE" IN THE SOUTH BEFORE SLAVERY In the eyes of Captain John Smith, early seventeenth-century Virginia offered up a perverse paradise of sorts, a bountiful Eden where, nevertheless, English men, women, and children could earn their bread--and a dry coarse cornbread at that--only by the sweat of their brow. Here was a place that abounded in the promise of "incredible pleasure, profit and plenty," and yet yielded only the noxious plant called tobacco; a place, moreover, where native "savages" indulged in "hunting and fowling," the sport of the English aristocracy, while Christian men and women were "rooting in the ground about Tobacco like Swine." Colonization mandated work that the settlers found both arduous and unfamiliar; to extract a living from the ground, all available hands must first clear brush and cut down trees, though "strange were these pleasures to their [former] conditions." High-born Englishmen "blistered their tender fingers" with the felling ax, and "poore Gentlemen, Tradesmen, Serving men, libertines, and such like" together found themselves reduced to the common lot of working in dirt.' Future generations would glorify the place of Jamestown in history as the first permanent settlement in British North America; but Captain Smith understood his mission as only the most recent in a bloody, century-long series of attempts to conquer southeastern territory, and to extract riches from it. At Jamestown, the tightly intertwined tasks of conquest and commercialization impelled early colonial officials to harness a workforce of Europeans, Native Indians, and Africans, all the while lamenting a "want of skillfull husbandmen." The labor of English planters in particular consisted of guarding against the Indians in the forest and the traitors in their midst, and they toiled in the fields as if under siege, forced "to watch vigilantly, and work painfully," at once workers and soldiers. After the massacre of 1622, which claimed 347 English lives at 31 sites scattered throughout the colony, Captain Smith and his men determined to "inforce the Salvages to leave their Country or bring them in ... fear and subjection." In the process whites also aimed to appropriate native crop fields, saving themselves the trouble of "cleering the ground of great Timber." In those "New World" mainland colonies governed by England and built on a foundation of tobacco, rice, cattle, timber, Indian corn, and peas, human labor was the key to wealth. Modeled after Barbados, South Carolina (founded in 1670) immediately institutionalized the system of black slavery, first within a "frontier" economy based on cattle and lumber produces, and later, by the early eighteenth century, within a staple-crop economy based on indigo and rice. In contrast, the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia (founded 1607) and Maryland (1634) produced tobacco with a predominantly white workforce until the latter part of the seventeenth century; and the "barrier colony" of Georgia (1733) developed a relatively diversified economy without black labor until both rice cultivation and slaves were introduced almost two decades after its founding. In these labor-intensive agricultural systems, physical strength and endurance served as the hallmarks of the workforce. These colonies needed "lusty labouring men ... capable of hard labour, and that can bear and undergo heat and cold, any one who is but able to inure himself to the Ax and the Howe...." A Georgia settler put the case in appropriately neutral terms according to gender, racial, and ethnic classifications: he called for "strong robust people, fit for our plantation work." Native groups shaped patterns of colonial labor in the pre-slave South not as workers so much as warriors hostile to the planters and their designs on the land. The earliest Chesapeake settlers unwittingly set down roots in the midst of the powerful Powhatan Confederacy, an extensive network of thirty tribes, all part of the Algonquian language group. More than a century later, white men in Georgia attempted to carve out a place for themselves wedged between the slave society of South Carolina to the north, and St. Augustine, an enclave of Spaniards, Indians, and runaway slaves, to the south. Colonization depended upon military security; and persistent threats to the integrity of English settlements throughout the 1600s meant that field workers could be called upon to use their guns against foes as likely as use their hoes in the ground. In 1623, Virginia officials set out to humiliate Captain Richard Quaile, guilty of some unspecified offense, when they decreed that he was to be "ignominiously degraded from his degree of Capt his sword broken and sent out o[f] the port of James Citty with an ax on his shoulder...."; his title of captain was to be replaced by that of carpenter. Yet by the mid-1620s, colonists in the Chesapeake were refusing to draw such an explicit line between soldiering and laboring. A century later, the Georgia Trustees took pains to link the tasks of planting and defending the colony through tail-male, an ancient land tenure system that ensured all freeholders would be soldiers by forbidding daughters to inherit land. Field laborers doubled as defenders and conquerors, as the times demanded. White men might hope someday literally to outgrow manual labor, but colonial elites devised a number of ingenious ways to exploit the productive capacity even of persons presumably free. By the late eighteenth century white southerners would equate black people with slavery, and white people with liberty, but the early colonists in the Chesapeake and Georgia knew that most labor was "naturally" unfree. In these three colonies, the only labor system foreordained was the "hard usage" of men, women, and children, whether red, white, or black. Indeed, almost all workers in early Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia found themselves bound to some form of exploitative relationship--children governed by their elders, servants by their masters, sharecroppers and tenants by their landlords, hirelings by their employers, women by their fathers and husbands, Indians and Africans by white men, criminals and sexual renegades by the state and church. In turn, each of these groups devised means of resistance to the people who sought to work them hard, raising the specter of internal subversion within settlements highly vulnerable to external attack. Despite differences in their respective political histories, planters in preslavery Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia demonstrated a willingness to take advantage of all kinds of labor, no matter what its age, color, sex, or nationality. At the same time, these white men remained profoundly suspicious of "strangers"--men, women, and children who were not English, Christian, or white, or persons who lacked one or some combination of these characteristics. The rush to profit taking pitted English ethnocentrism against a more open, and openly rapacious, attitude toward the labor potential inherent in all groups that peopled the southeastern coastal region. In determining who would work at what jobs, colonial officials and landowners were forced to remain ever vigilant, watchful of enemies in the forests and on the high seas, and watchful of members of their own households. "IT'S HARD LIVING HERE WITHOUT A SERVANT" The earliest Chesapeake planters had few colonial precedents to draw upon in their effort to wring a living from a lush but unknown land; the Spanish conquest of South America, and earlier English efforts in Ireland and the West Indies, offered little in the way of a guide for Virginia and Maryland settlers. Confronted by a large, resourceful, and eventually well-armed indigenous population, colonists on the North American mainland failed to subordinate a Native workforce for their own purposes. Nevertheless, the European demand for tobacco quickly convinced seventeenth-century Chesapeake planters that success in the commercial-colonial sweepstakes--with a well-ordered society based on a profitable export economy as the prize--would depend on their ability to control a large number of agricultural workers. In Georgia, too, field labor constituted the heart of the colonial enterprise, but in this colony work fulfilled a moral purpose as well; in the 1740s, the Georgia Trustees determined that the province should serve as a source of earthly and spiritual redemption--through work--for lowly English folk. Before these three colonies turned to black slavery, they all embraced a labor-management system that relied on field work performed primarily by white men, women, and children. In the New World, where critical factors in the production process--from the weather to the price of crops and attacks by animal predators--remained outside the control of individual planters, the exploitation of labor quickly assumed the level of political imperative. And given the fragility of these colonial outposts, modes of supervision of all kinds of workers assumed a particularly brutal form. By the late sixteenth century, the English could only curse the bad luck and ill-timing that had deprived them of the fabulous gold and silver mines scattered throughout the Aztec and Inca empires of Mexico and South America. The Spanish conquistadors proved that New World riches could be harvested quickly and efficiently by maintaining a large army of occupation to oversee indigenous populations put to hard labor; but first, empire builders had to land in the right place at the right time. Relegated to regions devoid of precious minerals and gems--parts of the West Indies and the North American seaboard--English colonists had to content themselves with the more mundane mission of extracting crops and timber, instead of silver and gold plate. The men who founded Jamestown in 1607 had a difficult time reconciling themselves to the idea that a land blessed with such natural abundance would offer up a bare subsistence only with the most strenuous effort. With their reliance primarily on the labor of colonists of their own nationality, ant with their crop-based economies, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia conformed to neither the Spanish Empire model of Indian slaves nor the English "kingdom" model of Irish serfs. The first planters in these three North American mainland colonies therefore found themselves embarked on a painful process of self-education about the limits of what a single worker, or a single household, might accomplish in the course of a season. In Virginia and Maryland, a shortage of women ruled out the conventional pattern of English husbandry, with a farmer presiding over a houseful of workers--his wife and children in addition to servants, hired hands, or a combination of these groups, depending on his status. In general, early southern colonial elites were not oblivious to the advantages of a family-based labor system, but they gradually dismissed the idea as impractical, for women and children represented a drain on precious resources--especially children, who were consumers for years before they became producers. Thus landholders came to believe that each productive unit must consist of several able-bodied men, and the more the better.' The tribulations of initial permanent settlements boded ill for whites determined to strive for self-sufficiency. The Virginia Company quickly set their "tenants" to work defending the colony and filling company stores with food. Yet during the first few years of Jamestown's history, the men, women, and children there were reduced to eating acorns, dogs, cats, roots, rats, and human flesh. The plentiful fish in the waterways and fowls of the air remained elusive to people who had little experience hunting or foraging--people fearful of venturing too far outside the stockade in any case. Ships from the mother country brought new hands to till the soil, but also new mouths to feed. Sailors and soldiers shared a disdain for field work they wanted to get on with the business of hunting for gold rather than waste their time scratching the earth for a meager subsistence. These predilections obviously complicated the politics of food distribution. After 1620 or so, company officials faced persistent difficulties in managing settlers who were not only expected to build their own shelter and guard against Indians but also grow their own crops and produce something of value (tobacco) for the Crown besides. High mortality rates blessedly reduced the number of hungry people, but also intensified the demand for men who would spend their time working, "watching and warding," an imperative that did not abate until the end of the century. The early history of the Chesapeake was marked by the successive seating and abandonment of plantations, for tobacco cultivation demanded, and then within a few years exhausted, fertile soil, and fertile soil remained located (unfortunately) under large trees. Very few English workers arrived in the colonies as skilled axmen, or experienced in felling trees or clearing brush for that matter, yet along with the hoe, the ax was a basic tool of colonial agriculture, and "improvement of the forest"--the planting of "gardens" in the wilderness--was the defining colonial enterprise. The early English colonists hailed from a country plagued by chronic local wood shortages; in England, fuel was scarce and expensive, and so most rural folk had to scrounge for "lops" (branches and twigs) to cook their food and keep themselves warm. Within the specialized English workforce, sawyers and woodwards (wood clearers) were in short supply. The horrible sense of shock expressed openly by the earliest colonists over the tremendous exertions necessary to clear the forest caused one proponent of settlement in the Chesapeake to declare defensively in 1650, "The objection, that the Countrey is overgrowne with woods, and consequently not in many Yeares to be penetrable for the Plough, carries a great feeblenesse with it." Writing from Georgia soon after his arrival, Thomas Causton observed rather tentatively, "It is impossible to give a true Description of the Place because we are in a Wood, but I can't forbear Saying it is a very pleasant one." Indeed, the deep dense forest of the eastern seaboard seemed to be its distinctive physical characteristic, symbolic of both the untamed nature of the place and its fertile potential. As late as the 1690s, one observer noted of Virginia, "the infinite Number of Trees ... make that Country more to resemble a Forrest, than one of the Countries of Europe." Views of the woods and their meaning ranged from the idyllic to the hellish--from an appreciation of the lushness of the landscape, with its myriad forms of flora and fauna, both edible and aesthetically pleasing, to a terror of what dangers might lurk within it. Among the most prominent of these dangers of course was the Indian; for example, Virginia plantations were situated in "thick woods, swamps, and other covert, by the help of which the enemy might at their Pleassure make their approaches undiscover'd on the most secure of habitations ... their sculking nature being apt to use these advantages." Even the forests of Virginia--which, cleared of their underbrush by native horticulturalists, resembled the graceful deer parks of England, playground of the gentry--were home to murderous wolves, of which many whites had an almost pathological fear. Somewhere between the association of forests with sweet songbirds and succulent fruits on the one hand, and with skulking Indians and lurking runaways on the other, lay the hard reality that the removal of trees constituted "truely the great labour" of early southern colonial life." From the Indians, whites learned how to prepare their ground for planting by stripping the bark off trees and then setting fire to the underbrush; in this way the colonists relieved themselves and successive generations of the task of the lowly woodsman to the extent that they did not have to cut huge stands of trees and then rip out the roots. Nevertheless, the building of dwellings and fences necessitated continuous tree chopping throughout the early years of settlement; and the custom of rotating tobacco fields every four or five years or so (rather than draining swamps or using fertilizers) meant that each new cohort of servants throughout the seventeenth century had to struggle with these same tasks anew. Where farmers on the English countryside relied on hedges, the southern planters used fences that had to be picked up and moved whenever new ground was cleared. The production of fence rails involved "disbranching" the timber, dragging the logs to a central workplace, and then assembling the fences on site. During the winter servants customarily cut firewood. In addition, some workers learned how to manufacture naval stores (pitch, tar, and turpentine) and others to raft logs to downstream sawmills. By the time Georgia was founded, white men realized that the seemingly simple task of clearing the wood was no job for novices with uncallused hands and puny arms. Uncertain how to open up a future homesite, land that was up with old Trees," the Salzburger colonists at Ebenezer obtained permission to import from South Carolina fourteen black slave sawyers, who were then forced to build a road from there to another settlement eight miles away. Four of the fourteen ran away and one of the slaves killed another one. As early as 1619, then, the tobacco syllogism had become abundantly clear: If "all our riches for the present doe consiste in Tobacco...," then it followed that "our principall wealth ... consisteth in servants...." In Georgia, the hard work of householders supposedly served as the linchpin holding together the colony's twin purposes of philanthropy and mercantilism. Yet no matter how resourceful a settler and how compliant his wife and children, the demands of a new plantation required the labor of more than one man. Wrote one settler home to a friend in England in 1738, "but I must tell you yt it's hard living here without a Servant, one man being incapable to Move Trees, & fence, with ye other necessary labours that one must go thro; before he can plant." His advice: "I must beg of you to get all ye Servants you can, and be carefull of 'em at Sea, for they'll bring you money, or enable You to live handsomely on Your plantation." About this time, even a seventeen-year-old freeman could write home from Georgia to complain, "I wish I had a servant, which would be extremely usefull to such one as I," assuring his father that the heavy demand for bound labor was "quite different here from what it was in England." Reluctantly, even representatives of the Georgia Trustees had to admit that each planting season brought fresh humiliations to the most worthy and industrious of farmers. For example, in the spring of 1741, in the vicinity of Savannah, the "infinite Quantity of Worms which infested our Lands" destroyed corn and salad greens alike, causing many a "poor Planter in the Field" to think his "former Labour ill bestowed in Agriculture." Disillusionment among the majority of Georgia settlers proved to be a fertile breeding ground for the pro-slavery sentiments that began to sprout just a few years after the colony was founded, sentiments that bore fruit when the trustees reversed their anti-slavery policy in 1751. In the colonial South, then, land was worth very little without the requisite labor to improve it. Chesapeake legislators recognized this fact when they established a system of headrights granting land according to the number of dependents imported by a settler, when they levied taxes on landowners according to the "tithables" (that is, white, black, and Indian men, and black and Indian women workers) in a household; and when they instituted the use of a crop--tobacco--as a form of common currency. Among the elite in all of the southern colonies, neither huge landholdings nor an English pedigree could compensate for the lack of a tractable workforce. The immense amounts of time and energy expended in pursuing runaway servants in Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia (by public officials as well as private citizens) indicated that planters literally could not afford to relinquish a single hand if they hoped to maintain their status and sense of well-being, no matter how modest. The defining characteristic of the southern colonial labor system--the organization of adult male hands into household units--produced a peculiar work ethic among those landowners fortunate enough to control many workers. Initially at least, the physical labor needed to clear the land at times claimed the energies of even the most well-born settler. Captain John Smith watched with satisfaction as two "proper Gentlemen" learned to swing an ax in the woods five miles outside of Jamestown; "within a weeke they became masters: making it their delight to heare the trees thunder as they fell." He noted that "voluntary gentlemen" who worked of their own free will were a far superior labor source compared to many more "presst to it by compulsion." However, the novelty of this type of work soon wore off for most highborn wielders of axes, and they began to see themselves primarily as managers and overseers, cultivating the fine art of making other people industrious. The founders of Georgia too put a premium on the cheerful performance of labor, but they were not so foolish as to believe that the most prominent planters had to perform that labor themselves. Successful planting depended upon the landowner's ability to cajole, or force, other people to work on his behalf. One work ethic enthusiast noted in 1739 that the colony would do well to rid itself of certain gentlemen, not only because "they would not work themselves" but also because they would not "employ their servants on their lands," preferring to hire them out for cash, and then using the income to live "idly" in Savannah instead of in the hinterland. In contrast, the conscientious master devoted considerable effort to making his servants perform his bidding in his own fields." Throughout the seventeenth century in the Chesapeake, and during Georgia's first generation, English planters needed workers who would prove to be steadfast allies in the battle against the elements, and in the wider war against groups who threatened the social and physical integrity of homogeneous English settlements. Consequently they looked to their own people as the major source of agricultural and military labor. The ideal colonist was a hard worker and a loyal soldier, like John Milledge of Georgia, who won the favor of the trustees (and a grant of four hundred acres) after years of commanding troops stationed along the Ogeechee River. Milledge was particularly adept at "cutting Lumber &c ... and appear[ing] peculiarly Active to serve the Colony, whenever required, especially in all Disturbances with the Indians, being a good Horseman and well acquainted with the Woods." Nevertheless, planters and colonial officials maintained an open mind about the possible benefits that a limited number of "strangers" might offer to their enterprise. And so different groups of workers became valued--and exploited--to the degree they could be tightly controlled within a New World that was otherwise beyond the control of any one Englishman. "STRANGERS" AS WORKERS During the course of the seventeenth century in the Chesapeake, and between 1733 and 1750 in Georgia, English colonists gradually turned to black slave labor, at least partially in response to failed experiments with a variety of other workforces. Population statistics for the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century and for Georgia between 1733 and 1750 reveal the contours of society in these southern colonies. Indentured servants--primarily white men ages eighteen to twenty-five-provided the bulk of labor until slavery began to predominate. From 70 to 85 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake before 1700 arrived as servants (a total of 130,000 to 150,000 people for the entire century). Depending on the decade in question, three to five males landed in Virginia for each female, and for Maryland the figure was two to seven men for each woman; at the end of the century the figures were 3.5 to 1 (male-female ratio) for Virginia and 2.5 to 1 for Maryland. Importations of black slaves did not begin to any great degree until 1685 (soon after the chartering of England's Royal African Company, a competitor in the international slave trade), and by 1700, the Chesapeake as a whole had no more than 8,000-9,000 blacks (about half of them tithables), including a few who were servants and landowners. Throughout the seventeenth century, in the area now encompassed by all of the southern states, Indians outnumbered whites and blacks, by four to one as late as 1685. However, by that time white colonists had pushed indigenous groups to the interior, so that whites had become numerically superior (45,200 to 23,000) on the thin strip of eastern coastline stretching from Virginia to South Carolina. Georgia had almost no black inhabitants until the lifting of the ban on slavery; thereafter both the black and white population grew rapidly, from 1,700 whites and 400 blacks (all slaves) in 1751, to 33,000 whites and 15,000 blacks by the time of the Revolution. Soon after the massacre of March 1622, some Virginia Company officials began to wax enthusiastic about the potential use of Indian labor for English profit. For example, in December 1622, John Martin composed an essay on "The Manner Howe to Bringe the Indians Into Subjection," suggesting that extermination of the enemy might seem to be the logical response to the massacre, but "holy writt" discouraged it, and besides, "other necessarie uses" might flow from a fresh supply of bound laborers. Once harnessed to English purposes, Indians might continue to reduce the numbers of natural predators like "wolves, bears, and other beasts (wch are in greate numbr)." They might also be made to deliver hostages (that is, members of enemy tribes) ripe for religious conversion, and adults and children compliant in growing silk, hemp, and flax. Indian men could serve as guides into hostile territory, as oarsmen "in Gallies & friggetts and many other pregnant uses too tedious to sett downe." Martin advised his countrymen not to "trinke or trade" with nearby Indians, for that kind of interchange might imply reciprocal obligations between the two groups; and he also hoped eventually to render them dependent on English food supplies (under the circumstances, a rather unlikely prospect). Martin's overly optimistic predictions soon gave way to a more realistic assessment of the relation between Indians and the English demand for labor, an assessment that stressed the uses of friendly groups as diplomatic allies, traders, and hunters, rather than as field workers. At least initially, such a relation was based less on exploitation and more on the accommodarion of interests between Natives and interlopers. Indeed, viewed from the perspective of the pre-contact period, Indians managed to incorporate the English into their own political system--based on the exchange of material objects for spiritual and social reasons--more easily than the English were able to take advantage of Indians as bound laborers for their own acquisitive purposes. From Indians, whites learned a variety of skills related to foraging, fishing, and growing crops like tobacco and corn. Only by observing Indians did the English come to understand how to hunt pigeons, produce cooking oil from acorns, extract syrups and dyes from trees, make canoes, tan the hides of wild animals, and use weirs and poisons to fish. Nevertheless, rather than apprenticing themselves to these "heathens," some English folk persisted in trying to hire, or coerce, them to perform certain types of work. This inclination carried with it obvious dangers. In the Chesapeake, Indians were compensated for killing wolves, retrieving runaway cattle and hogs, fishing, and gathering oysters and muscles. In Georgia, in 1739, a colonial official seeking a thieving runaway Irish servant noted that "some neighbouring Indians whom we sent for, came to assist us by Tracing (which they are very skilful at)...." Accounts of Indian hunters abound in the early records of Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia. For example, as "the Archbishop's obedient subjects," the German Protestants called Salzburgers, who settled near Savannah, had never learned to hunt game in their native country; in Georgia they relied on Indians for their fresh meat. Similarly, in England only poachers were skilled with guns, and in America few colonists besides uniformed soldiers knew how to use them at first. The difficulties attendant upon white men venturing too far into the forest in search of a tasty turkey gave these men an added incentive to delegate hunting to members of friendly, or tributary, tribes, and to supply them with guns. On the other hand, of course, the emerging Indian marksman did more than put fresh venison on the table; he also, at times, trained his fowling piece on English men, women, and children. Throughout the seventeenth century, then, the Virginia legislature struggled with the deadly consequences of "the disorderly employing of Indians with gunns." In 1658, lawmakers encouraged county court commissioners to pay bounties on wolves' heads "by imploying Indians or otherwise, Provided they arme not the Indians with English armes and gunns contrary to act of Assembly." Most Indians acquired guns through trade, and intercultural relations in general ultimately rested on a shaky foundation of diplomatic negotiation. (Integral to this process were natives who served as guides, interpreters, and mediators; at least a few of them were women, like Elizabeth Savage of Accomack County, Virginia, and Mary Musgrove of Georgia.) John Smith expressed well-founded apprehension over the indiscretions of "Gluttonous Loyterers" in Jamestown eager to sell everything from hoes to guns to the Indians in return for a ration of corn. Yet restraint in this regard could prove counterproductive in other areas. For example, the reluctance among mid-century Virginians to trade guns with the Indians caused them to lose out to other colonies in the lucrative beaver trade. Both Indian and English leaders aggressively promoted trade, but only if they could control it for their own purposes. Werowances (chiefs) sought out steel hoes, alcohol, and copper in order to consolidate their own power and maintain their own status. However, after 1650 or so, control over trade eluded the grasp of leaders on both sides, and aggrieved parties felt justified in seeking redress on their own terms. In Virginia, the bloody upheaval called Bacon's Rebellion was set in motion with a raid conducted by "certain Doegs and Susquahanok Indians" on the farm of an Englishman who "had before abused and cheated them, in not paying them for such Indian trucke as he had formerly bought of them, and ... they took his hogs for Satisfaction." A party of white men pursued the hog stealers and either beat or killed them all, and then an Indian war chief retaliated with more bloodshed. Soon the entire colony was consumed in a conflict that pitted not only Indians against whites but also groups of whites against each other. Georgia experienced no such conflagration, but it too recognized the hazards of unregulated trade with the Indians of the Creek Nation, and so stipulated that all white traders be licensed. Nevertheless, independent operators continued to pursue their own interests through violence and intimidation of colonial officials. Outnumbered by Indians by as many as fourteen to one during the early part of the seventeenth century, white men in the vicinity of Jamestown were understandably hesitant to try to put Indians to work in the ground; and indeed, the relatively limited exploitation of Indians as field hands and domestic servants more often reflected trade and diplomatic imperatives rather than labor demand. Indian bondsmen and women did exist throughout the southern colonies in the seventeenth century; some debtors and disturbers of the peace found themselves reduced to servitude by colonial courts, and some prisoners of war were enslaved. However, as a group, Natives proved to be particularly troublesome, if not downright dangerous, workers. Unlike their Latin American counterparts, they remained scattered in small villages, and hence difficult to capture in large numbers; and, too, they tended either to die or to run off before they had produced much of value for their masters. Moreover, most whites understood that they placed themselves in harm's way by holding Indians against their will. South Carolina dealt with the problem by exporting as many as twelve thousand Natives captured in war to New England and the West Indies between 1670 and 1710. Virginia followed suit in 1722, decreeing that any Indian who transgressed colonial statutes "shall suffer death, or be transported to the West-Indies, there to be sold as slaves." Thus from the English perspective, an Indian sold into bondage was better than either a dead or a "domesticated" Indian. Compared to the uncertainty posed by thousands of Natives who knew their way around the forests of the eastern seaboard, the non-English tradesmen and servants imported into the colonies would seem to offer a safe and reliable source of labor. Yet here again planters and government officials had to balance their demand for workers, and for specialized knowledge, with their queasiness over incorporating foes, and potential foes, into their tiny settlements. In this regard, English ethnocentrism and real security concerns clashed with profit seeking. Within a larger international political climate made volatile by the colonization efforts of rivals like the Spanish, Dutch, and French; by the depredations of pirates and privateers on the high seas; and by coalition building between various European powers and certain Indian tribes, non-Englishmen and women resistant to work discipline could be quickly cast in the roles of spies and traitors. From their founding, the southern colonies hosted a large number of non-English cultural and religious groups. Enclaves of Dutch and dotted Maryland's Eastern Shore. French Huguenots settled along South Carolina's Santee River and in the city of Charles Town. Georgia in particular proved an attractive destination for Protestants as diverse as Lowland and Highland Scots, Swiss, Dutch, and German Moravians, Salzburgers, and other dissenters. As long as these groups remained off to themselves they posed few problems for the English, and might even enrich the British Crown through their industry. More disruptive to the security of colonial settlements were ethnic bound workers of questionable loyalty to English officials and policies. Early Chesapeake planters utilized Irish, Dutch, Scotch, French, and Turkish servants; their Georgia counterparts employed laborers from Germany, Wales, Scotland, and Holland. When French servants ran away from Virginia, and when Dutch and German servants launched collective, "insolent" protests against their condition in Georgia, ordinary forms of worker resistance took on the appearance of treason. According to the findings of a Georgia official in 1748, the unreasonable demands of Dutch servants stemmed from "their Country Men residing in this Colony, who are generally speaking a very troublesome and discontented Sett of People, and many of these last are still worse, no less than five able bodied Men having deserted their Service and the Colony soon after their Arrival...." Scottish prisoners of war, and the Irish, by virtue of their Roman Catholicism and their subjugated status in their own homeland, required close supervision, and amounted to persistent sources of real and potential subversion within individual English colonial households. The English felt most betrayed by ethnic artisans with special skills. The warm climate of the southern colonies encouraged the first settlers to try to emulate a Mediterranean type of agriculture, and the seemingly endless tracts of standing forests held out the hope of a thriving naval stores and lumber industry similar to that in the Baltic States. The earliest settlers of Jamestown included Polish workers brought over to make pitch and tar, Germans to construct sawmills, Italians to set up a glassmaking house, Languedoc natives to tend grapevines, and an Armenian to grow silk. Georgia conducted experiments growing oranges, and also, within the first twenty years of its founding, imported a French baker and a French hatter-turned-vintner, a Dutch butcher, a French potter, and an Italian family steeped in the mysteries of silk cultivation. Whatever promise these workers offered to fledgling colonies, most of them soon squandered the welcome they initially enjoyed. The Jamestown Pole had the dubious distinction of being one of the first whites to defect to the Indians (in 1619), and by his "treachery"--"in a manner turned heathen"--caused the colony's leaders to fear that "the salvages would surprize us." In 1630, the Virginia House of Burgesses felt compelled to complain in a formal manner about the deceit practiced by those Frenchmen who were, ten years earlier, "transported into this country for the plantinge and dressinge of vynes, and to instruct others in the same ..." In their rush to reap the tobacco bonanza, these men and their families had apparently "concealed the skill, and not only neglected to plant any vynes themselves, but have also spoyled and ruinated that vyniard." They were henceforth forbidden to grow tobacco. Georgia officials expressed similar frustration with the Camus family, whose silk-growing exploits were generously subsidized by the colony's trustees beginning in 1733. Appreciative of Mrs. Camus's talents but angered by her arrogance and her fondness for the "Rum-Bottle," William Stephens, the resident secretary, soon tired of humoring the querulous matriarch of the family, and throwing money her way. At one point she declared to Stephens that "we must not think her such a Fool as to bring up any in her Art of winding Silk." Andrew Duchee, the French potter, turned out to be another disappointment; he too relied on the trustees' largesse, promising to become the first man to produce porcelain outside of China, using Georgia clay. The trustees "saw no Fruits of his Works," with the exception of a miserable product that could not "merit the Name of China-Ware." Moreover, the ungrateful Duchee early joined the ranks of the Malcontents, the pro-slavery group at odds with the trustees' policy on slavery, and boldly informed his superiors "that he would not rest till he saw the Use of Negroes granted...." Although some white ethnic workers confirmed the deepest fears of their suspicious hosts, others forced English men and women to reconsider their own religious and national loyalties. For example, at least one Georgia official cringed when he saw Jewish masters holding Christian servants: "I could not but be somewhat shocked at it, to think of Christians becoming bondmen to those infidels, and ... it would be ill looked on by everybody in the Communion of our Church." A Jewish physician born in Spain was targeted as a spy soon after his arrival in the colony via Virginia and North Carolina. Yet when colonial officials scrutinized their countrymen, whom they considered to be foul-mouthed, besotted, whoremongering servants, and their idle, ever-complaining English (albeit Christian) masters, these officials could judge hardworking Jewish planters and tradesmen to be honest men and upstanding citizens. In the New World, groups of workers were valued to the extent that they would work hard, and if not actively contribute to the defense of the colony, at least not undermine it. Workers of African heritage also occupied an ambiguous position in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Their skin color set them apart from whites (and Indians) regardless of status. Yet perceived according to a mix of racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic characteristics, blacks were not always irredeemable aliens in English eyes. Many of the first blacks in Virginia and Maryland had lived in the West Indies, or somewhere in the Spanish Empire, and some were English-speaking and Christian. At least thirty-two blacks, almost evenly divided between men and women, were living with whites in colonial Virginia in March 1619--that is, several months before a Dutch ship deposited "20. and odd Negroes," the event traditionally marking the arrival of the first people of African descent on the North American mainland. The small number of blacks in the region up through the 1680s or so were represented in a range of statuses, from slave to servant to overseer to landowner. Free blacks Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary owned 250 acres and raised livestock in early Northampton County, Virginia. In the 1640s, after a disastrous fire swept through the Johnson plantation, the local court reduced their taxes and exempted three women family members from tithes (a routine exemption for white but not black women). A network of free blacks--men and women who had managed to buy their way out of slavery--appeared in Northampton; in their struggles to maintain family homesteads, in their dealings with the court, and in their day-to-day labor in the tobacco fields, they resembled other small landowners. The institution of slavery developed on a piecemeal basis in the Chesapeake. Most black men and women worked in the fields, black women to a greater degree than white women of any status. By the late seventeenth century, on scattered quarters in the Chesapeake, black women were performing domestic work (for black slaves as well as white servants). The 1666 list of tithables for Northampton County, for example, includes "Nan, a negro woman" in a household of four white men. (In this list blacks are identified by their race and non-English whites--French, Irish, and Dutch--by their ethnicity.) However, certain factors signaled black people's uniquely vulnerable status. In the course of the seventeenth century, Chesapeake legislators passed a series of discriminatory laws that placed progressively tighter restrictions on blacks as servants, slaves, and even free people, limiting their choices of marriage partners and dashing whatever expectations they might have had about eventually securing their freedom. In contrast, for white men, bound labor was a condition that most of them realistically expected to outgrow, if they survived it, allowing them to go on and embrace the new roles of master and father. In the southern colonies, there existed old black servants but no old white servants. In the mid-1640s, for example, Philip Chapman's Accomack County, Virginia, estate consisted of an eight-year-old black girl and "Caine the negro, very anncient," both valued at prices considerably higher than Chapman's white male and female servants ranging in age from twelve years to their early twenties. "Caine the Negro, very anncient" had no counterpart among white servants, all of whom were very young. Moreover, white planters granted a few black men supervisory responsibilities over white women and children (at least), but whites in positions of political power felt uneasy about this arrangement. In Virginia, black men were barred by law from serving as the masters of white servants, though they might own black or Indian slaves. In 1669 in that colony, the fact that a white servant named Hannah Warwick labored under a black overseer was considered an extenuating circumstance surrounding an unknown crime that she had committed. In Georgia in 1741, colonial officials were outraged to learn that, in the vicinity of Augusta, two Dutch children, servants, "were tasked at the Discretion of ... [two] Negroes, who were authorized to punish them, if they did not fulfil their Task."33 Over time in the southern colonies, white ethnics (or their descendants) might become "English." Since they already possessed white skins, they merely had to adopt the English language, worship in Anglican churches, and profess loyalty to the British monarch. In contrast, no matter how gracefully individual blacks managed to acculturate themselves to English ways, their skin color marked them as permanent "strangers." In the seventeenth century, the ethnocentric English planters of the Chesapeake interpreted a dark skin not necessarily as a badge of "racial" inferiority, but rather as a sign that this particular group of people bore close watching; to the extent that blacks could never become English, they would remain a potential threat to the security of the colonies. Copyright (c) 1998 Jacqueline Jones. All rights reserved.
