Emma Lazarus Famous Poem Myth

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18

Edmund S. Morgan

The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Jun., 1971), pp. 595-611.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28197106%2976%3A3%3C595%3ATLPAJ1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

The American Historical Review is currently published by American Historical Association.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/aha.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.org Sun Nov 25 11:50:00 2007

T h e Labor Problem at Jarnestown, 1607-18

E D M U N D S. M O R G A N

THESTORY OF J A M E S T O W N , the first permanent English settlement in America, has a familiar place in the history of the United States. W e all know of the tribulations that kept the colony on the point of expiring: the shortage of supplies, the hostility of the Indians, the quarrels among the leaders, the reckless search for gold, the pathetic search for a passage to the Pacific, and the neglect of the crucial business of growing food to stay alive. T h r o u g h the scene moves the figure of Captain John Smith, a little larger than life, trading for corn among the Indians and driving the feckless crew to work. His departure in October 1609 results in near disaster. T h e settlers fritter away their time and energy, squander their provisions, a n d starve. Sir Thomas Gates, arriving after the settlement's third winter, finds only sixty men out of six hundred still alive and those sixty scarcely able to walk.

In the summer of 1610 Gates and Lord L,a IYarr get things moving again with a new supply of men and provisions, a new absolute form of govern- ment, and a new set of laws designed to keep everybody a t work. But when Gates a n d La W a r r leave for a time, the settlers fall to their old ways. Sir Thomas Dale, upon his arrival in May 161 1 , finds them a t "their daily and usual1 workes, bowling in the streetes."l But Dale brings order out of chaos. By enlarging a n d enforcing the colony's new law code (the famous Lawes Diuirze, Moral1 and Martiall) he starts the settlers working again and rescues them from starvation by making them plant corn. By 1618 the colony is getting on its feet a n d ready to carry on without the stern regimen of a Smith or a Dale. T h e r e are still evil days ahead, as the Virginia Company sends over men more rapidly than the infant colony can absorb them. But the settlers, having found in tobacco a valuable crop for export, have at last gone to work with a will, and Virginia's future is assured.

Tlie story probably fits the facts insofar as they can be known. But it does

An earlier version of this paper was read a t the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on December 29, 1968. I wish to express my thanks to those who offered criticisms at that time ant1 also to Helen M . Morgan and to Professors J. H . Hexter, Lawrence Stone, IVilliam N . Parker, and William B. Foltz who read the paper subsequently and made valuable suggestions.

1 Ralph Hamor, A T r u e Discot~rse of t h e Present State of Virginia (London, 1615; Richmond, '957)2 26.

596 E d m u n d S . Morgan

not quite explain them. T h e colony's long period of starvation and failure may well be attributed to the idleness of the first settlers, but idleness is more an accusation than an explanation. Why did men spend their time bowling in the streets when their lives depended on work? Were they luna- tics, preferring to play games rather than clear and plow and plant the crops that could have kept them alive?

T h e mystery only deepens if we look more closely at the efforts of Smith, Gates, La TVarr, a n d Dale to set things right. I n 1612 John Smith described his work program of 1608: "the company [being] divided into tennes, fifteenes, or as the businesse required, 4 hours each day was spent in worke, the rest in pastimes and merry exercise." Twelve years later Smith rewrote this passage and changed the figure of four hours to six hours."ut even so, what are we to make of a six-hour day in a colony teetering on the verge of extinction?

T h e program of Gates a n d La 'CYarr in the summer of 1610 was n o more strenuous. William Strachey described it:

it is to be understood that such as labor are not yet so taxed but that easily they perform the same and ever by ten of the clock have done their morning's work: at what time they have their allowances [of food] set out ready for them, and until it be three of the clock again they take their own pleasure, and afterward, with the sunset, their day's labor is finished.3

T h e Virginia Company offered much the same account of this period. Ac- cording to a tract issued late in 1610, "the setled times of working (to effect all themselves, or the Adventurers neede desire) [requires] n o more pains than from sixe of clocke in the morning until1 ten, and from two of the clocke in the afternoone till f ~ u r e . " ~ T h e long lunch period described for 1610 was also a feature of the Idawes Divine, Moral1 and Martiall as enforced by Dale. T h e total working hours prescribed in the Lawes amounted to roughly five to eight hours a day in summer and three t o six hours in inter.^

It is difficult, then, to escape the conclusion that there was a great deal of unemployment or underemployment at Jamestown, whether it was the idleness of the undisciplined in the absence of strong government o r the idleness of the disciplined in the presence of strong government. H O W are

2 John Smith, T r a v e l s and W o r k s , ed. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley (Edinburgh, I ~ I O ) , I : 149; 2: 466.

3 L. B. Wright, ed., A Voyage t o V i r g i n i a i n 1609 (Charlottesville, 1964)~ 69-'70. 4 A T r u e Declaration of t h e Estate of t h e C o l o n i e i n Virginia (London, 1610), reprinted in

Peter Force, ed., T r a c t s and O t h e r Papers (Washington, 1844)~ 3 , no. I : 20; Smith, T r a v e l s and W o r k s , 2: 502. Captain Daniel Tucker maintained a similar program in Bermuda in 1616: "according to the Virginia order, hee set every one [that] was with him a t Saint Georges, to his taske, to cleere grounds, fell trees, set corne, square timber, plant vines and other fruits brought out of England. These by their taske-Masters by breake a day repaired to the wharfe, from thence to be imployed to the place of their imployment, till nine of the clocke, and then in the after-noone from three till Sunneset." Zbid., 653.

5 For t h e C o l o n y i n V i r g i n i a B r i t t a n n i a : Lawes D i v i n e , A4orall and Martial1 (London, 1612), 61-62.

597 T h e Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18

we t o account for this fact? By o u r standards the situation at Jamestown demanded hard and continuous work. Why was the response so feeble?

One answer, given by the leaders of the colony, is that the settlers included too many ne'er-do-wells and too many gentlemen who "never did know what a dayes work w a s n a Hard work had to wait until harder men were sent. Another answer may be that the Jamestown settlers were debilitated by hunger and disease. T h e victims of scurvy, malaria, typhoid, and diph- theria may have been left without the will or the energy to work. Still another answer, which has echoed through the pages of our history books, attributed the difficulty to the fact that the settlement was conducted o n a communal basis: everybody worked for the Virginia Company and every- body was fed (while supplies lasted) by the company, regardless of how much he worked or failed to work. Once land was distributed to individuals and men were allowed to work for themselves, they gained the familiar incentives of private enterprise and bent their shoulders to the wheel.7 These explanations are surely all valid-they are all supported by the testimony of contemporaries-and they go far toward explaining the lazy pioneers of Jamestown. But they d o not reach to a dimension of the prob- lem that contemporaries would have overlooked because they would have taken it for granted. T h e y d o not tell us what ideas and attitudes about work, carried from England, ~ v o u l d have led the first English settlers t o expect so little of themselves in a situation that demanded so much. T h e Jamestown settlers did not leave us the kind of private papers that would enable us to examine directly their ideas a n d attitudes, as we can those of the Puritans who settled New England a few years later. But in the absence of direct evidence we may discover among the ideas current in late sixteenth- a n d early seventeenth-century England some clues to the probable state of mind of the first Virginians, clues to the way they felt about work, whether in the Old World or the New, clues to habits of thinking that may have conditioned their perceptions of what confronted them a t Jamestown, clues even to the tangled web of motives that made later Virginians masters of slaves.

ENGLISHMEN'SIDEAS about the New World at the opening of the seventeenth century were based o n a century of European exploration and settlement. T h e Spanish, whose exploits surpassed all others, had not attempted to keep their success a secret, a n d by the middle of the sixteenth century Englishmen interested in America had begun translating Spanish histories

8 Smith, Travels and W o r k s , 2 : 487. 7 A much more sophisticated version of this explanation is suggested by Professor Sigmund

Diamond in his discussion of the development of social relationships in Virginia, "From Or- ganization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," American Journal of Sociology, 63 (1958): 457-75; see also his "Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth: T h e American Colonies," J o u r n a l of Economic History, 27 (1967): 561-75.

E d m u n d S . Morgan

and memoirs in an effort to rouse their countrymen to e m u l a t i ~ n . ~ T h e land that emerged from these writings was, except in the Arctic regions, an Eden, teeming with gentle and generous people who, before the Spanish conquest, had lived without labor, or with very little, from the fruits of a bountiful n a t u r e . T h e r e were admittedly some unfriendly exceptions who made a habit of eating their more attractive neighbors; but they were a minority, confined to a few localities, and in spite of their ferocity were scarcely a match for Europeans armed with guns.1° Englishmen who visited the New World confirmed the reports of natural abundance. Arthur Bar- lowe, for example, reconnoitering the North Carolina coast for Walter Raleigh, observed that "the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour," while the people were "most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age. . . ."ll

English a n d European readers may have discounted the more extravagant reports of American abundance, for the same authors who praised the land often gave contradictory accounts of the hardships they had suffered in it. But anyone who doubted that riches were waiting to be plucked from Virginia's trees had reason to expect that a good deal might be plucked from the people of the land. Spanish experience had shown that Europeans could thrive in the New TYorld without undue effort by exploiting the natives. It'ith a mere handful of men the Spanish had conquered an enormous population of Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru and had put them to work. In the chronicles of Peter Martyr Englishmen learned how it was done. Apart from the fact that the Indians were naturally gentle, their division into a multitude of kingdoms, frequently at odds with one another, made it easy to play off one against another. By aiding one group against its enemies the Spaniards had made them- selves masters of both.12

T h e story of English plans to imitate and improve on the Spanish strategy is a long o n e . l V t begins at least as early as Francis Drake's foray in Panama in 1572-73, when he allied with a band of runaway slaves t o rob a Spanish mule train carrying treasure from Peru across the isthmus to Nombre de

8See especially the translation of Peter Martyr, in Richard Eden, T h e Decades of t h e n e w iuorlde or west I n d i a (London, 1555); a useful bibliographical history is John Parker, Books t o B u i l d a n E m p i r e (Amsterdam, 1966).

9Gustav H . Blanke, A m e r i k a i r r z E n g l i s h e n Schrifttztm Des 16. ztnd 17. Jahrhtrnderts Beitrage Zur Englischen Philologie, 46 (Bochum-Langendreer, 1962), 98-104.

losince Peter Martyr, the principal Spanish chronicler, identified most Indians who resisted the Spaniards as cannibals, this became the familiar sixteenth-century epithet for unfriendly Indians. I t is doubtful that many tribes actually practiced cannibalism, though some certainly did.

11 D. B. Quinn, ed., T h e R o a n o k e Voyages 1584-1590, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2d ser., 104, 105 (London, ig55), 1: 108.

12 Eden, Decades, passim. For English awareness of the Spanish example, see Smith, T r a v e l s a n d IVorks, 2: 578-81, 6 0 e 0 3 , 955-56, and Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., T h e R e c o r d s of t h e TVirginia C o m p a n y of L o n d o n (Washington, 1906-35), 3: 558, 5 6 e 6 2 .

13 I have dealt with this subject in a work still in progress.

599 T h e Labor Problem at Jarnestown, 1607-18

Dios on the Caribbean.14 T h e idea of joining with dissident natives or slaves either against their Spanish masters or against their wicked cannibalistic neighbors became an important ingredient in English plans for colonizing the New IYorld. Martin Frobisher's experiences with the Eskimos in Baffin Land and Ralph Lane's with the Indians at Roanoke15 should perhaps have disabused the English of their expectations; but they found it difficult to believe that any group of natives, a n d especially the noble savages of North America, would fail to welcome what they called with honest pride (and some myopia) the "gentle government" of the English.16 If the savages first encountered by a colonizing expedition proved unfriendly, the thing to d o was to make contact with their milder neighbors a n d rescue them from the tyranny of the unfriendly tribe, who must be their enemies and were probably cannibals to boot.17

T h e settlers a t Jamestown tried to follow the strategy, locating their settlement as the plan called for, near the mouth of a navigable river, so that they would have access to the interior tribes if the coastal ones were hostile. But as luck would have it, they picked an area with a more power- ful, more extensive, and more effective Indian government than existed anywhere else on the Atlantic Coast. King Powhatan had his enemies, the Monacans of the interior, but he felt n o great need of English assistance against them, and he rightly suspected that the English constituted a larger threat to his hegemony than the Monacans did. H e submitted with ill grace and n o evident comprehension to the coronation ceremony that the Virginia Company arranged for him, and he kept his distance from James- town. Those of his warriors who visited the settlement showed n o disposition to work for the English. T h e Monacans, on the other hand, lived too far inland (beyond the falls) to serve as substitute allies, a n d the English were thus deprived of their anticipated native labor.ls

T h e y did not, however, give u p their expectations of getting it eventually. I n 1615 Ralph Hamor still thought the Indians would come around "as they are easily taught and may by lenitie and faire usage . . . be brought,

141rene A. Wright, ed., D o c u ~ n e n t s concerning English Voyages to t h e Spanish Main 1569- 1580, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, nd ser., 71 (London, 1932). gives the original sources, both English and Spanish.

1 5 Richard Collinson, ed., T h e T h r e e Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., 38 (London, 1867), 131, 141-42, 145-50, 269, 271, 280-89; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I : 275-88

lGThe phrase "gentle government" is the younger Hakluyt's, in a proposal to make use of Drake's Negro allies from Panama for a colony at the Straits of Magellan. E. G . R. Taylor, ed., T h e Original Writings and Correspondence of t h e two Richard Hakluyts, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, zd ser., 76, 77 (London, 1935). I : 142.

1 7 Ibid., 121, 2: 241-42, 24S49, 257-65, 275, 318, 342. 1 8 T h e secondary literature on the Indians of Virginia is voluminous, but see especially

Nancy 0.Lurie, "Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization," in J. M . Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1959), 33-60 T h e most helpful original sources, on which most of our information is necessarily based, are Smith, Travels and Works, and William Strachey, T h e Historie of Travel1 into Virginia Britania (composed 1612), ed. L. B. Wright and V . Freund, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, nd ser., 103 (London, 1953). 53-1 16.

600 Edmund S. A4organ

being naturally though ingenious, yet idlely given, to be n o lesse industrious, nay to exceede our English."lQ Even after the massacre of 1622 Virginians continued to dream of an Indian labor supply, though there was n o longer to be any gentleness in obtaining it. Captain J o h n Martin thought it better to exploit than exterminate the Indians, if only because they could be made to work in the heat of the day, when Englishmen would not. And William Claiborne in 1626 invented a device (whether mechanical o r political is not clear) that he claimed would make it possible to keep Indians safely in the settlements and put them to work. T h e governor and council gave him what looks like the first American patent or copyright, namely a three- year monopoly, to "have holde and enjoy all the benefitt use and profitt of this his project or inventione," and they also assigned him a recently captured ~ n d i a n , "for his better experience and tryall of his inven- tione."'O

English expectations of the New World and its inhabitants died hard. America was supposed to be a land of abundance, peopled by natives who would not only share that abundance with the English but increase it under English direction. Englishmen simply did not envisage a need to work for the mere purpose of staying alive. T h e problem of survival as they saw it was at best political and at worst military.

ALTHOUGH long remained under the illusion that the Indians ENGLISHMEN would eventually become useful English subjects, it became apparent fairly early that Indian labor was not going to sustain the founders of Jamestown. T h e company in England was convinced by 1609 that the settlers would have to grow at least part of their own food.21 Yet the settlers themselves had to be driven to that life-saving task. T o understand their ineffectiveness in coping with a situation that their pioneering descendants would take in stride, it may be helpful next to inquire into some of the attitudes toward work that these first English pioneers took for granted. How much work and what kind of work did Englishmen at the opening of the seventeenth century consider normal?

T h e laboring population of England, by law at least, was required to work much harder than the regimen at Jamestown might lead us to expect. T h e famous Statute of Artificers of 1563 (re-enacting similar provisions from the Statute of Laborers of 1495) required all laborers to work from five in the morning to seven o r eight at night from mid-March to mid-September, a n d during the remaining months of the year from day- break to night. T i m e out for eating, drinking, and rest was not to exceed

19 T r u e Discourse, 2 . See also Strachey, Historie of Trauell, 91-94; Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613)~ 40.

20Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., T h e Records o f t h e Virginia C o m p a n y of L o n d o n (Washington, 1906-35). 3: 705-06; H. R . McIlwaine, ed., M i n u t e s of t h e Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1924), 11I .

2 1 Records of t h e Virginia C o m p a n y , 3: 1 7 , 27.

T h e Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18

Hard at work in old England. TYoodcut from Robert, t h e Devil. Printed by W . de Worde [1502?] (STC 21070, 21071). Photograph: Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480-rjjj (London, '935).

two and a half hours a day.'"ut these were injunctions not descriptions. T h e Statute of Laborers of 1495 is preceded by the complaint that laborers "waste much part of the day . . . in late coming unto their work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and noon-meat, and long time of sleeping after tYhether this statute or that of 1563 (still in effect when Jamestown was founded) corrected the situation is doubtful.24 T h e records of local courts show varying efforts to enforce other provisions of the statute of 1563, but they are almost wholly silent about this p r o v i s i o n , ' ~ n spite of the often-expressed despair of masters over their lazy and negligent laborers.26

2 2 R . H . Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., T u d o r Econornic Docurnents (London, 1924). 1: 342. For some seventeenth-century prescriptions of long working hours, see Gervase Markham, A Way to get W e a l t h (13th ed.; London, 1676), 115-1 j ; Henry Best, Rural Econonzy in Yorkshire in 1641, Sortees Society, Publications, 33 (Durham, 1857). 44. See also L. F. Salzman, Building i n England down to 1540 (Oxford, lgjz), 61-65,

2 3 11 Henry 7, cap. 22, sec. 4; Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, T h e Medieval Mason (Man- chester, 1933), 117.

24Tawney and Power, T u d o r Econonzic Documents, 1: 352-63. 2 5 A minor exception is in J . H . E. Bennett and J . C. Dewhurst, eds., Quarter Sessions Rec-

ords . . . for t h e County Palatine of Chester, 1 5 5 ~ 1 i 6 0 , Publications of the Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, 94 (Chester, 1940). 95-96, where a master alleged that his apprentice, John Dodd, "hath negligently behaved him selfe in his service in idleinge and sleepinge in severalle places where he hath been comanded to work." But sleeping (from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon and beyond) was only one of Dodd's offenses. On the enforcement of other provisions in the statute, see Margaret G. Davies, T h e Enforcement of English Apprenticeship . . . 1563-1642 (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1956); R . K . Kelsall, Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers (London, 1938); and R . H . Tawney, "The Assessment of TVages in EngIand by Justices of the Peace," I'ierteljnhrshrift fur Sozial- u n d Wirtschaftsgeschichte, I 1 (1 913): 307-37, 533-64, 26E.S. Furniss, T h e Position of the Laborer i n a System of Nationalism (Boston, 1920), 117-

It may be said that complaints of the laziness and irresponsibility of workmen can be met with in any century. TiVere such complaints in fact justified in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England? T h e r e is some reason to believe that they were, that life during those years was characterized by a large amount of idleness o r ~ n d e r e m p l o y m e n t . ~ 7T h e outstanding economic fact of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England was a rapid and more or less steady rise in prices, follo~ved at some distance by a much smaller rise in wages, both in industry and in agriculture. T h e price of provisions used by a laborer's family rose faster than wages during the whole period from 1500 to 1 6 4 0 . ~ ~ T h e government made an effort to narrow the gap by requiring the justices in each county to readjust maximum wages at regular intervals. But the wages established by the justices reflected their own nostalgic notions of what a day's work ought to be worth in money, rather than a realistic estimate of what a man could buy with his wages. I n those counties, at least, where records survive, the level of wages set by the justices crept upward very slowly before 1 6 3 0 . ~ ~

TiVages were so inadequate that productivity was probably impaired by malnutrition. From a quarter to a half of the population lived below the level recognized at the time to constitute poverty. Few of the poor could count on regular meals at home, and in years when the wheat crop failed, they were close to ~tarvation.~O I t is not surprising that men living under these conditions showed n o great energy for work and that much of the population was, by modern standards, idle much of the time. T h e health manuals of the day recognized that people normally slept after eating, and the laws even prescribed a siesta for laborers in the summer time.31 If they slept longer and more often than the laws allowed or the physicians recommended, if they loafed on the job and took unauthorized holidays, if they worked slowly and ineffectively when they did work, it may have

34; E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 5 6 9 7 .

2 7 D , C, Coleman, "Labour in the English Economy of the Sixteenth Century," Economic History Review, ed ser., 8 (1956), reprinted in E. M . Carus Mrilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (London, 1954-62). 2: 291-308.

28E. H, Phelps Brown and Sheila V . Hopkins, "Seven Centuries of Building \%'ages," Economica, 2d ser., 2 2 (1955): 95-206; "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, com- pared with Builders' Wage-Rates," ibid., nd ser., 23 (1956): 296-314; "Mrage Rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century," ibid., e d ser., 24 (1957): 289-306; H . P. R . Finberg, ed., T h e Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967)~ 435-57, 531, 583-695.

a f l a w n e y , "Assessment of Wages," 555-64; KelsaII, Wage Regulation, 67-86. Tawney ant1 Kelsall both argue that the enforcement of maximum wages according to the statute of 1563 demonstrates a shortage of labor; but except in a few isolated instances (there may well have been local temporary shortages) the evidence comes from the period after the middle of the seventeenth century.

3oColeman, "Labour in the English Economy," 295; Peter Laslett adduces figures to show that actual starvation was probably rare among English peasants ( T h e World W e Have Lost [London, 19651, 107-27), but there can be little doubt that they were frequently close to it and chronically undernourished. See Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen (New York, 1968), 9 1 3 8 .

31 Thomas Elyot, T h e Castel of H e l t h e (London, 1541). fols. 45-46; Thomas Cogan, T h e

603 T h e Labor Problem a t Jamestown, 1607-18

been d u e at least in part to undernourishment and to the variety of chronic diseases that undernourishment brings in its train.32

T h u s low wages may have begot low productivity that in turn justified low wages.33 T h e reaction of employers was to blame the trouble on defi- ciencies, not of diet or wages, but of character. A prosperous yeoman like Robert Loder, who kept close track of his expenses and profits, was always bemoaning the indolence of his servants. Men who had large amounts of land that they could either rent out or work with hired labor generally preferred to rent because labor was so inefficient and i r r e ~ p o n s i b l e . ~ ~

Even the division of labor, which economists have customarily regarded as a means of increased productivity, could be a source of idleness. Plowing, for example, seems to have been a special skill-a plowman was paid at a higher rate than ordinary farm workers. Rut the ordinary laborer's work might have to be synchronized with the plowman's, and a whole crew of men might be kept idle by a plowman's failure to get his job done at the appropriate time. It is difficult to say whether this type of idleness, result- ing from failure to synchronize the performance of related tasks, was rising or declining; but cheap, inefficient, irresponsible labor would be unlikely to generate pressures for the careful planning of time.

T h e government, while seeking to discourage idleness through laws requiring long hours of work, also passed laws that inadvertently discouraged industry. A policy that might be characterized as the conservation of employ- ment frustrated those who wanted to d o more work than others. English economic policy seems to have rested o n the assumption that the total amount of work for which society could pay was strictly limited a n d must be rationed so that everyone could have a little,35 and those with family responsibilities could have a little more. It was against the law for a man to practice more than one trade or one raft.^'^ And although large numbers of farmers took u p some handicraft on the side, this was to be discouraged, because "for one man to be both a n husbandman and a n Artificer is a gatheringe of divers mens livinges into one mans hand."37 So as not to take

Haven o f Health (London, 1589)~ 231-39; T h e Englishmans Doctor, or T h e School of Salerne (orig. pub. London, 1608) (New York, 1920), 77.

3 2 E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." 33 On the prevalence of such a vicious circle in pre-industrial countries, see W. F. Moore,

Industrialization and Labor (Ithaca, 1 9 5 1 ) ~ 106-13, 308. But see also E. J . Berg, "Backward- Sloping Labor Supply Functions in Dual Economies-The Africa Case," Quarterly Journal o f Economics, 75 (1961): 468-92 For a comparison of T u d o r and Stuart England with modern underdeveloped countries, see F. J. Fisher, " T h e Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: T h e Dark Ages in English Economic History," Economics, zd ser., 24 (1957): 2-18.

3 4 C . E. Fussell, ed., Robert Loder's Farm Accounts 161e1620, Camden Society, 3d ser., 53 (London, 1936); Lawrence Stone, T h e Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (New York, 1965)~ 295-97; Thirsk, Agrarian History, 198.

35 Compare Bert F. Hoselitz, Sociologzcal Aspects o f Economic Growth (Glencoe, I ~ G o ) , 33-34. 3637 Edward 3, c.6. A Collection in English o f the Statutes now i n Force (London, 1594).

fols. 22-23; Calendar of Essex Quarter Session Rolls (microfilm in the University of Wisconsin Library), 4: 228; 17: 124.

3 7 Tawney and Power, T u d o r Econoinic Documents, I : 353.

604 Edmzlnd S. Morgan

work away from his elders, a man could not independently practice most trades until he had become a master through seven years of apprenticeship. Even then, until he was thirty years old or married, he was supposed to serve some other master of the trade. A typical example is the case of J o h n Pike- man of Barking, Essex, a tailor who was presented by the grand jury be- cause he "being a singleman and not above 25 years of age, does take in work of tailoring and works by himself to the hindrance of other poor occupiers, contrary to the law."3s

These measures doubtless helped to maintain social stability in the face of a rapid population increase, from under three million in 1500 to a probable four and a half million in 1640 (an increase reflected in the gap between wages and prices)." But in its efforts to spread employment so that every able-bodied person would have a means of support, the government in effect discouraged energetic labor and nurtured the workingman's low expecta- tions of himself. By requiring masters to engage apprentices for seven-year terms a n d servants (in agriculture and in most trades) for the whole year rather than the day, it prevented employers from hiring labor only when there was work to be done and prevented the diligent and effective worker from replacing the ineffective. T h e intention to spread work is apparent in the observation of the Essex justices that labor by the day caused "the great depauperization of other labourer^."'^ But labor by the year meant that work could be strung out to occupy an unnecessary amount of time, because whether or not a master had enough work to occupy his servants they had to stay and he had to keep them. T h e records show many instances of masters attempting to turn away a servant o r apprentice before the stipu- lated term was up, only t o have him sent back by the courts with orders that the master "entertain" him for the full period.41 W e even have the extra- ordinary spectacle of the runaway master, the man who illegally fled from his servants a n d thus evaded his responsibility to employ and support them.42

I n pursuit of its policy of full employment in the face of a n expanding population, the government often had to create jobs in cases where society offered none. Sometimes men were obliged to take on a poor boy as a servant whether they needed him or not. T h e parish might lighten the burden by

38April 1594. Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, 16: 165. See also the indictment (1589) of four bachelors for taking u p the trade of poulterer, which "hindreth other powre men." Ibid., 15: 54. While the statute seems to allow single men and women under thirty to set u p in trade unless their services are demanded by a master, the courts, in Essex County at least (where the earliest and most extensive recortls are preserved), required such persons to find themselves a master. Moreover, the court was already issuing such orders before the statute of 1563. See ibid., 1: 85, 116.

3 : ) See note 28. 40 Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, 4: 128. 41 For examples: William LeHardy, ed., Hertfordshire C o u n t y Records, 5 (Hertford, 1928):

191-92, 451; E. H. Bates, ed., Quarter Sessions Records for t h e C o u n t y of Somerset, 1, Somerset Record Society, 23 (London, 1907). 11-12, 21: B. C. Redwood, ed., Quarter Sessions Order Book 1642-1619, Sussex Record Society, 54 (1954)~ 34, 44, 46, 128, 145-46, 188, 190.

4 2 For examples: Hertfordshire C o u n t y Records, 5: 376; Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, 1: 97, 193. 258, 325.

T h e Labor Problem a t Jarnestown, 1607-18 605

paying a fee, but it might also fine a man who refused t o take a boy assigned to him.43 T o provide for men a n d women who could not be foisted off o n unwilling employers, the government established houses of correction in every county, where the inmates toiled at turning wool, flax, and hemp into thread or yarn, receiving nothing b u t their food and lodging for their efforts. By all these means the government probably did succeed in spread- ing employment. But in the long r u n its policy, insofar as it was effective, tended to depress wages and to diminish the amount of work expected from any one man.

Above a n d beyond the idleness and underemployment that we may blame o n the lethargy and irresponsibility of underpaid labor, o n the failure to synchronize the performance of related tasks, and o n the policy of spreading work as thinly as possible, the very nature of the jobs to be done prevented the systematic use of time that characterizes modern in- dustrialized economies. Men could seldom work steadily, because they could work only a t the tasks that could be done at the moment; and in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the tasks to be done often depended on forces beyond human control: o n the weather and the seasons, o n the winds, o n the tides, o n the maturing of crops. I n the countryside work from dawn to dusk with scarcely a n intermission might be normal a t harvest time, but there were bound to be times when there was very little to do. When it rained or snowed, most farming operations had to be stopped altogether (and so did some of the stages of cloth manufacture). As late as 1705 John Law, imagining a typical economy established o n a newly discovered island, assumed that the persons engaged in agriculture would necessarily be idle, for one reason or another, half the time.44

T o be sure, side by side with idleness a n d inefficiency, England exhibited the first signs of a rationalized economy. Professor J. U. Nef has described the many large-scale industrial enterprises that were inaugurated in Eng- land in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth c e n t ~ r i e s . ~ ~ And if the development of systematic agricultural production was advancing less rap- idly than historians once supposed, the very existence of men like Robert Loder, the very complaints of the idleness and irresponsibility of laborers, the very laws prescribing hours of work all testify t o the beginnings of a rationalized economy. But these were beginnings only and not widely felt. T h e laborer who seemed idle or irresponsible to a Robert Loder probably did not seem so to himself or to his peers. His England was not a machine for producing wool o r corn. His England included activities a n d pleasures

43 Bates, Quarter Sessions . . . Somerset, 114, 300; Redwood, O r d e r Rook (Sussex), 96, 146, 194; W. L. Sachse, ed., M i n u t e s of t h e N o r w i c h C o u r t of Mayoralty, Norfolk Record Society, 1 5 (Norwich, 1942). 78. 216.

4 4 Coleman, "Labour i n the English Economy"; E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"; Keith Thomas, "Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society," Past a n d Present, no. 29 (1964): 50-66.

4 5 J. U. Nef, T h e C o n q u e s t of t h e Material W o r l d (Chicago, 1 9 6 4 ) ~121-328.

606 Edmzlnd S. Morgan

and relationships that systematic-minded employers would resent and thal modern economists would classify as uneconomic. At the opening of tht seventeenth century, England was giving him fewer economic benefits thar she had given his grandfathers so that he was often ready to pull u p stake and look for a better life in another county or another country.46 But a lifc devoted to more and harder work than he had known at home might n o have been his idea of a better life.

PERHAPSW E M A Y now view Jamestown with somewhat less surprise at th idle and hungry people occupying the place: idleness and hunger were th rule in much of England much of the time; they were facts of life to be take] for granted. And if we next ask what the settlers thought they had come t America to do, what they thought they were u p t o in Virginia, we can fin several English enterprises comparable to their own that may have serve as models a n d that would not have led them to think of hard, continuo1 disciplined work as a necessary ingredient in their undertaking.

If they thought of themselves as settling a wilderness, they could loc for guidance to what was going o n in the northern and western parts ( England a n d in the high parts of the south and e a ~ t . ~ 7 Here were the region mostly wooded, where wastelands still abounded, the goal of many in tk large migrant population of England. Those who had settled down we- scattered widely over the countryside in isolated hovels and hamlets ar lived 1)): pn tt11-e farming, that is, they cultivated only small plots of grour and ran a few sheep or cattle on the common land. Since the gardens r cluired little attention a n d the cattle hardly any, they had most of thc time to thelnielves. Some spent their spare hours o n handicrafts. I n fac they supplied the labor for most of England's minor industries, whil tended to locate in pasture-farming regions, where agriculture made few denlancts o n the inhabitants, than in regions devoted to market crops. B the pasture farmers seem to have offered their labor sporadically and . l ~ c t a n t l y . ~ ~T h e y had the reputation of being both idle and independe- They might travel to the richer arable farming regions to pick u p a £1 shillings in field work a t harvest time, but their own harvests were sm; 'They did not even grow the wheat or rye for their own bread and ma shift to live in hard times from the nuts and berries and herbs that tt gathered in the woods.

4 6 On the geographical mobility of the English population, see E. E. Rich, " T h e Popula of Elizahethan England," Economic History Revierc, nd ser., 2 (1949-56): 249-65; and P Laslett and John Harrison, "Clayworth and Cogenhoe," in H . E. Bell and R. L. Ollard, Historical Essays 1600-1750 Presented to David Ogg (New York, 1963). 157-84.

47 T h i s paragraph and the one that follows are based on the excellent chapters by J Thirsk and by Alan Everitt, in Thirsk, Agrarian History.

4 8 Thirsk, Agrarian History, 417-29; Joan Thirsk, "Industries in the Countryside," in I Fisher, ed., Essays in the Econornic and Social History of T u d o r and Stuart England (Lon, 1961), 70-88. See also E. L. Jones, "Agricultural Origins of Industry," Past and Present, no (1968): 58-71. Lawrence Stone, "An Elizabethan Coalmine," Econoinic History Review, nd 3 (1950): 97-106, especially 101-02; Thirsk, Agrarian History, xxxv, I I I .

607 T h e Labor Problem at Jarnestown, 1607-18

Jamestown was mostly wooded, like the pasture-farming areas of England and \Vales; and since Englishmen used the greater part of their own country for pasture farming, that was the obvious way t o use the wasteland of the New World. If this was the Virginians' idea of what they were about, we should expect them to be idle much of the time a n d to get grain for bread by trading rather than planting (in this case not wheat or rye but maize from the Indians); we should even expect them to get a ;ood deal of their food, as they did, by scouring the woods for nuts a n d beri ica.

As the colony developed, a pasture-farming population n o u l d have been quite in keeping with the company's expectation of profit from a variety of products. T h e Spaniards' phenomenal success wit11 ldising cattle in the IVest Indies was well known. And the proposed employment of the settlers of Virginia in a variety of industrial pursuits (iron works, silk works, glass works, shipbuilding) was entirely fitting for a pasture-farming community. T h e small gardens assigned for cultivation hy Governor Dale in 1614 will also make sense: three acres would have been far too small a plot of land to occupy a farmer in the arable regions of England, where a single man could handle thirty acres without as~istance.~"ut it would be not at all inappropriate as the garden of a pasture farmer. I n Virginia three acres would produce more than enough corn to sustain a man for a year a n d still leave him with time to make a profit for the company or himself at some other job-if he could be persuaded to work.

Apart from the movement of migrant workers into wastelands, the most obvious English analogy to the Jamestown settlement was that of a military expedition. T h e settlers may have had in mind not only the expeditions that subdued the Irishm but also those dispatched to the European continent in England's wars. T h e Virginia Company itself- seems at first to have en- visaged the enterprise as partly military, and the Lawes D i v i n e , Aforall and Martiall were mostly martial. But the conception carried unfortunate implications for the company's expectations of profit. Military expeditions were staffed from top to bottom with men unlikely t o work. T h e nucleus of sixteenth-century English armies was the nobility and the gangs 'of genteel ruffians they kept in their service, in wartime to accompany them into the field (or to go in their stead), in peacetime to follow them about

4 9 Harnor, T r u e Discourse, 1 S 1 7 ; Peter Bowden, in Thirsk, Agraric~n H i s t o r y , 652. It is impossible to determine whether the settlers had had direct cxpctientc in pasture farming, but the likelihood that they were following familiar pasture-farming procedures and may have been expected to do so by the company is indicated by the kind of cattle they brought with them: swine, goats, neat cattle, and relatitely few horses. Wlleli they proposed to set plows going, they were to be drawn by oxen as was the custom in pasture-farming areas. In arable falrning areas it was more common to use horses. T h e company's concern to establish substantial herds is evident in the Larces D i v i n e , Moral1 and Martiall in the provisions forbid- ding slaughter without government permission.

5oSee Howard h i . Jones, 0 Strange N e r ~ , W o r l d (New York, 1964). 167-79; David B. Quinn, "Ireland and Sixteenth Century European Expansion," in Historical Studies, ed. T . D. TYilliams, Papers Reat1 at the Second Conference of Irish Historians (London, 1958); T h e Elizabethans and t h e Zrish (Ithaca, 1g66), i o 6 - 2 2 . Profe5sor Quinn and Professor Jones have both demon- strated how the subjugation of Ireland served as a model for the colonization of America. Ireland must have been in the minds of many of the settler5 at Jamestown.

6 0 8 E d m u n d S . Morgan

as living insignia of their rank.51 Work was not for the nobility nor for those who wore their livery. According to the keenest student of the aristocracy in this period, "the rich and well-born were idle almost by definition." Moreover they kept "a huge labor force . . . absorbed in slothful a n d parasitic personal service." Aside from the gentlemen retainers of the nobility a n d their slothful servants the military expeditions that England sent abroad were filled out by misfits a n d thieves whom the local constables wished to be rid of. It was, in fact, government policy t o keep the able-bodied and upright at home and to send the lame, the halt, the blind, a n d the criminal abroad.62

T h e combination of gentlemen and ne'er-do-wells of which the leaders at Jamestown complained may well have been the result of the company's using a military model for guidance. T h e Virginia Company was loaded with noblemen ( 3 2 present or future earls, 4 countesses, 3 viscounts, and i g b a r o n s ) . j V s it possible that the large number of Jamestown settlers listed as gentlemen a n d captains came from among the retainers of these lordly stockholders and that the rest of the settlers included some of the gentlemen's personal servants as well as a group of hapless vagabonds o r migratory farm laborers who had been either impressed or lured into the enterprise by tales of the New TiVorld's abundance? We are told, at least, that persons designated in the colony's roster as "laborers" were "for most part footmen, a n d such as they that were Adventurers brought to attend them, or such as they could perswade to goe with them, that never did know what a dayes work was."54

If these men thought they were engaged in a military expedition, military precedent pointed to idleness, hunger, a n d death, not to the effective organi- zation of labor. Soldiers o n campaign were not expected to grow their own food. On the other hand they zuere expected to go hungry often and to die like flies even if they never saw an enemy. T h e casualty rates on European expeditions resembled those at Jamestown a n d probably from the same causes: disease and ~ n d e r n o u r i s h m e n t . ~ ~

But the highest conception of the enterprise, often expressed by the leaders, was that of a new commonwealth o n the model of England itself.

5 1 12.'.H. Dunham, Lord Hustings' Indentured Retainers 1461-1483, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Transactions, 39 (New Haven, 1955); Gladys S. Thompson, Lords Lieutenants i n t h e Sixteenth Century (London, 1923); Stone, Crisis of t h e Aristocracy, 199-270,

asstone, Crisis o f t h e Aristocracy, 331; Lindsay Boynton, T h e Elizabethan Militia 1558-1638 (Toronto, 1967); Thompson, Lords Lieutenants, i 15.

53Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 372. About fifty per cent of the other members were gentry. See Theodore K . Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Znvestinent i n t h e Expansion of England 1575-1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).

5 4 Smith, Travels and Works, 2: 486-87. 53 T h e expedition of the Earl of Essex in 1591 to assist Henry IV of France met with only

a few skirmishes, but only 800 men out of 3,400 returned. Thompson, Lords Lieutenants, 111. Even the naval forces mustered to meet the Armada in 1588 suffered appalling losses from disease. I n ten of the largest ships, in spite of heavy replacements, only 2,195 out of the original complement of 3,325 men were on the payroll by September. T h e total loss was prohably equal to the entire original number. Lawrence Stone, "The Armada Campaign of 1588," History, 29 (1944): 12-43, especially 137-41.

609 T h e Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18

Yet this, too, while it touched the heart, was not likely to t u r n men toward hard, effective, and continuous ~ o r k . 5 ~ T h e England that Englishmen were saddled with as a model for new commonwealths abroad was a highly complex society in which the governing consideration in accomplishing a particular piece of work was not how to do i t efficiently b u t who had the right or the duty to d o it, by custom, law, or privilege. IVe know that the labor shortage in the New IVorld quickly diminished considerations of custom, privilege, a n d specialization in the organization of labor. But the English model the settlers carried with them made them think initially of a society like the one at home, in which each of them would perform his own special task and not encroach on the rights of other men t o d o other tasks. JYe may grasp some of the assumptions about labor that went into the most intelligent planning of a new commonwealth by considering Richard Hakluyt's recommendation that settlers include both carpenters and joiners, tallow chandlers a n d wax chandlers, bowyers and fletchers, men to rough- hew pike staffs and other men to finish them.5'

If Jamestown was not actually troubled by this great an excess of special- ization, it was not the LJirginia Company's fault. T h e company wanted to establish at once an economy more complex than England's, an economy that would include not only all the trades that catered to ordinary domestic needs of Englishmen but also industries that were unknown or uncommon in England: a list of artisans the company wanted for the colony in 1611 included such specialists as hemp planters and hemp dressers, gun makers a n d gunstock makers, spinners of pack thread a n d upholsterers of feathers.58 IYhatever idleness arose from the specialization of labor in English society was multiplied in the New IVorld by the presence of unneeded skills and the absence o r shortage of essential skills. Jamestown had an oversupply of glassmakers and not enough carpenters o r blacksmiths, an oversupply of gentlemen and not enough plowmen. These were Englishmen temporarily baffled by missing links in the economic structure of their primitive com- munity. T h e later jack-of-all-trades American frontiersman was as yet un- thought of. As late as 1618 Governor Argall complained that they lacked the men "to set their Ploughs o n worke." Although they had the oxen to pull them, "they wanted men to bring them to labour, a n d Irons for the Ploughs, and harnesse for the Cattell." And the next year J o h n Rolfe noted that they still needed "Carpenters to build and make Carts and Ploughs, and skilful1 men that know how to use them, and traine u p our cattell to draw them; which though we indeavour to effect, yet our want of experience brings but little to perfection but planting T o b a c c ~ . " ~ g

For typical statements i m p l y i n g t h a t Virginia is a new commonwealth o n t h e English model, see t h e Lawes D i v i n e , Moral1 and Martiall, 47-48; R o b e r t Johnson, T h e N e w L i f e of Virginia, i n Force, Tracts, I , no. 7: 17-18.

5 7 T a y l o r , W r i t i n g s of t h e t w o R i c h a r d H a k l u y t s , 2 : 323, 327-38. a x Alexander Brown, T h e Genesis of t h e LTnited States (Boston, 1890), 1: 469-70. 5 9 S m i t h , Trauels and W o r k s , 2: 538, 541.

6 1o Edmztncl S. Morgan

TOBACCO,AS W E KNOW, was what they kept on planting. T h e first shipload of it, sent to England in 1617, brought such high prices that the Virginians stopped bowling in the streets and planted tobacco in them. T h e y did it without benefit of plows, and somehow at the same time they managed to grow corn, probably also without plows. Seventeenth-century Englishmen, it turned out, could adapt themselves to hard and varied work if there was sufficient incentive.

But we may well ask whether the habits a n d attitudes we have been ex- amining had suddenly expired altogether. Did tobacco really solve the labor problem in Virginia? Did the economy that developed after 1618 represent a totally new set of social and economic attitudes? Did greater opportunities for profit completely erase the old attitudes and furnish the incentives tc labor that were needed to make Virginia a success? T h e study of labor ir modern underdeveloped countries should make us pause before we sa! yes. T h e mere opportunity to earn high wages has not always prove( adequate to recruit labor in underdeveloped countries. Something more ir the way of expanded needs or political authority or national consciousne$ o r ethical imperatives has been requiredS6O Surely Virginia, in some sense became a success. But how did it succeed? What kind of success did it havc IYithout attempting to answer, I should like very diffidently to offer suggestion, a way of looking ahead at what happened in the years after tE settlement of Jamestown.

T h e founders of Virginia, having discovered in tobacco a substitute fc the sugar of the West Indies and the silver of Peru, still felt the lack of native labor force with which to exploit the new crop. At first they turnt to their own overpopulated country for labor, but English indentured sc vants brought with them the same haphazard habits of work as their maste Also like their masters, they were apt to be unruly if pressed. And when thc terms of servitude expired-if they themselves had not expired in t "seasoning" that carried away most immigrants to Virginia-they c o ~ be persuaded to continue working for their betters only at exorbitant rat Instead they struck out for themselves and joined the ranks of those demal ing rather than supplying labor. But there was a way out. T h e Spanish a Portuguese had already demonstrated what could be done in the N World when a local labor force became inadequate: they brought in natives of Africa.

For most of the seventeenth century Virginians were unable to comr for the limited supply of slaves hauled across the ocean to man the su plantations of the Americas. Sugar was a more profitable way to use sli than tobacco. Moreover, the heavy mortality of newcomers to Virg

60 Moore, Indz~strzalization and L a b o r , 14-47; Melville J . H e ~ s k o v i t s , " T h e Problem of '11 ing Societies to New Tasks," in Bert F. Hoselitz, T h e Plogress of C n d e r d e v e l o p e d Areas cago, 195"). especially 91-92. See also Wllliam 0 . Jones, "Labor a n d Leisure in T r a d i t African Societies," Social Science Research Council, Iterns, 23 (1968): 1-6.

T h e Labor Prohlenz at Janzestown, 1607-18 61 1

made an investment in Africans bound for a lifetime more risky than the same amount invested in a larger number of Englishmen, bound for a term that was likely to prove longer than a Virginia lifetime.

But Virginians continued to be Englishmen: the more enterprising con- tinued to yearn for a cheaper, more docile, more stable supply of labor, while their servants loafed on the job, ran away, and claimed the traditional long lunch hour. As the century wore on, punctuated in Virginia by de- pression, discontent, and rebellion, Virginia's position in the market for men gradually improved: the price of sugar fell, making it less competitive with tobacco; the heavy mortality in the colony declined, making the initial outlay of capital on slaves less risky; and American and European traders expanded their infamous activities in Africa. T h e world supply of slaves, which had fallen off in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, rose sharply in the third quarter and continued to rise.61

FYith these developments the Virginians at last were able to acquire substitute natives for their colony and begin, in their own English way, to Hispanize Virginia. By the middle of the eighteenth century Africans con- stituted the great majority of the colony's entire labor force.62 T h i s is not to say that plantation slavery in Virginia or elsewhere can be understood simply as a result of inherited attitudes toward work confronting the eco- nomic opportunities of the New World. T h e forces that determined the character of plantation slavery were complex. But perhaps an institution so archaic and at the same time so modern as the plantation cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the attitudes that helped to starve the first settlers of the colony where the southern plantation began.

01 O n t h e last p o i n t , see P h i l i p D. C u r t i n , T h e Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), "9. I h o p e t o deal elsewhere w i t h t h e o t h e r developments t h a t b r o u g h t slavery to Virginia.

6 2 I n 1755 t h e total n u m b e r of w h i t e tithables i n t h e colony was 43,329, of black tithables 59,999. Evarts B. G r e e n e a n d Virginia D. H a r r i n g t o n , Anzerican Population before the Federal Censtts of 1790 (Xew York, 1932). i t j e t j ~ .T i t h a b l e s were white m e n a n d black m e n a n d women over sixteen. Black women were t i t h a b l e because they were m a d e to work like m e n .