American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

“With Drake’s help, it seems, the vision of Hakluyt and Raleigh was beginning to materialize: England was bringing freedom to the New World. To be sure, it was coming as a means to an end; Drake and Raleigh were both interested in power, profit, and plunder. But freedom has frequently had to make its way in the world by serving as a means to an end, and it has often proved a powerful means.” 

This quotation supports Morgan’s central argument that freedom and equality were values that Americans sought alongside less desirable and antithetical—and in the case of slavery, fundamentally inhumane—ideas. From the start, then, the ideal of freedom was tinged by self-interest and exploitation of the very men who sought it in the New World. Raleigh and Drake, who respectively challenged the Spanish at the Outer Banks and attempted to integrate the Indians into Virginian freedom and equality, did not envision a colony and relationships based on race or racism.

“Although they hoped for profits, theirs was a patriotic enterprise that would bring civility and Christianity to the savages of North America and redemption from idleness and crime to the unemployed masses of England.” 

Morgan is connecting the ideas that were more fully developed in colonial Virginia, namely by linking the redemption of non-whites with the redemption of the poor. The English originally came to the Americas to make life better for the good Indians whom they thought they would encounter. They planned to manage the bad Indians as need be. While they were working with the Indians, they hoped the work ethic of the New World would also reform the unemployed from England by finding them industrious work in Virginia and helping England to deal with increasing unemployment.

“In Virginia they faced a people who had some of the same shortcomings, as well as—from the English point of view at least—a few of their own. The Virginia Company had sent the idle to teach the idle. And they had sent, as it turned out, a quarrelsome band of gentlemen and servants to bring freedom to the free. It was a formula for disaster.” 

This quotation supports Morgan’s claim that mistakes were made in deciding what type of person was initially sent to the colony, which undermined its success. The first ships were filled largely with nobles who could pay their passage, their servants, and servants who were contracted to work for the company but who came from undesirable backgrounds (i.e., beggars). Each group was idle because neither had an interest in manual labor. In the end, one group sought to compel the other to work, which created a constant tension that shaped Virginia’s economy and social structure.

“John Smith had not had his way in wishing to reduce the Indians to slavery, or something like it, on the Spanish model. But the policy of his successors, though perhaps not with company approval, made Virginia look far more like the Hispaniola of Las Casas than it did when Smith was in charge.” 

This quotation highlights Morgan’s contention that early on, many Virginians harbored racist attitudes toward the Indians. John Smith’s racism toward the Indians, as it turned out, was not rare. Racial hatred allowed the Virginians to abuse the Indians by killing them and stealing their land, and treating them just as the Spanish had by enslaving them.

“Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over. They had also put an end to Sandys’ plans for an integrated community of which the Indians would be a part.” 

This quotation marks a critical change in the settlement’s political ideals and supports Morgan’s idea that the settlers saw themselves as superior to the Indians and were willing to deny freedom to certain groups. Initially, the new program was intended to integrate Indians into the colony’s success, as it had been when the original settlers set sail from England. However, as the Indians failed to show sufficient deference and the settlers increasingly took their land and treated them poorly, those who wanted to kill the Indians were given their chance.

“Yet two or three months earlier, when a Dutch ship put in at the colony, the governor and cape merchant bartered Virginia provisions for twenty-odd Negroes (the first known Negroes to enter the colony), who certainly came ashore unsupplied with anything.” 

The first mention of Africans in Virginia shows that they were in America as early as 1619 and that they were not treated as labor and nothing more. They were bartered for labor, as were all servants, which at this time was not based on race. Indeed, Morgan’s point is that new arrivals, like the 20 Africans, came without proper provisions, which meant that most new arrivals went to work. Of course, the majority of them died in the early years.

“In boom-time Virginia, then, we can see not only the fleeting ugliness of private enterprise operating temporarily without check, not only greed magnified by opportunity, producing fortunes for a few and misery for many. We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things.” 

By the 1620s, it was clear that the large planters, who also happened to be the political leaders in the colony, were willing to treat men inhumanely to get them to work harder so that they could squeeze every ounce of profit they could. Morgan points out that servants could easily have their contracts sold without their consent or have their contract extended because of punitive punishments. And without women in the colony, servants could be further exploited because they were denied having families of their own.

“While racial feelings undoubtedly affected the position of Negroes, there is more than a little evidence that Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior.” 

This quotation supports Morgan’s claim that at the start of the colonial project in Virginia, the enslavement of Africans was not a forgone conclusion. In fact, Morgan shows that this position required a series of events, such as allowing hatred of Indians to grow into racist acts and treating white servants as things that could be bought and sold, to occur before slavery and racism were linked. Thus, slavery was not a preconceived idea; rather, the social, economic, and political conditions in Virginia had to combine in order for slavery and freedom to coexist.

“Servants were Virginia’s most valued form of property but also the most risky. […] The initial cost for a man for four or five years was no more in tobacco than he might make in a year. The risk came from the mortality to which servants were no less subject than masters.” 

A thread of Morgan’s analysis is that the labor shortage was critical to shaping Virginia’s view of slavery, none more so than the continual problems with servants and their tenancy. Since servants were cheap to bring in (and they were exploited because of their position), and since the labor shortage was so intense, planters were willing to take the risk that they could make money before their servants died. However, given the incredible death rates, unlike other forms of property a planter could purchase, planters were likely not to recover their investment in servants in the 17th century.

“And the whole population, but especially its men, was dying off rapidly and could sustain itself and grow only by continuing heavy immigration. These unfamiliar and unwelcome circumstances, no less than the colonists’ wish to create familiar institutions, dictated the shape of their developing society.” 

This quotation highlights the idea that immigration was required because settlers chose to build a plantation system and to continue to exploit labor. Because of disease, lack of provisions, and a host of other issues, the mortality rate in the colony was high. Rather than abandon tobacco or change the institution of servitude, planters and colonial leaders saw only one option to continue their profits, which was to bring in more labor.

“In the later 1650s as population and production figures headed up and tobacco prices headed down, the stage was set for the most ambitious effort of the century to save Virginia from tobacco and the evils that accompanied it.” 

Central to Morgan’s argument is the idea that the shift from servitude to enslavement and export products like tobacco opened the door for the mistreatment of Indians, the mistreatment of servants, and the enslavement of Africans. This causal order meant that at some point the colony would have to lessen its dependence on a single export and further diversify the economy. When Virginians did try to experiment with new ideas, they failed because of corruption, their attitudes toward work and servants, and general short-sightedness: They would not commit to short-term loss for long-term gain.

“Although the king, or the government he represented, became the principal tobacco profiteer as soon as the Navigation Acts were passed, tobacco seems to have invited exploitation by men of every rank in the seventeenth century; and the development of Virginia society after 1660 must be viewed with an eye to the toll that everyone who came near tobacco tried to collect from it.” 

Morgan shows how people with political power in and over Virginia and Virginians exploited tobacco and labor so much that they all had too much to lose in ending its production and export. The king relied on tobacco’s profits; the big farmers relied on its profits; even the small man relied on its profits. It also spurned illegal trade and corruption and led to the mistreatment of servants and freedmen.

“Managed or not, the acres were owned. And the servants who became free after 1660 found it increasingly difficult to locate workable land that was not already claimed. In order to set up their own households […] they frequently had to rent or move to the frontiers, where they came into conflict with the Indians.” 

Morgan highlights the plight of the freed servants to show why they harbored racist attitudes toward the Indians and so disliked the big farmers that they were willing to join Bacon’s Rebellion. Many freedmen were taken advantage of when it came time to end their servitude. Rather than being given their provisions and headrights, they were denied land that the big farmers had bought up through the sale of headrights, even though they never followed the law and put up homes and worked the land. If they could not find land on the frontier, the only other choice the freedmen had was to become tenants of their former masters.

“But it seems plain that by the 1660s Virginia was acquiring a new social structure. Outside the structure entirely were the remaining tributary Indians, segregated in what amounted to reservations, beyond the limits of settlement but rightly uneasy about their future. Inside the structure at the bottom were a number of slaves […] A little above them were a much more numerous body of servants.” 

Morgan uses this quotation to provide further evidence of how, in a matter of decades, the Virginians moved from seeing Africans as one of them to viewing Africans as part of a social hierarchy that placed Africans on the bottom. This situation, as Morgan shows, is how Virginians who believed in freedom could so carelessly and easily remove Africans’ freedom completely and Indians’ partially.

“Virginians could be so heavily exploited, legally and illegally, partly because they were selected for that purpose: they were brought to the colony in order to be exploited.” 

Morgan’s point in this quotation, which supports his larger claim, is that the system itself set up the potential for rebellion that the colony experienced as well as exploitation of other forms of immigrant labor, including Africans. An exploitative labor structure was established from the very beginning because of the tremendous cost of transportation and the condition of those who came: Most were the poor of the poor, and many were young teenagers, some of whom were contracted to work in servitude until age 30. Virginia’s leaders didn’t just exploit the poor through labor, however; they also exploited them through taxes, through corruption, and through deceit.

“Bacon was offering Berkeley a way to suppress a mutiny. The Indians would be the scapegoats. Discontent with upper-class leadership would be vented in racial hatred, in a pattern that statements and politicians of a later age would have found familiar.” 

Morgan shows that the rebellion, which was Virginia’s first civil war, set a path for how Virginians would thereafter treat the Indians. More importantly, the hatred of the Indians evident here demonstrates how racial hatred seeped into Virginia’s politics in the treatment of people who were not European and, in the long run, who were not white. Indians bore the brunt of the servants’ and freedmen’s hatred toward a system that exploited their labor.

“[T]he itching desire for rebellion was kept up in Virginians by the bad government of their colony, or at any rate by the itching desire of everyone at the top, whether in England or Virginia, whether a Beverley or Berkeley, a Charles or a James, to squeeze just a little more out of the men who grew tobacco.” 

Morgan argues that the underlying causes for rebellion in Virginia remained even after some reforms were instituted to calm the rebellion. Further, the leaders in Virginia doing the squeezing needed to find a way to ensure their source of labor and to make the servants and the freedmen back their plans to keep getting richer. In other words, after rebellion, the powerful in Virginia needed to find a way to ensure the freedom of the white freedmen while still having a group to exploit for labor.

“Slavery is a mode of compulsion that has often prevailed where land is abundant, and Virginians had been drifting toward it from the time when they first found something profitable to work at. Servitude in Virginia’s tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England. Men served longer, were subjected to more rigorous punishments, were traded about as commodities already in the 1620s.” 

A central aspect of Morgan’s argument is that the foundation for slavery, which did not arrive in Virginia as a deliberate policy, was laid once tobacco became the primary export crop and big farmers were allowed to mistreat their servants. But this mistreatment began within years of establishing tobacco, not significantly later. Moreover, because the big farmers treated their servants like objects, as contracts to be bought and sold, it was not a huge leap to the outright buying and selling of people.

“The plantation system […] had one insuperable disadvantage. Every year it poured a host of new freemen into a society where the opportunities for advancement were limited. The freedmen were Virginia’s dangerous men. […] The substitution of slaves for servants gradually eased and eventually ended the threat that the freedmen posed: as the annual number of imported servants dropped, so did the number of men turning free.” 

One of the ever-present problems in Virginia was what to do with the freedmen, whose political interests did not align with those of the big planters until slavery, when the planters used racism and some political and other benefits to convince the freedmen of shared interests. Since freedmen were considered a dangerous element, stability in the colony increased once slavery was instituted and there were subsequently fewer freedmen to contend with.

“Such was the price of slavery, and Virginia masters were prepared to pay it. In order to get work out of men and women who had nothing to gain but absence of pain, you had to be willing to beat, maim, and kill. And society had to be ready to back you even to the point of footing the bill for the property you killed.” 

Morgan makes a critical point here, namely that slavery could never have taken hold in Virginia if the entire society was not prepared to support enslaving human beings and the abuse necessary to force them to work. Planters bought their slaves, but it took the other governing leaders, the courts, and regular people to support the laws that allowed the enslaved to be dismembered or killed. The colony, and later the entire country, accepted the idea that slavery could coexist with freedom and equality.

“Although a degree of racial prejudice was doubtless also present in Virginia from the beginning, there is no evidence that English servants or freedmen resented the substitution of African slaves for more of their own kind. […] There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament.” 

This quotation highlights an interesting aspect of Virginian society: While prejudice toward the Indians was clear from the start, the first reaction to enslaved Africans was not initially racism. Indeed, Morgan argues cogently that the governing leaders and the planters had to legislate racism partly because the enslaved were brought into a ready-made plantation system. Thus, contrary to the reaction to Indians, policy was needed to band whites together in their contempt for blacks and Indians and in support of slavery.

“The fear of servile insurrection alone was sufficient to make slaveowners court the favor of all other whites in a common contempt for persons of dark complexion. But as men tend to believe their own propaganda, Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them.” 

This quotation shows how racism toward blacks in Virginia was constructed by the governing leaders and the planters, who were often one and the same, to ensure their labor source and their profits. However, if freedmen and servants were to stay the course, and to prevent rebellion by allowing them to act on shared interests, the elites had to offer the freedmen more than words. Therefore, they provided them with benefits denied to all non-whites, including extra provisions when servants finished their terms, like a gun and a new set of clothes.

“Thus by the second quarter of the eighteenth century Virginians had established the conditions for the mixture of slavery and freedom that was to prevail for at least another century: a slave labor force isolated from the rest of society by race and racism; a body of large planters […] and a larger body of small planters who had been persuaded that their interest were well served by the leadership of their big neighbors.” 

Slavery and freedom was possible partly because white Virginians banded together and moved non-whites out of the political, social, and economic realms. Racism provided another level of distance between the two groups and furthered the suffering of the enslaved. Finally, Morgan notes that this was the situation in place after the American Revolution and during the formation of the United Sates.