Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading scholars of colonial America was 89 when The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 was published in 2012. He would pass in 2020 at the age of 97.
Why "The Barbarous Years"? Here's Bailyn's explanation in the introduction:
"All the people involved - native Americans, Europeans, latterly Africans - struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured in what mattered. All . . . felt themselves dragged down or threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. All sought to restore the civility they once had known."
"Later generations, reading back into the past the outcome they knew, would gentrify this early passage in the peopling of British North America; but there was nothing genteel about it. It was a brutal encounter - brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples . . . and between European and Africans, but among the Europeans themselves . . ."
It is, indeed, a tale filled with violence, famine, harsh weather, crop failures, dangerous voyages, exploitation, constant infighting and outbreaks of violence within each settler group, along with daring, courage, sacrifice, and occasional attempts at understanding across the divides.
The natives were not a peaceable lot at the time. Baily describes the Iroquois, the leading northern confederacy in these terms:
"Fierce warriors perpetually organized for war, whose savage treatment of captives created terror wherever it was known, the Iroquois were the scourge of their neighbors and rivals. The Western Abenakis' panic fear of the Iroquois tribe closest to them, the Mohawks, has been described as 'almost psychotic'; the Hurons might realistically have anticipated that one day the neighboring Iroquois would utterly destroy them."
"They were at war with a succession of Algonquian, Montagnais, and Huron peoples . . . and at the same time they were driving the Susquehannocks . . . farther and farther to the south . . . they mounted lesser campaigns for similar reasons against the Western Abenakis in Vermont . . . and in scattered forays far to the south, across some of the backcountry tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas.
To the south, in Virginia, the leading chief was Powhatan who created a "brutally expansive empire", turning on a neighboring tribe, the Chesapeakes "with fury and obliterated the entire community", even as the Jamestown fleet set sail from Britain.
In advance of the arrival of European settlers, many of the tribes, particularly along the coast, were already suffering from the devastating onslaught of diseases brought by the early Atlantic traders, so that on occasion, the earliest settlers found the land almost deserted.
Bailyn discusses the Pilgrim and Puritan founders of New England, the Dutch in the New Netherlands, and the small Swedish and Finnish(1) colonies along the lower Delaware River, but spends the most time on the Virginia and Maryland settlements, and its on those colonies, and particularly on the risks faced by the earlier settlers, the introduction of indentured servitude, and slavery that I'll focus on.
It's often forgotten that for 17th century Englishmen, their primary reference point for colonialization and attitudes towards indigenous peoples was Ireland and the Irish. Ireland had been England's fastest growing colony for a century. And what did the English think of the "wild" Irish?
Bailyn provides quotes from leading Irish colonizers, many of whom later journeyed to the New World.
"They 'blaspheme, thei murder, commit whoredom, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal, and commit all abomination without scruple . . . matrimonie emongs them is no more regarded . . . than conjunction between unreasonable beasts, perjurie, robberie and murder counted alloweable'"
". . . more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish in their customs . . . then in any other part of the world"
This attitude carried over to the natives in the New World. One of the first governors of Jamestown, Sir James Dale, who launched the first war against native tribes in Virginia, is described in these terms:
"a participant in the ruthless slaughter of noncombatants in Ireland on the ground that 'terror . . . made short Warrs'"
Bailyn cites the leading historian of that English-Indian war regarding the tactics of that struggle:
"translated England's ad terrorem tactics from the Irish wars of the late sixteenth century - specifically the use of deception, ambush, and surprise, the random slaughter of both sexes and all ages, the calculated murder of innocent captives, and the destruction of entire villages . . ."
Whether in peace or war, the mortality toll on the Virginia settlers is astonishing. Malnutrition, disease, the heat and humidity, along with Indian attacks was unceasing. The original settlers landed in Jamestown in May 1607. By September only 58 of the 104 were still alive, and of that group only six were able-bodied men capable of labor. By January 1608, twenty more had died.
By May 1610, after the arrival of more settlers, only about 60 of 400 were still alive after a starvation winter, the survivors "so leane that they looked lyke [skeleton], cryeinge owtt, We are starved."
Eight hundred more arrived later in 1610, but six months later more than a third "had sickened and died or were killed by the Indians."
By the end of 1611 more than 1,500 settlers had arrived since 1607 but only 450 were alive. By 1616 more than 2,000 had reached the Virginia colony but the population was only 351, of whom more than 350 were killed in Indian encounters.
After the first decade, large and more isolated plantations were established but the deadly toll continued to mount. Half of the 280 sent to Martin's Hundred were dead by the end of 1621. A year after 34 men arrived at Berkeley Hundred, 31 were dead. Of 120 men and boys sent to Bennett's Welcome in 1621 only 10 were alive by the end of 1623.
And just getting to Virginia involved a perilous voyage taking two to three months, during which waves of sickness would pass through the passengers in their crowded quarters. In one instance, the colony lost valuable skills and workers when "Most of the carefully recruited ironworkers were lost on a single voyage".
In a notorious incident, of a shipload of 180 religious dissenters, only 50 survived the voyage; "they had been 'packed together', it was reported, 'like herrings; they had amongst them the flux, and also want of fresh water".
Following the early conflicts, English policy changed regarding the natives. In 1621, Governor Yeardley was told that "no injurie or oppression bee wrought by the English against any of the natives of that countrie wereby the present peace may be disturbed" and "to converse" and "labor amongst them . . . that therby they may growe to a likeing and love of civillty and finallie bee brought to the knowledge and love of God and true religion." Yardley was instructed to set 10,000 acres aside for the building of schools and living quarters for the Indians.
But Yardley's attempts to improve relations were too late, as the local tribes had already begun planning for a surprise assault on the colonists. On March 22, 1622 more than 300 English men, women, and children were killed. Over the next few months the colonists were to prevail and the surviving natives driven into the interior, but because of the inability to plant crops, perhaps another 1,000 settlers died on malnutrition and disease in 1622 and 1623.
In total, about 8,000 settlers arrived in Virginia between 1607 and 1624. A census the following year found only 1,218 still alive.
Many of those 1,218 were indentured servants, bonded for a set period of years, usually seven, to their masters. Bailyn reports that during the 17th century at least 70%, and perhaps up to 85%, of migrants to Virginia's tobacco coast were indentured servants.
Those servants were not just adults. Many were vagrant and orphaned children rounded up by the authorities and sent to Virginia. For instance, between 1618 and 1620, from Bridewell Hospital in London, a detention center and jail for vagrant children, "idle wastrels, petty theives, and dissolute women" sent at least 337 to Virginia as apprentices; by 1624 more than 4,000 vagrants were transported to the colony.
As the decades progressed, Bailyn tells us:
"Increasingly there were Irish among them, despite the fact that in the West Indies, where Irish laborers had been recruited in large numbers, they had proved to be difficult, unreliable, and often rebellious, largely as a consequence of their resistance to the vicious treatment they received from the English planters, who despised them."
Until freed, servants were under the absolute control of their masters being, "bought and sold, pledged as security on debts, even risked in gambling . . . [T]heir worth was closely calculated, upon sale or in estate inventories".
Even later in the century, the excessive settler mortality continued for both planters and servants.
"Between 15 and 30 percent of male immigrants to Maryland at midcentury died within the first 'seasoning' year of their residence."
In Virginia's Middlesex County "only a minority lived to the end of their service and joined the ranks of the free", while among landowning families the mortality rate was such that households were "complex, jumbled, unstable, at times bizarre."
The 1625 census counted 23 Africans "of indeterminate legal status", among the 1,218 inhabitants. For the first half-century of the colony that indeterminate status continued with a number of Africans acquiring freedom. That was to change.
By the 1670s decreasing immigration from Europe, and the cost of those immigrants, was becoming an increasing problem for the small group of plantation planters, who were expanding acreage and facing an growing need for labor. In 1670, Africans comprised about 9% of Maryland's population and there were 2,000 in Virginia, but there was not yet wholesale importation. At the time most Africans came from British owned Barbados, the Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, or from Spanish settlements on the American mainland, not directly from Africa.
It was towards the end of the period covered by Bailyn that the legal structure began to be put in place to clearly define and manage Africans, and planned importation directly from across the Atlanta became large scale. The change was also prompted by broader societal changes:
"By 1675 the stress lines in Chesapeake society had become clear. A restive, footloose, unsettled population of land-hungry former servants exposed to Indian assaults pressed against an established population of small-scale planters and farmers active in the local courts and, through their deputies, in the Burgesses. They in turn were sensitive to pressure from increasingly aggressive gentry families intent on creating great estates that required demanding personal management. . . And feverish land speculation was driving up land values, to the spectacular benefit of some but for many a keen sense of real and relative deprivation."
With regards to slavery we can see the stress lines statistically. Two of every three officeholders in Virginia and Maryland owned slaves, while only one of every 16 non-officeholders were slaveowners. The majority of tobacco farmers did not own slaves. The result, according to Bailyn was that:
"The record of the growth and distribution in the ownership of slaves reflects the emergence of a racist, patriarchal culture. But in the 1670s it was newly formed, strange, uncertain, and taut with inner tensions."
For the politically powerful planters:
"The question was not what the moral limits of slavery might be but how it might best be elaborated and defined in law for maximum use in the Chesapeake, and how it might related to differences in race".
It's Bailyn's reminder that from the planter perspective, slavery had always existed in one form or another; the default mode of societal organization. What is the exception, is the abolition movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century in Britain and its colonies in America, as discussed in Christopher Leslie Brown's history of the abolition movement in Britain, Moral Capital.
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(1) The author believes the Finnish settlers were the most compatible with the natives, as their lifestyle and culture was the most similar of all the Europeans.
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