style="font-size:15px;"> It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made one hundred thousand pounds a year for the king.
From the testimony of the governor himself, the rebellion against him had the overwhelming support of the Virginia population. A member of his council reported that the defection was “almost general” and laid it to “the Lewd dispositions of some Persons of desperate Fortunes” who had “the Vaine hopes of takeing the Countrey wholley out of his Majesty’s handes into their owne.” Another member of the Governor’s Council, Richard Lee, noted that Bacon’s Rebellion had started over Indian policy. But the “zealous inclination of the multitude” to support Bacon was due, he said, to “hopes of levelling.”
“Leveling” meant equalizing the wealth. Leveling was to be behind countless actions of poor whites against the rich in all the English colonies, in the century and a half before the Revolution.
The servants who joined Bacon’s Rebellion were part of a large underclass of miserably poor whites who came to the North American colonies from European cities whose governments were anxious to be rid of them. In England, the development of commerce and capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s, the enclosing of land for the production of wool, filled the cities with vagrant poor, and from the reign of Elizabeth on, laws were passed to punish them, imprison them in workhouses, or exile them.
In the 1600s and 1700s, by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America.
After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their cost of passage by working for a master for five or seven years, they were often imprisoned until the ship sailed, to make sure they did not run away. In the year 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, born that year as the first representative assembly in America (it was also the year of the first importation of black slaves), provided for the recording and enforcing of contracts between servants and masters. As in any contract between unequal powers, the parties appeared on paper as equals, but enforcement was far easier for master than for servant.
The voyage to America lasted eight, ten, or twelve weeks, and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a musician, traveling from Germany to America around 1750, wrote about his voyage:
During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water…. Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles.… On board our ship, on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one of the portholes into the sea.…
Indentured servants were bought and sold like slaves. An announcement in the Virginia Gazette, March 28, 1771, read:
“Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia, with about one Hundred Healthy Servants, Men Women & Boys—The Sale will commence on Tuesday the 2nd of April.”
Against the rosy accounts of better living standards in the Americas one must place many others, like one immigrant’s letter from America: “Whoever is well off in Europe better remain there. Here is misery and distress, same as everywhere, and for certain persons and conditions incomparably more than in Europe.”
Beatings and whippings were common. Servant women were raped. In Virginia in the 1660s, a master was convicted of raping two women servants. He also was known to beat his own wife and children; he had whipped and chained another servant until he died. The master was berated by the court, but specifically cleared on the rape charge, despite overwhelming evidence.
The master tried to control completely the sexual lives of the servants. It was in his economic interest to keep women servants from marrying or from having sexual relations, because childbearing would interfere with work. Benjamin Franklin, writing as “Poor Richard” in 1736, gave advice to his readers: “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.”
Sometimes servants organized rebellions, but one did not find on the mainland the kind of large-scale conspiracies of servants that existed, for instance, on Barbados in the West Indies.
Despite the rarity of servants’ rebellions, the threat was always there, and masters were fearful. After Bacon’s Rebellion, two companies of English soldiers remained in Virginia to guard against future trouble, and their presence was defended in a report to the Lords of Trade and Plantation saying: “Virginia is at present poor and more populous than ever. There is great apprehension of a rising among the servants, owing to their great necessities and want of clothes; they may plunder the storehouses and ships.”
Escape was easier than rebellion. “Numerous instances of mass desertions by white servants took place in the Southern colonies,” reports Richard Morris (Government and Labor in Early America), on the basis of an inspection of colonial newspapers in the 1700s. “The atmosphere of seventeenth-century Virginia,” he says, “was charged with plots and rumors of combinations of servants to run away.”
The mechanism of control was formidable. Strangers had to show passports or certificates to prove they were freemen. Agreements among the colonies provided for the extradition of fugitive servants (these became the basis of the clause in the U.S. Constitution that persons “held to Service or Labor in one State…escaping into another… shall be delivered up…”).
Sometimes, servants went on strike. One Maryland master complained to the Provincial Court in 1663 that his servants did “peremptorily and positively refuse to goe and doe their ordinary labor.” The servants responded that they were fed only “Beanes and Bread” and they were “soe weake, wee are not able to perform the imploym’ts hee puts us uppon.” They were given thirty lashes by the court.
More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants. They were mostly English in the seventeenth century, Irish and German in the eighteenth century. More and more, slaves replaced them, as they ran away to freedom or finished their time, but as late as 1755, white servants made up 10 percent of the population of Maryland.
What happened to these servants after they became free? There are cheerful accounts in which they rise to prosperity, becoming landowners and important figures. But Abbot Smith, after a careful study (Colonists in Bondage), concludes that colonial society “was not democratic and certainly not equalitarian; it was dominated by men who had money enough to make others work for them.” And: “Few of these men were descended from indentured servants, and practically none had themselves been of this class.”
It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and poor became sharper. By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia, with wealth equivalent to fifty thousand pounds (a huge sum in those days), who lived off the labor of black slaves and white servants, owned the plantations, sat on the governor’s council, served as local magistrates. In Maryland, the settlers were ruled by a proprietor whose right of total control over the colony had been granted by the English king. Between 1650 and 1689 there were five revolts against the proprietor.
