Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
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In reply to:
Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
Janet Crain 7/05/08
I'm eager to read what conclusions concerning free people of color you devine as resulting from Bacon's Rebellion.
Lulu Sweat
from
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jones-work.htmlhttp://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jones-work.html
American Work
Four Centuries of Black and White Labor
PLACES OF LABOR'S "HARD USAGE" IN THE SOUTH BEFORE SLAVERY
In those "New World" mainland colonies governed by England and built on a foundation of tobacco, rice, cattle, timber, Indian corn, and peas, human labor was the key to wealth. Modeled after Barbados, South Carolina (founded in 1670) immediately institutionalized the system of black slavery, first within a "frontier" economy based on cattle and lumber produces, and later, by the early eighteenth century, within a staple-crop economy based on indigo and rice. In contrast, the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia (founded 1607) and Maryland (1634) produced tobacco with a predominantly white workforce until the latter part of the seventeenth century; and the "barrier colony" of Georgia (1733) developed a relatively diversified economy without black labor until both rice cultivation and slaves were introduced almost two decades after its founding. In these labor-intensive agricultural systems, physical strength and endurance served as the hallmarks of the workforce. These colonies needed "lusty labouring men ... capable of hard labour, and that can bear and undergo heat and cold, any one who is but able to inure himself to the Ax and the Howe...." A Georgia settler put the case in appropriately neutral terms according to gender, racial, and ethnic classifications: he called for "strong robust people, fit for our plantation work."
Native groups shaped patterns of colonial labor in the pre-slave South not as workers so much as warriors hostile to the planters and their designs on the land. The earliest Chesapeake settlers unwittingly set down roots in the midst of the powerful Powhatan Confederacy, an extensive network of thirty tribes, all part of the Algonquian language group. More than a century later, white men in Georgia attempted to carve out a place for themselves wedged between the slave society of South Carolina to the north, and St. Augustine, an enclave of Spaniards, Indians, and runaway slaves, to the south. Colonization depended upon military security; and persistent threats to the integrity of English settlements throughout the 1600s meant that field workers could be called upon to use their guns against foes as likely as use their hoes in the ground. In 1623, Virginia officials set out to humiliate Captain Richard Quaile, guilty of some unspecified offense, when they decreed that he was to be "ignominiously degraded from his degree of Capt his sword broken and sent out o[f] the port of James Citty with an ax on his shoulder...."; his title of captain was to be replaced by that of carpenter. Yet by the mid-1620s, colonists in the Chesapeake were refusing to draw such an explicit line between soldiering and laboring. A century later, the Georgia Trustees took pains to link the tasks of planting and defending the colony through tail-male, an ancient land tenure system that ensured all freeholders would be soldiers by forbidding daughters to inherit land. Field laborers doubled as defenders and conquerors, as the times demanded.
White men might hope someday literally to outgrow manual labor, but colonial elites devised a number of ingenious ways to exploit the productive capacity even of persons presumably free. By the late eighteenth century white southerners would equate black people with slavery, and white people with liberty, but the early colonists in the Chesapeake and Georgia knew that most labor was "naturally" unfree. In these three colonies, the only labor system foreordained was the "hard usage" of men, women, and children, whether red, white, or black. Indeed, almost all workers in early Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia found themselves bound to some form of exploitative relationship--children governed by their elders, servants by their masters, sharecroppers and tenants by their landlords, hirelings by their employers, women by their fathers and husbands, Indians and Africans by white men, criminals and sexual renegades by the state and church. In turn, each of these groups devised means of resistance to the people who sought to work them hard, raising the specter of internal subversion within settlements highly vulnerable to external attack.
More Replies:
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Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
james lee ray 7/06/08
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Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
Laree Pezzullo 7/06/08
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Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
james lee ray 7/06/08
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Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath
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Re: Bacon's Rebellion Aftermath