Print by anonymous artist: Tobacco plantation (circa 1745 - 1865)

"We Americans are nothing if not overflowing with contradictions."

The Plantation became the British means of colonization before Henry VIII's reign. He broadened and deepened the institution, employing it as the primary means for subjugating enemies and employing otherwise idle citizens. He began the large-scale use of indentured servants in the service of state-owned agricultural enterprises. Each Plantation was run like a stock corporation, with the labor considered just another commodity required for production and humanity at best a side consideration. At the time, England had laws that insisted anyone without a profession was required to labor for a better, a better being anyone of greater means. Part of the justification for chartering the Virginia Company, which oversaw Jamestown and other early Plantations, was to put idle hands to work. It was a strategy to subdue the rabble through forced employment.

All but one of my forebears arrived in this country as some sort of servant. I do not have access to the terms under which each agreed to labor, but I feel confident that all but that one started their search for freedom by agreeing to a period of enslavement. Headright indenture contracted for a stake once an indenture was satisfied: a year's supply of corn, fresh clothes, a cow, and land. The land attracted them; the promise of becoming a freehold yeoman farmer seemed like a better offer than anything the Old Country's primogeniture promised. When immigration to this continent started, Europe was still in the Middle Ages, feudal territory ruled by contentious kings, entitled royalty, and unforgiving religious institutions. They were still burning heretics at the stake, for instance. Those not inheriting found little opportunity, so an indenture might have seemed to solve an otherwise insoluble problem.

An alarming number of those hopeful indentures didn't live to see the end of their service. I've found no instances where my forebears died in service, but the Mid-Atlantic and Virginia colonies were notorious for shockingly short life expectations. The heat and humidity were unlike anything any native of the British Isles would have ever experienced, and the labor was endless. Tobacco, eventually the primary crop, required constant tending and stoop labor. Further, indentures were easy prey to malaria and yellow fever. Records report a persistent sleepiness many indentures experienced. They believed that should they submit to the overwhelming urge to sleep, they wouldn't wake up. Zombies probably performed their summertime service. I feel exhausted just thinking about it!

Every one of my forebears headed West just as soon as they could. The West held promise. Vulture capitalists in London or Amsterdam had yet to buy the land there. Only the Indians stood between their slavery and their freedom, for even on land owned by a colonist, tribute was due to the crown, who retained the first deed to everything in their colonies. Given this constraint, even I can understand the motive to move into territory otherwise reserved as Indian hunting grounds.

My ancestors were racist and classist, perceiving themselves as somebody's better, even if that somebody was "only" an Indian. The British did not consider the Irish fully human. The Dutch established the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and every American colony going back to and including Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay employed enslaved people, first Native American, then African. Eventually, by around 1800, the indenture system did itself in. Enslaved Africans were seen as a more reliable investment, even though in the early years, before 1700, an enslaved person might not live to see age twenty-five. Life for them was brutish and short. Their masters were, without exception, bastards by even then current standards. Capitalism required subjugated classes, and each of my immigrant ancestors agreed to subjection as a condition of their eventual liberation.

I imagine the flight toward the West was a flight from that system. The Overmountain Men were, to a man and woman, recently enslaved people. They had not forgotten! They produced the first constitution on this continent that didn't presume royalty but equality. It probably took people intimately familiar with slavery to imagine a form of government that didn't command obedience as its primary premise but one that sought to extend and protect rights, not of workers or enslaved people or betters, but of ordinary people, the sons and daughters of rabble. Of course, these pioneers owned enslaved people, too. We Americans are nothing if not overflowing with contradictions.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz