Pursuits of Happiness

The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture

Jack P. Greene

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807864142
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Frühe amerikanische Geschichte

In this book, Jack Greene reinterprets the meaning of American social development. Synthesizing literature of the previous two decades on the process of social development and the formation of American culture, he challenges the central assumptions that have traditionally been used to analyze colonial British American history. Greene argues that the New England declension model traditionally employed by historians is inappropriate for describing social change in all the other early modern British colonies. The settler societies established in Ireland, the Atlantic island colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, the West Indies, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South followed instead a pattern first exhibited in America in the Chesapeake. That pattern involved a process in which these new societies slowly developed into more elaborate cultural entities, each of which had its own distinctive features. Greene also stresses the social and cultural convergence between New England and the other regions of colonial British America after 1710 and argues that by the eve of the American Revolution Britain's North American colonies were both more alike and more like the parent society than ever before. He contends as well that the salient features of an emerging American culture during these years are to be found not primarily in New England puritanism but in widely manifest configurations of sociocultural behavior exhibited throughout British North America, including New England, and he emphasized the centrality of slavery to that culture.

Chapter One
Two Models of English Colonization, 1600–1660

During the first six decades of the seventeenth century, an astonishing number of English people and smaller numbers of Welsh and Scots poured out of their native island in a massive movement west and south into and across the Atlantic. Without parallel in earlier English history or indeed even in the exodus of Portuguese and Spaniards to the East and to America over the previous century, this migration began slowly. No more than 25,000 to 30,000 people left during the first three decades of the century. Over the next thirty years, however, it reached substantial proportions, averaging as many as 6,500 to 8,000 people annually. Although surviving data are far too fragmentary to permit precise estimates of total emigration, probably no fewer than 240,000 and perhaps as many as 295,000 people left Britain before 1660.

This surging tide of humanity went primarily to five destinations. Beginning in 1603 and continuing for over forty years, 70,000 to 100,000 English and Scots joined a smaller group of Elizabethan emigrants to the “New English” plantations in Ireland. Four years later, in 1607, a small contingent of adventurers established the first permanent English American settlement in the new colony of Virginia. Along with its neighboring Chesapeake colony, Maryland, founded in 1634, Virginia was the destination of roughly 50,000 settlers by 1660, by far the greatest number of them arriving after the mid-1630s. Another, much more modest migration, consisting perhaps of 3,000 to 4,000 people, went to the western Atlantic island of Bermuda starting in 1612. Beginning with a small migration to Plymouth in 1620 and continuing with a huge influx into Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and the early 1640s, an additional 20,000 to 25,000 went to New England, many of them spilling over into the new colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Haven after the mid-1630s. Also in the 1620s, several small islands in the eastern Caribbean, including principally Barbados and the Leeward Islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat, became the destination for another, far larger migration of perhaps as many as 110,000 to 135,000.¹

By the 1640s and 1650s, England thus had five substantial areas of overseas settlements—the Irish plantations of Ulster and Munster; the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland; Bermuda; the New England colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Haven; and the West Indian colonies of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. The predominantly English people who went to these areas all intended to one degree or another for the new societies they were creating to be fundamentally and recognizably English. Yet the new research into the cultural dynamics and socioeconomic and demographic configurations of the two major centers of English settlement on the North American continent has made it clearer than ever before that during these early years of settlement the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland differed profoundly from the principal New England colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine how any two fragments from the same metropolitan culture could have been any more different. About the only characteristics they had in common were their ethnic homogeneity, their ruralness, their primitive material conditions, their remoteness from England, and, after their first few years, an abundant local food supply. In virtually every other respect, they seem to have been diametric opposites.

VIRGINIA, as England’s oldest American colony, occupied the crucial place in the transformation of the English conception of colonization during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Largely as a consequence of that “acquisitive and predatory drive for commodities and for the profits to be made on the rich products of the outer world” that characterized European overseas expansion during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Virginia’s orientation was almost wholly commercial from the beginning.² Yet, like the Elizabethans who had earlier formed projects for plantations in Ireland and America, the first organizers of the Virginia Company and many of the first adventurers to Virginia were still thinking primarily in terms of the Spanish experience in America. Hoping to secure a foothold in America before Spain and other rival European nations had occupied it all, they aspired, like the great Spanish conquistadores, to make some bold conquest that would bring them instant riches and fame and the nation wealth and power equivalent to that achieved by the Iberians over the previous century. Failing that, they thought of establishing commercial outposts, or factories such as those set up by the East India, Levant, and Muscovy companies in their respective spheres of influence during the last half of the sixteenth century, which would develop a lucrative trade with the natives. Even as it rapidly became clear that Virginia could succeed only if it could develop products that would be salable in European markets, those involved initially patterned their thinking on the English experience in Ireland, where such products were produced on units managed by the English but worked largely by native labor.³

An understanding of the ways participants in the Virginia enterprise initially conceived of the undertaking helps to explain many puzzling aspects of the colony’s early history. Accustomed to thinking of colonies as commercial agricultural settlements, as Virginia quickly became, later generations of historians have had difficulty comprehending why the Virginia Company sent military adventurers rather than farmers in its initial thrust into the Chesapeake, why these adventurers did not work harder to try to feed themselves, and why the company and its leaders in the colony found it necessary to govern for so long through a severe military regimen. But when it is recognized that conquest, not agriculture, was the primary object of the Virginia outpost during its first years, that the initial adventurers expected to get food not by dint of their own labor but, like their Elizabethan counterparts in Ireland and elsewhere, from the local population, and that all earlier trading company factories established in the midst of potentially hostile and numerically superior populations had been operated as military and commercial organizations rather than as agricultural societies, the history of Virginia during its early years becomes much more comprehensible.⁴

If the first English people came to Virginia looking for conquests or trade to make them wealthy and if they organized themselves so as to exploit the fruits of their hoped-for discoveries, they soon realized that neither conquest nor trade was likely to yield returns sufficient to sustain the colony, and the rapid development of tobacco as a viable commercial crop quickly transformed Virginia into the sort of commercial agricultural settlement that comes to mind when one thinks of early modern British colonies. Within a decade after its initial settlement in 1607, Virginia was organized for the production of a single agricultural staple—tobacco—for the metropolitan market. The high profits yielded by tobacco turned the colony into a boom settlement in which the reckless and single-minded pursuit of individual gain became the central animating impulse and the chief social determinant. In quest of wealth that would provide them with the civilized comforts they had left behind in England, men greedily took great risks. They dispersed themselves over the landscape with scant regard for the sensibilities of its Indian occupants. And they vigorously competed with one another for labor, the one commodity that provided the key to success in an economy that revolved around production of so labor-intensive a crop as tobacco.⁵

From these early decades, then, the labor requirements of producing tobacco were a primary force in shaping Chesapeake society. Aware that they had neither the coercive nor the persuasive resources necessary to reduce the local native populations to the hard labor involved in tobacco production, Virginia Company leaders moved quickly to solve their problem by guaranteeing prospective immigrants land and freedom in return for a specified period of labor as servants.⁶ For the next century, such servants constituted far and away the largest single source of European immigrants to the Chesapeake, probably 80 to 90 percent of the roughly 130,000 to 150,000 Europeans who migrated to the area before 1700. Almost wholly people who had not yet acquired much stake in society in England, these servant immigrants were drawn throughout the century from a broad cross section of English society, including, in roughly equal proportions, unskilled laborers and youths, agricultural workers, and tradesmen. They came mostly from areas within a forty-mile radius of three main ports of embarkation: London, Bristol, and Liverpool. Most important for the character of emerging Chesapeake society, they were predominantly young (aged fifteen to twenty-four with twenty to twenty-one the most frequent age) and male (ranging over time from six to two and one-half males for every female).⁷

These people came to the Chesapeake with hopes for a better life or at least one in which their sustenance was less problematic than it had been in England, and Virginia Company leaders fully intended that their hopes should not be disappointed. Once they had committed themselves to establishing an agricultural colony, company leaders sought to create a “stable, diversified society, where men would make reasonable profits and live ordinary, reasonable lives” in a context of traditional English political, religious, and cultural institutions.⁸ From the foundation of the colony, of course, the company, as Perry Miller has shown, had conceived of Virginia as considerably more than a purely economic venture. Along with its investors, backers, and the people it sent out to America, the company thought of the colony as part of a Divinely ordered plan in which English Protestants chosen by God would carry out the redemptive mission of reclaiming Virginia and its heathen inhabitants for His true church. The “conscious and powerful intention” of both promoters and adventurers, Miller has correctly argued, was “to merge the [colony’s] society with the purposes of God.”⁹ In the boom conditions that obtained between 1615 and 1625, however, such concerns, which had never been at the forefront of the Virginia enterprise, were thoroughly overridden by the race for tobacco profits. The company’s broader social and religious goals, including its design of fixing Virginia firmly within a “religious framework,” were very largely frustrated by the behavior of its settlers in Virginia, including even that of its own officers.

Indeed, the society that took shape in Virginia during these determinative formative years was a drastically simplified and considerably distorted version of contemporary English society. With no permanent commitment to the colony, property owners in Virginia showed little concern for the public weal of the colony and routinely sacrificed the corporate welfare to their own individual ends. Company officials led the way by expropriating so many of the resources the company sent to Virginia that, despite continuing heavy outlays, the company was on the verge of economic ruin by the time of its dissolution in 1624. Extremely reluctant to devote time or energy to any endeavor that did not contribute directly to their immediate tobacco profits, the free settlers often failed to produce enough food to feed themselves and their servants, whom they exploited ruthlessly and treated more as disposable commodities than as fellow human beings.¹⁰

By failing to grow enough food, overworking their servants, and unwittingly settling in areas with contaminated water, they also contributed to an astonishingly high mortality rate that took as much as 30 percent of the total European population in some years and was probably even higher among fresh immigrants. At the same time that they made their powerful Indian neighbors anxious by steadily encroaching upon their lands, they neglected to take adequate precautions against Indian attack and paid dearly for their laxity when Indians killed 347 people—more than a quarter of the total number of English settlers—in a surprise massacre on March 22, 1622. Of the some 7,200 people who came to Virginia during the eighteen years of company supervision, only slightly more than 1,200 remained in 1624. Though there was obviously some leakage to the Indians and some reemigration to England or other Anglo-American outposts, most of this startling population loss was the product of a grim mortality. By the mid-1620s, a few immigrants had managed to accumulate substantial fortunes and to monopolize a highly disproportionate share of the colony’s wealth. But their success had been purchased at an enormous cost in human life, and they had presided over the establishment of a society in which life for most of its inhabitants was little better than the hard, nasty, brutish, and short existence later attributed to the state of nature by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.¹¹

By the time Charles I made Virginia England’s first royal colony in 1625, Chesapeake society had developed a set of social and demographic characteristics that would prove remarkably durable. Oriented primarily toward the production of tobacco for European markets and deeply materialistic, Virginia was a highly exploitive, labor-intensive, and sharply differentiated society in which a few of the people who survived the high mortality had become rich and the vast majority worked in harsh conditions as servants, hoping to live long enough to work out their terms and become independent, landowning producers. With few people having any long-term commitment to the colony, religion and other traditional institutions were weak, a sense of community tenuous, and cultural amenities almost nonexistent. The population was mostly young, male, immigrant, outside the bounds of conventional family discipline, and incapable of reproducing itself. Men outnumbered women by three to one; three-fourths of the people were under thirty years of age, with nearly half falling into the age group between twenty and twenty-nine; more than nine out of ten were European born. Although the colony contained a small core of nuclear families, they formed no more than the earliest beginnings of a settled family structure. Created mostly after their members had arrived in the colony, families were predominantly childless; about two-thirds of the roughly 45 percent of couples that did have children had only one. High mortality resulted in more than half of Virginia’s few children living in broken families in which one or both parents were dead. Along with the absence of a clear correspondence between wealth and the traditional attributes of leadership as they were understood by Englishmen at home, the fragility of life—and fortune—in the colony meant that social and political authority was weak, impermanent, and open to challenge and that the potential for social discord was high.¹²

During the thirty-five years following the demise o...