Dispossessing the poor, Part III - Into the new world

 “Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land. If he have nothing but his hands, he may by industries grow quickly rich.”

Imagine how such words would affect poor people in London in the early 1600s, many unemployed and landless since the enclosure system had forced them off farms. The words were written by Capt. John Smith. Ads were posted throughout the city, promising wealth and freedom to anyone willing to go to the English colonies in North America, where free land awaited. The goal of the Virginia Company was to get the one thing their new colony needed most: workers.

The Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company were both trading companies chartered by King James I, in 1606, to settle the Atlantic Coast of North America. Stories about Pocahontas or the Pilgrims do not mention corporations, but they were the primary movers of the colonies. The king granted them authority to use “his” land, much as kings had previously done with feudal lords. The Plymouth company’s shareholders were gentlemen in Plymouth, while those of the Virginia Colony were mostly gentlemen from London.

There were several reasons the British government would want to cooperate with private companies to create colonies in North America. They hoped to find gold and silver, like the Spanish had (they did not). They wanted to grow tobacco, introduced to Europeans several decades earlier (turns out, the more people smoked the more they wanted). They hoped to establish bases from which to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. But there was another very important reason, one that set them apart from France and Spain.

England, especially in the cities, had too many people. And a great many of them were poor, whether unemployed in the cities or farming in the country. It was a great enticement, indeed, to tell them that in the colonies they could get rich - or, at the very least, be free, have land, and be their own boss. It sounded like a great deal, but the shareholders of the company and their agents were not quite as magnanimous as they seemed. Some of them spoke of the laborers they attracted - many of whom they expected to die in the process -as “manure” from which they would grow their empire. One of them described the colonies as a sinkhole into which they could sweep all the filth of England.

The catch was that you had to get across the ocean. It was expensive. Some of the new colonists had no problem paying their own way - these were the “gentlemen of means,” many of them second or third sons who would have only a small inheritance but could still afford to travel. These were the people who expected to own and control most of the land they encountered. For the poor people, imported as labor, they had to pay their way by signing a contract indenturing themselves, usually for a seven-year period. In other words, their masters who paid their way by buying their contracts OWNED their labor for seven years. Many drove their servants on with whips or literally worked them to death. That, plus disease, starvation, and wars with local Native Americans meant that, for the first 50 years, most indentured servants did not survive their first seven years. And, if they did, they were told the available land had all been taken (which brings us, once again, to Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676).

Many of the poor found themselves in the same position they had been in back in England: existing only to serve as labor, with no end in sight. Some, though, were daring. They left the tobacco plantations behind and pressed into the western part of the colonies, up into the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains. There, many of these “back woods” people adapted and became self-sufficient.

But that would change.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.