Richard Ligon may have been a failed planter, but he was a successful promoter of plantations. His book on Barbados was reprinted in 1673, and, according to April Hatfield, owned by planters in Virginia. She believes his influence there was enhanced by the presence of his brother Thomas, who was a cousin and business partner of William Berkeley. In the late 1650's, Thomas bought 2,000 acres, including some land from William Byrd. Hatfield also thinks Thomas Willoughby may have amplified Richard Ligon’s importance, since Willoughby was the agent for Ligon’s Barbado’s partner, Thomas Modyford.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
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