It’s clear why the Dutch West Indies Company would have promoted slavery. What’s not clear, is why sugar planters like James Drax were willing to go into debt to buy slaves when they lived on an overpopulated island. However, their shared experiences were formed the decade before when Barbados was land rich and labor poor.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
Showing posts with label Frontier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frontier. Show all posts
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Recently, Judith Thurman reviewed some books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose that suggested she grew into a rigid, domineering mother and that both drifted into conservative thought that made her books icons for people like Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan.
I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.
I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.
I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.
I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.
The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.
For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.
The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.
Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.
I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.
I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.
I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.
I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.
The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.
For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.
The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.
Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)