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The Catholic Refuge - A Plantation of Trade · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season four of American Political History The Catholic Refuge A Plantation Trade In early Maryland, the money in a man's pocket was a leaf.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not a coin, a leaf.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cured tobacco, pressed and weighed was the colony's currency.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hard silver coin was scarce on the Chesapeake.
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  SPEAKER_00: A laborer's wages were paid in pounds of tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: Debts were settled in tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: Court fines were levied in tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: The minister's salary was paid in tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: When a court wanted to punish a man, it fined him so many thousand pounds of tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: The leaf was the unit of value, the medium of exchange, the thing everything else was priced against.
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  SPEAKER_00: A visitor writing of the Chesapeake in sixteen seventy commented The general way of traffic and commerce there is chiefly by barter or exchange of one commodity for another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Barter in one commodity above all.
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  SPEAKER_00: A colony does not make its crop into its money by accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: It does it when the crop is the only thing it really has, when the entire enterprise is built on one plant, grown for one market three thousand miles away.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland had been founded as a refuge, a place where Catholics could worship in peace, but a refuge still has to eat, it still has to pay its debts, ship something across the ocean and return a profit.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco was a plant native to America.
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  SPEAKER_00: A century earlier no Englishman had ever smoked, let alone anyone from Africa, Asia, or Europe.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the time Maryland was founded, the courts and taverns of the old world and Asia had acquired an appetite for it, that nothing else seemed to slate.
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  SPEAKER_00: People paid and kept paying for the thing they breathed in and burned up.
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  SPEAKER_00: That bottomless demand is what shaped everything in the Chesapeake, because tobacco had two qualities that together built a whole kind of society.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, it was enormously profitable.
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  SPEAKER_00: If a planter could successfully cultivate a crop, he could make more money than anything he could be doing in England.
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  SPEAKER_00: Second, it was a crop that was hungry for two things land and labor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco exhausts the soil.
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  SPEAKER_00: A field planted year after year dies in a few seasons, and the planter must clear fresh ground.
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  SPEAKER_00: So tobacco always wanted more land, not a tidy farm but a sprawling claim, with new fields opening as the old ones gave out.
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  SPEAKER_00: And tobacco is punishing to grow.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every plant tended by hand, topped, wormed, cut, cured, packed, months of labor and summer heat for every leaf that reached a ship.
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  SPEAKER_00: A man working alone could tend only to so much.
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  SPEAKER_00: The way to grow rich in tobacco was not to work harder, it was to command more hands in the field.
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  SPEAKER_00: Land and labor get enough of both, and the leaf turned into a fortune.
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  SPEAKER_00: The whole history of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century is a history of planters reaching for more of each.
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  SPEAKER_00: The land came first, and the colony had a system for handing it out that tied the two hungers together in a single, fateful mechanism.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was called the headright, and Maryland did not invent it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Virginia did in sixteen eighteen, a generation before there was even a Maryland.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the Virginia Company, desperate to bind laborers to the colony that they kept fleeing, hit on an idea of paying them in land.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland copied the system.
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  SPEAKER_00: Its older neighbor had already built.
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  SPEAKER_00: The principle was simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: For every person you brought across the ocean, you received a grant of land.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bring yourself, and you get acres.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bring your wife, your children, your servants, you got acres for each of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fifty acres ahead was a common figure, in Virginia and Maryland alike.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that did.
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  SPEAKER_00: It made a human being into a unit of land.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every person you could transport became, the moment they stepped off the ship, a claim for fifty more acres of land.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a poor man, the headright was a road to a farm of his own.
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  SPEAKER_00: But for a man with money, a man who could pay to bring over tens of servants, twenty, fifty, the headright was an engine of accumulation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Each servant he imported earned him another fifty acres, and gave him another pair of hands to work the lands those acres became.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the system rewarded exactly the thing tobacco demanded.
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  SPEAKER_00: The more laborers you imported, the more land you were granted, and the more of both, you could grow more tobacco to buy more laborers to claim more land.
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  SPEAKER_00: The big grew bigger.
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  SPEAKER_00: The great planters assembled the states of thousands of acres, worked by gangs of imported labor while the colony's land concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
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  SPEAKER_00: For the first two generations, the hands that grew Maryland's tobacco were mostly English, and mostly bound in indentureship contracts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The indentureship system worked like this a poor English man or woman with no prospects at home signed a contract, an indenture, agreeing to work for a master in a colony for a fixed term, commonly four to seven years.
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  SPEAKER_00: In exchange, the master paid their passage across the ocean and fed and housed them through it.
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  SPEAKER_00: At the end, if they survived, they were free, and owed a set of freedom dues, typically tools, clothes, seeds, sometimes corn, sometimes the promise of land.
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  SPEAKER_00: Over three quarters of English who came to the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century came this way.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly poor, and they were fleeing in England with too many people and too little work.
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  SPEAKER_00: The colony was their gamble.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sell four, seven years of your life, cross an ocean, and bet on coming out the other side with land of your own.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was the same gamble in both Chesapeake colonies, because it was the same economy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Virginia and Maryland were two halves of one tobacco world, divided by a river and a religion, but joined at the leaf.
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  SPEAKER_00: What worked in one the other copied.
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  SPEAKER_00: What went wrong in one usually went wrong in both.
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  SPEAKER_00: George Osop, an indentured servant who served his term in Maryland and then published a book on it, a character of the Providence of Maryland, Osop's book is cheerful, almost to the point of an advertisement.
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  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to counter the darker reports drifting back to England, the stories that servitude in the Chesapeake was a kind of slavery, and so he painted the servant's life in warm colours.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those, whose abilities cannot extend the purchase of their own transportation over to Maryland or below, in this their necessity, sell themselves to a merchant, and they live well in the same time of their service.
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  SPEAKER_00: Oslop made the bargain sound like a trifling investment against a lifespan of gain.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what is four years of servitude?
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  SPEAKER_00: To an advantage a man all the remainder of his days, attained partially by the reinstatement of so small a time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Four years or seven against the whole rest of your life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Put that way, it sounds like a fine wager.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for some, it was.
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  SPEAKER_00: A servant who survived the term in a good year with a fair master could indeed come out on the other side, with a new start in life.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the bargain was harder than Oslop's verse, let's on, starting at the dock.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the ship came in, the servants were sold, auctioned.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the buyers bid not on the money, but in years, the term running down from the legal limit according to how strong or skilled the body looked.
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  SPEAKER_00: The best hands went for shorter terms.
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  SPEAKER_00: A man stepped off the ship and was sold to a stranger by the look of his arms and went where he was told.
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  SPEAKER_00: Oslop knew exactly what those hands were bought for.
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  SPEAKER_00: He named the colony's whole purpose in a single line.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco is the only solid staple commodity of this province.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything else, the furs, the corn, the cattle, was besides the point.
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  SPEAKER_00: The colony existed economically to turn human labor into cured leaf, and cured leaf into money in London.
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  SPEAKER_00: The servant was the means, the tobacco was the end.
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  SPEAKER_00: But notice what Oslop was arguing against.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was writing to deny something other people were saying, that the Chesapeake was a place that used up people, and the thing he was denying was, for many, the truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Chesapeake killed its servants in large numbers, the climate bred diseases the English had no resistance to, fevers off the marshes, what we have covered before as the seasoning.
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  SPEAKER_00: A servant arrived owing years of his labor, and a great many of them died before those years were up, having bought their masters a head right and often gotten a grave in exchange.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the contract itself could be bent against them.
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  SPEAKER_00: A servant who ran was hunted, and had time added to his term.
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  SPEAKER_00: A woman who became pregnant during her service, regardless of the reason, had years added for the offense.
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  SPEAKER_00: The indenture was a contract, but it was a contract between a person who owed years and a person who was owed them, and the law sat mostly on the owner's side.
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  SPEAKER_00: This was the labor the refuge ran on for its first decades, young, English, bound for a term and dying often enough that the supply had consistently to be replenished from across the ocean.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then, across the second half of the century, the labor that grew Maryland's tobacco began to change, slowly at first, and then in law all at once.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first labor we have already covered, the English indentured servant bound for the term of years.
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  SPEAKER_00: For decades this was the backbone of the workforce, the people who actually grew the tobacco.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second labor force coming is one that is often overlooked in history.
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  SPEAKER_00: Slave taking was an old tradition in America, far older than Europeans.
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  SPEAKER_00: Native nations had taken war captives as slaves for centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: We saw it with the Susquehannock raiding south for slaves from the Pescado.
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  SPEAKER_00: Once the colonial economies grew enough wealth, they began trading for native slaves, war captives taken by one nation and sold to the English, who put them to work in the fields or shipped them off to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
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  SPEAKER_00: Native slave raiding peoples, armed with English guns, took captives by the thousands across the century, and in the early Chesapeake, an enslaved person was far more likely to be a native than an African.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the English colonies, the African slave trade was a rare thing exclusive to the richest plantations, not a foundational piece of the economy, an exotic luxury at the edge of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: African slaves had to be carried across an entire ocean, and the European powers that commanded those markets for most of the seventeenth century were the Dutch and Portuguese, not the English.
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  SPEAKER_00: An enslaved African was expensive.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Chesapeake colonies were poor.
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  SPEAKER_00: A handful of the richest planters held a few.
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  SPEAKER_00: For everyone else, the labor that grew the tobacco was an English servant working off their indentureship or a native taken from some far off war.
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  SPEAKER_00: For decades, the Dutch had dominated the carrying of African slaves across the Atlantic.
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  SPEAKER_00: England spent the middle of the century fighting a series of war to break that dominance and winning.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in 1672, King Charles II chartered a company to seize England's share, the Royal African Company, which was granted a monopoly on the English's trade with Africa, including the trade of slaves.
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  SPEAKER_00: The numbers tell the story of what changed.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1640, African slaves in Maryland numbered around twenty, in a colony with a population around some six hundred, one thirtieth.
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  SPEAKER_00: By 1660, it was about one tenth of the population.
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  SPEAKER_00: Two things pushed that shift.
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  SPEAKER_00: First was supply.
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  SPEAKER_00: English servants grew harder to get.
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  SPEAKER_00: England's own economy was improving, the Civil War had ended, and the grim reports of the Chesapeake's mortality had spread home, so fewer and fewer poor Englishmen were willing to make the crossing.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second issue was control.
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  SPEAKER_00: An indentured servant served his term and went free, and a freed servant was a problem.
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  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to own land and then competed with his old master.
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  SPEAKER_00: Worse, the colony kept accumulating these free men, poor, landless, armed, and aggrieved.
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  SPEAKER_00: The planters wanted what every owner of labor wants, a workforce that did not end its term, did not go free, and did not turn every few years into a fresh crop of dangerous freemen.
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  SPEAKER_00: An enslaved African offered the planter exactly that, not a term of years, but a lifetime.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not a contract that expired, but a condition that was permanent.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Chesapeake did not invent the slave trade, it piggybacked on what England's islands in the Caribbean were doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: On Barbados, English planters had started with tobacco and white servants, just as Maryland had, and switched to sugar and African slaves who worked in their thousands for decades before the Chesapeake began purchasing an African slave.
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  SPEAKER_00: The English colonies of the West Indies had already proved that a cash crop could be grown by a people held for life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland and Virginia, reaching for a labor force that would not expire, reached toward a system their countrymen in an island had already built.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1664, under the governorship of Charles Calvert, Cecil's son, the Maryland Assembly passed its first slave law, an act concerning negroes and other slaves.
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  SPEAKER_00: Its core was a single Latin phrase, Durante Vita, for the duration of life.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the advance and consent of the upper house of the present General Assembly, all negroes or other slaves already within the province, and all negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the province, shall serve Durante Vita.
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  SPEAKER_00: The law made the condition hereditary.
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  SPEAKER_00: The children of an enslaved mother or father was born into the same lifelong service.
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  SPEAKER_00: The law did one more thing, and it tells you the paradigm being drawn by race.
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  SPEAKER_00: It turned its attention to English women who married enslaved men.
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  SPEAKER_00: Such a woman, the law declared, forfeited her free condition, would herself serve her husband's master for as long as her husband lived, and her children by him would be slaves.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: The act concerning negroes and other slaves produced a horror its writers had not intended, which the assembly had to pass a second law to stop, because the first law said an English woman who married a slave would serve her master's husband for her husband's life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some masters worked out how to exploit this.
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  SPEAKER_00: They forced their English maids to marry enslaved men, in order to bind the women for longer and claim their children as slaves.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maryland's assembly admitted as much when it moved to end the practice in 1681.
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  SPEAKER_00: Divers freeborn, English, or white women, sometimes by instigation, procurement, or convenience of their masters, mistresses, or dames, do intermarry with negroes and slaves.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 1681 law put a heavy fine on any master who forced such a match.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the time period in Maryland we are focused on was not yet the vast plantation of slaves it would become in the eighteenth century.
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  SPEAKER_00: The numbers in 1664 were still small, but the thing itself, slavery for life, inherited, defined by race, was becoming enshrined in law.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thirty years on from the settlement of St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mary's, it was now a place that ran on a single leaf, that measured its wealth in it, paid its debts in it, and bent everything else to the growing of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco shaped the land into spreading plantations, worked by bound labor, the English servants working off years, the natives taken from some far off war, and coming, when the prices finally fell, the African slave held for life.
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  SPEAKER_00: The crop ate the land, and it ate the people.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it always wanted more of both.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 16:20
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• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.