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The Grand Model - A Colony of a Colony · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season six of American Political History The Grand Model, a colony of a colony.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: To understand Carolina, you have to leave it, sail seventeen hundred miles southeast to a single small island in the eastern Caribbean, because Carolina was not really founded from England, it was founded from there.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Barbados is a speck in the Atlantic Ocean, a hundred and sixty six square miles smaller than many English counties, sitting out on the far eastern edge of the Caribbean, and in the middle of the seventeenth century that speck became the single richest piece of ground in the English speaking world.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: The people who had built Carolina came more than anywhere else from Barbados, and they were fleeing or carrying the system that had made the island rich.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: To understand what they built on the Carolina coast, you have to understand the machine that built it on that island.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we start there with the planter, with the crop that changed everything sugar.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: A generation before, Barbados had been a marginal place, English smallholders growing tobacco that could not really compete with Virginia's and cotton and indigo, scratching out a modest living.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then in the sixteen forties, the planters turned to sugar.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar was the most profitable agricultural commodity in the Atlantic world.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: European demand for it was effectively bottomless and still climbing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: The price was high and stayed high, and the land and climate of Barbados happened to be very good at growing sugarcane.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: A planter who got into sugar at scale was not making a farmer's living, he was making a fortune and making it fast.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: The wealth that came off the little island is hard to overstate.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Within a few decades, Barbados was producing more value in trade than all the other English colonies in America combined.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's Virginia, Maryland, New York, and all of New England combined.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: The big planters became some of the richest men in the English world, richer than most landed gentry back home, buying English estates and English seats in parliament with sugar money.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The phrase West Indian planter became synonymous with very rich, a single small Caribbean island, on the strength of one crop had become the most valuable colonial possession England had.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is the fact to hold at the center of this whole story, not the crop itself, not the climate, the money.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar generated wealth on a scale that the English had simply never seen come out of agriculture before.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar is not really farmed, it's manufactured on a tight clock.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sugarcane has to be cut the moment it ripens, and once you cut it the juice begins to spoil within a day or two, so the sugar cane has to move from the field to the mill, then to the boiling house almost immediately, crushed and then boiled down through a series of copper kettles into crystallized sugar before it all sours.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: During the harvest season, that meant the mills and the boiling houses ran continuously day and night for months.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was hot, exhausting, dangerous, and it could not stop, because stopping meant losing the crop you had spent your year growing.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sugarcane needed a farmer who tended the field on the crop's schedule.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: It wanted a large workforce that could be driven through hard, continuous labor on the crop's schedule, cutting, hauling, feeding the mills around the clock through the season.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of labor at that scale was hard to obtain, which brought every sugar planter the same question.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you get a large workforce you can drive that hard, that cheaply?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's worth being precise in this history because it's easy to get the cause and effect backwards.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Slavery did not arrive in the Atlantic world with sugar.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: The owning of slaves was one of the oldest institutions on earth, and it was already present in the English colonies.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: African slaves were being bought and sold in Barbados before sugar ever became a dominant crop, alongside the indentured servants and the native slaves.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Slavery was simply there, available, an ordinary feature of the world, the way it had been an ordinary feature for every world before theirs.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: What sugarcane changed was not whether slavery existed.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: What sugar changed was the scale at which it paid.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: When labor produces a modest crop, the number of workers it makes sense to buy and hold is modest.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: But when each worker driven through the sugar cane produces a share of the most profitable commodity in the Atlantic, then every additional laborer you can put on the field pays for himself many times over, and the incentive is to acquire as much labor as you possibly can.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: The wealth is what scaled the slavery.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar is bound up with mass slavery in the history of the Americas not because sugar created the institution, but because sugar made it pay on scale that allowed for the purchase at scale.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the Barbados planter, getting rich on sugar and wanting to get richer, was hunting for as much available work as he could put his hands on.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the early sugar years, much of that labor was white and indentured, poor English, Irish, Scottish, plus prisoners and the kidnapped, who served fixed terms if they survived.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Through the sixteen forties and into the early sixteen fifties, Barbados pulled in more indentured servants than any other English colony.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: But that supply tightened and then failed.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: The whole inducement of an indenture had been the land or the payout a servant collected at the end of the term.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: As the big planters bought up the island and turned it all into cane fields, there was no land left to give a free servant at the end of their indentureship.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The promise that had drawn people thinned out, and the stream of the forced indentured servants ended after the English Civil War ended, less Irish prisoners to hand off to some colony.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a matter of the planters preferring one kind of labor over another and picking the cheaper.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was that the labor they had been using became impossible to get in the numbers a sugar economy demanded.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: They tried to get whatever was available.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: They bought native slaves, shipped down from North American mainland and from the other islands, but that source was thin and soon dried up too, never close to the scale the fields demanded.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: One source and only one could deliver labor continuously in the numbers required without end.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: African slaves, carried to Barbados in the early years by Dutch merchants.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: As the slave population climbed, the planters found they needed something English law did not give them.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: English common law had no real category for a chattel slave, that is a slave who was permanently property, with no legal standing, inheritable and sellable like land or livestock.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: England had never run a mass slave system, so it had never written the laws to enforce one.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen sixty one, the Barbados Assembly passed what is generally considered the first comprehensive slave code in the English world, an act for the better ordering and governing of negroes.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Read plainly, it is property law.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It states its purpose to protect slaves as we do men's other goods and chattel.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: The act defined slavery as property in law, set out the punishments an owner or the authorities could impose, denied slaves the legal protections of an English subject, and held and fixed the master's near total authority over them.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was the working practice of the plantations written down and made enforceable, the legal architecture a mass slave economy needed in order to run.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it did not stay on Barbados.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: The code traveled with the system, revised in Jamaica in sixteen eighty four, and from there to the mainland, where South Carolina, writing its first slave code in sixteen ninety five, worked from the Jamaican version.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: The plantation, the people forced to work it, and the law that governed both moved together down the same lines of development from the island that first wrote it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Step back now from the plantation itself and ask what all of it was for.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why did England want colonies churning out sugar and tobacco in the first place?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: The answer lies in how the seventeenth century thought about trade.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Today we mostly assume that trade is mutual, that when two countries trade both come out ahead, and that more trade in general makes everyone richer.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody in power thought this in sixteen sixty.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: The paradigm, what we now call mercantilism, held that the wealth of the world was essentially fixed, one pie, and that trade was therefore a contest over shares of the world's wealth.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: If one nation gained, another must have lost.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Commerce was not a cooperation, it was a form of warfare conducted with ships and ledgers and armies.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: The goal was to end every year having sold more to foreigners than you bought from them, so that the difference flowed home as treasure, and to make sure your rivals ended the year poorer.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: The man who put this doctrine most cleanly was Thomas Munn, a director of the East India Company, writing around 1630.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: The ordinary means, therefore, to increase our wealth and treasure is by foreign trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule, to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: In a world that thought this way, a colony was not a community of fellow subjects building their own lives across an ocean.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: A colony was an economic instrument.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It existed to make the mother country richer, to grow things England could not grow and would otherwise have to buy from rivals, and to serve as a captive market for England's own manufacturers.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: A sugar island that produced a fortune in the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic, in this way of seeing things, just about the most useful thing a colony could possibly be.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Which is exactly why England spent these decades trying to wall off its colonies from everyone else.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: If a colony existed to enrich the mother country, then the worst thing it could do was trade with a rival, selling its sugar to the Dutch or buying Dutch goods so that the profit flowed to Amsterdam instead of London.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of the century, that was precisely the problem, because the Dutch, not the English, were the great carriers and merchants of the Atlantic.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Dutch ships were everywhere, they charged less, and they were happy to buy Barbadian sugar and sell them everything they needed, no questions asked.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So England wrote laws to stop it.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Navigation Acts, a series of them, each one tightening the rules.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: The first in 1651, under Cromwell, required that goods coming into England and its colonies travel on English ships.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: This was aimed squarely at cutting the Dutch out of carrying their trade.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: After the king came back, the Act of 1660 went further.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It named a list of valuable colonial products, sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo among them, that could be shipped only to England or another English colony, never directly to a foreign country.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Staple Act of 1663 closed the loop from the other side, requiring that most European goods bound for the colonies pass through England first to be taxed and handled by English merchants on the way.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Produce your sugar, sell it only into the English system, buy your goods only in the English system, and carry all of it on English ships.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: The colony was an economic vassal, producer and consumer for the Metropole of the English Empire.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: The reality in this early period was that the design barely worked.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: The first acts were sweeping and vague, and England simply did not yet have the naval power to enforce them across an ocean.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not enough ships, not enough customs men, too much coastline.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: A planter who wanted to sell to a Dutch merchant who slipped into a quiet anchorage could usually do exactly that, and many did.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: The laws were on the books, and breaking them carried a real risk if you were caught, but for now they were bound loosely, more of a statement of intent.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: What would eventually give the navigation acts their teeth was not better paperwork.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was England breaking Dutch sea power in a series of wars, and that is a story for a later season.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: For the Barbadians and the Carolinians, the imperial rules were a fact of life you worked around when it paid to.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Returning to Barbados, the sugar plantation economy quickly filled up the island.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because sugar only paid its scale, the operation that won were the large ones.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: A big tract, a mill, a boiling house, a large slave workforce, all of which took serious capital.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that scale did something to everyone beneath it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: A small planter working a few acres of his own land, his family's, and perhaps a servant or two, could not produce sugar at a price that competed with the estate worked by a slave workforce.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: The big plantation cost per pound of sugar was lower, and it could sell at a price the small farmer could not match and still feed himself.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: The small planter had no margin, no way to pay for his own labor against a slave workforce producing the same commodity, unable to compete, falling into debt, and finally selling the only thing he had left, his land.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the big planters bought out the small ones year after year, not in a single transaction, but as the end of a process that had already made the small farmer unviable, consolidating the island's many small farms into smaller and smaller numbers of large plantations.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Within a generation, Barbados went from a place of numerous modest farms to a place of a few hundred large estates, worked by tens of thousands of slaves and owned by a small, immensely rich planter class.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: By the sixteen sixties, every workable acre of the island was spoken for, which left two groups with no room to rise on Barbados.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: The first were the former servants and small farmers who had been shut out of the economy, men with some skill and ambition and no land, and an economy that no longer had a place for them.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: The second was the second sons of the planter class, men who had grown up in the plantation family but knew they would not inherit the estate, and had no future on an island where everything was already owned.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is the two different ends of Barbadian society, with the same problem.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: The island was full, and they needed somewhere with room.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there, three days sail to the northwest was a long, thinly settled coast that a group of London proprietors was advertising hard and struggling to fill.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: For a Barbadian with capital, ambition, and no land at home, it was the obvious move.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: They went, and they went in such numbers and with such money and such certainty about how a colony was supposed to work that they did not simply join Carolina, they built their society into it.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Carolina was not the only place they did it.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Barbados, full and overflowing, had become a kind of seed bed of the English Atlantic, throwing its surplus people and its system outward in every direction.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Barbadians helped populate Jamaica after England seized it from Spain in sixteen fifty five.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: They spread through the Leeward Islands, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Kitts.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: They turned up in the Serene in Virginia, and in New England's trading ports.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Carolina was one node in a Barbadian diaspora, one of several colonies of Barbados scattered across the Atlantic.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: But it was the one where the island's model would put down its deepest roots on the mainland in North America.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they understood a colony the way their whole world understood it as an asset.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: A plantation, a colony, a grant of land across the sea, these were investments, expected to return a profit to whomever held them, evaluated in pounds like any other corporation.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is why the proprietors back in London treated Carolina as a portfolio holding rather than a home, and it is how the Barbadians thought too.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: The planters also carried the financial machinery of the sugar world with them, an economy that ran not on cash but credit, on bills of exchange and long running debts that London merchant houses extended against the next crop.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: The planter was perpetually in debt to his merchant.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: The merchant advanced him goods and slaves against the harvest to come, and the whole Atlantic turned on those obligations.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Carolina was settled by people who thought in these exact terms land, labor, credit, return.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is the single most important fact about early Carolina.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: It did not drift gradually towards slavery over generations, the way Virginia and Maryland did, beginning with a handful of slaves and growing the laws around them slowly.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Carolina was a slave society from the start, because the people who shaped it, arriving already running a plantation in their heads.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: They did not have to invent the plantation or discover how to make slave labor profitable or grow into that system over time.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: They imported it, complete, from the island they had just spent thirty years perfecting it in.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: The organization, the expectations, the capital, and the slaves themselves.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sir John Yamens was a Barbados sugar planter.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: We met him in the last episode as the man who wanted the first Charlestown move south toward a better harbor.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: The proprietors made him a baronet and a Carolina governor, and when he came to plant the settlement near Charlestown, he did the characteristic Barbadian thing.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: He brought African slaves with him, from his own holdings on the island, to work the new colony from its first days.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sir John Yeeman was not an abstraction, it was specifically men sailing from a specific island, carrying specific people, to build on a new coast the thing they already knew how to build.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the colony's own rules were written to invite exactly that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: The head rights, the proprietor system for granting land, gave a settler additional acres for every person he brought, and the Carolina heads counted slaves for their master.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Bring a slave and you're granted more land, the same as if a family member or a servant had come, except that the African and their children were yours for life, and the land was yours to keep.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: From the beginning, the rules of settlement rewarded the importation of slaves to create Barbados style plantations.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: This whole apparatus was in place before the colony could reliably feed itself.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was, though, one thing the Barbadians could not bring with them, the crop.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar is a tropical plant.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: It needs the relentless heat and the long growing season of the Caribbean, and the Carolinas sitting in the temperate zone of the North American coast was simply too cool for sugar cane.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: The planters arrived with the whole apparatus for a sugar economy, the plantation organization, the slaves, the expectation of a single dominant crop, and no sugar to put into it.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: For the colony's first decades, they cast about for what to grow.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: What they eventually found was rice.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Carolina low country, as it happened, looked a great deal like West Africa rice coast, a hot, wet, tidal landscape of freshwater swamps and slow rivers feeling the pole of the sea.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Using African farming techniques, a field worked by a tidal method could yield several times what the same field yielded by simply waiting on the rain.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was one difference between the island they left and the coast they came to, and it was the size of the continent.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Barbados was one hundred and sixty six square miles.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Carolina's coast opened into a land that ran west, as far as anyone knew in 1670, without any visible end.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: The most profitable labor system in the English Atlantic, the one that had just consumed and overflowed a small island, was being set down in a place with effectively no limit on how far it could grow.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.