01:512:205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Headright, Typhoid Fever, American Elements
18 May 2018
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Chapter 4: American Life in the Seventeenth Century,
1607-1692
1. The Unhealthy Chesapeake
1. Life in the American wilderness was nasty, brutish, and short for the
earliest Chesapeake settlers; malaria, dysentery, and typhoid took a cruel
toll, cutting ten years off the life expectancy of newcomers (half of people
born in early Virginia/Maryland did not survive to twenty)
2. The disease-ravaged settlements of the Chesapeake grew only slowly in
the seventeenth century, mostly through fresh immigration from England;
the majority of immigrants were single men in their late teens and early
twenties, and most perished soon after arrival
1. Surviving males competed for the affections of the extremely scarce
women, whom they outnumbered nearly six to one in 1650
2. Although they were still outnumbered by three to two at the end of the
century, eligible women did not remain single for long
3. Families were both few and fragile in this ferocious environment; most
men could not find mates and most marriages were destroyed by the
death of a partner within seven years
4. Weak family ties showed in many pregnancies among unmarried
young girls (in one area, a third of the wedded were pregnant)
3. Yet despite these hardships, the Chesapeake colonies struggled on; the
native-born inhabitants eventually acquired immunity to the killer diseases
that had ravaged the original immigrants
4. The presence of more women allowed more families to form and by the
end of the seventeenth century, the white population of the Chesapeake
was growing on the basis of its own birthrate
5. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Virginia, with some 59,000
people was the most populous colony and Maryland, with about 30,000
people was the third largest colony (after the Massachusetts colony)
2. The Tobacco Economy
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1. Although unhealthy for human life, the Chesapeake was immensely
hospitable to tobacco cultivation; profit-hungry settlers often planted
tobacco before they planted corn; seeking fields to plant tobacco, these
new immigrants plunged farther up the river valley (Indian attacks)
1. Leaf-leaden ships annually hauled some 1.5 million pounds of tobacco
out of Chesapeake Bay by the 1630s and almost 40 million pounds a
year by the end of the century (18 million kilograms)
2.
3. This enormous production depressed prices, but colonial Chesapeake
tobacco growers responded to falling in the familiar way of farmers: by
planting still more acres of tobacco
4. More tobacco meant more labor; families formed too slowly to provide
it by natural population increase and Indians died too quickly on
contact with whites to be a reliable labor force
5. African slaves cost too much money; but England still had a surplus
of displaced farmers, desperate for employment; many of them, as
indentured servants lent their bodies for several years
6. In exchange they received transatlantic passage and eventual
freedom dues, including good, clothes, and perhaps a bit of land
2. Both Virginia and Maryland employed the headright system to
encourage the importation of servant workers; under its terms, whoever
paid the passage of a laborer received the right to acquire fifty acres of
land; masts thus reaped the benefits of landownership from the system
1. Some masters soon parlayed their investments and servants into
huge fortunes in real estate (great merchant planters)
2. These lords of vast riverfront estates that came to dominate the
agriculture and commerce of the southern colonies
3. Hungary for both labor and land, Chesapeake planters brought some
100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700; these white
slaves represented more than 75% of all European immigrants to
Virginia and Maryland in the seventeenth century
3. Indentured servants led a hard but hopeful life in the early days of the
Chesapeake settlements; they looked forward to becoming free and
acquiring land of their own after completing their term of servitude
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4. But as prime land became scarcer, masters became increasingly resistant
to including land grants in freedom dues
5. Misbehaving servants might be punished with an extended term of service
and even after formal freedom was granted, penniless freed workers often
had little choice but to hire themselves to their masters
3. Frustrated Freemen and Bacon’s Rebellion
1. An accumulating mass of footloose, impoverished freemen was drifting
discontentedly about the Chesapeake region by the late 17th century
1. Mostly single young men, they were frustrated by their broken hopes
of acquiring land, as well as by their gnawing failure to find single
women to marry in the Chesapeake region
2. The swelling numbers of these wretched bachelors rattled the
established planters; the Virginia assembly in 1670 disenfranchised
most of the landless knockabouts accusing them of having little
interest in the country and causing tumults at elections
2. Virginia’s Governor Berkeley lamented his lot as ruler of this rabble and
Berkeley’s misery soon increased in the later years
1. About a thousand Virginians broke out of control in 1676, led by a
planter, Nathaniel Bacon; many of the rebels were frontiersmen who
had been forced into untamed backcountry in search of land
2. They resented Berkeley’s friendly policies toward the Indians, whose
thriving fur trade the governor monopolized
3. When Berkeley refused to retaliate for a series of savage Indian
attacks on frontier settlements, Bacon and his followers took matters
into their own hands and fell murderously upon the Indians, chased
Berkeley from Jamestown, and put the torch to the capital
4. Chaos swept the raw colony, as frustrated freemen and resentful
servants sent on a rampage of plundering and pilfering
3. As this civil war in Virginia ground on, Bacon suddenly died of disease and
Berkeley rushed the uprising with brutal cruelty, hanging more than twenty
rebels; back in England Charles II complained
4. The distant English king could scarcely imagine the depths of passion and
fear that Bacon’s Rebellion excited in Virginia; Bacon had ignited the
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