Colonial Labor Systems & Law

The labor discipline systems of British colonial North America, slave and free, set the conditions of social and legal development for half a millennium. We consider how they began, and how the law grew with them.

Readings

Assigned

George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (1968), chapters 3 to 7

Eben Moglen, Settling the Law (1993), The Law of Settlement: Land Law and the Manors

E. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), pp. 108-180

Suggested

Notes and Materials

Projects

Transcript

It seems to me that Avery's dedication to his first-year students which is very commendable is going to run us to

10:40 on Thursday so there's no point trying to start at 10:35 both days we're stuck with 10 minutes of odd time so be here at 10:40 on Thursdays and 10:30 on Fridays and the court of appeals will be satisfied

Mechanical, procedural, or other similar questions I need everybody to register don't let that go any longer

the wiki is a good place to ask questions if you don't want to ask them here

I'm about to ask if you want to ask them here and I'll do that at least the top of every hour if not the top and the bottom

If you'd rather write a question write it than some conversation can happen other people can refine it there can be some conversation and in the end something can be made out of it which is informative to others, so I'm not against questions here by any means I'm always interruptible just raise your hand let me know that you want to ask a question in the middle of a paragraph that's fine with me

I'm hiring a transcriber

we will begin with this week's lectures to put up audio and a transcript

Where we will put it, obviously, is on the topic page for that lecture where the reading is and where any project connected with the reading will go

I'm going to hope that that work flow will be more or less current so the transcripts will appear in the weekend following each week's lectures but I can't be sure of that until I get somebody hired and see what his or her actual capacity to produce transcript is.

I want to do that work on campus not outsource it to India, you understand.

The reading will pick up in appearance in the wiki now so you will start getting notifications of future week's reading appearing on various pages where it is appropriately linked

I don't know exactly what the speed of that workflow is going to be because it turns out to be a little complicated. I'm trying both to scan for images and to OCR the documents as they are being scanned in order to provide ultimately for editable text for everything that appears in any of my courses.

Our workflow to OCR is still I would say a work in progress.

But it is getting there

And when it is getting there the consequence will be that it will be possible to put any book on earth into an inexpensive scanner you can build yourself from stock available parts and a published design. We're putting instructible videos on the Net that show you how to build them and how to turn any book on the Net in existence in the world into editable texts on the Net automatically in a short period of time using free software that anybody can copy, modify, and redistribute for zero. That should suffice to destroy the publishing industries around the world.

It will certainly make all the fighting about the google books deal look stupid.

Everybody is basing their analysis on the assumption that you can't scan a book for yourself, but we're gonna make it possible for every textbook on earth to be scanned and shared by ordinary people in their dorms using stuff they have available to themselves at no meaningful cost.

That will destroy the textbook industry forever.

Alright. So you know I know that the slow appearance of reading here is a small price to pay for the total revolution, but you weren't signed up for the total revolution so we'll try and get you the reading in at least images form as quickly as possible. At no time should there be any shortage of reading as you have begun to discover.

Other questions about process?

Student Question: What's the best way for students to scan stuff if we find stuff in library books somewhere...

The simplest thing to do is at the moment to go and use an ordinary photo copier as a flatbed scanner and if the machines you are using will scan a PDF ask them to scan a PDF. Put a flat piece of the frontest piece or rights pages of the books right on the front of anything you scan and email us the PDF. We'll run it through a little thing called Unpaper which worries about removing all the crap around the edges and straightening the page and doing all the stuff that human beings would be able to do if they were robots standing at the scanner which nobody is. So, a little bit mistaken. And then we'll attach it to the relevant place in the syllabus or put the raw PDFs in the wiki yourself rather than emailing them to us using the attachment mechanism which is sitting there for you waiting for you to attach a page.Waiting for you to attach any file to any page and in the workflow of my guys, they'll come along, take it down, unpaper it and put it back.

The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to get stuff in. What we want is for stuff to be appearing for in any form. If there are images there they can always be OCRed later. But, everything you bring into the wiki will be in the Net and will stay there forever and be accessible to everybody.

Last week at 10 o'clock in the evening as I was doing some work related to this class, I got a note from a guy in Peru - a stranger to me and he said "I finished my law degree here and I'm working on an LLM which I completed but I haven't any ability to complete my thesis. My thesis is about trademark in English Legal History and I can't finish it because, as you may know, the first trademark case in English Law (Samson's Case of 1529) is available only in Baker and Milson's sources of English Legal History book I can't get a hold of and of which as far as I can tell there is no copy on the South American continent. I see that you have assigned some pages of that book in your English Legal History course can you help me?"

Now, if I weren't putting Baker and Milson behind password protection because of racket from the Oxford University Press, he could have helped himself. So, I went and clipped out from the PDF of Baker and Milson the pages that he needs and I send them to him in Peru and of course, he's grateful.

because now he can finish his thesis. It would be against the rules, you understand. You're not supposed to do that and he's not supposed to finish his thesis.

Correct?

Because the ownership of knowledge claims to own a 16th Century case that's of course in the "public domain." But they presume to own it because they have a thing copyright around the anthology and the editing and the introduction and the blah blah blah and that's why he's not supposed to be able to finish his thesis.

Which is a fairly clean demonstration of what's wrong with copyright also a fairly clean demonstration of what you are about to do every time you go out there and you scan a document, you're making it possible for other people to learn, which is part of learning.

So, what we're doing is making a history workshop right? And that workshop will never get smaller, it will only get larger and a generation from now it will be very complete and everybody will be able to learn what we are learning. And in fact, they will be able to learn what we haven't learned cause they will see things in the documents that we don't see.

And then we'll do some projects and you'll collect some stuff in a thoughtful way and make a comprehensive collection of something and introduce it so people can use it and make some inferences from the documents contained in it and then that's your work.

And that work not only allows you to get out of the course, which I'm sure by that time will be extremely welcome. But, also, allows other people to learn...for free, which is not supposed to happen. Which is why most of the people who live on earth are supposed to die ignorant in order to vindicate the majesty of property.

But we're not gonna do that anymore and this course actually, oddly enough, is a little piece of how we don't do it anymore.

More about that? It's important, the question is important. How do we use this wiki to educate ourselves and other people. That's a real question - the one we're building the answer to.

Other questions about process?

Alright, my assumption is, not withstanding, that it's a false assumption that that which is contained in the reading I have said is assigned reading you've got. You don't have it because you're not going to do all the assigned reading which is not a fault. You're going to do what you're going to do. If you want to know what I was talking about, read the reading ok? Or, ask a question in the transcript, mark it, you know, what was this about? and somebody else will answer you and if nobody else answers you, then I'll answer you.

But, I assume that I am providing context to a set of information contained elsewhere, not recapitulating information. That's wasteful.

So, I assume that a complete set of information contains what is in the lectures. You don't have to come, you could listen to the audio some other place or read the transcript of course. But, if you come you can ask a question which is useful. And the reading. And whatever other people are putting in the wiki because they think that's useful.

Alright.

So where I think we are is that I have said, for a variety of different reasons involving quite separate views of the universe

understandings of the world, and what it's made of and why. Different groups of English speakers crossed the Atlantic Ocean during the course of the 17th century and established at different geographic spots on the North American coast - colonies.

That is to say, they removed themselves with a more or less permanent intent, designing to create communities in this geographic remove for some purposes specific enough in their nature. But, once again, seen through a screen of expectations and understandings not native to the environment they are joining but native to the environment they are leaving.

That's the experience of colonization.

To go from Greece to Marseilles in the 3rd century before the common era, you know, was an experience of leaving Greece too. But Marseilles is still on the North coast of the Mediterranean facing a sea which is familiar and a landscape which is familiar even to a displaced Greek. North America is not familiar. It may seem so, but actually that seeming is the consequence of a production of an illusion.

When it begins to be necessary then to think about the societies actually constructed by these English speakers in North America, it becomes necessary to see both their illusions and the reality behind them. And since the mechanisms that we have for grasping what is happening are their documents, the process of describing what is there and what is illusory and what is the illusion about what is there and what is the grasp that a contemporary has about what is there, how far he sees what he sees and how far he sees what he imagines he sees, becomes very important.

The legal historian tends to ignore all of this. The facts are facts and law is law and a court is a bunch of guys who know law sitting in a room. As I have suggested in the case of Jesse Thorton from another epoch of American history - that may not make sense. The Oregon Supreme Court may actually be remembering its travel across North America in a wagon.

I offer you John Winthrop speaking on the Arabella because they will remember that a long time. And they will view a lot through that lens which we might think of in a different way.

The collision between the illusion and the reality maybe is most obvious in Virginia.

And we do need to account in some sense, I think, first for the Virginians, not so much as a matter of priority in chronology. Although, that's there, you know, it will always begin with Jamestown.

We need to begin with Virginia because Virginia is the pivot of that Atlantic world.

There's almost no good in it - ever. But there sure is a lot of trouble and that trouble resonates throughout the Atlantic forever.

You can see where the trouble begins. The expectation of the Virginians is that you can use a capitalist model of colonial development - the joint stock company of her majesty's subjects trading to the Virginias.

To move in a very short order, essentially a full vertical stack of English society - maybe minus the very bottom of agricultural labor. You can transplant it across the Atlantic and move it to Virginia where it will begin immediately to have global strategic importance on the basis that there will be adequate resources in Virginia, not only to withstand a complex vertically hierarchicalized society, but that that will return profits.

This is nonsense. This is ridiculous. Experience proves it to be ridiculous to every single day. The crisis brought on in the initial settlement of Virginia is brought on because the company thinks that it can send gentlemen who cannot work lest they lose cast and goldsmiths and miliners and luxury tradesmen. And that somewhow they're going to be supported in the Virginian wilderness because it will work.

It won't work.

They don't send farmers. They don't send working men.

Certainly not in adequate proportion to the numbers of parasites they expect to be supported.

And there's nothing to do except an agricultural system with which they're totally unfamiliar.

Observers of the landscape see that Virginia is an extraordinary forest through which you can drive a coach between the trees and this appears to them a natural wonder.

Of course it's nothing of the kind. It's an engineered environment.

People have been burning out the underbrush to enable them to hunt in it for tens of thousands of years. And the way the forest of Virginia looks then is not the way it looks now. Nevermind all the ?

They can't see whether the environment they are living in is natural or artificial because they don't have the eye to understand where they are. They assume they are somewhere else. They starve.

To even the sissy inhabitants of their locale who are not tough people

Mere, Algonquians, Delawares, people who would be regarded by the Iroquois as lunch.

Those people don't starve. The work of growing enough food for a person to live, as I pointed out last time, is from their point of view, such simple and demeaning work that only women would be allowed to do it.

And to eat others in order to prevent yourself from starving? Everywhere in this corner of North America survival cannibalism is just a despicable thing. The Iroquois say this about the English adn the French all the time. You have absolutely no nobility of spirit. You are beneath contempt. You don't eat fallen enemies in order to assert your superiority over them, you eat one another in order to avoid starving.

Anybody knows that that's a shameful thing to do. No real human being ever does that. But of course the English have no choice. They cannot live without the very same aboriginal inhabitants whose devil-worship and cannibalism and everything else they think is contemptible and gives them the right to use violence whenever necessary in order to repel borders.

The borders who of course are actually keeping them alive by giving them the food they cannot grow.

And the Virginia of 1610 or 1612 or 1614 looks like it can maintain itself only by threatening to burn with hot iron or put a needle through the tongue of anybody who steals food.

Their still living on the edge of starvation after 10 years in a landscape which sustains hundreds of thousands of people around them and has, in the past, sustained millions of people with no particular effort. It's good land.

And if you cultivate the local food package and you use it in a sparing style, you could do a lot of things other than work. You could have hunting and war and other honorable occupations from the Indian point of view.

But they cannot even scratch their food out of the ground. They're trying to live dependent on a supply line that runs across the Atlantic Ocean. It's inconceivable. Yet they still see themselves as the superior beings in the neighborhood and at any moment now, they will discover the goal. And then everything will be as it's supposed to be.

And in that context, labor discipline is force as the law's divine moral and marshal make clear.

John Smith, teller of tall tales - some bizarre fraction of which turn out to be true - you know, the Pocahontas thing, how he was saved by an Indian princess who fell in love with him thing is the second time he told that story. He told that story about a Hungarian princess in the war against the Turks before he even came to Virginia and unfortunately for the 20th century historians who thought they were tracking the many lies of John Smith and the origin of the Pocahontas legend, turned out to be true.

And John Smith said he saved the Virginia colony when he found himself briefly as governor because he forced every man to work for an hour a day.

And without that they would have starved. And oddly enough, that's probably true too because in an hour a day, they probably could have done enough to save themselves. It's that easy but they don't know how. And it's not that they don't know how that there aren't people around them showing them all the time, they've learned that the way to hurt an Indian village is to burn down the corn and you see them do it even in times when they're starving themselves. They commit aggression and they go and burn down other people's food. What they can't do is assume to themselves the rhythm of producing it.

Largely because they are socially the wrong bunch. They are the gentlemen.

They are the people who would never get their hands dirty with dirt off the ground. Like the Warawumps across the way, they are not workers in agriculture. They think that's for lower class people, the way the Indians think it's for women.

All of this, as I have pointed out, will change. Tobacco will change it.

The drugs business is what you do with a stumbling agricultural economy. And the Atlantic Ocean is then, as it is now, essentially a place for the movement of drugs.

The longest lasting in our own time is the one we call petroleum but we spend all of our time worrying about cocoa paste and marijuana. It's a basin of the commoditites that draw their own market behind them.

And as I have pointed out, tobacco will do that in the whole of the European cultural system and in the English system that we are now following in particular. Tobacco will do that.

Well of course it will do that. Nicotine is the single most addictive substance that people habitually use.

It's the only addictive substance you can deliver in a package which is odds on to kill the person using it and still they will.

There isn't any other drug you can distribute in an actually faithful package and expect routine use.

Sufficient to found very wealthy monopolies on.

So once tobacco begins to make its way in that context in the English cultural environment, it becomes a commodity that draws its market. And in the beginning, the demand curve is steeper than the supply and so in Virginia in the early 1620s there's a boom.

Now all you need is people to grow it.

As we've already suggested that's not the original capitalist theory about how Virginia works. And the people who are going to be necessary for the process of cultivating tobacco are not the people who originially showed up. Now you are many years past that of course.

The labor is skilled labor. You can grow tobacco in the field in an unskilled way, though you would be better off not doing it. It takes a lot of weeding.

But you cannot process it for shipment across the Atlantic Ocean without a good deal of infrastructure which requires skill. It also requires some capital investment.

Because you grew up after the graduate, you have an odd assumption about packaging. You're assumption is plastic. The material science of packaging in the late 20th century is just bone simple. It requires only DuPont? and money. Oh, and petroleum of course.

The world that we are talking about uses a thing called a barrel. Everywhere.

And a barrel is a much more technoligcally sophisticated form of packaging than bullshit made from petroleum. In the first place, a barrel requires good wood, carefully processed. In order to make a barrel, you have to make staves and they have to lock together in a water-tight way. Water-tight.

They have to be capable of sustaining liquids free of air and contamination and leakage for long periods of time. In the case of the barrels we are talking about, they have to be able to keep out seawater indefinitely.

They have to be looped together at top and bottom by metal but they are held together by the forces of compression adn tension in the wood. Barrel staves must be chosen from the right woods in the beginnning and those woods must be dried in kilns and seasoned and treated for long periods before they can be made into barrels.

Green wood will not hold water.

They have to be carefully matched and they have to be carefully treated and they can't be ruined because the wood out of which you make barrels is an expensive processed commodity before you start using it. So when you waste it you are not wasting a renewble resource.

And all of this has to be done on an industrial scale. You have to be able to turn out hundreds of thousands of such barrels a year in order to run an export trade in the Atlantic basin and it doesn't matter whether what you're shipping is tobacco, which is valuable saltfish, which is a commodity by weight.

The packaging industries of the 17th and 18th centuries are themselves enormously skilled. And if what I say is you must be able to manufacture large casks in North America, you have to be able to fill them with tobacco that has been carefully dried, trimmed, treated, twisted. You have to be able to know the difference between a rope of tobacco which has been twisted with a great deal of sand and feels heavy but is actually meant to cheat you and tobacco which hasn't. You have to be able to judge the grade of the leaf before the process started out of what is after all, a fairly degenerated product that has been dried and smoked and wrinkled and twisted into other shapes and is beginning to break down.

You have all of the machinery which determines the difference between a whole leave and bunch of dust. And you have ways of processing the dust.

Because of course not all tobacco is smoked at anytime. And Europeans are snorting tobacco because nobody has invented the perfect nicotine delivery system and snorting it is much more effective than burning it in pipes. In order to turn it into a really good nicotine delivery system, you would have to add several poisonous chemicals.

And develop an entire system for killing people using it. Then you would have a perfect nicotine delivery system.

The Chinese communist party, which claims to be acting for the benefit of its people, manufactures 6 trillions such killing devices a year and operates the sale of them as a direct government monopoly to people who are addicted.

Don't ever take any bullshit from the Chinese communist party about the use of opiums and the device for imperializing China by Englishmen.

But the Virginians, right, they know everyhting except the death part. They know about the addiction part. They know about the economics. They are now locked in the early 1620s into an explosive boom, but they understand and are about to recapitulate what happens in agricultural booms. They are about to begin overproducing.

So as you see, in Morgan, the actual outcome of the boom is skyrocketing of tobacco prices in the early 1620s followed by a complete collapse in the later 20s. And what brought two shillings in 1622 brings twopence in 1629.

The solution is of course to continue expanding production, which requires, since Virginia has land in it, and all you have to do is push some people out of the way and they are not tough people. Whcih requires only labor. Now, the labor initially expected and employed for this purpose, as we have now got it we understand, we need agricultural labor from the outscourings of English society and so that's what begins to happen. You import servants to grow tobacco with. The importation of a servant means fundamentally moving somebody attached to an agricultural labor but not attached to the land anymore in English, to Virginia.

The cost of passage for that person is the primary investment necessary to move the agricultural labor from one place to another.

So, the deal is I will bring you to Virginia and you will work for me as my bound servant for as long as it takes to pay back, what we, as an accounting measure think of as the cost of your passage. During which time, you won't receive wages, though I'll keep you, if you will, and at the end of your term, you'll get a barrel of flour, a suit of clothes, and a gun and Virginia is yours.

That's the deal.

You can get a lot of people. Now that's not a good enough deal, not really.

What you get is a subsidy for doing that, which is called a headright. For every head you import, you get a claim against the colony for land. Basically, on a first come first serve turn in your paperwork and we'll give you the land basis.

In fact, what happens is, for roughly twenty years, those headrights actually pile up unused. The cost of acquiring the land and paying taxes on it. You're required to construct a dwelling there and so on is more than the land is worth because the price of tobacco is low and expanding production to meet it doesn't require new land.

The primary reason that new land is going to be require, as I pointed out last time, is that tobacco exhausts the soil you grow it in. It's hard on the nitrogen. And there's no organisms living in the roots of tobacco plants for putting nitrogen back in the ground. So, after you've been growing tobacco on land for awhile, unless you're using - oh, that would be petroleum again - to fertilize the soil, we use drugs to grow drugs as you will.

Unless you're doing that and you can't do that under 17th century conditions, you can't just put rotting fish in the rows as you would in a cornfield. That will work. Corn is a much better crop. Your're going to have to start over. You need new land.

Now even that cycle of the corn and the squash and the beans exhausts the soil too. It's not a solution to that problem. The aboriginal inhabitants of North America don't worry about it. When the time comes and where they are growing food no longer works for them, they simply go a little bit further away. They gurdle the trees. They cut once around at the bottom of all the trees. That of course kills the tree and then they will within a short period of time be able to burn it out.

They don't even bother removing the stumps. They don't use machinery to till the soil. They're just going to use a stick to make a hole in the ground so you can leave the stumps where they are. You can burn the ground over when the trees are dead. You can let it sit for one rainy period and then you can plant there. And you do that for whatever takes you - 10 years, let us say, in the Virginia sort of cycle - and then you go and burn another patch over and you leave the old part to grow woodland again and that will deal with it.

You come back after 2 or 3 decades/and burn what we call it if we don't think about the entire Amazon basin we use to make orange juice for guys in North America. It works.

And this you're going to have to do with tobacco - no question about it. So what's really happening that in the 1620s and 30s and even into the 40s, the headrights are piling up for land which is going to, in effect, be banked by the people who have now what is really the wealth of Virginia, which is servants.

Now as I pointed out, there are already people trying to market Africans into here. They have excess.

We need to look at that much more carefully in a little bit.

But let us just say that the entire structure of African societies in the western half of the continent is also being redeveloped.

Mechanisms of slave taking that are traditional and that have been adjusted by the arrival of Islam below the Sahara are also being reoriented by the presence of the Atlantic. In the long run, the leverage for that is not the tobacco in VA and it's certainly not the cotton in Alabama - nobody's even thought about that yet. It's sugar.

And what is appearing off the VA coast if when that Dutch bottom of 1619, that's already the beginning of an attempt to feel out whether you could deal with the marginal oversupply of labor to the sugar islands by laying it off against the Virginians. They're going to have to grow tobacco, they're going to have to use labor. They are going to buy these people right?

Except they won't.

Slavery is an economic proposition. Who you enslave may not be an economic proposition but slavery is an economic proposition.

And the economic proposition is intrinsically related to life support and VA is not a healthy place.

Now here again we have some interesting questions.

What if the western hemisphere had possessed a reservoir of endemic diseases unknown to Europeans?

What if Europeans found themselves ill-adapted to the endemic diseases of the western hemisphere?

Then it would have remained as Africa itself so long remained outside the possession of European grasp.

If the gradient of disease went against the visiting pink people as it does in Africa, below the Sahara, the kind of massive colonial effort we are now talking about would be impossible. As the conquest of Mexico and PEru would have been impossible.

In Mexico, in particular, the ability of the Spanish to hold even to grab temporary possession of the Aztec Empire, depended upon the fact that the gradient ran the other way. Without the small pox in Tenochtitlan, Cortes would never have broken in.

So, we note that one of the most important facts of human history is that the disease gradient in North America ran against the natives, not against the European

Is that a contingency? Could it have been the other way if you flip a coin?

Maybe. Although in the long run, the answer is probably not.

The reason, oddly enough, is a straightforward one. Though itself requires more assessment of contigency.

The exception of the llama, the civilizations of the New World did not domesticate intensively large animals. They didn't live with the animals they domesticated.

Animal domestication in Mexico is limited to the fact that it is good to eat dogs.

Now, this is not a shortage of gentic engineering wisdom. As I have pointed out, the same people who did not domesticate animals in North America pulled off the most extraordinary genetic modification of foodstuff in human history in the creation of corn. They know a lot about breeding. They're just not given a population of animals liekly to be helpful for their purposes in domesticated form.

And North America overflows with animals in their wild form.

When the Virginians are figuring out that they should be growing tobacco in order to live, the buffalo are still in western VA. They will not leave Ohio until the time of George Washington. North America is a gain park of useful animal protein, but you don't have to domesticate and the horse is not here. We bring it. So, in the absence of large domesticated animals living with and in the absence of domesticated birds, the endemic diseases, the endemic microbiological parasites that beset civilized human worlds, don't happen.

Nonetheless, there do seem to be some arbo viruses here that aren't in the European experience. Malaria almost certainly we brought.

But yellow fever probably not.

And in VA people sicken.

And in the first year that they are liked to die.

After that, after the first fever, they are said to be seasoned and their chances of dying go down.

But still, it is a deathful place. As you see in Morgan, there are good reasons to think about some aspects of VA law - treatment of orphans, the nature of the debt system, the nature of the family law - that come heavily from the fact that in this generation, in the period of the tobacco boom and bust, Virginians die rapidly and a lot of wealth is transmitted from husband to widow to new husband to widow to new husband to widow to new husband to widow.

And the much married Virginia heiress is a staple of the depiction of the 17th century society.

Sarah Gukinth Yardley Thoroughgood York.

The first families of VA come out of that stock.

But, for the moment the thing to say is that high mortality in VA in the early period disposes them away from slavery and towards a system of indentured servants.

Why pay for a lifetime if a lifetime isn't likely to be longer than what you have to pay to bring somebody for 7 years?

And so in the beginning, the labor system in VA is a system which assumes a kind of disadvantageous contract labor but contract labor.

Bargaining for its right to receive no wages.

Assuming that transport to a labor scarce society followed by a period of agricultural work for food, followed by the autonomous right to exist as an independent agent with enough to stand up in and a gun, is a better deal than you can get at home.

The fevers don't appear in the promotional materials.

But young people have a tendency to think that they are immortal.

What happens then over the course of the middle decades of the 17th century is that mature agricultural process for growing an addictive commodity using contract labor, mostly drawn from the English under class, appears and begins to deal with the process of organizing itself in space under conditions of high mortality.

It becomes very unequal very rapidly, as you would expect. A small number of people associated with the company, acquire a bulk of the servants and therefore, also, the bulk of the headrights.

Around 1650, they begin to cash in those headrights and rapidly up the river systems of the James and Appahaneck and the Virginian space begins to be occupied. The bottom land gets taken up.

The places you would want to grow to grow tobacco become filled and the owners have them. Now the Virginians begin to think about building as they will eventually sort of do - an immense palace say North to South across the colonial environment outside Jamestown, intended to keep outside the wolves and the wildmen.

They are thinking of finishing the space in a way. They really can't, however. The problem with that contract labor, like the problem with the 2 million people we put in prison, is that eventually you have to let them out. And so, in effect, you postpone into the future social problems which grow worse as you are postponing them.

Beginning in the later in the 1660s and becoming important in the middle of the 1670s, you get the difficulty that you have when you have a bunch of lose, young men with guns around. They have been promised that at the end of servitude, the run of the place. The place is now owned by other people and it is becoming difficult to see how they are to be individual proprietors on their own.

They don't want to use their arms against owners, they want to use their arms against mere Ingins. From their point of view the problem with the stability of the environment will be that it's not killing enough Indians.

We are beginning the intrinsic relationship between the social disturbances of the frontier and what Herman Melville was so powerfully referred to in the confidence of man is the metaphysics of Indian hate?

The root of which is capitalism.

This is why at the other end of the story in the final days of aboriginal America, Chief Joseph says that the love of the possession is a disease with them.

That they are all aware of this. That aboriginal America is coming aware that the difference between French speakers and English speakers is fundamental. By the end of the 16th century this is becoming clear. By the middle of the 17th century, it is absurdly obvious to all of aboriginal America as far out west as you can go and still retain knowledge of the Europeans. The Frenchmen command what they want is furs.

And they will take them and pay you for them and go away.

The Englishman wants the land and he wants to stay on it and push you off.

Thus, will begin the behavior which will be characteristic of the worst of times at the western edge even when the French are not trying to make it happen which by the end of the 17th century they always are. When an English family is massacred, they will stuff the mouths of the children with grass.

And the men, you want this land eat it is the message.

And for the Virignians trying to govern this situation in the middle 1670s, for governor Berkley in particular, the difficulty is that the war that those young men want to bring on is dangerous no matter which way it is fought. Of course, as a rebellion it would be dangerous but as a war against Indian America it is dangerous.

Nathaniel Bacon represents that rebel movement. He is willing to conduct a war on governor Berkley in the interests of the young men who want to kill more Indians. He dies of dysentery in the process, which is what happens to him.

But Bacon's Rebellion is - in that note of resounding history sort of way - Bacon's Rebellion is the demonstration that the stability of the tobacco society in the end depends upon the avoidance of the labor force you have to free. You're going to try to own the land and control it, then you don't want more free people.

Which probable still wouldn't make slavery a reasonable proposition economically if there weren't some change in the death rate.

And after 1650 in VA, there is a change in the death rate - quite substantial. As far as we can tell, and hard to motivate in the sense that nobody gives the reason. The likeliest reason is apple trees, I think. It's another aspect of the Englishman's illusion. He's constantly trying to make the landscape look the way his landscape looked.

And one of the things it should have in it is apple trees. When he makes apple trees, he changes what he drinks. And when he changes what he drinks, he solves the problem of his water supply. You can think of the apple tree from the Englishman as a filter for bioagents.

The water it takes out of the ground produces cider he can drink and of course he wants to.

More than anything else, a change in the nature of the Englishman's relationship to his water supply probably accounts for changes in the fever patterns.

But whatever it is, whether it is some adjustment in the disease that can happen. There was a disease that they called the sweating sickness in England in the middle of the 16th century that killed a lot of people. It went away. Nobody knows what it was.

The organism adapted. Not all pathogens want to produce death. Most pathogens don't want to produce death. They make a better living if the host doesn't die.

Maybe that happened. Though there's no reason to believe that happened because the fevers are still there, people still get them. But maybe it happened. The population could have changed itself - become more genetically resistant. But most likely, they changed environmentally. At any rate, once the death rate drops, the economic logic of the labor market changes.

Political stability demands or at least heavily suggests, a movement in the direction of a capital labor supply. You can't - everybody has seen it in North America - you can't turn the aboriginal inhabitants into a captive labor supply. Gee, that's odd. They manage it in Mexico. They manage it in Peru. What is it about these people?

With the usual sort of illusionary attitude, some will say they love freedom too much. They pine away and die in captivity says the Englishman about the aboriginal in many places, more in Massachusetts than in VA. Mostly the problem is they escape. It's hard to turn their home into a prison to contain them without a kind of expenditure of force that you can no longer have available. You are the interloper. To break a population, you might have to imprison most of its young men. You might have to put millions of people in jail. You can't do that in the 17th century VA. You can do it in 20th century VA, you can do it in 21st century VA if you execute a few...from time to time you may be able to hold the people in subjection but you can't do it here.

So they run away and they fight back and that won't work.

But there are constantly people pushing an African supply on you.

Among other things, they have a supply which is not perfectly graded to their needs.

We can't learn the lessons of the history of these places without also thinking about those islands in the Carribean. The contemporary US American thinks of those islands as barely relevant. Someplace where we have a Caribbean basin initiative and we pat people on the head and go on vacation.

But from the point of view of the strategy of the Europeans in North America, those islands are going to be the most important things for a long time and we need to think about them that way. They are the most important things because that's where the sugar comes from. That's a drug too. Sugar, as a drug is even more difficult to deal with than tobacco.

It is much more arduous to grow. Sugar cane is not an easy substance.

It takes care while it's growing. It's backbreaking to harvest and then it has to be burned. It is a dangerous complicated heavy farming job to grow it and when you grow it and you cut the cane and you've brought it to yourself, that's just the begninning. Now you have to process that cane. You have to break it, you have to smash it, then you have to cut it up and then you have to boil it and then you have to take the stuff you're boiling in immense quanitities and you have to reduce it again and again and again and you have to transport it from one vessel to another and it's got to stay hot.

It's not as hard to make as steel but it's the hardest thing to make that any European society is making at the end of the 19th century. Hard in the sense that the people who do it will have trouble. Not hard in the sense that it needs capital or hard that it needs ingenuity. Hard in the sense that it will destroy the people who do it.

Oh, ok. Let's use Africans.

The sugar business is inherently unsafe and inherently going to degrade the people who do it and you will wear them out and then they will be broken. But it's skilled work, you need to know stuff in order to do it and if you take the right Africans they will know about it because they, too, know about its cultivation. They don't process it like this.

But they know how it's grown as they know how the stuff that you're going to make is grown. We'll see them later in SC they know how rice is grown. Europeans don't know that. They know how indigo is grown. Europeans don't do that either.

The great money crops of the 18th century are crops Africans know how to make, white people just want the profits of them.

But the sugar thing is very special because it's not going to be a thing that anybody is going to voluntarily want to do so you're going to use forced labor to do it but you can't just use all the forced labor you have. You've got ships full of people and some of those people wouldn't be any good as sugar workers. Their bopdies are notworth buying for the process of expending them.

So there's always going to be labor in the Atlantic slave system that needs to go someplace other than where its highest value is. It's not fit for the job.

So there's always people looking for ways to work off excess. The part of the trade that's not the best. Now the Virginians by the middle of the 17th century be looking at that process with fresh eyes. It will make more economic sense. And over the course of two generations in the latter half of the 17th century, they'll make a slave society of themselves.

By two generations later, by the time we begin to move the empire from London to that marsh in the mouth of the Potomac, they will have made a slave growing society of themselves and their primary long-term economic interest will not be what they can use the labor to grow but that they can grow the labor to sell.

The empire will in 1808, eliminate them as inhumane and inacceptable the African slavetrade. That will be primarily an economic benefit to the Virginians in the control of the empire of the United States because they, who are making that possible, not because they are against slavery but because they wish to replace Africa as the source of its supply.

But we're a long way from that. We're still simply engaged in figuring out how to grow an addictive commodity which is the only thing that makes the colony possible. And what has happened has happened precisely because the process of constructing this community had very little to do with what people expected it to be. It became what it was by a process of trying to save itself at each stage from the calamity that impended over it because the relationship between what was expected and what existed was so great in its discrepancy.

Massachusetts of course is not constructing its society around that form of illusion. Massachusetts is constructing its society around religious ecstasy. Well, not a very ecsatic ecstasy of course. It's an ecstasy of weened affections. Here is ideology of a much more familiar form right? Those who object to the historical discussion of ideology as sort of thin, colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that suffuses everybody's thought process and isn't really visible. People who want their ideology thick enough to cut with a knife will of course always appreciate Massachusetts. Its full of hyperbole ideologizing, which is mostly usually called sermons.

But remember that these are not just general exertations. These are the complex, logical processes of people who have understood a sermon in a new way. They are the work of the Reformation at its finest. They believe that they are preaching the Word of God for the understandings of men.

In a plain style containing reasoning with numbered points, you see? John Cotton, or for that matter John Winthrop, but certainly John Cotton will enjoy spending 45 minutes explainging a thing in a form which enjoys seventhly and ninthly. My friend Harry Fisher of the Harvard Law faculty whose forebears came to Massachusetts in this period is still a guy who has a ten item list about everything.

It's a deep and imbiding system in the Massachusetts mind.

And what is being demonstrated is a system that beautiful, elegant Calvanist approach to the understanding of the relationship of human beings in society which depends upon the idea that everything is known beforehand completely by an omnipotent god which created before the beginnning of time an infinite number of souls, an infinite proportion of which are damned and an infinitesimal proportionof which are elect, notwithstanding which are in our town, at least enough peeople are elect to consitute the government and do everything that it is doing. Visible saints.

And in this structure, this belief in a society ultimately penetrated in every direction by the fact of predestination that you get the most extraordinary struggle of individualism. Not to control destiny which cannot be controlled but merely to understand it. Am I damned or am I saved? The single important question of a human lifetime. Never actually knowable to any human being and yet conveniently socially demonstrable collectively. We are saved if we don't fall to prosecuting our carnal intentions.

Here, the fundamental building block of social and labor discipline is family, by which I do not mean nuclear family and I certainly don't mean the Judeo-Christian family, something made up by politicians who were neither Jews nor Christians.

The family from the Puritan point of view is what it is to Napolean Bonaparte, who says to the drafters of the code that makes his name "Make the family responsible to its head and the head responsible to me and I will keep order in France." This is far closer to what a republican politician means when he talks about the family as a building block of society. It is not a happy thought.

It is directly related to Philip Larkins classic poem. Actually the poem which in public opinion surveys it turns out that more contemporary English people know than any other. You know the one right? They fuck you up, your mom and dad they don't mean to but they do? They fill you with the faults they had and something special for just for you. But they were fucked up in their time. People in their turn sloppy stern what is it I forget? Pardon me, I'm not a contemporary Englishman.

It's the unit of social control. The general court in 1632 says that every young man in the Massachusetts Bay colony who is living on his own must get into a family.

which means entering service if he doesn't marry - becoming somebody's boy.

It's the unit of surveillance. It's the unit of holy watching - what they would call surveillance. It's the precinct committee of communist party.

It's the locals who watch you and make sure you're keeping yourself straight and your nose is clean. Of course there's more to it than that.

As you will notice of them they must have the word of the Lord god in the Old Testament for the death sentence. They recognize that it is beyond the power of human beings to determine that someone should die for a crime , only if it is in Leviticus. If the Lord God said it to the Jews, then you may do it. Hence, for example, in 1638, when they have a case of a servant man who's been living in a family who's been having sex with girls 10 and 8 and in the family and they ask themselves the question can he for fornication be killed - they being children and all. Oddly in thiis America of the moment where you can always lynch a pedophile, they realized you they can't because the Lord God did not say to the Jews that they may do that and so they can't have a death penalty for it they can banish him, which they do. NBut that's all they can do. On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that a child who strikes a parent is to be executed. That was said.

Which doesn't mean they're going to do it because they're not idiots but on ther other hand, they can't ignore the word of the Lord God and you know how it is with adolescants in the house. So you don't keep the adolescants in the house, you send them ot be servants in somebody else's family and that is what happens in Boston in hte 1630s or for that matter in the 1740s.

In a godly household you'll send your teenagers to be servants in some other family for a while. It gets them out and it puts them under the subordination of somebody whom they are A) more likely to respect and B) whom you don't have to execute them for hitting. There is no case of an execution of a child for striking a parent in Massachusetts in the 17th century. But you will see a lot of preventive intervention to suggest to somebody that he should send his children into service.

As you will see in the records of the Essex Court, a statement to Robert Spur that he should cease to allow his daughters to be dragged as attractions for the men of Dorchester. He's serving drinks after hours and they're hanging out with his daughters and Essex County Court says you shouldn't do that anymore. Now we don't want to make any orders about this right now but you should stop hazarding the marriages of Dorchester and if you don't, we'll do something about it.

And it's morals enforcement of a Presbyterian time right? But it's holy watching. It's keeping the community to its covenants because of course, all of this is related to the central, fundamental idea of covenant. Of the bilateral bargain between the soul and God for salvation. Between the community and God for its preservation, you see how Winthrop talked about that sort of social covenant in the model of Christian charity. If we do our part, God will do his; but if we fail to do our part, then we shall be consumed out of the woodland whether we are going. Around the idea of the family as a covenanted institution.

And the community as made of families under covenant with one another and churches made of covenance among parishoners and the call to a minister to be in covenant with his community. And of course you see in the making of civil justice.

Oh, the fats in the fire as you see as Hasten says from the very beginning, government in Massachusetts rests in a very small number of things.

The way the charter has been used to create a government, we'll see it in more detail later, is essentially to turn the Board of Directors into the governor in assistance of Massachusetts.

The fat will get to the fire as I say in the middle 1630s when people begin to demand a little more share in their own governments.

The general court of the company will become much more a legislature and then there will be elections and sermons on elections and instructions of representatives and the whole New England democracy we are so very proud of will begin to emerge out of that Calivinist moment. But, look at what it begins in. Why has Winthrop on his own changed the militia company in Sussex?

The lieutenant and captain of militia. And the general court wants to haul him up for taking too much power, he who has of course been running the place since the beginning and he says you see him and his statement to the general court and he says "well, the magistrates you have a covenant with they, like the man you employ to build a house, he's in covenance to build for you as skillfully as he may and if he doesn't exert all of his skill then he is a workmen who has broke his deal with you and you can say something about it. But, if he exerts all his skill and still the house falls down well then God made it so. The magistrates," he says, "are deputies of God. You chose them, but it is God who chose you to choose them and if they exert all of their skill and all their effort and all their wisdom and still, there's failure, it is not their charge."

Power wants its legitimation in Massachusetts too. It works very hard to have it. The only power that need not legitimate itself is God's.

Because of course you can't be in Massachusetts if you don't accept that. It may not be easy to hang the guy who screws little girls, but you can certainly hang a Quaker.

In fact, you have to.

Anybody who says he has the inner light is either crazy or a criminal and if he won't go away and stay away peacefully, well then you have to string him up. When mistress Ann Hutchinson begins to have the inner light and starts preaching - it's not that she's a woman, that's another problem - she has a way of consulting the meaning of the scriptures on her own. She has an inner light, that won't do so send her away. And off she goes to New Rochelle and the Indians pack her up and Massachusetts has a feast day.

The lord God has shown his hand with respect to those who claim to have access. Still, the books of prophecy are closed. What could you do with logic otherwise?

I do want to talk about NY. I spent years and years trying to talk about NY. I'm giving you to read some things that may help. I'm going to have to use a little time next time. We have two sets of things to think about.

1. Having to do with the Dutch. But, more importantly what it means for the English to conquer a place run by other Europeans.

So far, we have talked about a landscape in which their idealizations had to do with what they saw as empty.

Providence thinks Winthrop has emptied Massachusetts of the Indians for them.

By the 1640s that will not be thinkable anymore. In 1676, when the Virginians are sustaining the internal problem of not killing enough Indians, Massachusetts is bleeding in a way that it won't bleed again until the Civil War.

Because the aboriginal inhabitants of New England have decided that this is the last chance and what the English call King Philip's War is a really serious attempt to push them out in the course of which everybody is trying to commit genocide and somebody does.

The New Yorkers, however, are in a different spot. They are sitting on the door to the interior of North America. Whether it is held by the Dutch or it is held by the English - whoever holds it will control the access to the interior of the continent. At the moment that means furs. Later, it will mean everything. This is about the strategy. This is about the global military balance in the Atlantic.

The other things that it's about have to do once again with the sugar islands.

Down there on that sand using captive labor, you can grow sugar. You wouldn't even think of trying to grow wheat there. It wouldn't work. Which means that the very stuff eaten by your workers must come from somewhere else and even more important you need vast amounts of wood. You need fuel to burn. You need construction material. You need wood which is the constant industrial underpinning of every process. And you can't grow forests in the Caribbean either. The sugar islands are in an inherent relationship with some form of temperate forest product land - they have to be. You can't use them as Europeans intend to use them unless you have some place that will bring barrels of flour and barrels of barrels.

Sugar, too, has got to be pretty neatly packed right? A little seawater and it's nothing at all.

You know how sugar is packed right? You can ship it in liquid form. We call that molasses. Or if you're really producing for the luxury market, you produce loaves. Those big rounded chunks of sugar you take apart with little silver hammers at the table.

But it's molasses right? And the reason it's molasses is that you can do with the molasses what you always want to do with agricultural products before the era of the railroad and the airplane.

You want to turn them into alcohol. It's cheap to ship. It's compact.

So of course it's molasses. That's what we're going to do and that means that somewhere all that stuff that's been boiled all that time to get it to be molasses is going to go somewhere where it's going to get boiled again. And it gets distilled and it gets turned into rum and that rum gets put into smaller barrels and then it can really go out into the Atlantic and do some good. So let's say that there's a guy, let's call him Askin. Let's put him in Barbados and let's give him several hundred Africans he owns and he grows sugar and he ships it.

And his correspondence, a guy in NY. Let's call it 1690 shall we?

He's probably Scots, speaks Dutch. Maybe he's been the Dutch speaking Scotsman of business for the guys up the Hudson River Valley who grow flour to ship to Jamaica and Barbados. Let's call him Livingston. That's who the first Livingston is. And he's got a big business based around land grants up the Hudson River Valley and he grows there flour that is the wheat that he mills in his own mill and puts in his barrels and ships to Jamaica and Barbados and of course he makes barrel. And barrel staves and ships those.

But he also has a deal with a rum boiler in Manhattan. Let's call him Roosevelt. Nicolas - the first of them.

And Nicolas and Robert Livingston both, they will own slaves because they are part of a system of Atlantic commerce which makes the African slave like the barrel of molasses a part of who they are. Who their essence is.

By the second decade of the 18th century, New York City will be the largest slave metropolis in the New World with the one exception of Charleston, SC where a tiny fraction of people, call them 5%, are the owners of the other 95% of the people who live there. And New York is not like that it's like it is now it's a third, but it's enslaved. Now that enslaved population will be house servants and butlers and cooks and it will be light industrial workers - the bakers and the guys who do the heavy work in every place where a fire is lit, the silversmiths or the iron coopers or the coopers, that is, a person who makes a barrel. That's why cooper is such a common name because a barrel is such an important thing.

They'll be doing all the work, in other words, that you would think of as working class jobs and they will do them sometimes in competition with free white people. NYC is not a purely slave place but it's a very slave place indeed.

And that's a mark of its direct, immediate relationship to the Carribbean.

So these New Yorkers that we're thinking about, these are people living in the margins of a whole series of other elements we have begun to explore. Their labor system has the mixture of the New England style and the VA style, but more importantly, the Jamaica or Barbados style.

We should think a little bit about Jamaica, but in order to do that, we need to think about Oliver Cromwell because without Oliver Cromwell Jamaica wouldn't be an English speaking place. Alright we'll do it in the morning. See ya later.

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Colonial Labor Systems & Law

Colonial Labor Relations & Law

The labor discipline systems of British colonial North America, slave and free, set the conditions of social and legal development for half a millennium. We consider how they began, and how the law grew with them.

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