tobacco at Mount Vernon (George Washington's plantation)
Farming patterns based on physical geography led to the development of different social patterns in New England vs. Virginia. The New England colonies had thin rocky soils, remnants of the what the glaciers left after scraping across the land 20,000 years ago. (Cape Cod and Long Island were created in part from the dirt that was moved eastward.)
In New England, intensive management was required to produce a profitable crop. Stones had to be moved and fertilizer (animal manure) had to be applied to grow wheat and other crops during the shorter summers in Massachusetts and New York. Farming was intensive, with a great deal of human effort invested in each small, hilly field to improve the productivity of the New England soil over the years. Farms produced food (wheat, meat, milk, etc.) and fiber (such as wool from sheep, or linen from flax). The New England farm products were sold locally, rather than shipped back to England. Major exports from New England included fish and lumber, which was manufactured into new ships.
In contrast, there was plenty of fertile and flat land in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont of Virginia. Virginia also had a longer growing season between the last frost in the Spring and the first frost of the Fall. Southern colonists practiced "extensive" rather than "intensive" agriculture; they could afford to abandon a farm field after several years, just as the Native Americans had done.
Virginia farmers quickly centered nearly all of their investment on growing one staple crop, tobacco - literally "betting the farm" that the crop would be successful and the prices in England would be high enough to make a profit. If soil eroded from Virginia fields during summer thunderstorms, if tobacco exhausted the minerals and nutrients in the soil... no problem, there was plenty of virgin wilderness in the largest colony in the New World to convert to new farmland.
There were many more acres under cultivation on Virginia farms compared to New England farms. Virginia farms were larger, but the yields per acre were lower. So long as Virginia labor was relatively cheap, that economic model was successful for the Virginians. The "First Families of Virginia" (FFV's) such as the Carters and the Lees gained great wealth and built great mansion houses, such as Carter Hall, Stratford, Mount Vernon, Gunston Hall, and Monticello. Note that these famous old mansion houses are almost all east of the Blue Ridge...
Where did the Virginia plantation owners find cheap labor to grow a staple crop (tobacco) for export?
The initial labor force was English, imported in ships to Virginia from London and other English cities. The rural poor in England ended up migrating to Virginia. It was a major gamble to move to the colony - but at least they had some opportunity to buy land in Virginia, while the chance of accumulating enough savings in England was close to zero. Getting across the Atlantic Ocean was not cheap in the 1600's. To pay for the trip, many Englishmen and Englishwomen agreed to commit to 7 years of labor in the colony, signing an "indenture" to document that commitment in exchange for the trip.
As part of the indenture system, a Virginian plantation owner would pay the ship captain for transporting laborers - and was obliged to provide food, shelter, and clothing to the indentured servants. The colonial government would grant 50 acres (a "headright") to the plantation owner for every person imported to Virginia, helping to finance immigration. Rarely would cash be exchanged in this process. The individual in England provided labor over 7 years, the colony provided land to the plantation owner, the ship captain brought a body to the plantation owner, and the plantation owner paid the ship captain in tobacco that had been produced by indentured servants who had been imported previously.
An English family who sold everything to pay for a trip to Virginia in the first dozen years of the colony would have found it hard to do more than scratch out a living for themselves in the colony. In the initial years of the colony, the London Company generated propaganda to recruit immigrants, and even went so far to establish a House of Burgesses in 1619 to give the immigrants political rights. Still, immigration was low, the death rate of those who did immigrate was high, and the European population of the colony grew so slowly that the London Company could not make a profit from trade.
Tobacco production was limited because the few colonists could produce only so much tobacco. One person could work 1-5 acres of land in a year - so a 50-acre headright was a generous grant for importing each worker. The London Company had plenty of land under its control in Virginia, but the workers were in England. If the private company could have borrowed vast sums to pay for transporting more immigrants to Virginia, perhaps the private investors could have finally reaped a profit from their company. However, in 1625 the king of England revoked the London Company charter, the private (and unprofitable) colony became a crown colony, and the investors who had ventured their capital took a financial loss.
Not everyone lost money on the colony, of course. A few people came with personal wealth from England to the Virginia colony in the early 1600's. They could pay to buy an initial small farm, then import a labor force. Many "started small" and worked their way to greater wealth. A few were wealthy enough to "start big," pay for one or more ships to transport new settlers to the colony, and create their own hundred.
The imported indentured servants would grow tobacco for a plantation owner to import more people, which would trigger grants for more land (50 acres per imported person) to expand the plantation. During the English Civil War in the mid-1600's, some "Cavaliers" who supported King Charles I and King Charles II fled England, to escape the Puritan repression... and those immigrants had wealth, education, and business connections. Can you see how this system led to an oligarchy of a few wealthy "First Families of Virginia"?
White laborers usually signed a contract or "indenture" for a few years of work, in exchange for transportation costs to Virginia. Indentured servitude was not slavery; an indenture was a contract, and the colonial court system helped to protect servants from unscrupulous plantation owners who did not hold up their end of the bargain. At the end of the 7 years, the plantation owner was obliged to give a few basic supplies to the laborers who had completed their term of indenture. In theory, the newly-freed indentured servants would walk west to the edge of European settlement (the "frontier"), carve a small farm out of the wilderness, start paying taxes, and extend Engish social patterns across the continent.
Why didn't the London Company find laborers to grow tobacco from places other than England?
Unlike the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean islands, Native Americans were not enslaved in Virginia to provide the initial labor force. Powhatan, the primary chief of the tribes in eastern Virginia, and his successors were able to maintain their independence for 15 years after Jamestown was established. The tribes controlled by Powhatan did not have the same technology as the English who sailed up "Powhatan's River" (James River) in 1607, but the Native Americans had sufficient weapons and courage to preserve their way of life in parallel with the English for several decades.
Powhatan's approach was not successful, but his tribes were not enslaved and forced to raise tobacco on English plantations. A massive decline in Native American population, after exposure to European diseases, also reduced the potential for raising tobacco with an "Indian" workforce.
Opechancanough convinced the tribes that peaceful coexistence was no longer acceptable and led a major uprising in 1622. After it failed, the English excluded the Algonquians from their plantations. Eventually the English even built a wooden pallisade (a wall...) from the James River to the York River, to define a region where Native Americans were not permitted. (NOTE: here is a potential quiz question regarding the Pamunkey and Mattaponi reservations that were established in 1677... are they on the Peninsula?)
Why didn't the London Company import slaves from Africa to raise tobacco from the start?
Virginia was not settled initially to be a farming colony, and slavery was not part of the London Company plan for making a profit. The first blacks from Africa were imported into Virginia in 1619, a dozen years after the English settled Jamestown. Slavery based on color gradually evolved in the Virginia colony over the next 50 years. During that time relatively few Africans were imported to Virginia, compared to the high percentage of indentured servants brought over to work on the tobacco plantations.
Discrimination was not a new concept to the colonists - the Spanish, the French, and the English were perfectly willing to kill each other based on religion or nationality, and Bacon's Rebellion showed the English were willing to kill "Indians" based on whatever reason seemed convenient at the moment. However, it took about 50 years to develop a series of laws defining perpetual slavery based on one's color, and thus to ensure a low-cost labor force in perpetuity.
After the London Company lost its charter, the pattern of indentured servant immigration expanded and Virginia became more profitable. More immigrants arrived after the English responded forcefully to the 1644 uprising and destroyed most Native American towns near the settled area, increasing the sense of personal security in the colony at the same time the Civl War in England reduced personal security at home. Native American threat diminished, especially after the
By 1700, after nearly a century of European immigration to the New World, the supply of willing white immigrants was inadequate to meet demand - witness the problems Governor Spottswood faced trying to get iron workers to his lands at Germanna. To the Virginians of the 1700's, slavery was desirable - and racism was justified - by the economic importance of having a low-cost labor force to grow tobacco.
Starting around 1700, Virginia landowners began to purchase a large number of imported slaves. By 1776, 40% of the population of Virginia was composed of black slaves - one reason the white colonists reacted so strongly to Lord Dunmore's proclamation of freedom to slaves who would rise up against their "rebellious" colonial masters. For almost 150 years, from 1700-1865, the primary laborers raising tobacco were black men and women who were forced to work without ever having an opportunity to get a fresh start after 7 years and walk to the frontier to start a new farm...
In New England, there was far less demand for a large pool of low-skill agricultural workers. New Englanders had slaves, but far less of an economic dependence upon the "peculiar institution" of slavery. The cultural attitudes towards slavery developed differently in New England, as the economic systems developed differently. The financial impact of the cries for abolition before the Civil War would have been dramatically different north of the Mason-Dixon line. (The Mason-Dixon line was the border surveyed in the 1760's to define the boundary between the Maryland and Pennsylvania colonies.)
