Jefferson and Edmund Morgan: Notes on Colonial Virginia

Written by Wayne Pounds

Tokyo, October 2025

In bringing these two historians together, one from Virginia in 1771, one from New York City in 1975, a comparison is intended, not the usual scholarly doggedness, but a moment of inspiration that came to the author as he enjoy enjoyed a perfect fall day, contemplating a monument to the light of the Ueno War,  the Battle of Ueno during the Boshin War, when pro-Imperial Kangun forces defeated remnants Shōgitai troops near the Kan'ei-ji temple. Most of the temple was destroyed and Ueno Park was later built there, celebrating the victory of modern militarism over an outdated loyalty older values. In doing this, I am bringing together historians from three periods, Thomas Jefferson from the colonial period, Edmund Morgan from his American Slavery American Freedom, and my modest self, residing a short walk from the battle ground of the Boshin War. Saigō commanded the Shogun’s forces and negotiated the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle.

In bringing these three histories together, my temerity is that of a writer with no publications, merely a blog on which he can place anything he writes, to be read by everyone and no one, a readership he cannot number, and Google analytics provide no basis for even rough guesses, though the analysis does state the maker of the internet explorers his visitors used. The Livingston here in this Arica draws on the Morgan history noted, and on Jefferson’s 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia. I shall mix and match histories from three pens and with noting which ideas come from which work, letting it all flow together. This is the scholar’s choice, electing  his sources, then not distinguishing them from others just as famous and excellent, not even writing footnotes, but operating at a folk level which he takes to be the spirit of the both of the histories he is ransacking. We are watering the tree of liberty with the writers’ blood.  In 1750 the people or Virginia lived in fear. A year earlier General Edward Braddock had marched against the French and Indians on the colony's western frontier. Braddock had been overwhelmed, and now Virginians faced invasion. The Reverend Samuel Davies summoned them to battle, lest "Indian savages and French Papists, infamous all the World over for Treachery and Tyranny, should rule Protestants and Britons with a Rod of iron." Virginians, Davies was sure, would never give up their freedom. "Can you bear the Thought," he asked them, "that Slavery should clank her Chain in this Land of Liberty?" British troops turned back the French, and Virginia was spared enslavement to papists and savages. Yet in that "Land of Liberty" even as Davies spoke and Virginians claimed liberty, two-fifths of all the people were in fact already enslaved, under the iron rule of masters who were "Protestants and Britons."

Walter Raleigh was Humphrey Gilbert's half brother. Though Raleigh was the younger by about fifteen years, the two men had been close. Like Gilbert, Raleigh had served an apprenticeship with the queen's forces in Ireland and had then become interested in America. He had invested in Gilbert's proposed colony and might have gone along on the exploratory expedition had he not been tied to England by a queen who liked to have her favorites close at hand. Raleigh, for the moment at least, was one of her favorites. She had endowed him with sinecures, monopolies, and pensions that transformed him rapidly from a poor young gentleman into a rich young courtier. Tall and handsome, looking like a costume actor ready for the stage, he had at the same time the vision, the brilliance of mind, and the daring that England nourished in such abundance during those years. When Gilbert vanished at sea, Raleigh had no difficulty in getting the queen to issue him a patent like Gilbert's, conveying dominion over any part of the American coast where he could establish a colony (and everything six hundred miles north and south of it) within the ensuing six years.

Roanoke dispelled some illusions, both among the Indians and among the English. The Indians of the Virginia region would not be likely again to mistake the English for gods. The English, on the other hand, would be wary of expecting to find America divided into good Indians and cannibals, with the good Indians eagerly awaiting English help. From this point we can perhaps date the beginnings of the English disposition to regard all Indians as alike. As yet, however, it did not follow that the only good Indian was a dead one. When the first permanent English settlers arrived in America in 1607, their sponsors had not given up hope of an integrated biracial community, in which indigent Englishmen

would work side by side with willing natives, under gentle English government.

The first wave of Englishmen reached Virginia at Cape Henry, the southern headland at the opening of Chesapeake Bay, on April 26, 1607. The same day their troubles began. The Indians of the Cape Henry region (the Chesapeakes), when they found a party of twenty or thirty strangers walking about on their territory, drove them back to the ships they came on. It was not the last Indian victory, but it was no more effective than later ones. In spite of troubles, the English were there to stay. They spent until May 14 exploring Virginia's broad waters and then chose a site that fitted the formula Hakluyt had prescribed. The place which they named Jamestown, on the James (formerly Powhatan) River, was inland from the capes about sixty miles, ample distance for warning of a Spanish invasion by sea. It was situated on a peninsula, making it easily defensible by land; and the river was navigable by oceangoing ships for another seventy-five miles into the interior, thus giving access to other tribes in case the local Indians should prove as unfriendly as the Chesapeakes.

The Englishmen who invested their money in the company’s high purposes were naturally disappointed in the colony's failure to live up to expectations. But they were not sure what, if anything, to do about it. By 1618 they were divided into factions. One group, led by Sir Thomas Smith, was composed of big merchants, for whom Virginia was only one of many ongoing enterprises. These men, who had dominated the company's counsels hitherto, could afford to regard Virginia as a long-term investment in which one need not look for immediate success. They were disappointed with the results thus far achieved and with the settlers' new addiction to tobacco, but they were willing to wait for Smith, who had been highly successful in other ventures, to bring this one to fruition.

From what little can be discovered about the value of a man's labor in Virginia in the 1600s, it is not hard to see why the demand for servants was high, even in the face of a food scarcity. At the time when Sandys took over the company and began pouring men into the colony, Virginia had just begun to ship tobacco in quantity to the English market. The prices it brought were considerably lower than those for Spanish tobacco, but high enough to excite the cupidity of every settler. In the colony in 1619 the best grade sold for export at three shillings a pound. In 1623 what reached England was worth no more than half that, and in bartering within the colony (where it had already become the

principal medium of exchange) it was said to be valued at less than a shilling a pound. In a lawsuit recorded in 1624 it was reckoned at two shillings a pound, and in 1625 at three shillings again. The boom lasted until 1629 or 163o, when the price tumbled to a penny a pound.  Though it recovered somewhat in ensuing years, it never again reached the dizzy heights of the 1600s. During that decade the profits from tobacco were enough to keep all the colonists growing as much of it as they could, in spite of every effort to turn them to other products.

If slavery had developed swiftly in Virginia during the booming 1600s it would not have been surprising, when tobacco prices were high enough to inspire the same

overpowering greed that moved the Spaniards on Hispaniola. Two decades later Englishmen in Barbados turned to slavery in as short a time, in order to exploit the island's newly discovered capacity for producing sugar. But in Virginia, although the tobacco barons of the 1600s bought and sold and beat their servants in a manner that shocked other Englishmen, they did not reduce them to slavery, aswe understand the term. And Virginians did not import shiploads of African slaves to solve their labor problem until half a century more had passed. Perhaps if the boom had continued, they would have; but when it collapsed, they relaxed a little in their pursuit of riches and began to think about making the best of life in the new

land.

The most obvious difference between Virginia and England was the abundance of land and the absence of people. The native population which might have made the two countries radically different was small to begin with and became rapidly smaller under the onslaught of European diseases and weapons. Once the English pushed the remnants out of the way, they had several million acres of fertile tidewater lands available for a mere handful of settlers. The relative abundance of land and the shortage of people would shape Virginian-and American-history for centuries to come. But during the colony's first half century the shortage of people was different in kind from any experienced in Americans' later absorption of the continent. It was not just that the colony was new. It was not just a matter of time, needed to build up the stream of immigrants. It was a matter of death. The rich lands of the tidewater were empty not simply for lack of immigrants but because the men who did come to settle on them died so fast. We have seen that after 1625 the colony grew rapidly. But the growth was achieved in the face of a continuing death rate of appalling proportions.

When and why Virginians began to live longer is almost as much a mystery as why they had died so rapidly. Concrete if indirect evidence of the rise in longevity comes from the rise in population after 1644. It had taken thirty-seven years to achieve the roughly 8,000 people present in that year. In the next nine years the number grew to more than 14,000; and in the nine years after that it reached a probable 25,600.' While it is not impossible that an increase in immigration contributed to the accelerated increase in population during these years, there is no clear evidence of it; nothing, for instance, like the letters of the 1600s remarking on the large numbers of arrivals in Virginia. The population, to be sure, continued to be composed primarily of immigrants. Although the New England colonies were able to grow without many new arrivals after 1640, Virginia and Maryland, like the sugar islands of the West Indies, would have expired without a steady flow of new workers. But the sharp increase in Virginia's population after 1644 probably came not from a corresponding rise in the number of annual arrivals but from the fact that the newcomers had begun to live longer. They did not live as long, perhaps, as they would have if they had stayed in England, and certainly not as long as they would have if they had gone to New England, but they did live longer than their predecessors. More of them were surviving their "seasoning," living out their terms of service, and taking a place in the community.

Of of those who profited from the labor of Virginia's tobacco growers after 1660, the king stood foremost. Royal interest in the wealth that came from tobacco long antedated Berkeley's efforts to renovate Virginia's economy. Already in 1619 James I, even as he denounced the evils of tobacco, had tried to gain for the crown some of the profits of supplying Englishmen with it.' Charles I had also tried, also unsuccessfully, to talk Virginians into giving him or his favorites the exclusive right to market their product. But the royal government had another way to collect the lion's share of the profits from tobacco: by requiring the colonists to ship their crop to the mother country, where an import duty could be collected on it.

The society Virginians established during the first fifty years of the colony's existence had been geared to function in the face of heavy mortality. One of its features was the annual arrival of new workers to replenish the dying labor force. The decline of mortality and the increase in population did not stop the flow of immigrants. Until the last two decades of the century the annual arrivals were probably not much under 1,000 a year and in some years much more. New workers were still necessary, because Virginia's increase in population did not solve the labor problem of the planters. When servants became free, they preferred to work for themselves even though that might mean going into partnership for a term with one or more other freedmen. And they had been able to set up for themselves because of the cheap public land that was another feature of Virginia society.

Virginians could be so heavily exploited, legally and illegally, partly because they were selected for that purpose: they were brought to the colony in order to be exploited. From the beginning Englishmen had thought of their New World possessions as a place in which to make use of people who were useless at home. Although the hoped-for transformation was supposed to be morally uplifting to those who experienced it, the purpose was not merely charitable. The wretches who were rescued from idleness and unemployment must be sufficiently able-bodied to make the rescue worth the rescuer's trouble. They should be young, but not too young to work in the fields. And they should be male rather than female, because, for reasons not altogether clear, English women were not ordinarily employed in growing tobacco or other work in the ground. The planters imported three or four times as many men as women. The fact that the population was therefore predominantly male and predominantly young helped to make heavy exploitation possible. If the men who grew the tobacco had had more women and children to support, they could not have contributed so large a share of their produce to the men who profited from their labors.

In 1676 civil war came to Virginia. The chain of events that led to it began in 1675 with an In dian conflict on the Potomac. There the big men had always taken the lead in harassing the Indians. Early in 1662 Colonel Gerald Fowke, a representative of Westmoreland in the House of Burgesses, had been convicted, along with Giles Brent, George Mason, and John Lord, of seizing and imprisoning without cause a king of the Potomac Indians. Fowke and Brent were declared "incapable of bearing any office civil or military in this country," and Mason and Lord were suspended from such offices. But somehow their names continued to appear as justices, burgesses, and sheriffs.' In 1675, when the county of Westmoreland had grown to 538 tithables  and adjacent Stafford County to 436, a new round of Indian troubles began.

All governments rest on the consent of the governed/ in1676  civil war came to Virginia. The chain of events that led to it began in 1675 with an Indian conflict on the Potomac. There the big men had always taken the lead in harassing the Indians. Early in 1662 Colonel Gerald Fowke, a representative of Westmoreland in the House of Burgesses, had been convicted, along with Giles Brent, George Mason, and John Lord, of seizing and imprisoning without cause a king of the Potomac Indians. Fowke and Brent were declared "incapable of bearing any office civil or military in this country," and Mason and Lord were suspended from such offices. But somehow their names continued to appear as justices, burgesses, and sheriffs. In 1675, when the county of Westmoreland had grown to 538 tithables and adjacent Stafford County to 436, a new round of Indian troubles

began.

Ir could be argued that Virginia had relieved one of England's social problems by importing it. Virginians of the late seventeenth century seemed to be plagued by the same kind of restless, roistering rogues who had wandered through Elizabethan England. England had kept them down by the workhouse, by the gallows, by whipping them back to the parish they came from, by sending them off on military expeditions and by shipping them to Virginia. Richard Hakluyt had hoped that the New World would save them from the gallows. It had, and although Virginians were not all happy about it, throughout the century they kept crying for more. They wanted men. They could not get enough of them. The problem was not, as in England, to find work for them but simply to keep them working for their betters.

As we have seen, Virginians had coped with the problem in several ways: by creating an artificial scarcity of land, which drove freemen back into servitude; by extending terms of service; by inflicting severe penalties for killing the hogs that offered easy food without work. They had also through rents and taxes and fees skimmed off as much as they dared of the small man's small profits for the benefit of burgesses, councillors, and collectors. But the burdens imposed on Virginia's workers placed the colony continually on the brink of rebellion.

Virginia slaves were introduced into a system of production that was already in working order. The substitution of slaves for servants probably increased the productivity and almost certainly increased the profitability of the plantation system. But slavery required new methods of disciplining the labor force, methods that were linked to racial contempt. If we don’t understand that contempt and the role it played in the history of Virginia—and I think in American history—we must probe not only the differences but also the resemblances between servants and slaves in the plantation system and in the consciousness of those who ran it. 

Ideally, from the point of view of the master, slavery should have made it possible to turn the slave's every waking hour to the master's profit. In an industrial society, where it is possible to engage in productive tasks at any time, it is tempting to think of masters thus directing their slaves. But absolute power did not in itself make for continuous employment in a pre-industrial society. We have already seen that sixteenth-century Englishmen were often idle, if only because there were times when nothing could be done. The tobacco plantation probably made fuller use of its workers' time than previous English agricultural enterprises had. But even on a plantation it was simply not possible to employ either servants or slaves usefully every day of the year, creasing contempt for blacks and Indians, they began to raise the status of status of lower-class whites. As Virginians nourished an in The two movements were complementary. The status of poor whites rose not merely in relation to blacks but also in relation to their white superiors. Virginia had always been advertised as a place where the poor would be redeemed from poverty. And during the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s it may actually have served that purpose, though more met death than success. With the decline in mortality and rise in population the numbers of poor freemen grew too large, and the scruff and scum of England became the rabble of Virginia. But as Indians and Africans began to man the large plantations and the annual increment of freedmen fell off, the economic prospects of the paleface poor began to improve. 

This is not to say that poverty disappeared from white Virginia with the introduction of slavery. A class of homeless men continued to drift about the colony, cheating the tax collectors and worrying the authorities. They crop up from time to time in petitions against them from the proper people of different counties. Accomack, which had complained earlier, joined with Lancaster and Gloucester in 1609 to request "that a law may be made to punish Vagrant Vagabond and Idle Persons and to assess the Wages of Common Labourers. In 1710 Henrico County proposed a workhouse for them. But the assembly apparently did not consider the problem worth acting on until 1723, when it passed an act modeled after the Elizabethan poor law. The preamble noted that "divers Idle and disorderly persons, having no visible Estates or Employments and who are able to work, frequently stroll from one county to another, neglecting to labour and, either failing altogether to List themselves as Tithables, or by their Idle and disorderly Life [render] themselves incapable of paying their Levies when listed." The act, which was renewed and enlarged from time to time thereafter, empowered county courts to convey vagrants to the parish they came from and to bind them out as servants on wages by the year. If the vagrant were "of such ill repute that no one will receive him or her into Service," then thirty-nine lashes took the place of servitude.

Governor Spotwood’s explanation of the way Virginians nourished an increasing contempt for blacks and Indians, they began to raise the status of lower-class whites. The two movements were complementary. The status of poor whites rose not merely in relation to blacks but also in relation to their white superiors. Virginia had always been advertised as a place where the poor would be redeemed from poverty. And during the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s, it may actually have served that purpose, though more met death than success. With the decline in mortality and rise in population the numbers of poor freemen grew too large, and the scruff and scum of England became the rabble of Virginia. But as Indians and Africans began to man the large plantations and the annual increment of freedmen fell off, the

economic prospects of the paleface poor began to improve. This is not to say that poverty disappeared from white Virginia with the introduction of slavery. A class of homeless men continued to drift about the colony, cheating the tax collectors and worrying the authorities. They crop up from time to time in petitions against them from the proper people of different counties. Accomack, which had complained earlier, joined with Lancaster and Gloucester in 1699 to request "that a law may be made to punish Vagrant Vagabond and Idle Persons and to assess the Wages of Common Labourers." In 1710 Henrico County proposed a workhouse for them. But the assembly apparently did not consider the problem worth acting on until 1723, when it passed an act modeled after the Elizabethan poor law. The preamble noted that "divers Idle and disorderly persons, having no visible Estates or Employments and who are able to work, frequently stroll from One County to another, neglecting to labour and, either failing altogether to List themselves as Tythables, or by their Idle and disorderly Life [render] themselves incapable of paying their Levies when listed." The act, which was renewed and enlarged from time to time thereafter, empowered county courts to convey vagrants to the parish they came from and to bind them out as servants on wages by the year. If the vagrant were "of such ill repute that no one will receive him or her into Service,"

Finis