-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: American Enterprise - Free and Not So Free Clarence H. Cramer©1972 Little & Brown and Company ISBN 0-316-16000-8 728pps. - First Edition - Out-of-print --[3a]-- III The Colonization of the New World: The Role of Corporations, Land Speculators, and Sweet Charity THREE prerequisites were essential to make British colonization of the New World a success: land, labor, and capital. The land was here but the other two requirements for successful settlement came from Europe in fact the economic history of the United States really begins with the investment of European capital and labor. Furthermore until recent times the United States continued to be dependent on European investment of capital and labor. Until the First World War the United States was in debt to Europe, and until the 1920's we had a very liberal policy on immigration, a policy that reflected our need for a supply of labor from abroad. We won political independence from Europe in 1783, but our economic independence from European capital and European labor was not to be achieved for almost a century and a half after the American Revolution. LAND. The abundance of land was apparent but the British had some difficulty in convincing Indians that they should either work for the British or move farther back into the hinterland. When the red men declined to do either the British adopted a homicidal Indian policy which was essentially taken over by the United States in later years. Initially the British rationalized their seizure, in major part by force, of the Indian's land on two grounds: the souls of the Indians had to be saved and the lands of the Indians had to be properly developed, and the red men were falling down on the job. On the first point the British developed the traditional rationalization that because it was the Indian's immortality that was at stake, what real difference could it make if the red man in the form of his mortal and finite body -got cheated, or even killed, in the process? And so it was that the so-called Indian menace was met with the Bible, torch, and musket. On the second point (the proper development of land) the British argued that unless a people improved what God had given them, they lost their title to it. This was a theory that would scarcely stand up in the national courts of any nation, but has been employed frequently in international relations. The British argued that they violated no property rights because the Indian had no real title; he had only a general residency like wild beasts in the forests, who did not improve the land either. Of course, the British have no monopoly on this argument; it was, for example, used in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Our Manifest Destiny divinely ordained us to take land that belonged to Indians and Mexicans. These people were dishonest, incompetent, slothful, did not develop the land properly, and should have it taken from them by someone who would. This was an echo of the usually tolerant Benjamin Franklin who once observed that rum should be regarded as an agent of Providence "to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth." In any case the British, and later the American, policy toward Indians can only be characterized as a brutal and ruthless one. In the beginning the India ns had been regarded as pagans ripe for conversion, or as a variant of Rousseau's Noble Savage uncorrupted by civilization; later, as the economic desire for land took over, they came to be looked upon as subhuman savages without souls to be saved, fit only for extermination. As Louis Wright has observed, for most of our history the British, the Spanish, and the Americans have felt the Indian to be like the rattlesnake and the alligator and poison ivy a curse on Utopia. Columbus found the Arawak Indians in the Caribbean "a loving people, without covetousness" but his Spanish successors set them to work in mines and on plantations, with the result that entire Arawak villages disappeared due to slavery, disease, warfare, and flight. When Pequot Indians in New England resisted settlement of whites in the Connecticut Valley, a party of Puritans surrounded one of the Indian villages and set fire to it ( 16 3 7). About five hundred Indians were burned to death or were shot while trying to escape; the woods were then searched for any Pequots who had managed to survive and those found were sold into slavery. The white Puritans offered devout thanks to God that they had lost only two men; when the Puritan divine Cotton Mather heard about the raid, he was grateful to the Lord that "on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell." The famous Jeffrey Amherst, a renowned British general after whom a college is named, had a unique solution for the Indian problem; he would have sent them gift blankets, infected with smallpox! The Puritans of New England, and the Presbyterian Scots along the Appalachian range, often quoted out of context a passage from Joshua ( 13: 1 ): ". . . and there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed." They interpreted this passage as a mandate to "move into the wilderness, to smite the Canaanites, and to seize the land that pleased them." In time, as the economic motive became all-powerful, there were but few who still talked of an obligation to convert Indians to the Christian faith. In 1790 John Adams would say that Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage was a chimera. In 1881 a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson, who has been dubbed the Harriet Beecher Stowe of the Indians, would publish a historical account of this record of injustice; the volume became famous under the title A Century of Dishonor. It might well have been called Centuries of Dishonor. In human annals there is no other record of the destruction of an entire race along with the violent subjugation of two whole continents. In the process of the extermination of the Indians it is discouraging to note that the most murderously effective weapons were alcohol, pestilence, warfare, broken treaties, and expropriation of land. Up to 1868 nearly four hundred treaties had been signed with various Indian groups by the U.S. government, and hardly one remained unbroken. The Indians were promised new lands and when these lands became valuable the Indians were moved on again and again as many as half a dozen times. This went on so routinely that the Sioux Spotted Tail once asked wearily: "Why does not the great White Father put his red children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?" In the 1880's President Cleveland would note that the "hunger and thirst of the white man for the Indian's land is almost equal to his hunger and thirst after righteousness." By the later 1960's some 400,000 of the total 550,000 Indians left in the United States were living on approximately 200 reserva-tions in 26 states. Ninety percent of them were housed in tin-roofed shacks, leaky adobe huts, brush shelters, even abandoned automobiles. Unemploy-ment ranged from 40 to 75 percent, and the average Indian family was try-ing to live on $30 a week. The normal age of death for an Indian in 1968 was forty-three years, for a white, sixty-eight years. His education, averag-ing five years, was the worst of any minority group; other Americans average a bit more than eleven years. Whatever the method of exploitation, with the arrival of the white man, the world of the Indian came to an end -whether he lived in the log houses on the Mohawk or in the tepees of the plains or on the pyramids of Mexico or in the palaces of Peru. Some nationalistic history textbooks in the United States have been critical of Spanish colonial policy but conveniently forget the elementary fact that the Indian survived in Latin America but was almost exter minated in the United States. LABOR. Colonial labor came from three sources: freemen, indentured servants, and slaves. The freemen were by name the possessors of freeholds they were the owners of property, usually land. The individual freeman worked hard on his own; he also augmented his labor supply by siting a large family. On the frontier a wife and children were economic assets. For that reason females were sometimes classified as good or indifferent "breeders." Biologically this meant that young women were in especial demand, so much so that (as Thomas A. Bailey notes) an "unwed girl of twenty-one could be referred to as an 'antique virgin.' " But widows were also sought after, particularly if they were not too old and had proved themselves fertile by producing children in the first or second marriages. Because of the demand there was occasionally a social and ethical problem; some widows remarried so quickly that the refreshments from the first husband's funeral could be used for the guests at the wedding which followed. On the frontier this moral issue was somewhat solved by the clergy through "delayed funerals"; this was the practice of preaching the funeral service some months after burial of the late husband in order to prevent the possibility that the "grieving" widow would ride to the graveyard behind her late husband's corpse and ride back in the embrace of a prospective husband. Because large families were advantageous on the frontier, babies arrived with great regularity and persistence. Benjamin Franklin was one of fifteen children by two mothers; Sir William Phipps, the successful hunter after treasure, was one of twenty-seven all by the same mother. This excessive childbearing shortened the lives of many frontier women; at the same time it resulted in a remarkable increase in the population. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were doubling their population every twenty-three years. In London the unfriendly and choleric Dr. Samuel Johnson would say that the colonists and rattlesnakes had similar birth rates; he found the increase undesirable for both species. Beyond the freemen, the balance of the labor supply was made up of either indentured servants or slaves (we will reserve the discussion of slavery for a later chapter). It is possible that indentured servants accounted for as much as three-quarters of the total immigration into the thirteen American colonies before 1775; some of them came voluntarily and some arrived involunta rily. Those who signed contracts voluntarily were known as "free willers" or redemptioners. Their agreements permitted ship captains to sell their services to interested employers over a period of years, usually five to seven, for a sum of money that would pay for their passage by ship thus rede eming it. Those who came involuntarily did so either as convicts or kidnappees. The kidnapped were largely children, although some were adults. The "spiriting away" of laborers became a regular business in such towns as London and Bristol, where adults would be plied with liquor and the children would be enticed with sweetmeats by the kidnappers, who were called "spirits." In the case of convicts England normally offered commutation of the death sentence to fourteen years of labor in the colonies; the commutation was usually seven years for other crimes, including imprisonment for debt. For that reason most of the convicts who were shipped to America for a period of indentured labor were known as "His Majesty's Seven-Year Passengers." It can be noted that some of them were the luckless victims of savage laws enacted in England and on the Continent to protect the property of the ruling classes; they were peasants caught shooting rabbits on some landlord's estate, or servant girls charged with stealing a pair of stockings. At first the jailbirds were largely rogues, vagabonds, debtors, and beggars, but in the eighteenth century others with more serious crimes murder, rape, and grand larceny were shipped. Among the transported women, there were many whom contemporary accounts described succinctly as "lewd." Obviously the transportation of such persons enabled England to solve a penal problem and she did so until the American Revolution put a stop to the use of American colonies as social wastebaskets; in the fifty years before the Revolution, Britain sent nearly 50,000 convicts to the American colonies, certainly a large number for a country with a sparse population. Enough of them were hardened criminals to establish the nucleus, in America, of a criminal brotherhood. The system of indentured labor could show both positive and negative aspects. For the employer this system provided cheap labor; for about twenty English pounds (for transportation, middleman's fees, and free-dom dues), he acquired a laborer for a period of years. During this time the only additional charge upon him was the cost of food and shelter, usually minimal. For the employee, if he lived long enough, there was the achievement of complete freedom and something to go with it usually some clothing and tools, occasionally a small parcel of land. The chief disadvantage was the multifarious brutality of the system, a cruelty that was extensive enough that .' it killed many indentured servants before they had an opportunity to become freemen. There were the appalling condi-tions on board the ships that transported the indentured servants, into which they were packed almost like sardines; many did not survive the trip over the ocean. There was the breakup of the family when contracts for its members were purchased by different employers in America, or when children or adults were kidnapped in England. During the period of em-ployment, treatment of the indentured was frequently very bad; they were given inadequate food, worked frightfully long hours, could be flogged and beaten, and were sometimes at the mercy of immoral employers. Servant girls, for example, could be held in longer bondage because of bastardy, and their masters were sometimes not above conspiring to this end. CAPITAL. Capital presented a problem; most of the American colonies were originally established as profit-making ventures. The English Crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not able financially to engage in commerce on a large scale. Individual entrepreneurs failed, although some of them tried particularly Sir Walter Raleigh. He was nearly bankrupted by the attempt to establish a colony at Roanoke in Virginia, and turned over the rights to his charter to nineteen London merchants. His failure taught a valuable lesson. Individuals had neither the funds nor the qualified personnel to establish a successful colony. Jointstock companies could and did supply both in return for royal grants of monopolies. Joint-stock companies, therefore, gave seven of the original thirteen American colonies their start: directly in the cases of Virginia, Massachusetts, New Amsterdam (New York), and New Sweden (Delaware); indirectly in the cases of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Later, land speculators known as proprietors would try their hand; they enjoyed some success in Maryland, the two Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Unlike the others, Georgia was not established for the initial purpose of making a profit; it was colonized by imperialists who were impelled by both philanthropic and defense motives. The profit motive was thus dominant in the establishment of all the American colonies save one; because of this original impulse, attempts would be made to hold settlers in the position of employees beholden for subsistence to a trading company, or in the status of liege servants to semi-feudal proprietors. This caused resentment with the result that most colonies changed over, in time, from corporate (charter) or proprietary to royal control; after their experience with corporations and proprietors, many colonists came to believe that royal governors could not be worse, and might be better. By the eve of the American Revolution Pennsylvania, Maryland, and tiny Delaware were the only surviving proprietorships and Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only charter colonies left, although by that time in both cases the charters were held by the people and not by British corporations. The idea of the corporation was relatively new; it had first been used in the time of Queen Elizabeth to establish what were perhaps the earliest' trading companies with what came later to be called permanent capital. These were the Levant Company for trade with the Near East, the Muscovy Company for trade with Russia, and the British East India Company to exploit the Far East. Now the same corporate device would be employed in the American colonies. During the earliest period the name Virginia embraced all North America not secured by Spain and France, and the term "Old Dominion" originally encompassed this large area. Presently a group of merchants and investors from London and another group from Plymouth, Bristol, and other western English cities applied for charters. They received them; the London Company was to colonize what is now North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The Plymouth Company was to settle in what is now New England. The coast between the present New York City and the District of Columbia could be colonized by either company so long as their settlements were one hundred miles apart. The site selected in 1607 by the London Company, for a tiny colony of Englishmen, was Jamestown, on the wooded banks of the James River. The early years there turned out to be a tragedy for almost all concerned; hundreds died of disease, of actual starvation, and later from Indian massacres. During the worst "starving time" in 16og-i6io, according to Captain John Smith one man, his mind unhinged by slow starvation, killed his wife, "powdered [salted] her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne," for which he was hanged, Smith later remarked, "Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado'd, I know not, but such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of." From hindsight we can ascertain that this loss of life was unnecessary; had the early colonists had eyes for something other than precious metals they would have observed that the woods were full of game and that the rivers were swarming with fish. A frightful Indian massacre in 1622 brought a royal investigation in the following year. It revealed that 5,500 colonists had gone to Virginia; of these, 4,000 had died, 300 had returned to England, and only 1,200 remained. The result of these shocking figures was that the king annulled the original charter in 1624, and from that time Virginia was a royal colony. The corporate life of the London Company (of Virginia) thus came to a close after seventeen years of existence, and after the original investors had sunk the present-day equivalent of more than $7 million into the venture. By 162 4 they had lost everything. There were a variety of reasons for this corporate disaster. The site had been wrong. Jamestown was embraced on one side by a swamp and on the other by the muddy waters of the James River. It was both damp and unhealthy. In London the investors had wanted a quick return on their capital, and were really interested in the primary windfalls that had made the Spanish so wealthy. Unfortunately there were no primary windfalls in Virginia, and planning based on their existence was all wrong. Ultimately profits would be found in secondary windfalls-in the lowly tobacco leaf and the humble potato. They would ultimately save Virginia, but they could not save the London Company. In addition, there was a monumental lack of economic incentive for settlers. The initial requirement was that they were to put their produce into a common warehouse, from which they were to draw according to their needs. There are indications that this Marxist system may creak and groan in the twentieth century; it certainly did not function in Virginia. There was too much land, and settlers were perfectly aware of the agrarian opportunities which were possible. Belatedly the company allowed the colonists to have private gardens, which were promptly planted with tobacco. Finally, the type of settler sent to Virginia left much to be desired. Captain John Smith observed that the company was sending too many gentlemen, soldiers, and fortune hunters. He asked instead for immigrants who were not afraid to soil their hands. It was his observation and the company later admitted he was right that it had allowed too many parents to disburden themselves of lascivious sons, too many masters to get rid of bad servants, and too many wives to rid themselves of unwanted husbands. The Virginia colony would have gone under had it not been for two men: Captain John Smith and John Rolfe. Smith was indubitably the most prominent person in the colony during its early days. As a leader he showed courage, great common sense, and a sound grasp of practical economics. Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, was the father of the tobacco industry; by 1616 he had perfected methods of raising and curing the pungent weed, a gift (economically but not salubriously) of the Indians to the Old World. This provided Virginia with its staple export; ultimately the prosperity of the colony was built on tobacco smoke. Europe had known about the weed for some time; a half century before Jamestown was settled there was a counselor to the King of France whose name was Jean Nicot. He went to Portugal as ambassador, got hold of some tobacco plants that had lately been brought from Florida. He cultivated the herb and began to test the use of the leaves for medical properties. His cook, having nearly cut off his thumb with a chopping knife, asked Nicot for help. The ambassador put a tobacco poultice on the damaged thumb, which promptly healed for other reasons, as we now know. Nonetheless, the fame of the herb and of Nicot's use of it spread to France, where tobacco became a medical remedy prescribed for almost every ailment. Thus it was that jean Nicot gave his name to the botanical designation of the tobacco plant (Nicotiana rustica), and gained immortality through the noun nicotine. When tobacco was first produced in Virginia it was a luxury product, high in price because of limited production. In London tobacco from the West Indies, which was considered superior, sold for more than200pence (18 shillings) a pound. Virginia tobacco, which was of poorer quality, nevertheless brought almost a hundred pence a pound. Under these conditions it is not surprising that tobacco was used mainly by the wealthy, and was retailed on London streets by the pipeful. These high prices brought on frenzied production and the inevitable drop in price. By 1627 the price paid to the planter in Virginia had fallen from almost a hundred pence to less than one penny a pound. Six years later, in 1633, the Virginia House passed a law restricting production; it limited each person who cultivated tobacco to 1,500 plants. Thus began governmental regulation of agricultural production on this continent, a practice that vexes us to this day.* [*With but few notable exceptions, all the cereals and fruits and table vegetables commonly grown in the New World originated elsewhere and were brought to these shores after Columbus's voyage. Those native plants which ultimately would be important economically are few in number. The most noteworthy are corn, tobacco, the potato, and the tomato. Curiously, two of them (the potato and the tomato) originated here but had to go abroad in order to gain acceptance in the Western Hemisphere. The white potato was domesticated in prehistoric times in the high Andes. To reach North America it traveled first to Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, then to the British Isles and Ireland. Ultimately Irish immigrants to New Hampshire in 1720 brought the potato to North America; this was the origin of the term Irish potatoes. The tomato required even more time for its return to the Western Hemisphere. It is a native of either Mexico or the Andes, was not popular here, arrived in southern Europe at the end of the seventeenth century and caught on. Two centuries later, Thomas Jefferson, always ready to try something new, brought a few tomato plants back from Europe. Curiously, in the early years both the potato and the tomato were considered to be aphrodisiacs. In the case of the potato it was whispered that the new product from America was a powerful love potion. Because of this belief, virtuous maids were warned against eating potatoes, and the Virgin Queen was said to look upon the new vegetable with distaste and suspicion. It was noted, however, that certain country gentlemen in England were tending their potato patches with loving care. The tomato was commonly called la pomme d'amour, and in this country was opposed as sinful and possibly poisonous until about 1900 when it began to attain general respectability. It now ranks third among our vegetable crops.] In the southern colonies in general, and Virginia in particular, large land holdings were encouraged by the headright system, usually fifty acres per head to a promoter who transported immigrants at his own expense. This system fostered large land accumulations, along with speculation in land warrants; this frequently raised the price of land beyond the means of indentured servants who had worked out their time. Through the headright system Virginia developed into the Cavalier State, with many large landowners in the tidewater region-the FFVs (First Families of Virginia); as an example, the Byrd family alone eventually amassed almost 200,000 acres. By contrast poorer folk were forced into the wild and dangerous back country. In the tidewater region only the great planters with gangs of African slaves could make a profit, and this was limited, because tobacco exhausted the soil after seven years. Many small growers had to abandon their worn-out fields and seek their fortune on the frontier. There they were compelled to bear the full brunt of Indian massacres, although they were unrepresented (or at least underrepresented) in the Virginia House of Burgesses, where the FFVs were in control. A rebellion was clearly in the making, and it occurred in 1676 a Virginian declaration of independence exactly a century before the one well known in U.S. history. Aristocratic old Governor William Berkeley, who was personally involved in fur trade with the Indians, was unwilling to antagonize them by fighting back. About a thousand angry back-country men broke out of control, under the leadership of twenty-nine-vear-old Nathaniel Bacon whose overseer had been tomahawked. Bacon's men chastised the Indians, defeated Governor Berkeley, and burned Jamestown. In the hour of victory Bacon died of a fever; there were rumors he had been poisoned. Berkeley then crushed the uprising with great brutality, engaging in an orgy of executions until Charles II recalled his aging governor with the comment, "That old fool has hanged more men in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father." As rebellions go this was a small one, but in the hindsight of history it was important indeed. Thomas A. Bailey has this conclusion to draw: The ill-fated Bacon's Rebellion was symptomatic of much that was to be American. It highlighted the cleavage between the older order of aristocracy and special privilege, on the one hand, and the emerging new order of free enterprise and equal opportunity, on the other. It arrayed the despised commoners against the lordly governing class, and the back-country frontier against the tidewater aristocracy. It showed at an early date that aroused colonists would unite and die for what they regarded as their rights as free men. Furthermore, the struggle continues to this day. The distinguished political scientist V. 0. Key has stated that Virginia is still probably the most conservative state in the Union what he calls a "political museum piece." It has continued as an oligarchy run by gentlemanly politicians with the support of the business community and the FFVs generally.* [* As David Hawke has pointed out so well (in The Colonial Experience, P. 273), there has been considerable disagreement among American historians in recent years about Bacon's Rebellion. In our text we have accepted the traditional point of view, well expressed by Thomas J. Wertenbaker in his Bacon's Rebellion (1957). On the other hand Wilcomb E. Washburn in The Governor and the Rebel (1957), makes Berkeley the hero and Bacon something of a villain. Wesley Frank Craven presents the rebellion as a most "complex problem" with no simple answer in his Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (1949). Fo r Bernard Bailyn it was a struggle for power between two elite groups (see James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeeth-Century America: Essays on Colonial History [1959]).] The second corporation that made a settlement in America was the one that financed the Pilgrim Fathers. Their leaders were Separatists who desired to withdraw entirely from the Anglican Church, and for this reason had run into trouble with the Stuart king. Ultimately they heard of Virginia and wanted to settle there; how they happened to land in New England is not exactly clear to this day. To make the trip the impecunious Pilgrims needed capital; for this purpose they got seventy "Merchant Adventurers" of London to put up seven thousand pounds to finance the expedition, and they received a charter from the London Company to settle in Virginia. The "Merchant Adventurers" had no concern for the religious aspect of the migration which, in time, was to achieve such prominence; the investors were interested in profits, which they hoped to achieve from fishing and fur trading. As with the Jamestown settlement there was to be no individual land ownership, at least in the beginning. The whole body of emigrants bound themselves to work for a period of seven years, during which time they would put all produce in a common warehouse and would receive subsistence out of a common store. There was an understanding that at the end of the period there was to be a settlement. In time adventurers and planters received one hundred acres for each person transported and every settler was assigned a garden plot plus an allotment of meadow and pasture. The voyage itself was a curious one. The captain of the Mayflower was a reformed pirate by the name of Jones. He didn't take the Pilgrims to Virginia, and there is basis for the belief that he never intended to do so. There is some evidence to indicate that he was secretly in the pay of the Plymouth Company, which controlled the coast on which the ship was to land, and that his claim that he had been driven off his course was sheer poppycock. In any case the Mayflower sailed on 6 September 1620 with a passenger list that has been of more interest to posterity than any other in modern history. It comprised 102 persons, but the passengers were not all Pilgrims in the religious connotation of the term. There is a popular fallacy that they represented a homogeneous religious group, fired with a burning zeal to found a church of their own in the wilderness. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Only forty-four of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims. The others, in the majority, were Strangers. They were not Separatists; in fact most of them were members of the Church of England, not from strong conviction but because they had been born in that faith. Among the fifty-eight Strangers were eighteen indentured servants, including four small waifs who were poor orphans of London, and who had been dragged off as kidnappees. The Strangers, like the tens of millions who crossed the Atlantic after them, were seeking in the New World not spiritual salvation but economic opportunity, a chance to better their worldly lot. All this led to several loud explosions between the Saints (Pilgrims) and the Strangers. By an ironic twist of fate it is among the Strangers, and not among Ye Saints, that one finds the three so-called Pilgrims who thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have enjoyed the greatest fame. They were Miles Standish (the Captain of the Guard), John Alden (the carpenter and suitor), and Priscilla Mullins (the sought-after damsel). But while there was a distinct cleavage between Saints and Strangers, all the passengers had one thing in common. All were from the lower classes from the cottages and not from the castles of England. On 11 November 1620 they all saw the "weatherbeaten face" the "stern and rockbound" shore of New England, rather than that of warmer Virginia. Wherever they landed it certainly was not on Plymouth Rock -the Pilgrims finally chose as their site the inhospitable shore of Plymouth Bay. They went ashore without a charter, and to avoid anarchy they drew up the Mayflower Compact -to serve as a kind of temporary constitution until a new charter could be obtained from the Plymouth Company, which controlled from England the region where they had landed by accident or design. They never got it, with the result that the Plymouth colony was still charterless when it ultimately merged with Massachusetts Bay in 1691. The early days of the colony were rugged ones. It was fortunate that the Indians in the area were few in number, having been wiped out by an epidemic of smallpox; even so, the winter of 1620-1621 was a terrible one, with cold and disease taking a grisly toll. Only forty-two out of the original 102 passengers survived, and at one time there were only seven who were well enough to lay the dead in their cold and forbidding graves. By the next autumn there had been good harvests, and with them the first Thanksgiving in New England. >From a corporate point of view, the settlers in the Plymouth colony in America bought out their London partners in 1626 six years after they arrived there -for £ 2,400; the stockholders in England therefore liquidated their holdings and sold at a loss. The purchase sum was to be repaid at the rate of 12 200 a year. In order to do so William Bradford (who was governor of the colony for more than thirty years) and his associates took over a monopoly on fishing and fur-trading until the debt was paid. This was finally accomplished in 1648 twenty-two years later but in the process Bradford had to sell a farm and Miles Standish also took a loss. With all of its notoriety, the small and peaceful Colony of Plymouth, with a maximum population of 7,000, was never really important either economically or numerically. Massachusetts Bay was not founded until Plymouth was nearly a decade old, but it became by far the most powerful and populous of the New England colonies. It resulted from the "Great Migration" of so-called Puritans, most of it from 1630 to 1640; the movement came to an abrupt end with the beginning of the English Civil War, after which New England's population growth was due largely to natural increase. The primary cause for the "Great Migration" was the general state of economic insecurity and unrest in England at that time. Subsidiary causes were the arbitrary rule of King Charles I and the persecutions of William Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury who harried Nonconformists out of the kingdom so successfully that he has wryly been called "the father of New England." For whatever reason, during this decade about 75,000 refugees left England; it must be noted, however, that not all were Puritans and only a third came to the continent of North America. By comparison with Virginia or Plymouth the original expedition to Massachusetts with its seventeen ships (led by the Arbella) and one thousand men and women was a massive one; the settlement was begun on a larger scale than any of the other English colonies on the mainland. For that reason historically the Arbella was more important than the Mayflower. The uniqueness of Massachusetts Bay was that it was not only the first self-governing colony in America, but also because it was modeled on the corporation that provided the capital. Whereas Virginia and Plymouth originally were operated by companies in England, the corporation that controlled Massachusetts Bay moved everything to the New World charter, officers, stockholders, capital, management. This was done largely for a religious reason; Winthrop was fearful that if the company's headquarters was left in London, interests hostile to the Puritans might gain control. So the entire corporation was moved to the New World, where it exercised the right of government over a large territory. No one seems to know how this was managed, although it is clear that it was done while the king and others were not tending to business and that the lawyers among the Puritans (including John Winthrop) used their legal training to good advantage. In any case, the transfer of both charter and company to America gave the new colony a political structure, and established a model for later American institutions. The stockholders (freemen) were voters, provided they were church members. The company officers (eighteen assistants) were the legislators; by 1644 the deputies (executives) and assistants had separated into upper and lower houses. This structure of two legislative bodies, elected annually, took root and in time became part of the state and federal structure of the United States. A trading company had thus given a corporate precedent to the American system of government, distinct from the parliamentary establishment of England. The company and the colony were the same until 1664, when the Crown rescinded the charter and the company ceased to exist; the colony became a royal one in 1691. Massachusetts Bay also differed from the Plymouth colony, with which it is often confused, in two other pronounced ways: in religion and in the status of its members. In religion the emigrants to Massachusetts Bay were not radicals or Separatists; they wanted moderate reforms that would "purify" the Church of England, but no revolution that would rock the social or political boat. They were men of great and sometimes pompous piety as the lives of the Cottons and Mathers testify. These settlers came from the middle (rather than the lower) strata of English society. A few had possessed large landed estates in England, some were wealthy merchants, others came from professional classes (doctors or lawyers), some were scholars. This is obvious from a glance at the titles on the rolls of the company: Sir Henry Roswell, Sir Richard Saltonstall, and John Winthrop who had twenty indentured servants and was governor or deputy governor of the colony for almost two decades. These men desired to reproduce here a replica of the stratified society they had known, but they would lop off the two classes which had been above them in England-the king and the titled aristocracy -thus leaving themselves in top position. Governor Winthrop feared and distrusted the "commons" as the ignoble sort, and believed that democracy was the "meanest and worst" of all forms of government. Essentially the Puritans also intended to establish in Massachusetts an economic structure like that in England, with large landed estates tilled by peasants and hired hands. Large estates, however, proved impossible because the gravelly soil of Massachusetts, strewn with boulders, took a long time to clear even for a small farm. In addition no staple crop was ever found for ready sale in England, like Virginia tobacco or Canadian furs. In time the forests of New England would produce lumber, and the farms would have beef for market, but these could not be sold in England -which got lumber from the Baltic and beef from her own farms. The commerce of Massachusetts with the mother country was necessarily indirect; the colony sold lumber and beef in the West Indies for sugar and rum, and used these commodities in the famed triangular trade routes. Agriculture was disappointing; the Atlantic Ocean was not in the sea the Puritans could farm and reap without sowing. Massachusetts began to exploit the "codfish lode" off the coast of New England; in due course the development of this secondary windfall would yield more wealth than did the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. As Samuel Eliot Morison has pointed out (in his classic The Maritime History of Massachusetts) the colony derived her ideals from the sacred book but achieved her wealth from the sacred cod so much so that today a splendid facsimile of the fish is displayed with pride and satisfaction in the state house in Boston. The sea became so important that even the Puritan clergy were forced to recognize its existence. Once a minister told a congregation (in the famous fishing village of Marblehead) that the parishioners had come to the New World to "plant religion in the wilderness." A fisherman, with almost unanimous support from the rest of the audience, reproved him by shouting, "We did not come here for religion. Our main end is to catch fish." The clergy took the cue. In some churches the minister, as if he were on board, ascended into the pulpit by rope ladder. Men of the cloth even became interested in profits. A subsidiary feature of maritime industry one that could provide a pleasant primary windfall was known as "moon-cursing," the plundering of wrecks. There is a story about the Reverend Mr. Lewis of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. During his sermon one Sabbath, this entrepreneurial parson glanced out of the window and saw a vessel going ashore. He stopped his sermon, descended from the pulpit, and with a shout of "Start fair!" led his congregation pell-mell out of the meeting-house door. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substancenot soap-boxing! 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