White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (28 page)

Between 1665 and 1666, Smith paid for the transportation of at least 160 people, earning certificates for 8,000 acres of land in the Chesapeake.

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Smith owned two plantations, Oak Hall and Occohannock. Jill Nock Jeffery has compiled a grim story of the nature of the regimes there and how the man himself was exposed. The disclosures started in June 1668, when two of his servants spoke out in the Accomack County Court against him. Jean Powell complained that Smith had physically abused her. In evidence, she displayed in court the marks of bruising and lashes on her back. Then Ann Cooper, another of Smith’s indentured servants, charged him with fathering her illegitimate child. It was the beginning of an avalanche of revelations.

Three months later, a child was born to another of his indentured servants, Elizabeth Carter, who was also Smith’s mistress. The baby was secretly delivered at the home of one of Carter’s friends, Jane Hill, without a midwife or anyone else being called. The two women declared it to have been stillborn and called neighbours to witness the tiny body. However, the neighbours spotted blood and bruises around the head and reported this. Carter and Hill were arrested and charged with murder.

Infanticide by unmarried mothers was common enough on both sides of the Atlantic at this time, as women always bore the brunt of the ferocious laws penalising ‘fornication’. No one had more to fear than an indentured servant in America. The mother of an illegitimate child faced a whipping and a fine to compensate her master for the time off she would spend caring for the infant.

Since few servants had any money to pay fines, the mother had to compensate by serving extra time – usually two years. Her child became a slave before it could walk. The law initially specified that girls born to a servant would themselves become a servant and remain so until they were twenty-four years of age (later reduced to eighteen) and boys until twenty-one. While these children did not face a lifetime in bondage like the offspring of black slaves, given the short life expectancy of those days, they faced almost half a lifetime as chattels.

The law was no kinder to the woman if her master was the father of her child. True, she would be removed from his service but only to be placed with another master. She would still have to pay the penalty for fornication and serve the extra years if she had no 201

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money. As for the master who might have raped her, if he was classed as a gentleman he could not be whipped. All he faced was a fine and the loss of a servant.

Elizabeth Carter was acquitted of murdering her baby but was ordered to pay 500 pounds of tobacco or receive twenty lashes for bearing an illegitimate child. She was also ordered to receive thirty lashes for taking ‘physic’ during her pregnancy. During her trial, Carter named Smith as the child’s father and claimed he had lured her into his bed with promises of marriage. She said that she participated in a
ménage à trois
with Smith and his first wife’s sister. Smith denied all of Carter’s charges but was judged to have fathered the dead child and fined 500 pounds of tobacco. He was recognised as a gentleman and so was spared the whip.

More of Smith’s servants began to come forward pleading for protection against him. A picture of violence and deprivation, and then of rape and murder, emerged. Servants wore rags on their feet and dared not ask for shoes. Their diet consisted of hominy and salt, and sometimes nothing at all. Almost all had been beaten savagely and repeatedly. Some had been kept in bondage long after the expiration of their indentured period. Others had vanished after being taken for punishment to an island owned by Smith and still known today as Smith’s Island.

One set of rape allegations came from a former servant called Mary Jones. She claimed that when her indentured period expired, Smith refused to free her. She was held for fourteen months on his island, tied ‘neck and heel’ and suffering many whippings. Smith raped her several times. As in England at this time, rape was rarely punished or even prosecuted in the Americas. The least likely rapes to be punished were those of indentured servants. Women servants were widely seen as loose and corrupt, like servants in general.

This time, however, the servant was believed and Smith was ordered to be taken into custody. Emboldened by this, other servants came forward with allegations. They included another alleged rape and two murders. Smith was said to have beaten two male servants to death: John Butts (known as ‘Old John’) and Richard Webb. The record does not reveal details of Webb’s death, or whether the allegation led anywhere, but it does include 202

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damning evidence on the fate of Old John. He was evidently about sixty years old and exhibited all the fragilities of a body worked beyond design. According to other servants, his inability to work like a younger man made him a target for Smith’s cruelty.

In 1666, Old John was beaten for stealing a piece of bread. He ran away but returned to the plantation. Citing the sixty year old as a runaway, Smith took him to the constable, Captain Bowman, for the statutory punishment for runaways: up to thirty strokes of the whip. Bowman saw bruising on Old John’s arm and remarked that the man looked more in need of a nurse than a whipping. He refused to administer the punishment.

An infuriated Smith took Butts home, where he cut off one side of the servant’s hair to mark him as a runaway, stripped him and began to whip him. Two other servants watched and counted forty or fifty lashes before their master stopped. Smith then put a

‘plough chain’ around Old John’s ankle and forced him ‘to work by day and grind [corn] by night’. He continued to thrash him.

About three weeks after the visit to Captain Bowman, Old John died while sleeping in an open tobacco house.

The local justices found that Smith had beaten Butts in ‘contempt of justice’ but, because the relevant records did not survive the American Civil War, we don’t know if Smith was ever tried for murder. What we do know is that, despite all the evidence and all the outrage caused by the various allegations, Smith was acquitted of rape and freed. Not only that, two of his alleged rape victims, Mary Jones and Mary Hues, were judged to have lied and were ordered to serve double the time specified on their indentures for making false accusations. The one blessing – if a relative one – was that they were sold to new masters and not returned to Henry Smith, an indication that the court knew very well that they told the truth.

It has been suggested that political influence with Governor Berkeley may have led to Smith being let off the hook, for it seems that he was neither jailed nor even fined. He was able to sell his lands and move to Somerset County in Maryland. However, in Governor Berkeley’s defence, he may have had other things on his mind. Virginia was edging towards rebellion – or rather her servants were.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BACON’S REBELLION

To this day, Nathaniel Bacon remains a paradox. He was an aristocrat from one of England’s most illustrious families yet he almost sent Britain packing from America a hundred years before George Washington. Some see him as a self-serving adventurer who tapped into the grievances of thousands in a bid for personal power. Others see Bacon as a true revolutionary, a crypto-Cromwellian, and his rebellion as the first stirrings of American independence.

There were numerous uprisings and small-scale rebellions in England’s American colonies before the final break with Britain but none as serious as that led by Bacon in 1676. The danger he posed was reflected in the venomous description of him by a royal commission that was appointed to investigate the rebellion a year later. He was:

ominous, pensive, [with a] melancholy aspect, of a pestilent and prevalent logical discourse tending to atheism . . . of a most imperious and dangerous hidden pride of heart . . .

and very ambitious and arrogant. But all these things lay hid in him till after . . . he became powerful and popular.1

This man sent the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, scurrying for safety across the Chesapeake, saw Jamestown burnt to the ground 205

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and the mansions of the Tidewater estates ravaged, and roused all the servile classes – white and black – in revolt.

Bacon was twenty-nine – ‘indifferent tall but slender, black-haired’

– when he arrived in the province two years earlier. He came from the same family as James I’s Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, and he was married to a cousin of Governor Berkeley. Needless to say, the well-connected young man was immediately inducted into the planter elite. He acquired two plantations and was appointed to the Governor’s ruling council.

He arrived in a province that was in a state of increasing unrest.

After the end of the English Civil War, Virginia had been viewed by Cromwell as a dumping ground not just for the Irish but for English undesirables, too. Cromwell’s military commanders swept up hundreds of prostitutes, beggars and vagrants with a view to transportation. After filling gaols in the Midlands with them, one of Cromwell’s generals boasted: ‘I may truly say that you will ride all over Nottinghamshire and not see a beggar or a wandering rogue.’2

It is unclear how many of England’s cast-offs and rogues Virginia now had to accommodate but there was a rising tide of protest at the ‘Newgateers’ being shipped over. With the Restoration, it got worse. As well as the sweepings of the prisons, the province was forced to accept as servants veterans of Cromwell’s New Model Army. A number of mini-insurrections by servants followed and former Roundheads were said to be involved in every one.3 The most serious, in 1663, became known as the Servants’ Plot. It was a localised uprising that was contained in Gloucester County. But it was considered grave enough to be put down with a studied show of ferocity and the ringleaders’ severed heads were displayed on chimney pots. To prevent more outbreaks, servants’ movements were restricted across the colony. Planters were warned especially to keep their men on the plantation on the day of rest, Sunday.

Action was also taken to stem the flow of convicts. In 1670, Virginia’s General Court warned that ‘the great number of felons and other desperate villains sent over from the prisons of England’

were a ‘danger’ to the colony.4 Urgent protestations were made to the King and he agreed to suspend convict shipments.

But Virginia’s tensions went much deeper and wider. In 206

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1672, the assembly reported that a ‘Negro rebellion’ was in the making and expressed fears that white servants would join it. The assembly stated that ‘many negroes are now out in rebellion in sundry parts of this country’ and warned that ‘very dangerous consequence may arise to the country if either other negroes, Indians or servants should happen to fly forth and join with them’.5

In fact, there was discontent throughout Virginia, from servants and slaves, to ex-servants and middle-ranking planters. Land was the constant grievance. Most ex-servants had none. Either they weren’t allocated any on attaining liberty or, if they were, they couldn’t afford the very expensive business of having it surveyed.

The minority who managed to acquire a plot didn’t feel that much better off. These were bad times for the tobacco business and many small men were going to the wall.

The focus for the discontent was Governor Berkeley, who was so obviously the grandees’ man. On everything – land patents, taxes, appointments, even the siting of protective forts – Berkeley appeared to favour the grandees. The tax system was especially resented. Berkeley and his council insisted on a poll tax, which meant that an ex-servant with fifty acres was taxed as heavily as the grandee who once owned him and had 10,000 acres.

Virginia ignited in 1675 when a war broke out with one of the few native American tribes still with a toehold in the Chesapeake.

Like so many conflicts between settler and Native American, this originated in a tiny incident – the theft of a few hogs from a plantation – and escalated into widespread butchery. Hundreds died on both sides.6

Nathaniel Bacon joined the Indian war after a servant on his plantation was killed. Within weeks, he emerged as leader of the most violent settlers who favoured total extermination of the indigenous population. This set them at loggerheads with the Governor, who counselled conciliation, distinguishing between ‘bad’ tribes who should be destroyed and ‘good’ tribes who behaved. Sir William’s motives were probably mixed. On the one hand, he was trying to serve imperial ends by sustaining Native American allies in case of further wars against the French. On the other hand, he and 207

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his grandee friends had a lucrative fur trade with those tribes he dubbed as ‘good’.

Bacon and the wild men wouldn’t be reined in. They continued to defy the Governor by harrying the tribes. In one surprise attack, 120

Native Americans were slaughtered in what became known as the Battle of Bloody Run. Bacon boasted how his war party ‘fell upon the men, women and children . . . disarmed and destroyed them all’.7 Only three of Bacon’s men were killed. He became a hero.

Over several months, Bacon and Berkeley duelled: the Governor ordered the younger man’s arrest and then pardoned him; Bacon had the Governor in his hands but released him.8 As the contest ebbed and flowed, it became an argument over more than the tribes.

Bacon, the aristocrat, raised a class banner against those who ruled the colony. He painted them as parvenus and corrupt bloodsuckers who took a soft line with the Native Americans because of the money being made from trade.

Bacon was forceful when in full flow:

Let us trace these men in authority and favour to whose hands the dispensation of the Country’s wealth has been committed; let us observe the sudden Rise of their Estates compared with the Quality in which they first entered this Country . . . let us consider their sudden advancement and let us also consider whither any Public work for our safety and defence or for the Advancement and propagation of Trade, liberal Arts or sciences is here . . . adequate to our vast charge . . . and see what sponges have sucked up the Public Treasure and . . . juggling Parasites whose tottering Fortunes have been repaired and supported at the Public charge.9