Export-oriented settlers in the southern colonies relied on a North American version of the New World plantation system. It was an economic and social system of LABOR relations in which a planter with capital invested in bound laborers, land, and buildings that constituted the means of production. In the 15th century the Portuguese forged a general model of the system using African slaves on the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa, subsequently introducing it into Brazil. In the New World it appeared in the Caribbean in the 17th century, then spread in the Americas during the next two centuries. In most colonies of English North America, British and German indentured servants made up most of the unfree laborers in the 17th century. Planters purchased thousands of transported British criminals in the 18th century, but African slaves were imported in much greater numbers in the 18th century. By the 1730s the trend was clear: The richest planters owned labor forces composed almost entirely of black slaves, and society was organized primarily along racial lines in the Tidewater coastal region of the southern colonies. Masters exercised great personal power over slaves and servants in regard to their general treatment and corporal punishment, and a slave code and other legal apparatuses backed up their authority. By 1763 organized white militias maintained the system on a day-to-day basis.
If servants or slaves threatened the planters’ power, as occurred in Bacon’s Rebellion, soldiers could be summoned from Britain.
The successful planter put together several economic elements, but only the shrewdest and most resolute men and women could arrange these elements to best advantage. The land was the important first decision: The best lands lay in the Tidewater region extending from the Chesapeake Bay to Georgia and in the lower Mississippi Valley’s New Orleans region. These bottomlands, sometimes partially cleared by Native Americans, typically were rich, well watered and well drained, and located near major rivers used to transport produce. It did not take much of the best land (250 to 500 acres) to support a highly profitable enterprise, but most of the finest land was quickly bought up by the richest of the earliest colonial families, some of them owning more than 100,000 acres. They monopolized large reserves for the support of future generations, because intensive plantation agriculture exhausted the soil.
The richest planters erected imposing estates. A mansion house usually was set near the crest of a natural levee, facing the river, often with formal gardens. Barns, separate kitchens, wells, privies, and other necessities were arranged not far from the “big house” in accord with drainage requirements. An overseer’s house might also exist. Beyond these premises were located the slave quarters, where slave cabins, crude and lacking in comforts, were arranged in a block pattern. However, most plantations were far more humble.
The fields required highly specific cultivation according to a strictly regulated seasonal agenda to produce rice, TOBACCO, and indigo. Hydraulic techniques of flood control and knowledge of rice in Africa enabled slaves to establish that very profitable crop along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. The African tradition of hoe agriculture, with which English ploughjoggers were unfamiliar, was necessary to maximize the production of the crop. The system was a capital-intensive response to rising consumer demand for excellent Virginia quality smoking and snuff tobacco—especially in Europe and particularly in France—to strong demand in southern Europe for rice, and to the demand in all ports for high-quality indigo.
As a social unit the plantation system contained contradictions in all of its relations. Planters used violence to force an arbitrarily defined “race” of people to work and to submit as the planter kept most of the profits of their labor. The plantation was divided socially in another way: Patriarch, wife, and their children lived in the big house as a family, sharply withdrawn from the traditional village life that remained important for the English gentry. Their isolation intensified as the increasing shortage of land drove nonslaveholding whites out of the Tidewater. By contrast, the slave quarters formed a communal space with kin and unmarried people living in close quarters, often with two or more generations. The plantation system was riddled with weaknesses that redounded to the benefit of slaves. Most important was the ability of most slaves to resist dehumanization and play satisfying roles in the slave community. Many also engaged in subversive social relations with other laborers and free white farmers. As a result planters had to exercise unrelenting vigilance to maintain control of the slave population. In addition, most slaves and servants had family plots of waste lands assigned by the master, and much of the best produce of these plots (hogs, fowls, greens) was purchased by planters for their own consumption. While indentured servants had hope of getting free and even prospering in some cases, slaves generally were without hope of purchasing or otherwise gaining their freedom.
The work of bound laborers was long and grueling. Tobacco and rice required germination, transplanting, and frequent worming and weeding, followed by preparing and curing the product for export. Other seasonal activities were interspersed in the schedule of the main crop: digging drainage ditches and laying by corn, fodder, firewood, and lumber.
See also Maryland; slavery.
Further reading: Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1986);-, From British Peasants to Colonial
American Farmers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Philip D. Morgan, Slavery Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
—Thomas N. Ingersoll
World History
