Topic: Gullah History
The Earliest settlers in South Carolina may not have brought the plantation system with them, if for no other reason than they did not yet have a crop requiring slave labor. What they did bring, though, were views of land usage and labor practices they learned as young men in England.
Thus, if one were to begin at the beginning, as proposed in the post for 14 October 2021, one would start with the Duke of Normandy landing on the British island in 1066. William confiscated lands of those who opposed him, and redistributed them to 180 of his supporters. However, ownership remained in his hands, and it was granted in return for military support. [1] Knight’s heirs had to prove their military skills before grants were renewed. Land without title has little value, and, after William passed, nobles found ways to define ownership as something that could be inherited and disposed of by individuals. [2]
The next milestone in the history of land ownership was the Bubonic Plague, which killed 40% to 60% of the English population, after it entered the island in 1348. [3] Arable land reverted to waste because not enough men were available to cultivate it, and no markets existed for agricultural products. With scarce labor, wages and standards of living improved for survivors.
Harriett Bradley argues there was another reason land was abandoned: after several centuries of agriculture, it no longer was fertile. When the land produced less for the same effort, poverty ensued. [4] Landowners replaced the hierarchy of services with leases, and paid laborers only when they worked during plowing and harvesting times. Landowners became “concerned with the problem of getting as much rent as possible.” [5]
Land became a burden. Ambitious men looked to trade for wealth. After Mary of Scotland became queen in 1553, joint-stock companies were given monopolies for foreign trade: the Muscovy Company was first in 1550. [6]
Trade patterns changed in the 1570s. The Spanish introduced a new method for extracting silver from ore, and, within a few years, exports from South America increased ten-fold. [7] Instead of using the new wealth to develop his country, [8] Philip II spent it trying to suppress Protestantism in what is now Belgium. The center of European trade moved from Antwerp, Belguim, to Genoa, Italy, in 1572. [9] Elizabeth chartered the Turkey Company in 1581 and East India Company in 1600 to pursue trade in the new commercial centers. [10]
Silver exports from South America reached their peak between 1580 and 1620. [11] Gold was hoarded, and, with inflation, prices for wheat and fire wood rose steeply in England in the 1580s. [12] David Fischer reports England entered a period of “deep depression,” and wealth became concentrated in the hands of the few. [13]
Many believed demographic recovery from the Black Death was the cause. They reasoned that as the population grew, it expanded beyond the available food and firewood supply. [14] As always, more factors were involved. The climate veered abruptly toward the cold when crops failed between 1594 and 1597. [15] This was followed by a return of epidemics and a major economic collapse between 1610 and 1622 [16] with an accompanying drop in the price of wool and textiles. [17] The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, probably did not help, although fighting was confined to the European continent.
The problems were not limited to the island. On the continent, Fernand Braudel believes the influx of silver from the Spanish Empire was a factor, [18] especially when it led to devaluations of currencies. He notes volatile prices affected merchants and entrepreneurs more than landowners, and so those with means began acquiring land. [19]
Presumably this turn to land also occurred in England, where there was little new land to be had. Henry VIII already had seized the estates of the monasteries and sold them to raise money in the 1540s. [20] James I tried to dominate Ireland with new colonies in Ulster. However, London merchants did not believe the dangers of settling a hostile countryside were worth the investment in land. They only contributed under duress. [21]
Something more promising appeared with the Great Drainage Act of 1600, which promised companies that drained swamps would receive a share of the recovered land in compensation. James supported proposals to drain fens in the eastern part of the island where a large number of monasteries had been established, and then deposed. Local lease holders objected violently, and little came of the first attempts [22] beyond the idea that companies could be rewarded if they claimed new lands that were “free or virtually free of any conflicting title or encumbrance.” [23]
Overseas colonies opened another source of wealth. James chartered the Virginia Company in 1606 to protect English land claims on the continent between the French in Canada and the Spanish in Florida. It was rechartered in 1609, with one company open to merchants from London and a second to men in Bristol. [24] Unlike Ulster, this was popular: about 650 individuals and 50 London companies invested. [25]
Satisfaction did not last long: until John Rolfe produced a decent variety of tobacco in 1617, [26] the colony had no commercial crop, and depended on the company for supplies. Some investors turned that need into an opportunity by organizing a separate company to supply the colony. [27]
The original Virginia company owned the land and the settlers were contract employees, much like the rural wage earners mentioned above. When the first contracts came due in 1613, many planned to leave. To retain them, the governor offered those who remained three-acre tenant farms. [28]
The first period for investors ended in 1616, but the company had no money to distribute. Instead, it gave each of them fifty acres for private development. It expanded the new idea that land could be substituted for cash in 1617 when it promised fifty acres per person to anyone who paid the way for a settler, even if the person was an indentured servant or slave. [29] The original investors began pooling their grants to create bigger plantations and hired their own contract laborers. [30]
The investors still were not satisfied, and Robert Rich was especially vocal. His complaints led James to revoke the charter on 24 May 1624 and convert it into a royal colony, [31] thus diverting any profits to himself. A few days later, on May 29, Parliament abolished such monopolies. [32]
Courteen began his settlement of Barbados after Parliament acted, with some idea of land ownership dervied from the Drainage Act. However, James’ son, Charles I, was not one to admit the legitimacy of Parliamentary actions. He reintroduced grants as “patents,” exploiting as exception to the Statute of Monopolies. In 1627, he gave James Hay the rights to develop the Caribbean islands. [33]
This set in train thirty-three years of legal conflicts that ultimately involved the heirs of Courteen and Hay, and the creditors of both. The details, which have been chronicled by Larry Gragg, [34] are outside the scope of this essay. What is important is the attitude toward land and deeds. Hay’s creditors sent their own agent to Barbados who took over Courteen’s settlement. Land ownership still belonged to the strongest. However, to gain trust from Courteen’s colonists, who had gone as contract employees, he granted them titles to the land they had worked. Each time, threats arose to whoever was in power on the island, land was used to reward supporters.
Chaos continued until the Restoration of 1660, when Charles’ son, Charles II, cancelled all the patents, and recognized a royalist supporter as the true leasee of the land which he, the king, ultimately owned. [35] He only had been on the throne a short time when he acted, and needed to avoid reigniting the civil war that had raged in England for eighteen years. To prevent rebellion, he confirmed the land titles of settlers. [36]
And so, just before settlers in Barbados begin promoting a scheme for Carolina, they had assurances that land ownership no longer was something that could be revoked by the whim of a monarch or revoked to punish unfaithful followers. Not all the ideas introduced by William I were extinguished, but an important one had been replaced by the concept of private land.
End Notes
1. Charles J. Reid Jr. “The Seventeenth-Century Revolution in the English Land Law.” Cleveland State Law Review 43:221–302:1955. 234. The exact number, 180, is from “Enclosure.” Wikipedia website.
2. Reid. 235–236.
3. For more on the effects of the Bubonic plague and the introduction of the woolen industry, see the post for 19 May 2019.
4. Harriett Bradley. The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1918; reprinted by Batoche Books of Kitchner, Ontario, in 2001. 30.
5. Bradley. 38–39.
6. Michael John Hebbert. “London.” Encyclopædia Britannica website, uploaded 20 July 1998; last updated 4 August 2021.
7. Fernand Braudel. Le Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à Epoque de Phillippe II. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966 revised edition. Translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. 1:476.
8. Braudel. 1:478–479.
9. Braudel. 1:490.
10. Hebbert.
11. Braudel. 1:476.
12. David Hackett Fischer. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 74.
13. Fischer. 91.
14. Fischer. 72–73.
15. Fischer. 93. The effects of the mini-ice age on Jamestown are mentioned in the post for 31 October 221.
16. Fischer. 95.
17. Fischer. 96.
18. Braudel. 1:490.
19. Braudel. 1:527.
20. Reid. 238.
21. James Stevens Curl. “The City of London and the Plantation of Ulster.” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website, 2001.
22. “The Middle Level of the Fens and Its Reclamation.” 249–290 in The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, volume 3 edited by William Page. London: Saint Catherine Press, 1936.
23. Anthony N. B. Garvan. Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. 59.
24. “Virginia Company.” Wikipedia website.
25. Jeff Wallenfeld. Answer to query “What are the names of the men who funded the Virginia Company of London?” posted to Beyond Britannica website by anneypeters on 23 November 2020. He responded on 24 November 2020.
26. Emily Salmon and John Salmon. “Tobacco in Colonial Virginia.” Encyclopedia Virginia website, 5 February 2021.
27. Bernard Bailyn. Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. 78. The company was the Somers Isles Company; the islands now are known as Bermuda. Rolfe was among those who first explored Bermuda. [37]
28. Bailyn. 78.
29. Bailyn. 79. This use of land to attract settlers became known as the head-right system.
30. Bailyn. 80.
31. C. H. F. “Rich, Robert (1587-1658).” 48:1885-1900 in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1896. Rich is the Earl of Warwick. He was one of the investors in the Somers Isles Company, and eventually joined the fray in Barbados on behalf of Courteen’s heir.
32. “Statute of Monopolies.” Wikipedia website.
33. Hilary Beckles. A History of Barbados. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 8. Hay was the Earl of Carlisle, and had been associated with James I. [38]
34. Larry Gragg. Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Chapter 3, “Establishing a Colony, 1625–1660.”
35. Robert M. Bliss. Revolution and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 142.
36. Richard S. Dunn. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. 80.
37. “Somers Isles Company.” Wikipedia website.
38. “James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle.” Wikipedia website.
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