Conceived in Liberty (109 page)

*
Herbert L. Osgood,
The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
(Worcester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 2: 216.

*
The decision awarded to Fairfax the present Virginia counties of Culpeper, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Madison, Prince William, Stafford, Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, Warren, Page, Shenandoah, Clarke, Frederick, King George, Westmoreland, Richmond, Northumberland, and Lancaster; and the West Virginia counties of Jefferson, Berkeley, Morgan, Hampshire, and Hardy.

The political structure of eighteenth-century Virginia featured the
form
of democracy (except of course for slaves and servants), prettifying the hard reality of oligarchic rule by the large planters. Accordingly, the hierarchy of officialdom was continuously permeated by the scions of a handful of leading planter families. As Professor Sydnor states:

At the peak of the official hierarchy were the members of the Council, who were chosen from the top families of the planter aristocracy... and they were in a favorable position, which they did not hesitate to use, to secure large grants of land. Good family helped to put a man in the Council; in turn membership in the Council enabled a man to improve the fortunes of his family. The advantages of the office were enjoyed by a rather small number of families interrelated by blood and marriage. One kind of relationship is indicated by the fact that only fifty-seven family names appear on a list of the ninety-one men appointed to the Council from 1680 to the Revolution. Nine family names account for almost a third of the Councillors during this century; and fourteen other names for almost another third. Five Councillors bore the name of Page; three each the names of Burwell, Byrd, Carter, Custis, Harrison, Lee, Ludwell and Wormley.
*

A similar though necessarily broader social structure held for the distribution of the powerful appointive county offices headed by local county judges, who performed executive and legislative as well as judicial functions. It held, also, for the elective House of Burgesses, especially in the positions of power in that chamber. As Sydnor concludes:

Birth into one of the ruling families was almost essential to the making of a political career in eighteenth-century Virginia. A man inherited local prominence from his father or uncle in much the same way that he inherited land and slaves and social position. It is difficult to recall the name of any Virginian of the Revolutionary generation who rose to high office without the aid of influential relatives.
*

In contrast to the other offices that were appointive, the powerful House of Burgesses was elected democratically by the citizens. But various not-too-subtle devices were employed to ensure oligarchic control of the results. For one thing, the voting, as was usual in that era, was by open oral declaration in front of the oligarchically selected sheriff and not by secret ballot. One common device was for the leading planters of the locality to be called upon first to declare their votes; the lesser folk of the county well understood their role. In addition, the sheriff, an appointee of the oligarchic county court, had complete power to set the dates and times of the poll and to open or close it at his whim. Furthermore, he had the power to decide which voter was properly qualified. As an extra lagniappe for the large planters, everyone could vote in any county in which he held a sufficient amount of land.

In addition to these devices, which wrapped the rule of oligarchy in a cloak of democratic procedure, there applied the general truths of the rule of oligarchy within the democratic form, such truths as were analyzed by the great political theorist Gaetano Mosca. As Mosca wrote:

In all societies... two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class always is the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism....

What happens in other forms of government—namely that an organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority—happens also and to perfection but under the appearances of the contrary under a representative system. When we say that the voters “choose” their representatives, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative
has himself elected
by the voters and if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that
his friends have him elected....

The political mandate has been likened to the power of attorney that is familiar in private law. But in private relationships delegations of power and capacities always presuppose that the principal has the broadest freedom in choosing his representative. Now in practice in popular elections that freedom of choice, though complete theoretically, necessarily becomes null not to say
ludicrous. If each voter gave his vote to the candidate of his heart we may be sure that in almost all cases the only result would be a wide scattering of votes. When very many wills are involved, choice is determined by the most various criteria, almost all of them subjective, and if such wills were not coordinated and organized it would be virtually impossible for them to coincide in the spontaneous choice of one individual. If his vote were to have any efficacy at all, therefore, each voter is forced to limit his choice to a very narrow field, in other words, to a choice among the two or three persons who have some chance of succeeding; and the only ones who have any chance of succeeding are those whose candidacies are championed by groups, by committees, by
organized minorities.
*

*
Charles S. Sydnor,
American Revolutionaries in the Making
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 63.

*
Ibid.,
p. 74.

*
Gaetano Mosca,
The Ruling Class
(New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1939), pp. 50, 154.

The tobacco planters of Virginia continued, in the eighteenth century, to get into periods of economic difficulty, and the secular trend was ominous. The price that planters had to pay for slaves rose with the increased demand for slaves on South Carolina rice and indigo plantations. Thus, the common price of slaves rose from thirty pounds per head in 1741 to forty-six pounds in 1750 to fifty-eight pounds in the 1770s. Soil exhaustion also lowered the productivity of the tobacco plantations.

The tobacco planters continued to try to escape their dwindling fortunes on the market by seeking special privilege. A favorite device was a compulsory cartel, imposed by the state, to restrict tobacco production. Production quotas were then imposed on each plantation. But these restrictions did not have the desired effect of raising the price of a commodity that was grown on an international market; and curtailment in one area provided a lively inducement for other farmers to fill the gap by increasing
their
output. Moreover, the cartel’s schemes worked the greatest hardship on the
small
planter; tobacco was the major monetary medium in Virginia and Maryland and the small planter was forced to pay fixed sums—in tobacco—for governmental fees, taxes, and quitrents. Hence, forced restriction on the amount of tobacco grown was a great hardship on the small planter, whose fixed fees loomed larger in proportion to his total output. Thus, a Virginia-Maryland tobacco cartel scheme in the late 1720s fell through because the small farmers of Maryland would not comply unless Lord Baltimore reduced the quantity of tobacco levied for quitrents. When Lord Baltimore refused to agree, the scheme had to be abandoned.

The Virginia planters also tried to escape their difficulties by exploiting the
British merchant-creditors, that is, by inducing the government to interfere in the process of collecting contracted debts. In 1708, Maryland passed a law decreeing that debtors might escape a debt by declaring bankruptcy, but the Crown disallowed the law on the cogent ground that the planters might easily defraud their creditors. Virginia, in 1749, allowed planters to pay debts in depreciated Virginia paper currency; all such laws were also disallowed by the Crown as invasion of the creditors’ property. And, in 1732, Parliament specified that the lands and slaves of the planters were liable for their debts.

The tobacco merchants have had a bad historical press. The general assumption has been that the merchants purchasing tobacco “exploited” the tobacco planters, doing so both as creditors and as payers of supposedly excessively low prices. But middlemen no more “exploit” their customers or suppliers than does any other group on the free market. All prices, whether selling or purchasing, are set by supply and demand in the ultimate service of consumers. Neither is anyone forced to go into debt; on the market, the creditor supplies a valuable service for which he is paid by the debtor.

There were essentially two methods by which planters sold their tobacco in the eighteenth century. The large coastal planters sold to London merchants on consignment, shipping the tobacco from their wharves for sale abroad; serving as agents of the planters, the merchants were obviously in no position to do any exploiting. The small upland planters, on the other hand, not being in a position to finance or take risks for the longer period, sold their tobacco outright to Scottish merchants, who established stores in Virginia to buy the product and then resold it at Glasgow.

The Scottish merchants did try to form agreements to lower the prices they had to pay for tobacco, but even if they had succeeded, this would not have been “exploitation,” for they would then have been forced to be content with smaller amounts of tobacco. The marginal tobacco farmers, hit by lower prices in relation to their costs, would have shifted to other lines of work. But such buyer-cartel agreements could not succeed in the face of free competition and the force of the market. Thus in 1770 an Alexandria merchant complained that “there are too many purchasers pushing one another,” and three years later protested that he only bid up the price of tobacco to meet competition: “I am sorry to observe that a few wrongheaded men have it in their power to affect the price.” And newly established merchants, attracted by any temporary success in pushing down prices, had to bid up their buying prices in order to attract the business of suppliers. Thus, merchant-factor James Robinson reported gloomily in 1769 that the price of tobacco would be “extravagantly high” because of amounts offered by new merchants in Fredericksburg and Falmouth. Some months later he reported with equal concern that he would have to abandon his refusal to buy tobacco for more than twenty-five shillings because of the competition of new stores. And when merchants at Dumfries, Virginia, tried to lower the buying prices in 1770, other merchants
quickly increased their competing business in Fauquier County. Furthermore, if the planters felt that the merchants’ bids were too low, they could always decide to ship on consignment to London, as they did in 1773. As Professor James H. Soltow concluded in his admirable article on the subject:

From a business point of view, the tobacco buyer had not only a short-run interest in purchasing as much tobacco at as low a price as possible, but also a long-run interest in establishing and maintaining a market for his goods and services. Shrewd entrepreneurs, engaged in a competitive business, recognized that profits derived from efficient use of the capital invested in ships, stores, and goods. Robinson [a merchant-factor]... summarized the... policy of... tobacco purchasers in this way: “Such is the course of our trade that we must endeavor to buy all the tobacco we can at the different stores at whatever is the market price, the company not being willing to lose any of their interest in this branch to any person whatever.”
*

*
J. H. Soltow, “Scottish Traders in Virginia, 1750–1775,”
Economic History Review
(August 1959): 92.

As tobacco plantations expanded, the extent of Negro slavery increased as well. In 1710, there were 23,000 Negroes in Virginia among 55,000 whites; in 1750, the colony contained 101,000 Negroes and 130,000 whites. And, contrary to historical opinion, the Browns have shown that, while the larger plantations were in the Tidewater area, the proportion of slaves was no greater in many Tidewater areas than in the Piedmont. In fact, the greatest proportion of slaves to total population appeared in the land between the James and Rappahannock rivers, both in the Tidewater and going back well into the Piedmont area. Similarly, the evidence indicates that the proportion of the value of slaves in the total assets of the planters was no greater for large than for small slaveholders.
*

The condition of the slaves was what we might expect, where some people are owned by others as capital. Slaves were kept in compounds where they were condemned to miserable lives of severe labor, little food, long working hours, and savage treatment; above all, they lived absolutely and continuously under the direction of their masters. Torture was systematically used even by the “kindest” of masters. For instance, Landon Carter, one of the most eminent planters of the colony, systematically whipped female slaves who were wasting their time tending their young children or daring to feign pregnancy. Stealing the master’s property was a particularly heinous offense. When two slaves were caught killing a sheep, Carter ordered them tried and declared that “one shall be hanged to terrify the rest.”
**
Legal marriages by slaves were
forbidden, and unofficial slave families were often broken up. The prevalent practice of fornication by the masters with the female slaves was regarded as “a pleasant method to secure slaves at a cheap rate.” In law, the cards were stacked against the slaves: a slave received thirty lashes for daring to hit a white Christian, but any owner could kill a slave at will in the process of punishment; runaway slaves refusing to return could be killed, and if such a slave were killed, or executed for any other crime, the government compensated the slave owner. Many runaways committed suicide rather than return to their owner.