Chapters 11-13

-Good description of “The Volatile Society”: The decline of mortality and the increase in population did not stop the flow of immigrants…New workers were still necessary, because Virginia's increase in population did not solve the labor problem of the planters. When servants became free, they preferred to work for themselves even though that might mean going into partnership for a term with one or more other freedmen. And they had been able to set up for themselves because of the cheap public land that was another feature of Virginia society.

…As they began to live longer, however, as more became free each year, their very numbers posed a problem for the men who had brought them. If the ex-servants continued as freemen to make tobacco, though they would automatically con­tribute to the fees and duties levied on the trade, they would be competing with their former masters. By adding to the volume of the crop, they would help to depress the price. If they did not make tobacco but lapsed into an idle, perhaps dissolute life such as many had led in England, they would corrupt the labor force and contribute nothing to the revenue derived from the colony. As things were going then, the increasing number of freedmen, whether dili­gent or delinquent, would increasingly cut into their former masters' profits….

In efforts to handle this problem, the men who ran Virginia began to alter their society in ways that curtailed and threatened the independence of the small freeman and worsened the lot of the servant. During the last thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century, while tobacco was enriching the king and so many others, most of the men who worked in the fields were losers, and they did not much like it.

-The tragedy of freemen having possibilities cut off by land-engrossing elite reminds me of a story where the elite didn’t get their way later on, and the story turned out well.  According to The Mystery of Capital, the story didn’t turn into a tragedy when settlers moved west later because they were able to squat on land and our democratic institutions took their side against the speculators (According to de Soto, this is the big story for the world to learn from the U.S. today and why capitalism hasn’t worked in the developing world—because they haven’t let this happen).

-By the 1660’s, Va. was acquiring a new social structure, and the “losers” are the fast-growing group at the bottom.

-I wonder if their mobility was better or worse than that of England or Europe in general.

-He sure does like Berkeley.  Not only would his diversification scheme have worked, but his plan would’ve helped both losers (freemen and Indians) by switching the tax from poll to land and discouraging accumulation.

-It makes sense, but this seems a more positive assessment on Berkeley than I seem to have remembered in the past.

  

-I find it interesting that we have difficulty sorting out the story between Bacon and Berkeley because the documents weren’t dated—it shows the messiness of doing history.  This would be an interesting tidbit to share with my AP students when we do DBQs—I wonder if there’s one on Bacon’s Rebellion.