Chapters 4-6

-This is why it is dangerous to go to grad. school when you’ve been teaching history for a while.  His assessment of the reasons for why there was such horrible and self-destructive violence and the failure to grow enough food to support themselves in Jamestown shattered my lesson plans—he undermined all of the reasons I’ve listed in the past.

-lack or organization is not the reason—the problems continued with strong government

-collectivism was not the problem—they were still buying corn after private plots we instituted

-Question: Does he contradict himself when he says that private plots were installed but they still didn’t have enough food?  Later he says that the plots were small.

-The trajectory of the race relations continues: John Smith goes against the biracial harmony of the past and wants to treat Indians the way that the Spaniards did.

-Another blow to my lesson plans—the king taking over the colony was not a power grab; Morgan shows that it was the only humane thing to do to prevent the disastrous failure from continuing.

-Something that keeps surfacing that I like about Morgan (we see this with his dealings with Sandys): He doesn’t depict his character as black and white but rather depicts real humans’ good intentions wilting as they are exposed to reality.

-So, the real cause of the suffering was colony officials abusing their positions.  It was private enterprise run amok.

            -Despite scarcity, they kept demanding more servants.

            -“Some at least were succeeding and the way they succeeded will bear looking into.”

-“the charnel house [that was]…first American boom country”—they didn’t grow enough food but did grow tobacco.

-Here’s a good use of evidence that the colonists just wanted a quick buck—the fragility of their temporary dwellings.

-“[Sandys] had hoped to build a community without want and without oppression. Ironically, his concentration on getting men across the water played into the hands of local profiteers who engrossed not only goods but men. Virginia differed from later American boom areas in that success depended not on acquiring the right piece of land, but on acquiring men.”

-But, could you argue that this wasn’t really “private” enterprise causing such devastation?

-It was laws (isn’t “private” enterprise or the free market the absence of laws?) that geared the colony for exploitation: “ The company's generosity to its officers - combined with the high death rate to lay open every surviving tenant sent by the company to exploitation by any officer who claimed him as part of his quota of tenants.”

-Public officials took what did not belong to them and embezzled.

-The next step in the trajectory from the English birthright of liberty toward slavery and why it was happening:

“It seems evident that while the Virginia Company was failing in London, a number of its officers in the colony were growing rich. In order to do so, they not only rendered less than faithful service to their employers; they also reduced other Virginians to a condition which, while short of slavery, was also some distance from the free­dom that Englishmen liked to consider as their birthright.”

-He follows with examples of ruling with an iron fist and lacking the laws and customs that had protected the working class in England.

-Good summary of the trajectory to this point:

-“In boom-time Virginia, then, we can see not only the fleeting ugliness of private enterprise operating temporarily without check, not only greed magnified by opportunity, producing fortunes for a few and misery for many. We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things. In order to make the most out of the high price of tobacco it was necessary to get hard work out of Englishmen who were not used to giving it. The boom produced, and in some measure depended upon, a tight­ening of labor discipline beyond what had been known in England and probably beyond what had been formerly known in Virginia.”

-Again, though, I wonder if his description of this as private enterprise is accurate: It sounds to me like the kleptocrats of post Soviet Union Russia or the grasping elite of Latin America who abuse their powers to rob other of their property.

-Important transition: "Like a damnd slave," …the treatment of labor in boom-time Virginia and in the rising hatred of Indians, we can begin to discern some of the forces that would later link slavery to freedom.