White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (29 page)

In June 1676, during a stalemate in the struggle between the rival factions, the Governor called a new election for the House of Burgesses. Bacon and other critics of the Governor romped home in the seats they contested. Most were freemen: ‘men that had but lately crept out of the condition of servant’, as one upper-crust observer from England later sneered.

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Reforms were pushed through the new assembly, reducing the power of patronage. The contest became a rebellion. Bacon insisted on raising a force under his own control to wage war on the Native Americans, at which the Governor once more ordered his arrest.

Bacon’s class rhetoric increased. He published a Declaration of the People, indicting Berkeley for unjust taxes, favouritism and not protecting the small planters in the border territories. Twenty of Berkeley’s leading supporters, most of them grandees, were named as ‘wicked and pernicious counsellors aides and assistors’ who had violated His Majesty’s interest in Virginia while ‘acting against the commonality’.

At this point, Bacon offered freedom to every slave and servant who deserted their masters and joined him.10 As far as is known, he did not, however, free his own servants and slaves, nor those of his adherents.

Hundreds of runaways, both black and white, rallied to his support, along with landless freemen, poor farmers and owners of smaller estates. The women amongst them were described as

‘great encouragers’. Sir William Berkeley dismissed them as ‘rude, dissolute and tumultuous felons’.11 The grandee Nicholas Spenser labelled them ‘trash of which sort this country chiefly consists, we serving but [as] a sink to drain England of her filth and scum’.12 In fact, Bacon’s supporters included men and women from every level below the grandees. Lists of those who actively backed the rebellion included scores of fairly substantial planters, plus magistrates and burgesses.

By August, Bacon had sufficient men to hold Jamestown and the western shore. More than that, he believed that he could defeat an army being sent from England.13 Sir William sailed to the eastern shore, where he bided his time till that help from England arrived.

Under the initials T.M., a burgess and supporter of Bacon wrote an account of the rebellion including the spectacular incident that now took place in Jamestown. It featured two more of Bacon’s supporters among the burgesses: Richard Lawrence and William Drummond. Lawrence was supposed to have been motivated to join the rebels by love. It was said that he was ‘in the dark embraces of a blackamoor, his slave, and thought Venus was . . .

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to be worshipped with the image of a negro’. T.M. described how Lawrence and Drummond set an example to the crowds in the captured capital:

Here resting a few days they concerted the burning of the town, wherein Mr Lawrence and Mr Drummond owning the two best houses save one set fire each to his own house which example the soldiers following laid the whole town with church and statehouse in ashes, saying, ‘the rogues should harbour no more’.14

The rebellion came to an abrupt end with Bacon’s sudden death.

In October 1676, he fell ill and before the month ended he was dead of the ‘bloody flux’. Though the rebellion disintegrated, numbers of supporters, black and white, remained at large. In November 1676, Thomas Grantham, a naval captain delegated to help the Governor, caught up with one of the last bands of rebels.

He inveigled most of them into surrendering by promising them their freedom:

I . . . met about 400 English and Negroes in arms . . . some were for shooting me and others were for cutting me in pieces. I . . . did engage to the Negroes and servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their slavery: And with fair promises and rounds of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them several notes under my hand that what I did was by the order of his Majesty and the Governor . . . Most of them I persuaded to go to their homes, which accordingly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their arms.

Grantham outfoxed this remaining group by persuading them he would take them to a rebel-held fort. Instead, he took them to within range of a man-of-war. ‘They yielded with a great deal of discontent,’ reported Grantham, ‘saying had they known my purpose they would have destroyed me.’15 Grantham was later knighted.

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It is doubtful that any of those who surrendered were given their freedom – an iron collar and a whipping was their likely fate.

Governor Berkeley was in no mood to give anything to the rebels.

When William Drummond was captured and brought before him, Berkeley said, ‘I am more glad to see you, Mr Drummond, than any man in this colony! You shall be hanged in half an hour!’

‘What your Honour pleases,’ replied Drummond.16 Twenty-three others followed Drummond to the gallows, all without trial.

Richard Lawrence was among them. The fate of Lawrence’s lover is unrecorded.

The Governor’s vengeance took Charles II aback. ‘The old fool has taken more lives in his naked country than I have taken for my father’s murder,’ the King remarked.17 Berkeley had in fact hoped to copy the King, who had ordered Oliver Cromwell’s corpse to be disinterred from its impressive tomb in Westminster Abbey, dragged to Tyburn, hanged, beheaded and quartered. Berkeley planned the same for Bacon’s corpse but when the coffin was opened it was full of stones. The Governor was left with only a ditty to express his loathing for his dead adversary: ‘Bacon is dead I am sorry at my heart / That lice and flux should take the hangman’s part.’

Substantial numbers did find freedom after the rebellion.

Between 880 and 890 bond labourers of every race fled Virginia.

Most were soon recaptured and returned in chains. Others succeeded in getting away and created the maroon communities of the Cumberland Plateau.

The Royal Commission set up to investigate the rebellion ladled out bromides about the ‘credulous silly people’ whom Bacon had misled. Two-thirds of the colony were ‘vulgar and most ignorant people who had been seduced’, said the commission. One of the Tidewater elite, Richard Lee, was more honest and acknowledged that the rebellion was about inequality. ‘Hopes of levelling,’ he said, lay behind the ‘zealous inclination of the multitude’ to support Nathaniel Bacon.18

Lee and his fellow grandees were left to worry about the implications of the revolt. From Maryland, where an attempted uprising was suppressed, the Governor warned that unless a method of rule was adopted that would ‘agree with the common 211

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people . . . the Commons of Virginia would mire themselves as deep in rebellion as ever’.19

A nightmare vision was conjured up of armed blacks and whites rising in unity against the planters. The support Bacon inspired brought home to the elite their basic vulnerability. They had no sizeable yeoman class as a barrier to servile revolt. European colonies in parts of the Caribbean had created a yeoman class by encouraging planters to parent children with slave or servant women. The Chesapeake colonies had not done this; in fact, they had positively discouraged inter-racial coupling. The task facing Virginia’s rulers now was to fashion a class that gave them ‘as many Virginians with a stake in suppressing servile insurrection as there were in fomenting it’.20

They played the race card. The status of the European servile class was upgraded and a sense of racial superiority instilled. Meanwhile, the process of degrading non-whites was accelerated. Law after law deprived Africans and Native Americans of rights, while bolstering the legal position of European servants. In the space of twenty years, non-whites lost their judicial rights, property rights, electoral rights and family rights. They even lost the right to be freed if their master wanted to free them. In parallel, whites gained rights and privileges.

Masters were forbidden from whipping their white servants ‘naked without an order from a justice’. They were told to provide real freedom dues: corn, money, a gun, clothing and fifty acres of land.

And the notion of a ‘white race’ was promoted. Hitherto, the English had never applied colour to distinguish race. Now white servants, whose daily condition was little different from that of Africans, were taught that they belonged to a superior people.

On the big plantations, white and black began to be given different clothing. Living quarters were segregated. Sometimes the races ate separately. But whites remained chattels and when they ran away they were pursued as ferociously as ever. White slavery went on. Not only that, as the eighteenth century advanced, a vast new pool of potential white slaves materialised as the peoples of central Europe began to share the American dream. But they wouldn’t prove easy to handle.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

QUEEN ANNE’S GOLDEN BOOK

In February 1709, when the ice was hardly broken on the Rhine, a stream of boats sailed through the chilly waters carrying thousands of peasants. They sang hymns and folk songs and were generally in high spirits. Bound together by expectation and buoyed up by hope, the passengers had left their homes in Germany to float downstream toward the Netherlands and into the unknown. The travellers became known as the ‘Poor Palatines’ but, like almost everything about the episode, this description was not the whole story. It is true that among the migrants were many villagers from the Palatinate region, but others came from the duchies of Württemberg and Baden and the innumerable other small duchies and princely states in the area that today comprises part of western Germany.

Although most were illiterate, the catalyst for their strange odyssey was a book. One work alone, a volume that few of the many thousands floating down the Rhine could possibly have read, propelled 30,000 peasants from their homelands and towards the promise of a new life in America.1

The volume was commonly known as ‘Queen Anne’s Golden Book’, but it had nothing to do with Queen Anne, the British queen, and it certainly wasn’t made of gold.2 However, those who clapped eyes on it would certainly have noticed the picture of Queen Anne on the cover and the elaborate gold lettering on the 213

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title page. The book was an anonymous propaganda piece written to extol the virtues of emigration to America. It first appeared in the Rhineland in 1706. Even the best advertising campaign is unlikely to have the spectacular effect of making multitudes sell up, risk all and change their lives. There has to be something more. In the case of the ‘Golden Book’, that extra ingredient was the message that not only could a new life be had but, better still, someone else would pay. As the emigrants would soon find out, the promise was pie in the sky. The German migrants would become ensnared in the British indentured-servant system, facing seven years’ labour in a colonial industrial enterprise. Uniquely, the Germans would defy the British authorities through collective passive resistance.

The ‘Golden Book’ had such an effect because of a religious connection between Germany and America. One of the earliest links was forged by the English Quaker, William Penn, who travelled through the Palatinate in the 1670s preaching a form of religious observance that chimed with local German feelings. A few years later, Penn became the proprietor of a new American colony that he modestly named Pennsylvania. It was designed as a land of religious tolerance but it was also a land from which Penn stood to make a fortune – if he could people it. In 1681, Penn wrote a pamphlet translated into German, explaining the virtues of his territory. He followed this up a year later with a
Brief Account of the
Province of Pennsylvania
, published in both English and German.

Another similar pamphlet followed two years after that. Penn was nothing if not persistent.

Persuasive though advertisements by Penn and his allies undoubtedly were, none could account for the phenomenon of 1709, when masses set sail. For one thing, the Palatines and their neighbours were almost unanimous in their desire to go not to Pennsylvania but Carolina. They had ‘Queen Anne’s Golden Book’

to thank for that. The work’s real title, engraved in gold, was
A
Complete and Detailed Report of the Renowned District of Carolina
Located in English America.
Most of those influenced by it might never even have seen it. Word of mouth would have been enough to spread Carolina’s allure through illiterate villages.

This book had little power when first published. Its pages were 214

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stuffed with descriptions of Carolina, its landscape, vegetation, soil type, animal life and so on: all the things poor farmers would like to know. But even this was not enough to persuade people to leave their homeland en masse
.
Then, in 1709, the work was reissued, with a powerful new ingredient. This was a copy of a letter from London that described how Queen Anne had helped a small band of fifty Palatines emigrate to America in 1708. The beneficent queen had apparently paid for their upkeep and lodgings in London and for their passage to America, and even provided assistance until they were set up in the New World: ‘The Queen would give them bread until they could grow it themselves.’3 To the impoverished villagers, it seemed miraculous. They could sell up and sail to a new life, guaranteed by the Queen of England, no less. If only it had been that simple.

The book was at best a well-meaning propaganda puff for a colonial enterprise. It is now accepted that the author was a Lutheran pastor called Joshua Kocherthal, an obscure cleric from south of Heidelberg. In 1708, Kocherthal accompanied a small group of poor Palatines to London to seek help in emigrating to America.

They came to the attention of Queen Anne, who charitably agreed to help, and the group was given free passage to America.

At around this time, Kocherthal met the owners of Carolina, or their representatives, and emerged as a promoter of their colonial enterprise. Carolina was under the control of an assemblage of Lords Proprietors, originally a group of eight men awarded a royal charter for the territory by Charles II in return for helping him to regain the throne. The meeting of the man of the cloth and the men of business gave rise to ‘Queen Anne’s Golden Book’. It would be far more successful than any of them could have imagined.