The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
Sir Thomas Dale, missing church three times meant execution. As did blasphemy: in what was presumably seen as a fitting punishment, one man’s tongue was run through by a red-hot poker, after which he was chained to a tree until he died.55 The colony itself was said to be God’s will, bringing Christianity to Native people and glory and wealth to England, God’s favored nation.
That none of this was too convincing is clear. By 1612, forty to fifty men had deserted, about 10 percent of those still alive, off to marry and live with Powhatan people. Six others had attempted to reach the Spanish in Florida.56 To keep a workforce it became necessary to make joining the Indians or trading with them another crime punishable by death, as was fornication. Considering the lack of English women in the colony, this must have referred to sex with Powhatan women, which was often manipulated to Powhatan advantage. English men could be lured into death traps or perhaps coaxed into an alliance through connection with women who were part of Wahunsonacock’s entourage.57 Many other infractions were likewise subject to the death penalty, often administered to elicit maximum fear among the spectators. Lesser infractions involved whipping or such inventive punishments as lying all night with your back arched and your heels tied together and drawn backwards toward your head.58 That so many ran off to the Indians, and that it was deemed necessary to so intensely punish those English who, in various ways, consorted with Indians, is testament to the opinion of many at Jamestown: striving for a successful colony was not in their best interests.
Indeed, there was good reason, beyond the harsh punishments, to hold this opinion. Jamestown itself was an unhealthy, swampy site, with dirty water; death from malnutrition, combined with malaria and the intestinal “bloody flux,” was rampant and gruesome.59 In addition, leaders very quickly decided that conflict with the Powhatan was preferable to cooperation, raiding better than trading, especially when it turned out that the Chesapeake didn’t have gold or other items of great value to the English. Trade, therefore, wasn’t going to provide the wealth the Virginia Company investors required. But corn grown by Powhatan women was desperately needed, and it quickly became easiest to get it by raiding. So life in the colony was threatened not just by disease, but also by angry Powhatan, as well as by punishment from English leaders. And once tobacco became established as an immensely valuable, but also immensely labor-intensive, crop, laborers began to die of overwork and malnutrition, or even of being whipped to death. If you were one of the convicts shipped after 1619, your indenture, as directed by the Privy Council, was to constrain you to “such heavy and painful works as such servitude shall be a greater terror than death itself.”60 And life for non-convict indentured servants was scarcely better; indenture was a form of temporary slavery. You became a piece of property that could be sold or passed on to heirs.61 But more of this in the next chapter.
For someone like X, indenture would have been a dismal prospect, with very little to weigh on the other side of the balance. Supposing the colony survived, what was in it for him? At the end of the contracted seven years of labor, you were to receive a share in the Virginia Company—that is, assuming you lived that long, which at first was highly unlikely. As was the prospect of actually receiving anything of value. When the first arrivals came to the end of their contracts, a share in the Virginia Company was worthless. Instead, small parcels of land were made available—company land, on which you could be a tenant. People Governor Dale favored were designated as “farmers,” and had to give two and a half barrels of corn per acre and 30 days’ service to the company each year, while “laborers” instead owed eleven months service per year.62 This would have borne little resemblance to freedom for either group. Those who did not run away and finished their indenture but rejected the Company’s continued control of them could (somehow) return to England—or join the Powhatan.
By 1616, keeping a labor force had become a real problem. It required some way of providing better options—a lure to keep people tied in, and again land proved to be the only viable (in the eyes of the elite) resource. Ending the indenture system, or even making it less oppressive, was apparently not on the table. Instead, the Company set aside land to be available for private ownership, with the payment of “quitrent,” a kind of real estate tax. The headright system gave rights to land for however many head (of people) you brought to the colony. This meant that any of the free people who were already there could increase their holdings by 50 acres for each person whose way they paid—which in practice frequently meant buying an indentured servant from the ship’s captain who had provided the servant’s passage, and thus acquiring the headright. In addition, it was now possible to own a private plantation, or to form syndicates to own a plantation. Until 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the Company also reserved land for its own use, and brought over sharecropping tenants to work it.63
ONE MORE STEP WAS CRITICAl in controlling recalcitrant colonists, beyond providing the hope of land and the wealth that went with large-scale tobacco growing. I mentioned earlier that the gender relations that helped control men and kept them tied into the class hierarchy had fallen apart at Jamestown. This had to be mended. Originally Jamestown was to be a trading post, along the lines of those established by Europeans in Africa and Asia. It was not to be a colony in the sense of families making a life there. It was simply to be the point at which wealth would be extracted from the local inhabitants. The problem was that there was no wealth to extract, or at least nothing that the English recognized as wealth (the Powhatan, with their flourishing exchange of wealth items, must have found this an odd attitude!). The only way for the colony to provide its investors with wealth was by becoming an agricultural outpost. But that entailed settled people doing the labor themselves, rather than simply taking wealth from Indians.
Settling people, convincing them that the long-term investment of hard labor and of capital in making land productive for tobacco was worth it, required giving them private ownership of land, or at least the prospect of it. For such long-term commitment, simply turning loose a bunch of able-bodied young men wasn’t going to work. Women were needed, who would produce children, and even more important, would “civilize” the men and persuade them that cooperation in the present, in the hope of a better future, was worth it.64 Women, in other words, would restore the structures of patriarchy. And patriarchy is at least as much about controlling subordinate men as about controlling women. A man who is poor, who is dominated by other men, but who can go home to be king of his castle, where he rules and is served, is more likely to acquiesce to the orderly extraction of wealth and to the class structure that places him toward the bottom. The raw use of force in punishing can then ease off. In Virginia, in a sense, families would act as hostages, as a guarantee of men’s good behavior. Obedience because you don’t want to jeopardize your family’s chances of rising in the social structure feels voluntary, quite different from obedience because of fear of a horrifying punishment. And that is especially true if you have the right to punish your family and servants. The feeling that you are in control at home can enhance your feelings of self-worth, which may well be battered outside the home.
So the Virginia Company decided to reconstruct the patriarchal social hierarchy that prevailed in England.65 And Powhatan women definitely wouldn’t do as wives in a patriarchal system. Powhatan women expected, and got, a significant degree of equality with men. Their voices, particularly as elders in their matrilineal clans, were heard and influenced political decisions. Inheritance of position went through the female line, giving women leverage in relation to brothers and uncles and fathers and husbands. Some women were werowances. “[I]n the Powhatan world,” says historian Helen Rountree, “women… were considered intelligent, autonomous human beings just as the men were.”66 Definitely not good submissive wife material. Whether the Virginia Company officials considered making it legal to marry Powhatan women I don’t know, but it certainly seems unlikely. Instead, in 1620 the Company began shipping boatloads of poor and desperate women to Jamestown to be sold, as indentured servants were, but as wives instead of servants—another form of unfree labor. The going rate was 120 pounds of tobacco, paid by the husband to the ship’s captain, six times the cost of a male servant. This was so profitable that one company official set up a joint-stock company simply to sell women in the colony.67
Perhaps eventually X Radford might have seen land ownership as a real possibility. Perhaps he dreamed of buying a wife. At this point, perhaps he would