The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck

      CHAPTER 2

       Ancestor Tales of Dispossession and a Revolt of the Unfree

      So here we leave imaginary X’s and turn to Radfords who aren’t imaginary, but will nevertheless have to be imagined, for their presence in the historical record, itself fragmentary, in the wills, the land titles, the court cases, is fleeting indeed. You see their shadows, the occasional historical marks their feet left on the sands of time. But who they were, why those marks were left, what the substance was that made those shadows, that will all have to be imagined. Historically, anthropologically, and sociologically placed, imagining, of course, chasing a reality that did once exist, and that lives on in the underpinnings of our world today.

      This ancestral Radford is real, that is, John not Benjamin. John is my ancestor because seven generations later his descendant, Elizabeth Radford, married Thomas Davidson, great-grandson of the Alexander who crossed the ocean. It was her brother, my father’s great-uncle Ben—who, according to family mythology, watched an up-and-coming young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln play horseshoes.

      So, what was this John Radford doing at age fifty-seven, heading for Virginia? We know he did indeed do that, an old man for those days, far older than the usual immigrant, voluntary or involuntary. We know because his mark is there, in the historical record. Why he did it, we will have to imagine. First, his mark: in 1652, Thomas Todd claimed 450 acres of what was once part of a Native polity, on Winter Harbor, on the coast in what is now Gloucester County, Virginia. Todd got the right (in English eyes) to those acres by claiming John Radford as a headright, along with headrights for seven other people. To make that claim, Todd would have paid the ship’s captain for their passage. In return, the eight should have become Todd’s indentured servants, owing him their labor for a contracted number of years—in essence they were selling themselves to him for a limited term.¹ However, it is unlikely that John was in fact indentured. I appear, at least on the Radford side of the family, to be descended from relative privilege from the moment this ancestral Radford set foot on invaded but not yet fully conquered Virginia soil.

      I say “privilege” because the next we know of John is the shadow of activity that could not have occurred if he were indentured, and indicates that he had some kind of head start. He bought land, 160 acres in Northumberland County, from a man named Martin Cole in 1654, just about a year and a half after his arrival. The court record of the sale refers to him as “Gent,” an appellation reserved for those with money and position.² He clearly did not go through the standard procedure, which involved surviving indenture, then renting, and finally years later, with luck, for rental conditions were terrible, buying land and marrying.³ This was the common pattern for those indentured servants who actually succeeded in becoming planters themselves—and high school history to the contrary, not too many made it that far. Indeed, between the founding of Jamestown and the American Revolution, only one-fifth of the indentured servants who arrived in British North America became independent, as either farmers or artisans. The rest either died before they became free or became day laborers or paupers.⁴

      Perhaps at this point I should make it clear that the privilege I am talking about here did not include the white privilege that, looking back from the vantage of the present, we might be inclined to read into John Radford’s experience of life in Virginia. What he had was class privilege and male privilege; whiteness in and of itself had not yet been legislated—and enforced with punishment—into privilege during the initial tightening of control over the exploited and resisting workforce that is characteristic of state formation. By the time John’s (probable) son Bruen died in (probably) 1687, however, whiteness had begun to mean privilege, particularly for the relatively well-to-do.⁵ By the time Bruen’s (probable) son George died, five decades after Bruen, however, whiteness conveyed some degree of privilege over free blacks to even the poorest and the unfree indentured, who could successfully claim an identity as English.

      The laws that created difference between the two were, as we shall see, tightened after English and Africans revolted together, and were designed to control poor whites just as much as to control Africans. The key was being able to claim that it was the English part of your ancestry that identified you. Bear in mind that by this time there had been several generations of intermixture among English, Native American, and African, whose status ranged from freedom to varying degrees of servitude in a society which at first did not have strict racial lines. That mixture was the result of marriage, of unmarried consensual sex, and of rape performed primarily by English men, all of it producing numerous people of mixed ancestry. Before approximately 1670, there were few Africans in Virginia, and most of them, for most of those early decades, were in some form of indenture, very different from the slavery Venis and Adam would experience in the mid-1700s. There was not a clear and dramatic difference between English and African indenture; exploitation for both was frequently severe; and being white in itself brought no particular privilege until toward the end of the 1600s. So, it wasn’t whiteness that brought John Radford his bit of privilege compared to Africans or other English. It was class.

      That class privilege came to him from England, for John Radford was a surgeon—a “chyruegeon [sic]”—as the records of one court controversy indicate.⁶ Medical fees, at least in 1664, were described as “exorbitant,” so his income in Virginia may have been high.⁷ Perhaps he actually paid for his own transportation, thus acquiring a headright for himself, but the ship’s captain might have lied, claiming he had borne John’s transportation costs, was given a headright for John, and sold it to Thomas Todd. Or perhaps John himself sold his headright to Todd, or perhaps Todd simply put together a list of names and claimed to have paid their transportation. In none of these cases would John have been actually indentured. Colonial authorities turned a blind eye to much of this maneuvering of headrights, some of which was clearly fraudulent, some in a legally gray area, but all certainly common—and it led to the wealthy, who could buy up many headrights, accumulating immense estates, often scattered over several counties, and to a corresponding land shortage for those coming out of indenture.⁸

      By 1652, the catastrophic death rate of the early years had eased a little, but life was very far from secure. For newcomers, getting land was becoming harder and harder, and without it there were few ways to make a living. Tobacco was the only viable export crop, but it brought inconsistent returns. Even worse, tobacco was literally money, used to settle debts, make purchases, and pay tithes. Without land, you couldn’t grow money, and marriage would be unlikely. Indeed, 20 to 30 percent of men never married.⁹ Many people coming to the end of their indentures found themselves stuck, unable to move upward in the Virginia hierarchy.¹⁰ Deep poverty was increasing. Early deaths were normal. In Middlesex County, research by Darrett and Anita Rutman revealed that as late as 1689 sixty percent of children had lost one parent by age thirteen. Thirty-seven percent had lost both by the time they were eighteen, by which time girls might themselves be married.¹¹

      WE