The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
ancestry. Bruen, who at least later was reasonably well established, and was the son of someone designated as “gent,” would have had the power to ensure that the English part of George’s ancestry determined his identity.
Although there is no record of his owning either land or people, Bruen must have been reasonably well respected in that nest of Radford connections on the Rappahannock. After all, he signed John Burnham’s will. He served on juries, did appraisals of estates, and acted as an agent in the sale of Tappahannock Mill.44 These are low-level positions, but were rarely given to men without property.45
Assuming Bruen was already living in what was then Rappahannock and later became Essex County before he first shows up in the records in 1680, he would have been in the thick of the bloody upheaval of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Which side he would have been on is a question. John Burnham, apparently his patron, sided with Berkeley and the old established elite who ran the colony; rebels eventually burned him out. So Bruen might have followed his patron’s lead. But not many among the ordinary people in Rappahannock, or elsewhere, sided with Berkeley. Tappahannock itself was a center of opposition to Berkeley.46 So, statistically, Bruen is more likely to have been at least nominally one of the rebels, although probably not one of those who joined Bacon’s army, since that army was composed mainly of laborers, free and unfree, and the poor. He may well have been one of the relatively well-off who backed away when, as Webb describes, the revolt shifted from merely challenging Berkeley’s rule and his failure to undertake what many saw as the obviously necessary genocide of the surrounding Indians.47 Instead it became a real revolt of slaves, servants, and the poor but free, challenging the entire established social hierarchy, including disobeying the king’s representatives and fighting the king’s military.
THE CAUSES OF THE SIMMERING discontent that underlay Bacon’s Rebellion are linked to the strategies that are often used to get people to agree to work for next to nothing, as was happening to indentured workers in Virginia. Until 1675 over half the population was unfree and English.48 Life-term servitude, slavery as opposed to indenture, was growing only slowly during this time. The death rate was so high that it did not make sense to buy people for a lifelong stint of forced labor until toward the end of the century. Buying a lifetime of servitude was expensive, and it was an investment you might well lose through death long before the initial expense was paid off. Buying people for a shorter term through indenture meant you stood a better chance of making back your investment, as the Rutmans and Edmund Morgan both explain.49 In some areas, the unfree English labor force was supplemented by Indians, who could have been enslaved “legally” according to English standards, often by other Indian nations, in “just wars” fomented by the English, with other tribes.50 Although that unfree labor force was largely English, there were many whose status was ambiguous. After all, several generations had passed since the English and Africans began contributing to the Native gene pool of the Chesapeake.
So the English state provided dispossessed workers, but how was the state to maintain that dispossession in Virginia, so that people would work even though the state was weak, too weak to dispossess completely either Native people or ordinary English colonists? As we have seen, land was available and granted through headright. Nor could the state prevent people from squatting on the outer edges of English settlement, although Native polities did maintain limits to that process. It takes a strong state to keep land monopolized in the hands of the few in the face of demands to the contrary, and the Crown’s government in Virginia was unable to do so during the first decades of English settlement in the early 1600s. Nevertheless, Jamestown tobacco planters needed a labor supply—dispossessed people.51
So to keep them dispossessed, the state stepped in again. Indenture was a legally enforced contract—you were technically in debt to whoever paid your passage until you had served your time. With state oversight weak and distant, local state actors, the elites who ran the local governments in the name of the Crown and nominally under its jurisdiction, enforced the system. It was local elites who saw that runaways were legally caught and whipped and who oversaw the contracts by which indentured servants were forced to work and were sold or transferred through inheritance from one owner to another.52 Those same local elites adjudicated disputes between owner and servant. Servants could not take up land by purchase or headright, even though it was available. They were kept dispossessed until the indenture was completed.
However, given a state too weak to force people into lifelong servitude and given also that more tobacco growers clearing more land was profitable for the Crown, land was at first often provided after indenture. But by the 1630s, land was becoming a commodity to be bought and sold, rather than held from the Crown with an annual quitrent to maintain an individual’s right to a particular piece of land. And by the 1650s, servants ending their indentures could no longer count on getting the fifty acres their contracts specified.53 Land was either too expensive for newly freed servants to buy, or it was simply unavailable except on the dangerous frontiers. Many either continued as laborers or became tenants required to grow tobacco, making barely enough after taxes and rent to keep themselves alive.54 Dispossession thus functioned more permanently by privatizing land through state policies that made it possible for a few wealthy landholders, as well as London merchant/investors, to own enormous tracts and to pass them on legally to their heirs.55 As land became less available, and owners could sell for whatever price they could get, another string was added to the dispossession bow: it was okay to refuse people land to feed themselves if they couldn’t pay the required amount.56
In other words, during the 1650s and 1660s, the foundation for a capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, permanent dispossession, and wage or tenant labor for most men had been laid and was gradually solidifying. The expected progression to landownership for servants surviving indenture was no longer secure. Instead of the prospect of moving up the colonial hierarchy as independent planters, workers saw lifelong dependence as wage laborers, or worse. But honorable manhood required independence, land, and wife—property and patriarchy—and attaining either independence or wife was nearly impossible without land.57 In other words, the class structure was not sufficiently developed to cause English laborers—still the majority of the workforce—to accept landlessness as normal and permanent wage labor as an honorable way to head a household. This left the relatively few Africans and the many English, who existed on a wide continuum of statuses ranging from more or less enslaved to more or less free, deeply angry—landless, desperate, and often armed. It was they, Africans and English, indentured, enslaved, or poor, who eventually became the backbone of the army of Bacon’s Rebellion.58 But it was not they who actually orchestrated the rebellion.
Discontent had been heating up for a number of years, sometimes breaking out into organized resistance.59 There were a number of sore points, the most intense of which was rampant poverty for the many in an increasingly rigid class structure. In addition, there were issues angering people across the class spectrum, not just African and English unfree workers or the newly freed and frustrated. There was the declining price of tobacco. Then Berkeley’s Assembly restricted the vote in 1670, so that only property owners and householders, not all free men, determined who would be assemblymen.60 In 1673, the elites were exempted from payment of taxes, while for average planters taxes took between one-quarter and one-half of their annual income, leaving them close to starvation in bad years and their laborers likely even closer.61 There was additional taxation for forts that appeared to be placed to protect elite estates from Indian attack but left smaller outlying planters vulnerable.
All this came close to a boil when Indian attacks increased (in response to considerable provocation), just before the start of Bacon’s Rebellion. Most of the deaths from these attacks occurred in Rappahannock and other frontier areas. In Rappahannock there was a dramatic increase in the number of wills proved in court during and right after this period, presumably reflecting the heightened death rate.62 It is easy to see why a later formal complaint to the king’s commissioners stated, “Poore Rappahannock lies a bleeding.”63 The pot actually boiled over in 1676. Susquehanna Indians from over the border in Maryland, in a revenge attack, killed thirty-six English in Rappahannock, not too far from Tappahannock, where Bruen might have been living. Indians also attacked