The Peasant Planters of Seventeenth-Century Virginia

Thinking of seventeenth-century Virginians as maximizers is nothing new. Indeed, seventeenth-century Virginians themselves seem to have made the same assumption. But observers then and now have sharply disagreed over what, how, and why these planters maximized.

For instance, there is a ubiquitous (usually implicit) assumption in seventeenth-century writing that Virginians maximized tobacco production. But these contemporaries certainly had no notion that, in maximizing tobacco production, planters were maximizing capital accumulation, a distinctly twentieth-century idea. Indeed, seventeenth-century observers were more likely to attribute this maximization to either the planters’ laziness or the lack of capital that prevented Virginians from being able to discover and develop alternative staples.

But even present-day scholars who do presume that seventeenth-century Virginians were maximizing capital accumulation sharply differ on how they went about doing it. Some historians presume that planters simply maximized tobacco production because it was the most profitable activity at hand. But other historians suggest that planters did not maximize tobacco production; rather they moved in and out of tobacco as the market directed, expanding tobacco production when the demand was high and contracting when the demand was low.

Curiously enough, when these maximizing assumptions are rigorously tested, one finds a type of behavior that neither contemporary observers nor modern historians would lead us to expect. Quite at odds with maximizing anything, planters seem to have behaved in a way one typically associates with the stereotype of the lazy peasant in a pre-capitalist economy. Far from maximizing tobacco production or responding positively to market incentives, seventeenth-century tobacco planters were found to respond quite perversely. Whereas contemporaries and historians believe that rising tobacco prices either encouraged planters to increase tobacco production and demand for labor and land, or had little impact on planters already maximizing production, rising tobacco prices actually resulted in a decrease in tobacco production and reduced demand for labor and land.

The View from the Seventeenth-Century

While Europeans in general went to America for “God, gold, and glory,” Englishmen also went intent on producing staple commodities that could be shipped back to the mother country. Such staples would both help make England more self-sufficient‑-a central goal of much of the mercantilist literature of the times‑-and generate the income necessary to help the colony pay its own way. Virginians over the course of the seventeenth century experimented with various staples like sassafras, silk, and wine. But the only consistently profitable staple that they were able to produce in the seventeenth century was tobacco.

Nobody can deny the central importance of tobacco to colonial Virginia. Tobacco assured the very survival of the colony. Yet tobacco was the from the start a highly problematic staple. In all of the lists of expected staples that colonial promoters believed Virginia could and would produce, nobody listed tobacco. After all, James I had thoroughly condemned tobacco in his 1604 pamphlet A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco. ¹ English and Virginia officials would deny that tobacco could be even a staple because it could only contribute to the vices rather than the wealth of England; they spoke of its “unstapleness.” ² What possible good could come from sucking in and blowing out the smoke of a burning weed?

Throughout the seventeenth century, Virginia could never escape the stigma which King Charles I laid on her in 1627 of being a colony “wholly built upon smoke…and that so easy to be turned into air.” ³ Every commentator was convinced that there had to be more profitable and beneficial staples if only the planters would seek them out and develop them. ⁴ Surely the economic incentive was strengthened even further as the increased supply of tobacco outran world demand, sending the price of tobacco tumbling through much of the seventeenth century.

Virginians offered numerous explanations for this failure to diversify. At one time or another they stressed their lack of skills, political corruption, Indian attacks, the dismembering of the colony in the founding of Maryland and later the Northern Neck grant, restrictions on free trade, the lack of towns and markets, the Navigation Acts, factional disputes, catastrophes, God’s will, the abundance of land, and the lack of interest on the part of merchants. ⁵ A most popular explanation among Virginians in the early years of settlement was the lack of desire among early settlers to settle permanently in the colony, desiring as they did only “to gett a little wealth by Tobacco…and to return to Englande.” ⁶ But the most general seventeenth-century explanations about why planters maximized tobacco production and ignored other staples typically stressed one of two things: indolence or poverty.

Lazing in Lubberland

Underlying all the writing about Virginia, either implicitly or explicitly, lay a shared image. For the poor laborer, Virginia, lying in the same latitude as all of “the Gardens of the World,” was a Lubberland where “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour.” ⁷ For the ambitious gentleman, Virginia promised quick riches to restore flagging fortunes.

Complementing these personal visions, the public vision of Virginians throughout the seventeenth century–echoing the goal of colonial promoters, Company and Crown officials alike–consistently championed the idea of turning the Virginia wilderness into a garden. They sought to plant a “colony” rather than a mere trading post, to replicate in Virginia the complex social economy of England supplemented with the trades and industries that England lacked. ⁸ Virginians, while celebrating the natural abundance of the land, encouraged their fellow planters to improve upon nature. ⁹ The more specific goals associated with this image included at various times the development of towns, manufactures, agricultural reform, and, most importantly, alternative staples for export.

America appeared to Englishmen as a possible solution to the problems in England associated with overpopulation and poverty‑-in particular, the problem of idleness, “the root of all evil.” New World abundance, they believed, would transform the poor into the competent and the idle into the industrious, both at home and abroad. ¹⁰

Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic, the image of the promised land quickly tarnished when exposed to reality. Indeed, from almost the first, the “promise” of Virginia became the “problem” of Virginia. Instead of the promised industry and abundance, there were repeated reports of terrible hardships. Instead of the many beneficial staples that the colony was capable of producing, Virginians shipped only tobacco.

For many observers throughout the seventeenth century, the immediate source of Virginia’s woes was readily apparent‑-the indolence of her settlers. In short, Virginians were simply too lazy to fulfill the promise of Virginia. The problem was laid out in the first official report from the governing council in Virginia on June 22, 1607, which called for the “home Council [to] enact stricter regulations for the conduct and labor obligation of the hired workman,” claiming “the land would Flowe with milke and honey if so seconded.” While not denying the natural abundance of Virginia, the report stressed the downside of Lubberland proclaiming that a proper colony would only come with industry. ¹¹ This view became the accepted dogma of Virginia’s critics in England, Company officials like Sir Thomas Dale, and numerous visitors. ¹² John Smith, and later natives like Robert Beverley and William Byrd II, shared much in common with these writers, although their views were tempered by boosterism. ¹³

Many of the early critics traced the source of Virginia’s indolence to the quality of her colonists. “It was accepted in England,” concludes historian Nicholas P. Canny, “that only those in need of employment were likely to be attracted as settlers to either Ireland or Virginia, and since they were generally considered to be lazy, licentious and rebellious, it was consistent that the promoters saw little hope that colonization efforts would bear fruit unless commanded by leaders whose ’eminence or nobility’ would restrain the ‘servile nature’ of the majority.” ¹⁴ Furthermore, contemporaries could hardly be surprised by the results of a promotional literature which, they clearly recognized, appealed to the lazy streak in potential colonists. ¹⁵ These critics came to reject any New World transformation in the natures of the dregs shipped out to Virginia. Samuel Purchas captured English opinion about Virginians when he observed that a “prodigious prodigal here is not easily metamorphosed in a Virginian passage to a thrifty planter.” ¹⁶

The literature of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century is as replete with criticisms of “this slothful indolence” as that of the early seventeenth century. ¹⁷ Yet by the end of seventeenth century, native Virginians like Beverley and Byrd along with transplanted Virginians like John Clayton and Hugh Jones were proliferating explanations that highlighted not so much the quality of the immigrants as the negative impact of abundance on industry. ¹⁸ In 1684, Clayton described Virginia as “a place where plenty makes poverty, Ignorance ingenuity, and coveteousnesse causes hospitality that is thus every one covets so much and there is such vast extent of land that they spread so far they cannot manage well a hundred partt of what they have every one can live at ease and therefore they scorne and hate to worke to advantage themselves so are poor with abundance.” ¹⁹ Or Beverley: “If there be any excuse for them in this Matter [their Laziness], ’tis the exceeding plenty of good things, with which Nature has blest them; for where God Almighty is so Merciful as to work for People, they never work for themselves.” ²⁰ And Byrd in his description of “Lubberland”: “To speak the truth, ’tis a thorough aversion to labor that makes people file off to North Carolina, where plenty and a warm sun confirm them in their disposition to laziness for their whole lives.” ²¹ Similarly, Jones: “The common planters leading easy lives don’t much admire labour, or any manly exercise, except horse-racing, nor diversion, except cock-fighting, in which some greatly delight. This easy way of living, and the heat of the summer makes some very lazy, who are then said to be climate-struck.” ²²

In the earliest years, critics believed that only the martial policy of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale could put the colonists on the right track. ²³ Later critics tended to rely more on moral suasion and the market to cure indolence. ²⁴ Men like Byrd and Beverley in the early eighteenth century seemed to assume that they could simply shame their fellow Virginians into industry, as Beverley believed they shamed each other to reinforce the Virginian tradition of open hospitality: “If there happen to be a Churl, that either out of Covetousness, or Ill-nature, won’t comply with this generous Custom, he has a mark of Infamy set upon him, and is abhorr’d by all.” ²⁵ “I should be asham’d,” said Beverley, “to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.” ²⁶

Other Virginians, while condemning indolence, seemed resolved to letting the market have its way. They avowed that only the market pressure of still lower tobacco prices and dire poverty would ween planters away from tobacco and force diversification. ²⁷ Governor Harvey, for example, in 1630 observed that “seeinge the base condition of Tobacco, [the people] are willinge with all convenience to set themselves upon the raisinge other comodities.” ²⁸ Governor William Berkeley concluded in a 1663 letter to Lord Clarendon that “truly my Lord this is now our case, that if the Merchants give us a good price for our Tobacco wee are well, if they do not wee are much better, for that will make us fall on such Commodities as god will blesse us, for when wee know not how to excuse forty years promoting the basest and foolishest vice in the world.” ²⁹ “Wee have it certainly in our power,” observed Thomas Ludwell in 1667, “to be a very rich and happy collony were wee not of soe ill a constitution as not to be industrious till necessity compells us.” ³⁰ Nicholas Spencer in 1683 noted that a slight rise in the price of tobacco

quieted the minds of our unthrifty inhabitants, who cannot be persuaded to undertake some new industry, but prefer to live miserably by tobacco. The pleasing thought of a cessation of planting they have for the present laid aside…By my observation I cannot persuade myself that either a cessation or a stint in the number of plants will effect what is intended. The work must do itself; the crop must grow to such vast quantities that no one will come to fetch it, and then the law of necessity will force them to new industries. ³¹

Governor William Gooch believed Virginians in the 1730s “an indolent people who would abandon economic habits only out of necessity.” ³²

Poverty in a Land of Plenty

However vociferously Virginia’s critics blamed the colony’s woes on the indolence of the colonists, Virginians for the most part publicly rejected such arguments. Colonial leaders and other supporters of the colony throughout the seventeenth century‑-echoing the optimism of early promoters of colonization‑-downplayed the issues of the quality of immigrants and the need for coercion. Recognizing the bankruptcy of jeremiads and of martial law as policy for attracting potential colonists, most colonial leaders continued to maintain the optimistic view that the problem lay neither in the land nor the people, that New World abundance would indeed transform the indolent into the industrious. From the 1620s until Robert Beverley’s scathing attack on the indolence of his fellow Virginians in 1705, almost every official public statement made by colonists suggested a very industrious lot in Virginia. ³³ When Nathaniel Bacon declared to his followers that “there is nothing soe hard, but by Labour and Industry it may bee overcome,” he said it with the expectation that his Virginians did indeed have the requisite industry. ³⁴ Indeed, in the classic style of a jeremiad, Beverley himself romanticized the great industry of the past when Berkeley “set all hands industrously to Work in making Country Improvements.” ³⁵

Behind this more positive view of Virginians lay a firm belief in the central role of hope and opportunity in driving economic development. ³⁶ America‑-the very land of hope and opportunity‑-naturally worked miracles on idle Englishmen, much as pre-Jamestown colonial promoters had hypothesized. Sir William Berkeley’s A Discourse and View of Virginia (1663) provides the classic statement of this view:

An other greater imputation lyes on the Countrey, that none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives go thither. This to our Maligners we would easily grant, if they would consent to the omen of it: for was not Rome thus begun and composed?…[T]hose that come from hence with those ungoverned manners and affections, change them there for sober and thrifty passions and desires, which is evident in most that are there; and those that will either experimentally or morally weigh the nature and conditions of men, shall find, that naturally this change will follow the alteration of our conditions…and the natural reason is evident, for it is hope and a proposed end that quickens our industry, and bridles our intemperance.” ³⁷

These supporters of Virginia traced the failure of the colony to live up to its promise, not to indolence, but to poverty. Planters throughout the seventeenth century complained about their poverty, attributing the source variously to exorbitant prices of commodity imports, high taxes, soil depletion, natural calamities, lack of shipping, but most especially, falling tobacco prices. ³⁸ Economic historians highlighting the domestic economy have rightly pointed out that subsistence production (at market prices) made up a greater share of total household income than income from marketed staples in colonial southern (and northern) households. ³⁹ Nevertheless, in the view of both contemporaries and economic historians who highlight the export economy, uncertainties in the farm price of tobacco far outweighed other elements in the perception of poverty for the seventeenth century as a whole. Tobacco prices were the barometer of poverty and prosperity. The comment by Charles Carroll III to an English friend in the late eighteenth century could be applied to the entire colonial era: “Our estates differ much from yours, the income is never certain. It depends upon the casual rise or fall of the price of tobacco.” ⁴⁰

And Virginians weeped over the low prices of tobacco from as early as 1620, as tobacco prices quickly plummeted from their initial astronomical heights. Although Governor Berkeley lamented in 1663 that tobacco at less than two pence per pound “at length has brought them to that extremity, that they can neither handsomely subsist with it, nor without it,” Virginians in 1626 had similarly complained about the contract price of twelve pence per pound: “How can wee councell the planter to make his tobacco principall good, which now soe much concernes us, if hee still bee enforced to make soe great quantities to furnish himself with necessaries.” ⁴¹ Four years earlier in 1622 (when tobacco prices were still higher) Captain Francis West and other “auncient Planters and Adventurers on the behalf of themselves and the rest of your poore distressed Subjects of that Plantation” had petitioned the King “on the behalf of themselves and the rest of your poore distressed Subjects of that Plantation” “that by their long experience hazard and chardge both of their persons and estates, for many yeares now past,” they have found that the colony could produce many staples to supply the needs of Kingdom “but by mainteyning warre with the Indians, and the former benefitt, which hath bene made by Tobacco they have bene hindered and mispent their times therein.” Because now “tobacco is of noe value,” unless the King be pleased to take them under his protection and institute a tobacco contract with an assured reasonable price giving the planters the “meanes to subsist for the present, and apply themselves for the future to plant some reall commodity there, to which that Country is apt and fitt,” they lamented they “are like to perish, and soe hopefull a Plantation will presently sinck and become of noe use at all.” ⁴² The rhetoricians of poverty were caught in the paradox of living in a Lubberland where “any laborious honest man may in a short time become rich” while at the same time bemoaning their poverty and the low price of tobacco–“the only meanes for our present supportacon and subsistence”–two themes echoed over and over again in the seventeenth century. ⁴³

Poverty‑-often with graphic details of nakedness, the suffering of women and children, abandonment, ruin, destruction, and “great wants and miseries”‑-was the most frequent specific explanation given for any action or non-action in the seventeenth century and was used at one time or another to justify practically everything. ⁴⁴ Poverty was used to justify the remittance or reduction of tobacco duties (1624, 1679, 1713); a grant to Virginia of the sole rights of tobacco importation into England (1624); the repeal of tobacco importation monopolies granted by the king to private individuals (1625, 1628, 1638); the imposition of a set price for tobacco by the colony (1632); opposition to central tobacco warehouses (1638); the removal of restrictions on tobacco production (1638, 1663); stricter controls on the quantity and quality of tobacco production (1640, 1663, 1665, 1666, 1680, 1681, 1686); free trade with all English ports (1645); elimination of tobacco as a circulating medium (1645); restrictions on civil law suits (1646,1658); encouragement of the trade with the Dutch (1647); establishment of county markets (1656); prohibition of the importation of unnecessary commodities (1661); timetables for debt payment (1666); setting up public manufactures (1666); inability to pay the cost of defense against the Dutch or Indians (1667, 1672, 1673, 1679); promotion of town development (1680); opposition to adjournment of the Assembly (1682); prohibition of the exportation of certain raw materials and semi-finished manufactures (1682); and opposition to the removal to England of jurisdiction over certain types of court cases (1684). ⁴⁵

Poverty checked the economic development of Virginia in two major ways. First, poverty destroyed the hope and opportunity which Virginians believed provided the ultimate key to colonial development. Second, poverty meant insufficient capital and time to search out and develop alternative staples. ⁴⁶ Every cause given for the lack of diversification and overproduction of tobacco was equally a cause of poverty, although the poverty argument normally identified the ultimate source in external forces. ⁴⁷ Perhaps the most egregious and direct link with poverty was the vicious “debt cycle” quite familiar to contemporaries and historians of the postbellum South. Planters complained that merchants took advantage of the planters by selling them clothes and provisions (and less useful commodities) at excessive rates while paying low rates for tobacco, placing the planters in debt almost to the value of the next crop. Necessity forced planters to continue planting tobacco which kept them in perpetual debt and “continual slavery.” ⁴⁸ Planters who attempted to avoid the problems of tobacco by transplanting a more traditional English agriculture soon failed and found themselves forced to turn to tobacco for survival. ⁴⁹

Before Virginia could achieve its promise, the colony first had to escape poverty. So the colonists pushed for Crown policies‑-like allowing free exportation into non-English ports and the prohibition of domestic tobacco production in England‑-that would drive tobacco prices upward. Higher tobacco prices would provide the poor planters with both the hope (escape from poverty) and means (especially capital) necessary “to sett up those staple commodities which require a longe expectation of proffitt.” ⁵⁰ Cessation, stinting, or other physical restrictions on tobacco production as the methods for raising tobacco prices were further recommended as providing the requisite time along with the capital to search out and develop such projects. ⁵¹

Maximizers All!

Despite the widely variant contemporaneous interpretations of Virginia’s problems, interestingly enough commentators could agree on one thing: that tobacco planters were quite industrious when it came to producing tobacco. Indeed one might say that practically every discussion about tobacco coming out of seventeenth-century Virginia was premised on the assertion that Virginians maximized tobacco production.

This is quite obvious for the defenders of Virginia who stressed over and over how industrious Virginians were at the same time they lamented that Virginians had no other outlet for that industry except tobacco. Furthermore, with tobacco prices as low as they were, Virginians were forced to produce as much tobacco as they could simply in order to survive. In their justification for stinting or cessation of tobacco, Virginians also suggested that planters literally had no free time to experiment with or cultive alternative staples, so tied up were they with growing tobacco.

But even those who criticized the indolence of Virginians accepted matter-of-factly that planters maximized tobacco. John Hammond in 1656 observed that after the 1622 massacre, Virginians

again began to bud forth, to spread further, to gather wealth, which they rather profusely spent (as gotten with ease then providently husbanded, or aimed at any publique good; or to make a Country for posterity; but from hand to mouth, and for a present being; neglected discoveries, planting of Orchards, providing for the Winter preservation of their stocks, or thinking of any thing staple or firm; and whilest Tobacco, the onely Commodity they had to subsist on bore a price, they wholy and eagerly followed that, neglecting their very planting of Corn, and much relyed on England for the chiefest part of their provisions. ⁵²

Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton made a similar observation at the end of the seventeenth century:

The only Thing whereof they make as much as they can, is Tobacco; there being always a Vent for that at one Time of the Year or other; besides that their Want of Cloaths and Household-Furniture, and all their other Necessaries, instigate them to make as much Tobacco as they can, this being the Money of that Country which Answers all Things. ⁵³

But for both the poverty and indolence camps, the assumption of maximization is more often left implicit than explicit. Contemporaries rarely talked about the option of planters increasing tobacco production. Some Virginians did sometimes (but not often) stress that the reason for the Virginians’ concentration on tobacco was the relatively high return to their labor in tobacco than in other commodities, hinting that higher prices for some other staple and/or lower prices for tobacco might lead planters to shift from tobacco to the other staple. ⁵⁴ A handful of statements by Governors Berkeley, Culpeper, and Gooch pushed the relative profitability argument so far in the direction of classical economic theory (with its assumptions of perfect substitutability between commodities in a market equilibrium) as to suggest that a lowering of the price of tobacco or a raising of the price of an alternative staple would ceteris paribus promote a reduction in tobacco production and vice versa. ⁵⁵

But such statements were rare. More typically, Virginians depicted tobacco production as a matter of all or nothing, either being totally dependent upon tobacco or abandoning it altogether. Surely observers who condemned planters as lazy might have suggested that those same planters might have chosen to increase tobacco production rather than diversify in response to falling tobacco prices. But they did not. The implicit assumption is that planters were already making as much tobacco as they could, whether as a matter of survival or out of habit.

Modern Historical Interpretations

Historians today tend to reject seventeenth-century explanations that trace the problems of Virginia to the planters being either lazy or strapped for capital. David Bertelson’s The Lazy South drew heavily on the example of seventeenth-century Virginia to prove that the South was anything but lazy as we understand the term today:

The problem then is to explain why most men in the southern colonies seemed to lead idle lives when in actuality they were often very busy. The answer lies in the fact that they were not busy all of the time. Diligent labor of the sort Max Weber has associated with the “spirit of capitalism” is not necessary if men work mainly for gain, for there is no reason why they should be busy during periods when activity will yield no reward…Hunters and herders, as well as farmers and planters, could conceivably have had and did have many periods of free time. This sporadic inactivity would have contributed to an impression of idleness, which belied the underlying reality. With “the great labor about tobacco being only in summertime,” the Virginia planters “acquire great habits of idleness all the rest of the year,” a description of the colony noted. ⁵⁶

Numerous historians have echoed the seventeenth-century view that tobacco planters maximized tobacco production regardless of changes in tobacco prices. Reasons given are diverse. Older historians like Philip A. Bruce, L. C. Gray, and others concluded that planters continually overproduced regardless of the price of tobacco out of habit, lack of foresight, or institutional constraints. ⁵⁷ Avery O. Craven argued that for a hundred years after the enactment of the Navigation Acts, with only occasional breaks of a few years duration, a depression led to an insatiable demand for land placing planters “under constant pressure for [earning the] largest returns from his soils.” ⁵⁸ James Curtis Ballagh, Richard B. Morris, Wesley Frank Craven, and others have asserted that the goal of planters was to acquire as much land and labor as they could. ⁵⁹ More recent historians like Edmund S. Morgan, Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, and Charles Wetherell have claimed that planters maximized tobacco production in order to survive in the New World wilderness, to provide for the next generation, as the best way to maximize profits and capital accumulation, simply because the opportunity existed, and/or as a traditional strategy that planters maintained despite the vagaries of the market because there were simply no seemingly more profitable alternatives without undertaking great risk and uncertainty. ⁶⁰

Since the mid-1970s, some historians and economists have come to challenge this idea that planters simply maximized tobacco production. These historians have argued that Virginians actually followed the ups and downs of the tobacco market fairly closely. Historians Russell R. Menard, John J. McCusker, Lorena S. Walsh, Paul G. E. Clemens, Gloria L. Main, Allan Kulikoff, and James Horn, and economists Terry L. Anderson, Robert Paul Thomas, and David W. Galenson, under the aegis of “staples” theory‑-with its emphasis on the export-led nature of colonial economic-demographic development‑-have highlighted a cyclical pattern of booms and busts throughout the seventeenth century. Periods of rising tobacco prices saw expanding tobacco production, increases in the pace of immigration, and the advance of settlement; periods of falling tobacco prices led to contracting tobacco production, experiments with alternative staples, and the spread of manufacturing. Planters only attempted to maximize tobacco production in boom periods. ⁶¹

Curiously, some of these same historians have felt compelled to acknowledge that, for certain planters at certain times, falling tobacco prices may have actually spurred the expansion of the tobacco economy. Some who make this claim suggest this was the situation only for the poorest, most debt-ridden planters. “Small planters,” Russell Menard concludes, “had fixed expenses and debts to pay; when tobacco prices declined they felt pressures to expand production in order to maintain the income of their farms.” ⁶² For certain planters, writes Gloria Main, “no real alternative to planting existed. They needed the income to pay their debts and to hang on for another year. The response of people in this position was to increase their effort, that is, to raise more in order to obtain the same income.” ⁶³

But other scholars have suggested that the planter class as a whole may have at times responded to falling tobacco prices by expanding tobacco production. This was an idea first suggested by L. C. Gray in his seminal study of the History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. Drawing his insight from some early eighteenth-century observer, Gray concluded

It was observed that for a considerable time after the beginning of a depression period the planter class actually increased the acreage planted, trying by the production of a larger quantity to make up for the smaller price. ⁶⁴

Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, in their classic community study of Middlesex County, capture succinctly the general constraints on production decisions:

The farmer could not readily respond to lower prices by shifting to other crops. Even at a low price, tobacco retained an assured market of sorts. And…after all, the Chesapeake farmer knew that he need simply semiclear a few more acres and find another laborer and hoe in order to increase the productivity (and profitability) of his farm. ⁶⁵

Robert Brenner similarly concludes:

Despite their recognition as a body of the need for economic diversification, the planters as individuals generally tried to overcome their financial difficulties simply by increasing their tobacco output. This naturally led to crises of overproduction, further falls in prices, and ever‑deepening debt. ⁶⁶

Other historians go further to suggest that Chesapeake planters were constantly spurred to expand production through good times and bad, pushed during busts and pulled during booms. ⁶⁷ If L. C. Gray thought that a depression could spur production for a time, he also believed that booms‑-like the good prices before the War of Spanish Succession‑-could as well. ⁶⁸ John Rainbolt, finding evidence that planters expanded production in response to falling prices, pithily noted that, “ironically, the private economic behavior of the great planters exacerbated the economic condition their public policy sought to resolve.” But Rainbolt also argued that with a slight increase in tobacco prices after Bacon’s Rebellion, “the modest improvement only encouraged overproduction in subsequent years.” ⁶⁹ Clemens observes that “the price of tobacco remained strong enough to drive up the level of production,” but, in the same paragraph argues, “as prices continued to fall, the pressure to increase farm production and maintain profit levels intensified.” ⁷⁰ Allan Kulikoff provides the baldest statement of this ambivalent view:

Increasing Continental demand for tobacco led Chesapeake planters to overproduce, and these surpluses magnified the impact of depressions. Each downturn in tobacco prices triggered a similar sequence of events. When prices began to decline, planters responded by attempting to increase their tobacco output. Continued production led to even lower prices, and economic decline accelerated. Marginal producers, unable to cover their costs, dropped out of the market, and total exports stagnated. After several years of level exports, short-term European demand for tobacco usually improved. Prices therefore began to rise, and planters redoubled their efforts to grow tobacco. The stage was set for another depression and a repetition of the entire economic cycle. ⁷¹

According to other scholars, there were two distinct kinds of expansive responses to changes in tobacco: while rising tobacco prices led to extensive development through increased acquisition of labor and land, falling tobacco prices led to intensive development through increased effort (at least in the short run) and improvements in the technology of tobacco culture. ⁷²

Putting Theories to the Test

None of these notions about tobacco production and the failure of Virginia to diversify has ever been put to any rigorous test. Much of the analysis has been restricted to descriptive graphs and tables, subject to multiple contradictory interpretations. For instance, historians have long recognized that tobacco productivity rose over the course of the seventeenth century while tobacco prices were falling. The data in Figures I and II are based on aggregate English tobacco import and tithable population data, but the same trends of rising productivity in the seventeenth century are suggested by contemporary literary estimates and analysis of probate records. ⁷³

Figure I

Figure II

Historians have interpreted this inverse relationship in numerous ways. Certainly there is a general consensus that rising productivity drove down the price of tobacco. But what drove tobacco productivity up? Allan Kulikoff suggests that high profits drove the process:

Between 1620 and about 1680 the price and production of tobacco followed a classic new product curve, similar to that of electronic calculators in the 1970s. Tobacco planters received very high prices for their product in the 1620s, and that encouraged both higher output and a search for ways to increase productivity. As production per hand increased from about 750 pounds a year in the 1630s to 1,650 a year in the 1670s and shipping costs declined the price for tobacco fell, but planters still received a profit for their tobacco because they produced more of it with the same labor. ⁷⁴

Others, however, like Galenson and Menard, believe that “some of the major gains in productivity were achieved during depressions.” ⁷⁵ In general, most historians suggest that the seventeenth-century increase in productivity was the result of permanent advances in technological or organizational efficiency in tobacco culture fairly unrelated to tobacco prices. This was the result of adjusting to the environment or “learning by doing” during the earliest years of settlement. None of this negates the consensus that these planters were industrious maximizers for all assume regular daily levels of physical and mental effort remained fairly constant while productivity was rising. ⁷⁶

But which if any of these views is more correct? Did higher tobacco prices spur planters to increased productivity? Or did lower prices? Or were increases in productivity independent of tobacco prices? All of the above? Such questions can only be answered by fairly sophisticated statistical analysis.

But statistical analyses of such empirical evidence are few and far between in the study of the colonial Chesapeake. Some historians have reported a strong positive correlation between changes in taxable population and tobacco prices. ⁷⁷ Others have found a positive correlation between unindentured servant registration and tobacco prices. ⁷⁸ One historian has even concluded there was a strong positive correlation between premarital sex and tobacco prices. ⁷⁹ Charles Wetherell employed a fairly sophisticated Box‑Jenkins time series approach to study the relationship between English tobacco imports and farm tobacco prices but found only a very weak, if any, correlation. ⁸⁰ However, as I am sure all these authors would readly concede, none of these studies could qualify as a definitive statistical test of the various interpretive frameworks of economic development in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.

As a result of the work of numerous scholars of colonial Maryland and Virginia, the seventeenth-century Chesapeake is hardly the “statistical ‘dark age'” it was called as recently as 1978. ⁸¹ Chesapeake scholars have performed miracles in generating quantifiable data from stingy surviving records. Although we do not have much individual-level data, we do have enough aggregate-level data‑-for example, annual times series of tobacco imports, population, prices, acreage‑-from the late seventeenth century to analyze three key elements in the colonial Chesapeake economy: tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land.

I tested these three economic measures were tested employing fairly straightforward multiple regression analysis, the kind that economists typically use to test their hypotheses. Now any discussion of multiple regression analysis is going to be necessarily very dry and complex, so the details have been left for the appendices. But, very briefly, the analyses involved a lot of experimentation with variables and combinations of variables in search of a better fit between predicted and actual data. For example, the examination of tobacco productivity drew on such data as the annual totals of tobacco imports into England, the size of the working population in the Chesapeake, the farm price of tobacco, various measures to gauge the availability of shipping, and proxies of land and labor quality. One of the more innovative aspects of the approach employed here was‑-rather than simply to assume that planters responded to the most immediate prices (as staples theorists often presume)‑-to experiment with various other ways planters might have reacted to price changes, for example, averaging the price of tobacco over the last so many years or taking into account the minimum price over the last so many years.

The results were, as already suggested, quite surprising. Far from maximizing tobacco production or responding positively to market incentives, seventeenth-century tobacco planters were found to respond quite perversely. Whereas historians and contemporaries would have us believe that rising tobacco prices either encouraged planters to increase tobacco production and demand for labor and land, or had little impact on planters already maximizing production, multiple regression analysis shows something quite different. Supposedly maximizing planters in aggregate responded to rising tobacco prices by curtailing tobacco production. Rising tobacco prices led to a decrease in tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land. (See Appendices I, II, and III.)

Furthermore, the evidence also suggests that planters hardly responded like stockjobbers to rapid fluctuations in prices. They were conservative in their decision-making; they did not respond quickly to rapidly changing tobacco prices, but rather averaged in current prices with those of the recent past in making their production decisions. Furthermore, they were risk-averse; they hedged their bets by basing their decision in part on minimum prices, suggesting an unwillingness to gamble that prices would not fall back to such lows again. ⁸²

These findings seem to turn on its head the central assumption of practically all historians of early America that seventeenth-century Virginians were industrious maximizers. But if they were not industrious maximizers, what were they? Here we might start by going back to the observation of some historians we have already discussed, the observation that falling tobacco prices may have actually spurred improvements in tobacco productivity. Indeed we find this to be quite generally true.

Undoubtedly over the course of the seventeenth century some of this increase in productivity came from long-run “irreversible” changes in technological or organizational efficiency. But much of this increase also came simply from increased physical, and mental, effort. ⁸³ And these short-run improvements in productivity were inherently “reversible.” Falling tobacco prices spurred increased effort. But when prices rose, planters in aggregate did not maintain the same level of effort, let alone increase it. No, they reduced their effort. Thus, not only did planters in aggregate not maximize their labor‑-even when there was profit to be made‑-but they acted very much like the classic stereotype of the lazy peasant: the more you paid them, the less they worked. ⁸⁴

What exactly did planters do to decrease productivity in periods of rising tobacco prices? That is a very difficult question to answer with confidence. Tobacco was a very labor-intensive crop. Over the course of the planting year there was much room for modifying total output, from the seeding of the beds in January, making of the hills in April, transplanting in May, topping, hoeing, and suckering in June and July, cutting in August, and casking in October. ⁸⁵ However, since historians have concluded that most of the increase in tobacco productivity over the seventeenth century came primarily as a result of an increased number of plants per laborer (which advanced six- to ten-fold), most likely intermittent reductions in productivity came from a decrease in the number of plants tended per laborer. ⁸⁶

These findings on tobacco productivity raise significant questions about the nature of labor relations in the colonial Chesapeake when servants and slaves comprised a significant part of the labor force. Edmund S. Morgan shows that for every head of household in late seventeenth-century Virginia, there were another one or two dependent laborers. ⁸⁷ Furthermore, slavery was an ever larger part of this dependent labor force over the time period (1679-1703) that I analyzed tobacco productivity; in Maryland, slaves went from 20% of the bound labor force in the late 1670s to 75% in the late 1690s. ⁸⁸ If the labor force in aggregate responded perversely to changes in tobacco prices, what does this say about the master-servant and master-slave relationship? Surely it raises doubts about Morgan’s thesis that planters turned to slavery as a “way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor without as great a risk of rebellion.” ⁸⁹

A “peasant” framework of planter behavior is further confirmed by the findings on how planters responded to changing tobacco prices in their decisions on purchasing labor or patenting land. Quite simply, labor and land became more valuable as tobacco prices fell, less valuable as tobacco prices rose. Again this shows that planters were hardly maximizers. It also challenges the view of some scholars that there were two distinct kinds of expansive responses to changes in tobacco, extensive and intensive. Rather falling tobacco prices pushed planters toward both intensive efforts to increase tobacco productivity and extensive efforts to acquire additional labor and land to expand production. Rising tobacco prices led to contraction.

Understanding planters in this way provides additional support for various other interpretations of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. For example, contemporaries and historians alike have noted that poverty in the form of falling tobacco prices pushed planters to experiment with alternative staples, take up domestic manufactures, and increase subsistence production, projects which more often than not fell apart when good times returned. Although scholars have tended to interpret such behavior in terms of the responsiveness of “economic men” to market incentives, the behavior seems even more typical of the kind of reversible effort we see with regard to tobacco productivity. Not only did tobacco busts spur increased effort in the tobacco fields, they also promoted increased effort to try to find alternative sources of income. Rising tobacco prices reversed these trends. ⁹⁰

Perhaps more importantly, these findings about the demand for labor in late seventeenth century Virginia strongly second the view of some historians that the late seventeenth-century tobacco depression played a major role in the shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery. ⁹¹ This is not to deny the importance of many other factors that historians have emphasized, such as the reduced supply of servants from England, increased availability of slaves, improving mortality, Queen Anne’s War, and increasing labor tensions. ⁹² But surely it is not totally coincidental that, as Farley Grubb and Tony Stitt have recently noted, “the transition to slave labor occurred when tobacco prices had fallen to their lowest.” ⁹³ Russell R. Menard has convincingly shown that there was much resistance to slavery among middling and poorer planters who positively favored English servants to African slaves. Besides the greater cost and risk associated with purchasing a slave, masters simply preferred dealing with servants who shared a common language and culture. ⁹⁴ In such a scenario, perhaps the pressure of rock-bottom tobacco prices was sufficient catalyst for these planters in the 1690s to experiment with slavery in an attempt to realize the benefits that wealthier planters had been reaping since the 1660s.

A Curious Blindspot

Such perverse behavior is indeed troublesome for both Smithians and Marxians. Smithians might suggest that the planters were only maximizing utility with a greater preference for leisure over additional income. Marxians might claim that such behavior substantiates the precapitalist nature of early Americans. After all, as Max Weber concluded, such a leisure preference was the essence of “traditionalism,” “the most important opponent with which the spirit of capitalism…has had to struggle.” ⁹⁵ But neither Marxian nor Smithian Americanists have ever entertained the possibility that early Americans were ever so “backward.”

This suggests a curious blindspot in early American historiography: a failure to take seriously any evidence that might suggest that early Americans might have responded to increases in opportunity in a “perverse” manner. Fundamentally, neither Marxian nor Smithian frameworks offers a satisfactory explanation of planter values or behavior because none, underlining a paradigmatic bias in early American historiography with regard to the nature of the New World environment and/or the Anglo-American character, is prepared to deal seriously with the prevalence of “indolence” in early America. ⁹⁶

This can readily be seen in the reaction of historians to contemporary observers of the American frontier from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries who have with the same broad strokes ubiquitously condemned both the avarice and the indolence of early Americans, thus projecting competing images of the frontier as a Hobbesian state of nature and a Lubberland. ⁹⁷ Historians have simply never known what to do with these comments about lazy Americans in Lubberland. In order to resolve this rhetoric of indolence with assumptions of maximizing behavior, historians have ignored the rhetoric, downplayed indolence as atypical behavior, or tried to explain away such ubiquitous complaints as evidence of something else like avarice, status anxiety, or a lack of opportunity‑-anything but laziness. ⁹⁸

The bias is reflected in colonial Chesapeake historiography in the interpretation of many seemingly ambiguous behaviors‑-such as the agricultural regression from English standards (persistence of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture, the lack of a plow, lack of agricultural reform), the concentration on tobacco to the exclusion of corn in the early years and other commodities in later years, and dispersed settlement and the lack of town development. On such behaviors, open to push as well as pull interpretations, historians come down universally on the side of pull.

Darrett and Anita Rutman lay out the two opposing ways we could interpret such ambiguous behaviors:

In one sense, the tobacco cultivation of the Chesapeake was crude, even slovenly, a stark contrast to the cross‑plowing, harrowing, and ditching of English agriculture‑‑the elaborate working of the soil of an increasingly intensive farming system. In another sense, however, it was a model of efficiency, of the principle of the least effort applied to gain the greatest profit. There was no need for elaboration when, with no more equipment than a hoe, a single laborer could set and tend two to three acres of semicleared land, between six and ten thousand plants, making a crop of eleven to twelve hundred pounds cured and packed in a good year, seven or eight hundred in a bad one, roughly three to six pounds sterling at Virginia’s mid‑century price. ⁹⁹

The question is which sense is more accurate: laziness or efficiency? Yet no historian who analyzes such behaviors seriously entertains laziness or even a leisure preference as an explanation when an entrepreneurial interpretation will do just as well. ¹⁰⁰

When one starts looking for this anti-indolence or maximizing bias, one finds its effects everywhere. For instance, besides issues of production already considered, one can also see its impact on approaches to consumption. There is a general consensus among historians of the dominance in seventeenth-century Virginia of a Spartan, ascetic attitude toward consumption, presuming that planters survived on the barest necessaries and rolled back any remaining profits into capital accumulation or the purchase of additional factors of production. As Gloria L. Main puts it, “By rigorously limiting his purchases and applying all his labor, and that of his wife, to extracting the maximum quantity of tobacco from the land, a planter could hope to build surplus credits and eventually acquire a servant to expand the crop still further.” ¹⁰¹ While perhaps consistent with evidence from probate records (which reveal very limited amounts of consumer “durables”), this view ignores much contemporary evidence on the importation of “non-durables”‑-what contemporaries called “unnecessary commodities” or “luxuries” along with “necessaries” like distilled grain spirits, wine, rum, and a great variety of other “strong waters”‑-that an older generation of historians at the turn of the century highlighted as quite typical of Englishmen and which took up much of planter income. ¹⁰² One can easily accept the importance of real changes in durable consumption in the eighteenth century highlighted by Lois Green Carr, Lorena S. Walsh, and others, without the dubious presumption of an earlier maximizing asceticism. ¹⁰³

Beyond the Colonial Chesapeake

Of course, you might be asking how far we might go in extrapolating from multiple regression analysis. Perhaps you simply could not be convinced by any such statistical analysis anyway. Or maybe you are thinking the problem is that we simply misjudged these Virginians; either they valued leisure over additional profits (as Smithians might say) or they were pre-capitalists (as Marxians might say).

But I will take the argument one step further and argue that Englishmen in early modern England acted in the same perverse way. Yes, England, almost universally acknowledged to be the true birthplace of capitalism, whatever pretensions the United States can make as to having achieved capitalism’s fullest form. Scholars have argued over when the transition to capitalism occurred in England. Some, following Marx, have highlighted late eighteenth-century industrialization. Others have argued for the earlier emergence of capitalism in a sixteenth-century commercial agrarian revolution with its enclosure movement and the emergence of the putting-out system ala R. H. Tawney. Others follow Max Weber in stressing a seventeenth-century intellectual revolution, the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the English Civil War, and the rise of the economic and political liberalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Alan Macfarlane dates the transition way back in the Dark Ages, rooted in the ancient English tradition of private property rights. But few doubt that the transition occurred some time between the sixteenth and early nineteenth century. ¹⁰⁴ For their part, practically all American Marxians and Smithians, whatever their difference over early Americans, assert the bourgeois capitalist nature of seventeenth-century English society. ¹⁰⁵

Interesting, though, seventeenth-century Englishmen, whether in the colonies or the mother country, would have had no trouble understanding the perverse behavior we discovered through statistical analysis. Indeed, to them, such behavior was quite normal. Unfortunately we have lost the language that was once so common. Before we can challenge our biases, we need to hearken back to another world and a species of economic analysis that predates Smith and Marx.