History is one of those subjects, that depending on the
subject and the observer, the story can change significantly. The amount of
time and care an observer decides to spend on any historical topic is
important. For this reason, it’s important to take any representation of
history with a grain of salt. It’s safe to assume that license has been taken
for the sake of brevity at best or ignorance at worst.
Recently watching “America: the story of us” on the History
channel, I became engaged in the segment on Jamestown and Plymouth. Always a
fan of pre-American Revolution history, I was excited to see how they might
relate the plight of the early Americans. Jamestown and Plymouth faced similar problems in maintaining
enough food to feed themselves.
Anyone that needs a refresher, Jamestown was founded in 1607
as a product of the Virginia Company.
The segment in “America” picks up where John Rolfe, the pioneer in
tobacco production, comes into Jamestown. According to the show, “Rolfe finds
at Jamestown Hell on earth. More than 500 settlers made the journey before
Rolfe. Barely 60 remain. It’s called the ‘starving time’…The
English arrive unprepared for this new world, and unwilling to perform manual
labor. Instead of livestock, they
bring chemical tests for gold.” The program fails to address though why the
Englishmen, who had risked their lives in the trans-Atlantic trip, could not be
compelled to work, despite George Percy’s 1607 account that the land was “good
and fruitfull”.
According to Tom Bethell in his seminal work on historical
property rights The Noblest Triumph, “The
colonists were indolent because most of them were indentured servants, expected
to toil for seven years and contribute the fruits of their labor to the common
store before becoming freemen.” This communal property system inhibited the
efforts of all the individuals in the camp. This true race to the bottom for
ambition created massive shortages of food.
Sir Thomas Dale rectified this problem upon his arrival in
1611. He immediately split up all the land, giving each man three acres to use
to his own ends. The only requirement on the property was that the man devote
one month in community service and deposit two and a half barrels of corn to
the store house every year.
What was the result of letting individuals of being largely
responsible for their own fortunes? According to John Rolfe in 1616, “Whereas
heretofore we were constrained yearly to go to the Indians and intreate them to
sell us corne…now the case is altered; they seeke to us ¾ come to our townes[…]to buy
corne”.
How does this differ from the narrative of the “America”
project? The portrayal is that John Rolfe had come into town, planted black
market tobacco seeds, and the colony took off. Needless to say, a family can’t sustain simply off of
tobacco. With the irregularity of new shipments, the colonists couldn’t depend
on trading tobacco for the products imported. It was the distribution of
property to individuals, rather than public ownership, that allowed Jamestown
to feed itself.
The story of property rights in Plymouth weren’t much
different. At the end of 7 years, the property would be equally distributed
between the investors in England and the Pilgrims working the land. From the
start, the workers disagreed with the communal property stipulation, but the investors
demanded it. Here again, we see that these individuals felt unmotivated to be
productive.
When the Governor decided after years of failure to split
the land, the scene changed dramatically. Bethell writes of William Bradford’s
account of the pilgrims before and after the transition, “the community was
afflicted by an unwillingness to work, by confusion and discontent, by a loss
of mutual respect and by a prevailing sense of slavery and injustice. And this among ‘godly and sober men.’
Therefore the land they worked was converted into private property, which
brought ‘very good success.’ The colonists immediately became responsible for
their own actions.”
How does this compare to the “America” narrative again?
The program does a good job showing the dynamic between the
Native Americans and the Pilgrims. It puts a heavy emphasis on the sense of
community between these two groups. (The Native Americans, wanting their own
expansion of lands, bartered their knowledge of fertilization in the poor soils
of Plymouth for weapons to take over a rival tribe). This is likely accurate,
but misses the point of receiving the knowledge of fertilization. Even after
this knowledge was disseminated, the colony could not feed itself. The effect
in “America” is accurate, but the cause shown ignores all besides the glossy
Thanksgiving report we all learned in grade school.
The moral of Jamestown and Plymouth is that, left to their
own devices, people must and choose to take care of themselves. The moral of this essay? History must told
from the eye of the beholder. When looking at any topic, look for many
beholders.
