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The Planters of Colonial Virginia
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
76 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2009
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August 7, 2022
The planters of the 17th-century Virginia colony, as historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker sees it, were not the sort of people that a modern reader might envision upon seeing a book with a title like The Planters of Colonial Virginia. They were not the elegant slaveholding planters forcing hundreds of people to work for them in the fields while they lived the life of leisure in a riverside mansion house. Rather, Wertenbaker says, they were virtuous, independent yeomen, who were unafraid of hard work; but they were subverted, subjected to unfair competition, by the introduction of slavery into colonial Virginia. And if you find that interpretation of Virginia’s colonial history more than a bit self-serving (as I know I do), then you are already starting to sense the tensions that you may feel if you choose to take up Wertenbaker’s 1922 book The Planters of Colonial Virginia.
Looking at Wertenbaker’s first and middle names, one might not be surprised to learn that he was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, or that he earned all of his university degrees, including his Ph.D., from the University of Virginia. Wertenbaker made the history of the Old Dominion – and mainly its colonial history – his life’s work, with books like Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia; or, The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (1910); Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688 (1914); Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia (1958); two different books on Nathaniel Bacon’s 1675-76 rebellion against the colonial government of Virginia; and of course The Planters of Colonial Virginia. Before his final illness made him unable to continue with his work, he had all but finished a history of the Virginia port city of Norfolk. Truly, Thomas Jefferson might have been proud of his 20th-century namesake.
Recruited away from U.Va. by Woodrow Wilson himself, Wertenbaker came to Princeton University in 1910, and began what would be a decades-long career at Princeton. A hard-working educator, popular with Princeton undergraduates and revered by the graduate students he mentored, Wertenbaker also served as chair of Princeton’s History Department, and as president of the American Historical Association. And like his namesake Thomas Jefferson, Wertenbaker was invited into membership in the American Philosophical Society. To call Wertenbaker’s career as an historian successful would be an understatement.
Reading The Planters of Colonial Virginia, one certainly sees the characteristics of Wertenbaker’s work that made him such an eminent historian of his time. He has the eye for detail that characterized classical historians like Herodotus and Thucydides and Tacitus, and he is interested in capturing the reality of the times he studies, writing early in the book that “Tidewater Virginia for the English settlers was a pest-ridden place. The low and marshy ground, the swarming mosquitoes, the hot sun, the unwholesome drinking water combined to produce an unending epidemic of dysentery and malaria” (p. 37). It’s certainly not the Colonial Williamsburg or Jamestown Settlement picture of early Virginia life.
Wertenbaker chronicles the steps that the Virginia Colony took in its efforts to induce settlers to come to this promising but daunting new land. “In the early days of the settlement a law was passed designed to stimulate immigration, by which the Government pledged itself to grant fifty acres of land to any person who would pay the passage from Europe to Virginia of a new settler” (p. 32). The planters needed labor – meaning, at the time, English workers who would commit themselves to serve out an indenture for someone who had paid their passage. “The only drawback was the long and expensive voyage across the Atlantic”, Wertenbaker tells us, and therefore “the planters turned to the simple expedient of advancing the passage money to the immigrant, and of placing him under strict legal bonds to work it out after reaching the colony” (p. 29). This was the well-known system of “indentured servitude.”
Wertenbaker was diligent, indeed inexhaustible, in searching through primary-source records, as one can see from his observation that “In fact, the names of fully three-fourths of all the persons who came to the colony, whether as freemen or servants during the first century of its existence, are on record at the Land Office in Richmond” (p. 32).
Further evidence of how carefully Wertenbaker consulted his primary sources can be found when he writes about how, in order to look at the question of how many indentured servants in 17th-century Virginia “succeeded in establishing themselves in the Virginia yeomanry”, he reviewed the records of colonial governor Francis Nicholson and found that “Nicholson’s rent roll of 1704 supplies a complete list, with the exception of those in the Northern Neck, of every landowner in Virginia” (p. 97). One can imagine how long it took Wertenbaker to look through all those records.
Wertenbaker’s review of these primary-source records is not simply for the sake of showing off his bona fides to fellow historians who might be jealous that he, and not they, can boast membership in the American Philosophical Society. Rather, he wants to support the point he seeks to make regarding the non-slaveholding yeoman planter. He was, in Wertenbaker’s view, the real hero of the saga of 17th-century Virginia – a hardworking small farmer, in contrast with to the slaveholding grandees who would lord it over vast estates in a later Virginia:
Turning to the various records of the time that deal with the distribution of land – deeds, wills, transfers, tax lists, inventories – we find that these conclusions are fully borne out. All reveal the fact that the average plantation, especially in the seventeenth century, so far from vying with the vast estates in existence in certain parts of America, was but a few hundred acres in extent. (pp. 43-44)
The tobacco-growing plantation colony of Virginia had its economic ups and downs, but its population and its output of tobacco for the mother country both grew. It seems significant, therefore, that “In the period from 1660 to 1725 there was, as we shall see, an exodus of poor whites from Virginia” (p. 37). The reason for that emigration of impoverished Anglos from Virginia, as Wertenbaker sees it, can be traced back to the moment, decades earlier, when “In 1619 a Dutch privateer put into the James River and disembarked twenty Africans who were sold to the settlers as slaves” (p. 27).
As importation of enslaved Africans to colonial Virginia increased, Wertenbaker tells us, it became steadily more difficult for the yeoman farmer with a small farm to compete with slaveholding planters who could, and did, steadily increase their holdings in both land and enslaved people. “Prior to the…close of the Seventeenth century and the opening of the Eighteenth, the most important factor in the life of the Old Dominion was the white yeomanry” (p. 59). Yet slaveholding took hold as the labor system, to the point that yeoman farmers who wanted to compete with the great planters had to become slaveholders themselves. “The Virginia which had formerly been so largely the land of the little farmer had become the land of masters and slaves. For aught else there was no room” (p. 154).
What makes these passages from The Planters of Colonial Virginia difficult, even disturbing, is the way in which Wertenbaker’s reverence for the white Virginia yeoman planter of the 17th century is combined with an evident lack of concern for the African men, women, and children who were brought to Virginia as slaves. Wertenbaker calls slavery “the institution which was to play so sinister a part in American history” (p. 125); and while I see concern in Wertenbaker’s pages regarding how slavery affected the development of the United States, I don’t see much concern in Wertenbaker’s pages regarding the effect of slavery upon enslaved people.
I do wish that Wertenbaker, in the midst of his expression of concern for how slavery affected the unfortunate white yeoman farmer of 17th-century Virginia, could have spared a word for how slavery affected black Africans who were brought to North America against their will – who were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and brought to Virginia, under the most horrifying circumstances imaginable, because there were large numbers of white Virginians, whether yeoman farmers or not, who were more than willing to purchase fellow human beings and hold them in bondage. The simple fact is that there were plenty of Wertenbaker’s virtuous yeomen who, when the proverbial chips were down, were only too ready to engage in the devil’s bargain – entering the world of slaveholding, when doing so meant the chance to rise in power and influence within their society.
Wertenbaker concludes by stating that “the Virginia of the eighteenth century, the Virginia of…Washington and Jefferson, was fundamentally different from the Virginia of the seventeenth century, the Virginia of Sir William Berkeley and Nathaniel Bacon. Slavery had wrought within the borders of the Old Dominion a profound and far-reaching revolution” (p. 164). True enough. I would just liked to have seen a word or two on behalf of the people who were held in slavery – their lives, their travails, their dreams of achieving freedom and self-determination for themselves and their families.
The Planters of Colonial Virginia, in the Kindle edition that I have, is 561 pages long. Yet Wertenbaker’s text ends on page 164; the following 400 pages consist of reprintings of primary-source documents like rent rolls. The book, judging from some reviews that I have read on my Kindle, seems to be of value to a number of readers for its value as a genealogical resource.
While I respect Wertenbaker’s hard work and his undeniable talent as an historian, I cannot recommend The Planters of Colonial Virginia as a work of Virginia history. But if this book helps you with some future project of family genealogy, then I wish you well in your work of tracing the history of your Virginia ancestors.
Looking at Wertenbaker’s first and middle names, one might not be surprised to learn that he was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, or that he earned all of his university degrees, including his Ph.D., from the University of Virginia. Wertenbaker made the history of the Old Dominion – and mainly its colonial history – his life’s work, with books like Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia; or, The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (1910); Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688 (1914); Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia (1958); two different books on Nathaniel Bacon’s 1675-76 rebellion against the colonial government of Virginia; and of course The Planters of Colonial Virginia. Before his final illness made him unable to continue with his work, he had all but finished a history of the Virginia port city of Norfolk. Truly, Thomas Jefferson might have been proud of his 20th-century namesake.
Recruited away from U.Va. by Woodrow Wilson himself, Wertenbaker came to Princeton University in 1910, and began what would be a decades-long career at Princeton. A hard-working educator, popular with Princeton undergraduates and revered by the graduate students he mentored, Wertenbaker also served as chair of Princeton’s History Department, and as president of the American Historical Association. And like his namesake Thomas Jefferson, Wertenbaker was invited into membership in the American Philosophical Society. To call Wertenbaker’s career as an historian successful would be an understatement.
Reading The Planters of Colonial Virginia, one certainly sees the characteristics of Wertenbaker’s work that made him such an eminent historian of his time. He has the eye for detail that characterized classical historians like Herodotus and Thucydides and Tacitus, and he is interested in capturing the reality of the times he studies, writing early in the book that “Tidewater Virginia for the English settlers was a pest-ridden place. The low and marshy ground, the swarming mosquitoes, the hot sun, the unwholesome drinking water combined to produce an unending epidemic of dysentery and malaria” (p. 37). It’s certainly not the Colonial Williamsburg or Jamestown Settlement picture of early Virginia life.
Wertenbaker chronicles the steps that the Virginia Colony took in its efforts to induce settlers to come to this promising but daunting new land. “In the early days of the settlement a law was passed designed to stimulate immigration, by which the Government pledged itself to grant fifty acres of land to any person who would pay the passage from Europe to Virginia of a new settler” (p. 32). The planters needed labor – meaning, at the time, English workers who would commit themselves to serve out an indenture for someone who had paid their passage. “The only drawback was the long and expensive voyage across the Atlantic”, Wertenbaker tells us, and therefore “the planters turned to the simple expedient of advancing the passage money to the immigrant, and of placing him under strict legal bonds to work it out after reaching the colony” (p. 29). This was the well-known system of “indentured servitude.”
Wertenbaker was diligent, indeed inexhaustible, in searching through primary-source records, as one can see from his observation that “In fact, the names of fully three-fourths of all the persons who came to the colony, whether as freemen or servants during the first century of its existence, are on record at the Land Office in Richmond” (p. 32).
Further evidence of how carefully Wertenbaker consulted his primary sources can be found when he writes about how, in order to look at the question of how many indentured servants in 17th-century Virginia “succeeded in establishing themselves in the Virginia yeomanry”, he reviewed the records of colonial governor Francis Nicholson and found that “Nicholson’s rent roll of 1704 supplies a complete list, with the exception of those in the Northern Neck, of every landowner in Virginia” (p. 97). One can imagine how long it took Wertenbaker to look through all those records.
Wertenbaker’s review of these primary-source records is not simply for the sake of showing off his bona fides to fellow historians who might be jealous that he, and not they, can boast membership in the American Philosophical Society. Rather, he wants to support the point he seeks to make regarding the non-slaveholding yeoman planter. He was, in Wertenbaker’s view, the real hero of the saga of 17th-century Virginia – a hardworking small farmer, in contrast with to the slaveholding grandees who would lord it over vast estates in a later Virginia:
Turning to the various records of the time that deal with the distribution of land – deeds, wills, transfers, tax lists, inventories – we find that these conclusions are fully borne out. All reveal the fact that the average plantation, especially in the seventeenth century, so far from vying with the vast estates in existence in certain parts of America, was but a few hundred acres in extent. (pp. 43-44)
The tobacco-growing plantation colony of Virginia had its economic ups and downs, but its population and its output of tobacco for the mother country both grew. It seems significant, therefore, that “In the period from 1660 to 1725 there was, as we shall see, an exodus of poor whites from Virginia” (p. 37). The reason for that emigration of impoverished Anglos from Virginia, as Wertenbaker sees it, can be traced back to the moment, decades earlier, when “In 1619 a Dutch privateer put into the James River and disembarked twenty Africans who were sold to the settlers as slaves” (p. 27).
As importation of enslaved Africans to colonial Virginia increased, Wertenbaker tells us, it became steadily more difficult for the yeoman farmer with a small farm to compete with slaveholding planters who could, and did, steadily increase their holdings in both land and enslaved people. “Prior to the…close of the Seventeenth century and the opening of the Eighteenth, the most important factor in the life of the Old Dominion was the white yeomanry” (p. 59). Yet slaveholding took hold as the labor system, to the point that yeoman farmers who wanted to compete with the great planters had to become slaveholders themselves. “The Virginia which had formerly been so largely the land of the little farmer had become the land of masters and slaves. For aught else there was no room” (p. 154).
What makes these passages from The Planters of Colonial Virginia difficult, even disturbing, is the way in which Wertenbaker’s reverence for the white Virginia yeoman planter of the 17th century is combined with an evident lack of concern for the African men, women, and children who were brought to Virginia as slaves. Wertenbaker calls slavery “the institution which was to play so sinister a part in American history” (p. 125); and while I see concern in Wertenbaker’s pages regarding how slavery affected the development of the United States, I don’t see much concern in Wertenbaker’s pages regarding the effect of slavery upon enslaved people.
I do wish that Wertenbaker, in the midst of his expression of concern for how slavery affected the unfortunate white yeoman farmer of 17th-century Virginia, could have spared a word for how slavery affected black Africans who were brought to North America against their will – who were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and brought to Virginia, under the most horrifying circumstances imaginable, because there were large numbers of white Virginians, whether yeoman farmers or not, who were more than willing to purchase fellow human beings and hold them in bondage. The simple fact is that there were plenty of Wertenbaker’s virtuous yeomen who, when the proverbial chips were down, were only too ready to engage in the devil’s bargain – entering the world of slaveholding, when doing so meant the chance to rise in power and influence within their society.
Wertenbaker concludes by stating that “the Virginia of the eighteenth century, the Virginia of…Washington and Jefferson, was fundamentally different from the Virginia of the seventeenth century, the Virginia of Sir William Berkeley and Nathaniel Bacon. Slavery had wrought within the borders of the Old Dominion a profound and far-reaching revolution” (p. 164). True enough. I would just liked to have seen a word or two on behalf of the people who were held in slavery – their lives, their travails, their dreams of achieving freedom and self-determination for themselves and their families.
The Planters of Colonial Virginia, in the Kindle edition that I have, is 561 pages long. Yet Wertenbaker’s text ends on page 164; the following 400 pages consist of reprintings of primary-source documents like rent rolls. The book, judging from some reviews that I have read on my Kindle, seems to be of value to a number of readers for its value as a genealogical resource.
While I respect Wertenbaker’s hard work and his undeniable talent as an historian, I cannot recommend The Planters of Colonial Virginia as a work of Virginia history. But if this book helps you with some future project of family genealogy, then I wish you well in your work of tracing the history of your Virginia ancestors.
October 20, 2023
First written in 1922, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker lays out the historical background that framed the economy of colonial Virginia. Basically England was in competition with other nations for world dominance. Whoever is king of trade in the Far East and beyond rules the world.
Thus England's goal was to colonize the New World in order to derive a profit in the trade market. Unfortunately free labor enhanced that profit, so England imposed slavery in Virginia (and the other colonies).
Although there is much detailed historical record and documented data galore from the research of records of the 17th and 18th century, the book left out a few details:
When England imposed the slave trade onto Virginia (and the other colonies), they also bound the Planters to it. The Planters were not allowed to free their slaves or even to enact legislation (through the House of Burgesses which was the government system of representation among the Planters) to free slaves.
In short, England forgot that Virginians were also Englishmen (and thus tensions between the Burgesses and the Crown arose long before the 18th century). This is heavily detailed in the book through the analysis of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 (which some historians describe as a precursor to the American Revolution one hundred years later.)
Even worse, England forot that the slaves were human beings. A terrible cycle began in the 17th century. In the 18th century the Planters rose against the Crown. It was the Era of Enlightenment and the consciouses of the new generation of Planters were stricken.
Also not mentioned by the author yet abounding in penned on paper in the 18th century was the Planter's knowledge that tobacco destroyed the land. Slavery was not profitable. It was dying out. The Planters of Virginia (and some of the other colonies) were known to educate their slaves to prepare them for a life a freedom. The Founder Fathers from Virginia (of the Planter class) also advocated for the freedom of slaves when the Declaration of independence and Constitution were written.
"Historians have often expressed surprise at the small number of Tories in Virginia during the American Revolution. The aristocratic type of society would naturally lead one to suppose that a large number of the leading families would have remained loyal to the Crown. Yet with very few exceptions all supported the cause of freedom and independence, even though conscious that by doing so they were jeopardizing not only the tobacco trade which was the basis of their wealth, but the remnants of their social and political privileges in the colony."
The last half of the book provides documentation of all the 17th and 18th century records from which the author derived the data listed in this book.
Thus England's goal was to colonize the New World in order to derive a profit in the trade market. Unfortunately free labor enhanced that profit, so England imposed slavery in Virginia (and the other colonies).
Although there is much detailed historical record and documented data galore from the research of records of the 17th and 18th century, the book left out a few details:
When England imposed the slave trade onto Virginia (and the other colonies), they also bound the Planters to it. The Planters were not allowed to free their slaves or even to enact legislation (through the House of Burgesses which was the government system of representation among the Planters) to free slaves.
In short, England forgot that Virginians were also Englishmen (and thus tensions between the Burgesses and the Crown arose long before the 18th century). This is heavily detailed in the book through the analysis of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 (which some historians describe as a precursor to the American Revolution one hundred years later.)
Even worse, England forot that the slaves were human beings. A terrible cycle began in the 17th century. In the 18th century the Planters rose against the Crown. It was the Era of Enlightenment and the consciouses of the new generation of Planters were stricken.
Also not mentioned by the author yet abounding in penned on paper in the 18th century was the Planter's knowledge that tobacco destroyed the land. Slavery was not profitable. It was dying out. The Planters of Virginia (and some of the other colonies) were known to educate their slaves to prepare them for a life a freedom. The Founder Fathers from Virginia (of the Planter class) also advocated for the freedom of slaves when the Declaration of independence and Constitution were written.
"Historians have often expressed surprise at the small number of Tories in Virginia during the American Revolution. The aristocratic type of society would naturally lead one to suppose that a large number of the leading families would have remained loyal to the Crown. Yet with very few exceptions all supported the cause of freedom and independence, even though conscious that by doing so they were jeopardizing not only the tobacco trade which was the basis of their wealth, but the remnants of their social and political privileges in the colony."
The last half of the book provides documentation of all the 17th and 18th century records from which the author derived the data listed in this book.
July 18, 2012
This public domain reprint from 1922 provides some fascinating insights on the evolution of the Virginia plantation economy from its beginnings in 1607 to the mid-18th Century. Wertenbaker is especially curious about how large scale plantations squeezed out yeoman farms, especially after slavery really took hold ca. 1700, and how imperial trade policies set in London, particularly during the later Stuart years, impacted Virginia incomes. Modern readers will find Wertenbaker's subtle but painfully racist perspective offputting.
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