Analysis: The Present State of Virginia

Date: 1724

Author: Jones, Hugh

Genre: report

Summary Overview

The Present State of Virginia was a short book written to inform British people of conditions in Virginia and the surrounding region. It covers the colony’s population, geography, economy, and political and religious institutions. Like many works on the colonies, its purposes were largely promotional, encouraging interest in and immigration to Britain’s possessions in North America by painting a rosy picture of colonial life. It was one of a group of texts on the colonies produced in the era, and its author, Hugh Jones, even suggested that it be read along with Robert Beverly’s History and Present State of Virginia. The book is not merely descriptive, however, but contains suggestions by Jones on how Virginia and British relations with the colony could be improved.

Document Analysis

These passages from The Present State of Virginia deal with labor relations, specifically slavery and indentured servitude, primarily in an agricultural context as was suited to Virginia’s agrarian economy. Anxious to paint Virginia in as pleasant a light as possible, Jones minimizes the hardships and oppressions suffered by slaves, painting a picture of slavery as an institution that both provided a good life to the slaves and profitable estates to the masters. His praise of slavery accompanies a poor estimate of the mental and emotional capacities of African and African-descended people. However, Jones’s principal ideological goal was not the defense of slavery, which as an institution was not under serious attack at the time, but the encouragement of the immigration of the British poor to the colony, whether voluntarily as free or indentured servants or under coercion, as in the case of convicts. For this reason, he also shows the conditions of white servants as in a very positive way, both during their indentures and afterward, and claims that the colonies offer opportunities to poor British and Irish people.

Jones’s portrait of Virginia was designed to attract English interest and support at a time when many were suspicious of colonial ventures. His parenthetical remark that not all schemes are bubbles is a reference to the South Sea Bubble, a financial crash based on the stock of the South Sea Company that had wiped out many British investors in 1720. Jones claims that Virginia is a going concern, not another potential disaster, and points out that the slave-worked tobacco plantations of Virginia are highly profitable. Like other promoters who wanted to emphasize the economic value of the colonies to Britain, Jones wrote of the great mass of commodities shipped every year from British ports to Virginia, establishing prosperous colonies as valuable markets for British exports. Excluding rival exporters from the British colonies had been a goal since the seventeenth century.

Jones presents some aspects of Virginia culture in a way that would be familiar to British readers, for example, referring to the landowners as “gentlemen,” the same term used for members of the landowning class in Britain. However, although the abolitionist movement had not begun by 1724, slavery and the plantation system was still a major challenge in presenting Virginia to British readers. Part of the reason was the simple issue of unfamiliarity. Britain was not populated by the large numbers of African-descended people characteristic of the southern British colonies, and British agriculture was organized on a far different basis than Virginia plantation agriculture. Although some literature of the time, such as Aphra Behn’s popular novel, Oroonoko (1688), presented slavery as a cruel institution, Jones portrays slavery as practiced in Virginia as a humane institution. One reason for this, he claims, is that African and African-descended people (whom he refers to most often as “Negroes”) are particularly well adapted to the physical conditions of Virginia tobacco plantations. He minimizes the burdens slaves face in their work, which he describes as “not very laborious.” The intense heat characteristic of the Virginia summer he identifies as something the slaves actually enjoy. He also asserts that during the cool, damp times of the season, presumably less congenial to people originating in tropical Africa, their owners protect them from heavy work. The frequent use of the whip and other forms of physical punishment on plantations goes unmentioned.

Of course, slavery was not merely hard physical labor, but also the deprivation of freedom, an important value for Jones’s British readers, who saw Britain as a country enjoying a freedom unique in the world and frequently referred to those living under foreign despotic regimes as “slaves.” Although Jones recognizes that the slaves complained of their lack of freedom, he immediately adds that they do not know what to do with themselves when free. He also points out that many slaves were already slaves in Africa and are thus accustomed to the condition.

A major part of Jones’s praise of slavery consists of favorably contrasting the lot of slaves with that of free workers in terms of material rewards. Jones claims that although both slaves in Virginia and free people in England work as woodcutters, the slaves are better fed. Jones also argues that the slaves were better off in America than they were in Africa, pointing out that many would have been slaves in Africa as well.

Although Jones’s idyllic portrait of slavery has little to do with the harsh exploitation that was the lot of the typical slave, it is somewhat more accurate in depicting Virginia tobacco slavery than it would be in describing other forms of agricultural slavery, such as the sugar slavery of the Caribbean and the rice slavery of South Carolina, which were far more physically debilitating. In these areas, slaves lived shorter lives and reproduced at a much lower rate than in Virginia. By contrast, Jones describes the Virginia slave population as “prolifick,” and such was the reproductive rate on tobacco plantations that Virginia planters were much less dependent on slave importations to maintain their work forces than were planters in South Carolina and the Caribbean colonies, although the expansion of the Virginia colony did lead to large-scale slave importation.

Although Jones emphasizes the carefree life, good working conditions, and plentiful food allegedly available to Virginia slaves, he does not sentimentalize slavery as based on the benevolence of the master, but rather explains that its beneficial nature is rooted in the master’s economic interest. Since slaves were an important economic asset to their owners, it was in the owner’s interest to maintain the slaves’ health and even to care for slave children, who would grow up to be valuable economic assets in the future. (Jones does not touch on the fate of slaves who grew too old or too sick to work and lost their economic value to their master.) Cruel and careless masters were actually harming their own economic interests, as well as their reputations. The same economic incentives extended to overseers, whose compensation was based on a proportion of the slaves’ production. (The sexual exploitation of enslaved women by masters and overseers alike, an important part of the culture of slavery, goes unmentioned, save for a brief reference to mulattoes.)

Jones did little research into the history and lifeways of the slaves themselves, nor were his opinions of the overall benevolence of the system apparently based on conversations with slaves. Jones distinguishes between the slaves born in Virginia, who had adopted, however superficially, the English language and English lifeways, and those recently arrived from Africa. Since a larger proportion of Virginia slaves were American-born, the process of acculturation that Jones observes was more advanced in Virginia (and the other Chesapeake and northern colonies) than it was in colonies farther south. His description of African languages as “various harsh Jargons” is virtually meaningless and reflects a profound cultural arrogance; for African customs, he simply refers his readers to another book. Clearly, he did not regard the African cultural background of the slaves as of significant value, but he did not consider the assimilation of the slaves into English customs as altogether good either. He states that the slaves “affect” the culture of the English, suggesting that they do not wholeheartedly adopt it and that their adoption of English customs is an affectation. Curiously, for a clergyman, he says little of slave religion. At the time, the Church of England that dominated religious life in Virginia was not greatly concerned with converting the slaves, nor did many plantation owners encourage it, although this would change later. There is some evidence that later in his career, as a parish clergyman in Maryland, Jones worked hard to spread Christianity among the slave population. He also distinguishes the African slaves who had been slaves in Africa and are resigned to their lot in Virginia as well from those leaders in African society who had been enslaved by their enemies and have not accepted their enslavement, even in America. These latter figures were not presented as tragic, like the title character of Oroonoko would be in European literature, but as comic—”haughty” and “lazy.”

Jones’s discussion of the nature of the slaves themselves is basically negative. According to him, Africans have an inherently “barbarous and cruel” nature that is only restrained by keeping them under a strict discipline. He clearly thought little of the mental capacities of African-descended people as well. Jones portrays African and African-descended slaves as best suited for hard physical labor and less able to perform skilled labor such as artisanal work. Although he does recognize that slaves trained as artisans are the most valuable slaves, he adds that they are not suited for this work, as could be seen in the relatively poor quality of what they produce. According to Jones, African-descended people are not only inferior in intellectual capacity to whites, but to American Indians as well; the good “Mechanicks” are the plantation owners themselves, and the slaves only perform well under their direction. The difficulties former slaves face in dealing with their new freedom is presented as further evidence that they are not truly worthy of it.

What keeps Jones from fully endorsing the slave society of early eighteenth-century Virginia, ironically, is his positive valuation of the lives of enslaved workers. In effect, he argues that work in Virginia is too good for Africans and that the support given the African population should instead go to the British poor. Like many of his contemporaries, Jones believed that there was not enough work for the poor in Britain itself and that relocating them to Virginia would provide them work to support themselves while enabling Virginia to fill its labor needs without importing Africans. (He does not specify what would happen to the African-descended people already in Virginia if his plan were adopted.) Jones recognizes that this would interfere with the business of slave traders but dismisses this consideration as unimportant. (Slave traders as a class were not highly regarded in colonial society, and elsewhere in The Present State of Virginia, Jones suggests that they should go into other professions.)

Jones sees the solution to Virginia’s labor problem, therefore, as ultimately solvable by encouraging white immigration. The wish to encourage immigration was one he shared with many other writers on the colonies going back to the earliest days of colonization. Jones focuses principally on the immigration of the lower classes who would become workers in America rather than those already doing well in Britain, who would be much harder to persuade, due in part to cultural prejudices. Most English people, Jones asserts, view England as the best country in the world and are reluctant to leave it for another, no matter how bad their circumstances. (Although Jones mentions Scottish, Irish, and Welsh as well as English people in the context of immigration, he ascribes this stay-at-home prejudice solely to the English.) By default, the majority of immigrants were considered the refuse of English society.

Jones views a mass migration of poor British whites to the colonies as the solution for many social problems, including unemployment and petty crime. Although he does not advocate the enslavement of the poor, he does allow for a coercive element in dealing with the criminal classes, in line with the Transportation Act of 1718.

In discussing the fate of white convicts shipped to America, Jones adopts basically the same line that he does with slaves, claiming that convicts live better as servants, with more “Ease and Satisfaction” in Virginia, than they did as either convicts or free people in their home countries. Regarding the contributions made by servants, Jones is most skeptical of those of convicts, many of whom, he claims, would simply renew their lives of crime in a new setting, exert a bad influence on other servants, and ultimately face the same fate—hanging—that they had avoided in Britain itself. However, Jones does not believe that this is true of all transported convicts, nor do problems with individual convicts cause him to question the entire project of convict transportation. He does point to efforts to regulate the number of convict laborers and slaves in Virginia but adds that these efforts have been ineffective.

Jones refers to two Jonathans in dealing with the subject of convict labor. Jonathan Wild was the master criminal of early eighteenth-century London, and before his hanging, he controlled hundreds of thieves and other offenders. “His Forward Namesake” was the tobacco and slave merchant Jonathan Forward, who contracted with the British government to transport convict laborers across the Atlantic after the passage of the Transportation Act. The fact that the government turned to a slave merchant to transport convicts and that Forward won the contract based on being able to ship the convicts for the lowest amount of money per head indicates a connection between the brutalities of the established African slave trade and those of the new convict trade. It also suggests that shipping British workers across the Atlantic was perceived as an economic alternative for slave traders as well as for employers in Virginia. Jones explicitly refers to convict laborers as “enslaved.” Although skeptical of the possibility of reformation in most cases, Jones places convict labor in the context of the need of the American colonies for labor rather than in that of punishment, since he maintains that work in Virginia is relatively easy.

While he believes that African laborers are best suited for hard, unskilled physical work in the hot Virginia sun and not well suited to becoming free workers, Jones emphasizes the diversity of economic options available for white immigrants once they have finished their indenture: In addition to laborers, white immigrants could become overseers, tenant farmers, or artisans. Jones lists a range of occupations that could be followed in Virginia. He maintains that any able-bodied person should be able to support himself. (Jones did not explicitly distinguish between male and female emigrants here, but most of the professions he lists were male professions, and males outnumbered females among emigrants. The principal economic advantage for female emigrants was the ease of finding a husband in a predominantly male society as compared to staying at home.)

Jones endorses the regulation of the movement of laborers, white and black, within Virginia by means of a pass system, where workers who were found away from their place of employment would be required to produce a written pass from their employer or owner. This system prevented the growth of an unregulated, mobile, “vagrant” population, which, like other English social reformers going back to the sixteenth century, Jones sees as a major problem in England itself. Virginia offered the possibility of a far more regulated society, through slavery, indentured servitude, convict labor, and the pass system.

Bibliography

Jones, Hugh. The Present State of Virginia, from Whence Is Inferred a Short View of Maryland and North Carolina. Ed. Richard L. Morton. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1956. Print.

Morton, Richard L. “The Reverend Hugh Jones: Lord Baltimore’s Mathematician.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 7.1 (1950): 107–15. Print.