The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

primarily carried on by ship from the larger plantations, where smaller farmers
could bring their tobacco and order shipments of supplies in return from Great
Britain. Scottish merchants began offering an alternative around the 1740s, setting
up trading posts that competed with the London merchants’ former monopoly.
Books were part of their trade, and the new merchants brought the price of reading
material down. 27
Labor was always short in the Chesapeake colonies. Originally, indentured
servants primarily shipped from London did the work in the fields. The “enclosure”
of English lands by the aristocratic landlords created a huge number of beggars,
especially in London prior to 1650. Many of the settlers had been forced to
emigrate, and servants made up three-quarters of the Chesapeake settlers in the
seventeenth century. They typically were required to work under extremely harsh
conditions from four to seven years, and then received clothes, tools, and fifty acres
of their own land if they survived the indenture. After 1665, freedmen could rarely
obtain their own farms in Virginia. Such “headrights” resumed in 1705 after the
native Indians were pushed farther back. 28 The former servants sometimes started
their own farms in the Virginia backcountry or in Maryland. Slaves were imported
from Africa beginning early in the seventeenth century, and after Bacon’s Rebellion
in 1676, plantation owners turned to slaves rather than servants as a more lucrative
system of labor. Slaves required a larger initial investment than indentured servants,
but it was a long-term advantage for the wealthiest landowners that helped to
consolidate the hierarchical social structure. 29 In 1730, the population of Virginia
27 Hugh Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” in Amory and Hall, eds., Colonial Book,
30-31. David A. Rawson, “ ‘Guardians of their Own Liberty’: A Contextual History of Print
Culture in Virginia Society, 1750 to 1820” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1998),
150-153.
28 Taylor, American Colonies, 119-152. The “headright” system awarded land, typically fifty
acres, for each person who traveled to the Virginia colony. A man who paid for travel for himself,
family members, and servants would receive fifty acres for each person. Indentured servant would
also get fifty acres of land if they completed their term of servitude.
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