American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

This chapter shows how increasing racist contempt was accompanied by an increase in the “status of lower-class whites” (338). Once Africans and Indians were moved to the plantations, life for white poor, servants, and freedmen started to improve.

Problems with homelessness and poverty remained, however. In 1723 the assembly passed a law akin to the workhouse laws in England. The colony’s parishes were responsible for caring for their destitute, and masters too were not allowed to free slaves, in part because they might try to free the old and those who could no longer work, to remove their responsibility to clothe and to feed them. By the middle of the 18th century, “small planters” were the majority of the “free population” (343). With a temporary rise in the price of tobacco, the lives of small and big planters alike improved.

The main changes wrought by slavery, however, were the “social, psychological, and political advantages” (344) that accrued to the small planter when they aligned with the big planters against the enslaved. Because the ruling class feared slave and servant insurrection, they told all whites that they were superior, then they offered new benefits to bring small planters and other whites into the fold.