As masterless men, detached and unproductive, the vagrant poor would acquire colonial masters. For Hakluyt and others, a quasi-military model made sense. It had been used in Ireland. In the New World, whether subduing the Native population or contending with other European nations with colonial ambitions, fortifications would have to be raised, trenches dug, gunpowder produced, and men trained to use bows. Militarization served other crucial purposes. Ex-soldiers formed one of the largest subgroups of English vagrants. Sailors were the vagrants of the sea, and were often drawn into piracy. The style of warfare most common in the sixteenth century involved attacks on nearly impregnable fortifications, and required prolonged sieges and large numbers of foot soldiers. Each time war revived, the poor were drummed back into service, becoming what one scholar has called a “reserve army of the unemployed.”22
The life of the early modern soldier was harsh and unpredictable. Disbanded troops often pillaged on their way home. In the popular literature of the day, soldiers-turned-thieves were the subjects of a number of racy accounts. John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) and others of its kind depicted the wandering poor as a vast network of predatory gangs. Ex-soldiers filled empty slots in the gangs as “uprightmen,” or bandit leaders. “Cony-catchers” literally bagged their booty. These consummate robbers had as one tool of their trade the hook, which was jammed through open windows in order to steal valuable goods. In proposing to ship “our idle soldiers” overseas, Hakluyt aimed to turn con men into actual cony-catchers, shooting rabbits to give hearty substance to the American colonists’ daily stew. In other words, sending veteran soldiers and convicts to America would reduce crime and poverty in one masterstroke.23
Whatever else their lives entailed, vagrants, children of beggars, and ex-soldiers who might be transported to the New World and transplanted onto its soil were thought to be fertilizing wasteland with their labor. Their value was calculated not in humane (or even human) terms, but as a disembodied commercial force. If that proposition seems cold and calculating, it was. In death, they were, to use the operative modern phrase, collateral damage. They had more value to the realm as dead colonists than as idle waste in England. In his grand scheme, Hakluyt imagined disciplined children of English beggars who survived in the colonies as nothing more than a future pool of soldiers and sailors.24
Planting unwanted people in American soil meant fewer temptations to take up lives of crime. Some might actually thrive in the open, vacant land of America—because surely they had no chance at all in the overpopulated labor market back home. Still, one cannot resist the conclusion that the children of the poor were regarded as recycled waste. Their destiny, once these same folk were “bred up” as soldiers and sailors, was to fill out a colonial reserve army of waste men, to be sent to die in England’s wars. Brutal exploitation was the modus operandi of the English projectors who conceived an American colonial system at the end of the sixteenth century—before there were colonies.25
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When Jamestown, the English outpost along the Chesapeake Bay, was finally founded in 1607, the hardships its settlers experienced proved the general flaw in Hakluyt’s blueprint for creating real-life colonies. Defenders of the Virginia Company of London published tracts, sermons, and firsthand accounts, all trying to explain away the many bizarre occurrences that haunted Jamestown. Social mores were nonexistent. Men defecated in public areas within the small garrison. People sat around and starved. Harsh laws were imposed: stealing vegetables and blasphemy were punishable by death. Laborers and their children were virtual commodities, effectively slaves. One man murdered his wife and then ate her.26
After the miscarriage of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke, Jamestown was christened England’s first infant child. Bidding the English patience with Jamestown, the poet John Donne sermonized in 1622, “Great Creatures lye long in the Wombe.” Jamestown’s was a slow, painful birth, attended by scant confidence in its future. That year, a lopsided Indian attack nearly wiped out the entire population.27
The pervasive traumas throughout Jamestown’s early years are legend. Before 1625, colonists dropped like flies, 80 percent of the first six thousand dying off. Several different military commanders imposed regimes of forced labor that turned the fledgling settlement into a prison camp. Men drawn to Jamestown dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work. Not even starvation awoke them from the dream. A new group arrived in 1611, and described how their predecessors wallowed in “sluggish idlenesse” and “beastiall sloth.” Yet they fared little better.28
There were few “lusty men” in Virginia, to repeat Hakluyt’s colorful term. It remained difficult to find recruits who would go out and fell trees, build houses, improve the land, fish, and hunt wild game. The men of early Jamestown were predisposed to play cards, to trade with vile sailors, and to rape Indian women. A glassblower was sent to make colored beads—trinkets to sell to the Indians. This was Hakluyt’s idea. But where were the husbandmen needed to raise food?29
Impracticality, bad decisions, and failed recruitment strategies left the colony with too few ploughmen and husbandmen to tend the fields and feed the cattle that were being shipped from England. Jamestown lost sight of the English creed expressed in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): that every productive society prized its tillers of the earth. More wrote that in failing to promote husbandry, “no commonwealth could hold out a year.”30
John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, took these words to heart. In 1609 he introduced the strain of tobacco from Bermuda that Virginia’s settlers succeeded with, and tobacco quickly became the new gold—the ticket to wealth. Its discovery led to a boom economy, bringing high prices for the “filthy weed.” Tobacco was at once both a boom and bane. Though it saved the colony from ruin, it stunted the economy and generated a skewed class system. The governing council jealously guarded what soon became the colony’s most precious resource: laborers. The only one of Hakluyt’s lessons to be carefully heeded was the one they applied with vengeance: exploiting a vulnerable, dependent workforce. 31
The governor and members of his governing council pleaded with the Virginia Company to send over more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves, were sold to the highest bidder. Indentured servants were hoarded, overworked, and their terms unfairly extended. Land was distributed unequally too, which increased the class divide. Those who settled before 1616, who had paid their own passage, were given one hundred acres; after that date, new arrivals who paid their own way received only fifty acres. More important, from 1618, those who brought over an indentured servant received an additional fifty acres. The headright system, as it was known, allotted land by counting heads. More bodies in a planter’s stable meant more land. Significantly, if a servant died on the voyage over, the owner of the indenture still secured all of his promised acreage. It paid to import laborers, dead or alive.32
Contracts of indenture were longer than servant contracts in England—four to nine years versus one to two years. According to a 1662 Virginia law, children remained servants until the age of twenty-four. Indentures were unlike wage contracts: servants were classified as chattels, as movable goods and property. Contracts could be sold, and servants were bound to move where and when their masters moved. Like furniture or livestock, they could be transferred to one’s heirs.33