XVII. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE VIRGINIA PLANTER AND THE LONDON MERCHANT

By JOHN SPENCER BASSETT,

PROFESSOR, TRINITY COLLEGE.

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THE RELATION BETWEEN THE VIRGINIA PLANTER AND THE LONDON MERCHANT.

By JOHN SPENCER BASSETT.

The London Company, which projected the settlement of Virginia, was at bottom a trading company. Although it had certain creditable notions of serving the Fatherland and the Church of England, it never would have made the various attempts to plant and sustain the colony if there had not been behind its efforts the notion that the company would reap financial reward in return for its expensive outlays. As a trading company it had before its eyes for an example the success of the Muscovy and East India companies, and it not unnaturally sought to reach its gains in much the same ways as those employed by those companies. It was natural for it to think that a vineyard planted with so much pains and cultivated at so much expense ought to be reserved for its private advantage. It accordingly sought to monopolize the trade of the colony. It established a regulation by which all persons who traded with the colony in an independent relation were to be arrested and fined 24 per cent of the amount traded for if they were Englishmen and 5 per cent of the same if they were foreigners. As for the trade of the company itself, each member wrote opposite his name the amount which he adventured in the enterprise, and the profits were to be divided in the same proportion. The goods sent by the company were to be in the hands of the Cape Merchant and his two clerical assistants. He was not a trader so far as the colonists were concerned, for all things were owned in common. It was not till private property was allowed that there appeared a modification of this relation. Studley was the first Cape Merchant of the company, and after his death in the first summer of the colony's existence he was succeeded by Smith."

a Bruce: Economic History of Virginia, II. 261-263.

There were three classes of persons who violated this monopoly: The seamen on the ships which came to the colony, the officials of the company in the colony, and independent traders.

Of the first class it may be said with great show of truth that they were the first to violate the regulation. This breach certainly appeared as early as 1608, when there came to the colony the "second supply" of provisions for the people. At that time dire want had held the people for some months. There sprang up, as soon as the ships arrived, an illicit trade between the sailors and the inhabitants. The latter were in such a state of want that they could not be satisfied with the slow, and in some other senses unsatisfactory, manner of distribution adopted by the officials. They began with the recklessness of hungry men to barter their furniture, their articles of luxury which they had brought from England with them, and their very implements for the food which the seamen smuggled ashore from the ships. It was only through the most rigorous measures that this trade could be checked.

The violation of the monopoly by the officials of the company resident in Virginia was not of so frequent occurrence as that by the seamen, but it sometimes happened. The most notable instance of it was in the governorship of Argall. That shameless officer stopped at no measure to line his nest at the expense of both company and inhabitants; but his favorite method in regard to the trade was to wink at the violations of the monopoly by captains of ships and by independent traders. The Cape Merchant himself was not above suspicion in regard to this kind of wrongdoing."

As to the introduction of the independent traders, there is but little direct evidence. The monopoly as first established was to expire in 1616. So little profit had been realized out of the enterprise at that time, however, that the company was loath to surrender its advantage. It accordingly created a private corporation known as "The Society of Particular Adventurers for Traffic with the People of Virginia in Joint Stock," and in this corporation the company and its members took shares. It attempted, moreover, to restrict the trade of the colony to the new association, but in this it was not successful. The people of Virginia were not willing to have their

a Bruce: Economic History of Virginia, II, 282-286.

commerce bound in such narrow lines. The company tried to retain the full monopoly while it seemed to relinquish it. Thus it provided that independent traders should be allowed to buy freely of the inhabitants everything but tobacco and sassafras." This grant, which may seem on the surface to be a considerable concession, was in fact not much of a concession, for there was but little produced in the colony that was worth bringing away besides tobacco and sassafras. About the same time the strictness of this regulation was relaxed so much as to allow persons to send, on their own account, provisions to the colony if the members of the company refused to subscribe to the stock of the corporation which had the monopoly. So fast did the independent trader get a foothold that in 1621 the entire crop of tobacco was marketed to him and and sent out of the colony before the arrival of the somewhat tardy ships of the company. From that time till the end of the company's rule in 1624 there was no improvement in these conditions. The trade had become practically open to the world. The repeal of the charter brought a complete removal of restrictions. From that time the independent dealer went up and down the Virginia rivers in full confidence in his mastery of the situation.

The independent trader appeared first in the colony as a ship captain. With his ship loaded with such goods as he thought the people would need, he came into the rivers with offers to trade. As between him and the company's agents there was the usual advantage of him who enters competition with a clear head and with the incentive to quick turns and shrewd dealings against a sedate and rather clumsy agent of government. He undersold the agent. He was in the first instance frequently the owner of his ship and of his cargo. But sometimes he was merely agent for the owner. He established a warm and familiar relation with the inhabitants along the James, and his periodic trips to the colony were looked forward to with something more than the interest one felt in the arrival of one's supply of winter clothing. He was an emissary from that world of happy memory which all the people, except the children, had once lived in. He brought the news of friends in England, or at least he brought information about political happenings. In the dreariness of the

a Bruce: Economic History of Virginia, II, 280–282.

bIbid. 291.