John Van Houten Dippel Race to the Frontier, ''White Flight'' And Western Expansion (2006)

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.These lower-class whites bore a stigma of dependence for their failure to makeit on their own, chiefly as tobacco growers, and this psychological scar pushedthem further west.County records from the 1760s and 1770s show that 50 whitefamilies moved out of Lunenburg for every 75 that moved in.Those who left weremostly small farmers.They headed further west, bringing with them a lastinghostility toward the slaves who in their view had prevented them frommaking a livelihood in Virginia s Southside.This displacement of economically1.See, for example, Dabney, Virginia, 188.2.Morgan, Slave Life, 435.3.Beeman, Southern Backcountry, 64.60II.Running for the Virginia Hillsdependent whites represented another negative consequence of slavery s comingto Virginia s Piedmont.1Nor was this impact limited to backcountry Virginia.Further to the south,in the colony of South Carolina, slaves were increasingly being employed to per-form a raft of jobs previously performed exclusively by whites.Working-classwhites in Charleston and inland towns joined forces to vent their outrage at thisdevelopment: shipwrights, chimney sweeps, carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, andother skilled workers took to the streets in one of America s first organized laborprotests.In the Carolina countryside, blacks were also taking over such skilledand semiskilled jobs as blacksmith and creating more anti-slave animosity.2 Atthe bottom of the Southern economic pyramid there was simply not enoughwork for both poor whites and slaves, and, more often than not, it was the wage-earning whites who lost out.Because of the investment already made in them,slaves were invariably the more economical choice.However, it appears thatwhites of little means were not forced out of colonies south of Virginia to thesame extent that they were in the Old Dominion itself.For example, while com-petition from slaves did make survival very difficult for these whites in Georgia,a more diversified economy allowed them to find jobs and remain there.In andaround Savannah, whites worked as cooks, household servants, shoemakers, tai-lors, tavern owners, overseers, and clothing makers.Even though the proportionof blacks in Georgia rose sharply from 20 percent in 1751 to 40 percent in 1773,there is little evidence that this influx led to a large out-migration of poorwhites.3In Virginia, the flip side of this economic coin was accumulating capitalamong the large planters.Despite a steep climb in land prices, their holdingscontinued to grow.This was as true for the Tidewater as it was for the Pied-mont.In the northern Chesapeake, Maryland and Virginia, planters with estatesworth 100 pounds or more consolidated their economic primacy by staying outof debt and setting aside enough money to provide for their heirs.Those at thevery top of the pyramid households owning land valued at over 1,000 pounds supplemented their incomes by moving into other spheres of economic activ-ity.This diversification protected them against future slides in tobacco prices.Some bought goods and sold them profitably to other planters.Others, like Vir-1.Ibid., 68-69, 79, 99.Beeman say that the large number of debt cases in the countysupport this conclusion that many whites could not make a living in Lunenburgduring the second half of the 18th century.2.Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 311.3.For a detailed account of the impact of large-scale slavery in Georgia s non-slaveholdingwhites, see Lockley, Lines in the Sand.He finds evidence that blacks and whitesworking together developed relations that were not highly antagonistic. Instead, biracial interaction sometimes blurred the strict boundaries of race. Ibid., xvii.61Race to the Frontierginia s William Byrd, became venture capitalists; they lent money or dabbled inland speculation, purchasing estates in the Piedmont and then encouragingsmall farmers to migrate there, either leasing or selling off small parcels of land tothe newcomers.Some members of the planter elite opened rural stores, investedin iron making, or entered the highly lucrative professions.By succeeding in these undertakings, the great planters added to theiralready considerable wealth.During the 1730s, for example, the proportion ofestates bordering the northern Chesapeake Bay worth between 100 and 500pounds increased from slightly more than one fifth to nearly one third of thetotal.But, while a handful of families were growing richer, the vast majority ofsettlers, with the least amount of land at their disposal, were not.Farmers whoowned property valued at 100 pounds or less continued to constitute nearlythree fourths of the landowning whites.Conversely, families with farms worth500 pounds or more made up just 2.2 percent of the landed class.1 This sameskewed distribution of wealth could be found inland.The Southside s Lunen-burg County typified the pattern.Whereas most farms there extended oversome 600 acres, the average amount of land owned by a member of the county splanter elite in the 1760s was 1,481 acres.2 Forty miles to the north, in AlbemarleCounty, the richest 10 percent of planters, which included Thomas Jefferson, hadaccumulated 70 percent of the privately-held property and owned over 60 per-cent of all slaves by the time of the American Revolution.3As the Piedmont evolved economically from a frontier backcountry into aheavily settled agricultural region, it came to look more and more like the Tide-water.The same hierarchy became well entrenched.Headed by the planter elite,it included yeoman farmers, tenant farmers, laborers and craftsmen, white ser-vants, freed blacks, and slaves.For several decades, these various groups coex-isted without much conflict largely because they were widely dispersed andhad little contact with one other.At the same time, a prosperous tobacco econ-omy rewarded rich planters and small farmers alike.Thanks to their comparablyaffordable prices, massive tobacco exports from the Chesapeake colonies domi-nated the European market, averaging some 100 million pounds by the early1770s.But this prosperity would be short lived.The coming of war with Englandwould curtail the sale of tobacco overseas.Meanwhile, the intense cultivating ofPiedmont lands quickly exhausted the rich soils.Within a few decades, thebackcountry had lost its agricultural attractiveness.Good acreage becamescarce, and what was still available grew more expensive, making it more diffi-1.Land, Economic Base and Social Structure, 645, 647, 649, 651, 654.2.Beeman, Southern Backcountry, 71, 31.3.Majewski, House Dividing, 15.Thomas Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres in Albemarle whenhis father died in 1757.62II [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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