The hope of the English King was to use the plantations as a population pressure valve, to ship off his poor, his criminal, his adventurous and his disagreeable to expand his Majesty’s Realm through the creation of plantations, places for the planting of people, which would then one day become provinces. Indeed, by the 1730s the plantations were often referred to, when discussed singularly, as a province. This was the dream that never truly materialized.

The basis for this dream was the system of debt servitude already enshrined in the poor laws and the Magna Carta, the system of debt slavery, which was a system in which the status of “slave for life” was an extreme sentence placed only upon those who refused to abide the system of cyclic slavery in which one fell in and out of bondage and some rose up from bondage into the mercantile class. The virgin nature of The Plantations, the vast, untapped, available resources argued that more than some would rise from servitude, that all or most would rise and the king would have seeded realms upon realms to his ancestral patrimony. The problem was—and this was noted with horror by the King’s census-takers in 1627 and 1627—that the actual economics of destroying a primeval wilderness and replacing it with an agrarian resource extraction economy, in the face of a warlike people occupying and utilizing this fastness as a managed habitat, called for a disposable work force, which was provided by the increasing industry of the home country along with the crop failures and famines precipitated by the Little Ice Age. The British were attempting—and would eventually succeed over two centuries—to do what had taken Rome and Christendom over 1000 years to do in Europe, to kill a continental forest and eradicate its people and/or maim their worldview.

The doomed slaves very rarely “crept from servitude” to take their place as planters but either died, bred another generation of children doomed to debt slavery, or escaped to live with the savages of the slowly retreating forest. South Carolina, the focus of the video below, was the most violent and most atypical of the plantations.

3:40 into this video is the case of a Mister Johnson, a mixed race man who would be regarded as black today, initiating an effort to condemn men to servitude for life, a sentence which had existed for some time in English Poor Laws. By the 1650s, in Plantation Virginia, a small number of the 200 Africans imported as time slaves, as well as their mixed race children, had risen to slave owning status. Within 10 years of the State Assembly session in which it was decided that Africans and Indians could no longer legally traffic European Christians, and it was also decreed that Africans could be held for life—along with any European who ran from his owner 3 times—Anthony Johnson won a county court ruling that he could extend John Castor's term to life. According to the short video below, which defines slavery as only applying to people of African descent, the man who pushed for that ruling was one who wished to traffic in those of his own race. I will have to re-read the arguments supporting the Virginia laws that were presented in The Lies that Bind Us and The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, before appending this video properly. However, with censorship increasing, I thought it prudent to post this source link beforehand. At the time of Anthony's action, the notion held by the Virginia Gentry, was that men of any race could traffic in their own, and that Englishmen could traffic on everybody.

To support this project and view some graphics go to: