Arthur Noll
In an earlier article, the Pilgrim and Jamestown experience that led to our American Thanksgiving holiday was discussed. In part, it was said and I quote:
The history of the colony was chronicled by Governor William Bradford in his book, Of Plimouth Plantation, available at many libraries. Bradford relates how the Pilgrims set up a communist system in which they owned the land in common and would also share the harvests in common. By 1623, it became clear this system was not working out well. The men were not eager to work in the fields, since if they worked hard, they would have to share their produce with everyone else. The colonists faced another year of poor harvests. They held a meeting to decide what to do.
As Governor Bradford describes it,
“At last after much debate of things, the governor gave way that they should set corn everyman for his own particular… That had very good success for it made all hands very industrious, so much [more] corn was planted than otherwise would have been”. The Pilgrims changed their economic system from communism to geoism; the land was still owned in common and could not be sold or inherited, but each family was allotted a portion, and they could keep whatever they grew. The governor “assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number for that end.”
Bradford wrote that their experience taught them that communism, meaning sharing all the production, was vain and a failure:
“The experience that has had in this common course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst Godly and sober men, may well evince the Vanities of the conceit of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of propertie, and bringing into commone wealth, would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.”
Their new geoist economic system was a great success. It looked like they would have an abundant harvest this time. But then, during the summer, the rains stopped, threatening the crops. The Pilgrims held a “Day of Humiliation” and prayer. The rains came and the harvest was saved. It is logical to surmise that the Pilgrims saw this as a was a sign that God blessed their new economic system, because Governor Bradford proclaimed November 29, 1623, as a Day of Thanksgiving.
Thinking further about the history of Jamestown and the Pilgrim experience, I think there are other important factors to be considered, that make me question the conclusion that changing the social structure was solely responsible for the success of the colonies.
In both cases, there was a learning curve. People were coming from England, which in spite of being further north in latitude, had a milder climate than what the Pilgrims found. This was probably a terrible surprise to them, since understanding that the weather coming off a land mass would be much colder even further south, than the English weather coming from the Gulf Stream, was beyond the knowledge of the day. The Jamestown colony further south, was more comparable in weather, but even so, the weather conditions were difficult. The Jamestown colonists immediately were faced with several years of severe drought, that would have been difficult for anyone. I do not know what the agricultural, hunting and fishing and gathering experience of the colonists was, but even if it had been extensive, the new lands, plants, animals, and weather would have required a lot of adjustment. I do not believe that many domestic animals were brought over to begin, disallowing sources of food with which they might have been familiar. No cows or goats to easily turn the abundant green vegetation into milk and meat, sheep to turn it into wool and meat. No oxen to plough the fields, left untended by the natives killed by earlier smallpox epidemics that had raced up the coast from Spanish explorers, and likely growing grass, weeds and brush, tough to eradicate. The natives had likely slashed and burned the fields in the beginning, and abandoned them if the grass and weeds took over. It would have been impossible to get them back with just bone hoes. The native system was to cover the soil as completely as possible with crops of corn, beans and squashes grown together, shading out the competition from weeds, and fertilize with fish. Abandon and start over if fertility was lost, or if weeds and grass got too established. The Europeans were used to having the aid of draft animals to keep a field open, and manure from animals to fertilize. Given where they had come from, slashing and burning big trees would have seemed incredibly wasteful -which it is-, but strangely enough, the effort to kill a very large tree is tiny compared to the effort to kill the grass that will grow in the area shaded by that tree. You only need to cut away the bark and inner layer of bark and wood to cut off the life of a tree, and the sunlight reaches the ground even if you don’t cut it down completely. Grasses evolved to survive trampling, repeated grazing. Without draft animals, though, it is very hard to be a farmer any other way, than by periodically getting a new field from the forest. The colonists would have had to learn the methods of the natives, using fish to fertilize, smothering competition in the planting method, working without the aid of draft animals. People might have worked very hard, only to fail, because of putting energy down paths that did not have a good return. It is possible they gave up their communist systems just as they were really learning how to cope, and these systems would have turned out ok if they had just hung on a little longer. It should also be remembered that while they were on their own to a large extent, ships did start going back and forth, bringing these animals, more tools, more people.
I have also read that the Pilgrims discovered after the first couple of years that they were not the first Europeans there, fishing villages that were completely commercial enterprises, meaning no women or children in them, had been established on islands on the Maine coast, and immediately upon the discovery of these, trade for fish was established, taking the edge off of their needs for food.
But the other factor aside from the details of agriculture, was that all these people had grown up in market economies. They wanted to give communist structures a try, but this was a big adjustment by itself. That they felt plagued by people not working hard enough, indicates a level of distrust of each other typical of the independent agent market society they were trying to leave behind. With no clear understanding of how to get food and shelter, mistakes could easily be blamed on the system of government that felt new and strange, rather than admitting that it was really ignorance of the details of how to live there. People often don’t work hard if they are not sure of what they are doing, have doubts it will work. Faced with a field of established grass and weeds, and only a hoe and shovel, despair that this will work is a likely-and realistic- reaction. What their intellectual foundation was for the communist system is not recorded. We have a glimpse of their intellectual capabilities, they were prone to see “signs” for the rightness or wrongness of actions, in totally unrelated weather phenomena, as when the Pilgrims felt that God had told them they had made the right decision to change the social structure, when a drought broke. This doesn’t indicate to me a strong intellectual foundation. With a firm grasp of their interdependence, and exactly why a market system leads to problems later on, it seems they might have made the change. It seems to me that the intellectual understanding was weak, and the psychological attraction to the familiar way they had been raised , combined with the need to learn a new land, was too much, and they gave up. The help they could get that was most familiar and trusted was from the market system, supplies from England, fish from the fishermen. Whatever they had set out to do, living in the stone age was not the goal, and the native’s knowledge was bound to be viewed with suspicion.
It is quite possible that with the learning curve ascended to close to the point of success, old dreams of greed began to reemerge. The land and ocean was incredibly lush, they could likely start to see the possibility of being rich.
In short, the same forces that lead to the small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers in England becoming farmers, and exchanging money, and led to the conditions of rich and poor and overpopulation, soil depletion, they were trying to leave behind, were at work all over again. They were like an alcoholic that swears to quit, does so, and regains health, only to succumb to the siren song again.
I think the experience of these colonists should be compared to another, similar group of colonists, the Viking Greenland colonists. These did not start off with ideas of leaving behind the market. From the beginning to the end, by all indications, they were deeply governed by markets and the church. They could not let go of these forces, even when the fields were overgrazed, the weather changed, and adaptation to live more like the Eskimos was called for, to survive. I think this shows the depth of psychological conditioning, to really change the way we have grown up with is very difficult. Even in the face of death, and with the example of the Eskimos for how to live successfully, they could not do it. They vanished from history. The Pilgrims and the Jamestown colonists could not do it either. They apparently saw the need for change, but could not cling to that need firmly enough. The price of failure for the Vikings was death. The price of failure for the others was putting off the need for change a little longer.
We must be “born again”, to reach the “kingdom of heaven”. The bonds of psychological comfort we have grown up with, must be broken and replaced with new sources of comfort. This is a painful process that is difficult to do, just as childbirth is difficult and painful. Faith and understanding of the intellectual grounds for the change are the only rock in the emotional storms that arise from the attempt to change. If this rock is not solidly grounded in reality, and firmly held on to, the change will not happen.