A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies

Some things never change.

A reconstruction of “Jane,” believed to have been eaten by her Jamestown neighbors

An important problem one must solve when running a country is to induce people to work. There is a spectrum of solutions between two extremes: leave people alone (libertarianism) or force them to produce at gunpoint (communism):

• When you leave people alone, they face the possibility of failure; they will have no shelter, no food, and may lack other necessities unless they work to produce them. This seems cruel if one believes that people are incapable of solving their own problems. However if one believes that people are capable, then leaving them alone affords them the greatest incentive and freedom to survive on their own.
  

• The opposite approach seems more compassionate: provide people with guaranteed income, housing, food, etc. But this system kills the incentive to produce, so the promises of security are empty: the government cannot actually guarantee anything if nobody is producing anything. Communist societies respond to production failures by forcing people to work under penalty of imprisonment, torture, or worse.

The first two “permanent” American colonies, Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620), provide amazing illustrations of the effects of incentives. Both were initially communist, as specified in their contracts with their investors. All assets were held by a commonwealth. There was no individual property, so nobody could accumulate personal wealth; everything went into the common store.

So: these early communities were formed with no concept of private ownership – everything was communal, as befits people creating their own version of Heaven on Earth. And yet, in community after community, this grand experiment failed.

Jamestown Settlement, 1607

In December 1606, the Virginia Company sent three ships to the New World with a total of 133 colonists, only 105 of whom disembarked at Jamestown the following May. Among them was Captain John Smith, a soldier-adventurer and promoter of the company, who became its chief historian. He is said to have later saved the colony from starvation during the winter of 1608-1609 by obtaining corn from the natives he had befriended. But handouts were not enough; in 1614 Smith wrote: 

“When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly together, glad was he who could dip from his labor, or slumber over his task he cared not how; nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true pains in a week as now for themselves they will do in a day. Neither cared they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, so that we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty as now three or four do provide for themselves. To prevent which, Sir Thomas Dale has allotted every man three acres of clear ground, in the nature of farms … who are exempted, but for one months’ service in the year, which must neither be in seed-time nor harvest, for which doing, no other duty they pay to the store but two barrels and a half of corn.”

Was this a fluke, perhaps some character defect of Europe’s first colonists in what is now Virginia? Apparently not.

Plymouth Colony

A decade later William Bradford, the primary historian of a similar social experiment being conducted in the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony, had this to say regarding a different group of people settled in a different place:

“So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the governor (with the advice of the chief among them) gave way that they should set corn, every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go on in the general way as before.

And so was assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance), and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The experience that was had in the common course and condition, tried sundry years and that among godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times – that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes, etc. with the meaner and younger sort thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery: neither could many husbands well brook it.

Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God has set among men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be reserved among them. And it would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men having this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The results were stark: People without individual incentives will literally starve rather than do the work required to produce a sufficient common food supply. Both colonies survived only because they abandoned their "common store" and allowed each family to keep most of the food it produced, resulting in enormous well-documented behavior changes. So while the communist/socialist approach always sounds good on paper, it is actually the cruelest option, but because so many people (especially the young) are ignorant of the role of incentives in stimulating production, our societies eventually walk themselves down the road of "compassionate" self-destruction.

Even more astounding (to me) is the fact that I eventually encountered Smith’s and Bradford’s writings only by chance.* Essentially all accounts of Jamestown and Plymouth would have you believe that the settlers’ sufferings were caused by uncontrollable New World conditions, like:

• unfamiliar vegetation,

• cruelty of the climate,

• and occasional hostilities of the natives.

While these may have been contributing factors, the reality was quite different. People in a communist society quickly realize that the results of any extra effort they expend are diluted among the whole community, reducing their incentive so much that they work very little and consequently produce very little.

This raises two interesting questions:

• Why do our history books generally supply their own narratives about the causes of the settlers’ starvation rather than quote the explanations of the historians who were actually there?
  

• If highly motivated people who had already survived seasons of near-starvation cannot be induced to produce enough food under a communal system to avert yet more poverty (despite their having the ability to produce everything needed), what are the prospects for the rest of us?

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* In 1992 I was convinced by a door-to-door  salesman to acquire a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which still occupies most of one of my bookcases. As a bonus, it came with a 21-volume set called the Annals of America.  Annals contains original writings of persons associated with what would ultimately become the USA, starting with Christopher Columbus’ 1493 report detailing his first voyage to “the Indies,” which was actually what we now call the Bahamas. My set sat untouched for years before I started reading the whole thing to my wife, item by item, at bedtime. From Annals I learned to not necessarily trust history books, which tend to contain their authors’ opinions rather than the original texts of people who actually lived the experience. For example, one can read numerous accounts of Jamestown and Plymouth, both in print and online, without encountering a single mention of the fact that the men documenting both colonies attributed their near failures to their communistic social contract, or that both colonies turned around dramatically after reverting to a system of personal incentives. Can it be that our modern historians intentionally omit what is arguably the most important lesson one can learn from reading the real story?

==== ADDENDUM OF 10/6/2024

I should have noted that “communism” was not necessarily the ideological preference of the individual colonists, whose economic inclinations I do not know because I’ve never seen them documented.

Jamestown was a corporate venture funded by English investors of the Virginia Company of London. The stockholders, not the colonists, owned the land. Jamestown settlers arrived just as the Company approved its Second Charter of Virginia. Modern readers have the disadvantage of not having lived within the cultural context of the authors, so I’ll try to supply some.

At the time, far less than one percent of England’s land was owned by the people who lived on it; almost all land was held and subdivided by the wealthy elite (dukes, earls and other appointees of the king, who ultimately and actually himself owned all the land). Even today, according to one source who has claimed to have done much research, “Half of England owned by less than 1 per cent of population”.

In the Second Charter’s Article VI we see that the company claimed ownership of the entire territory of Virginia, and in the tradition of England at the time, would operate it under a system of “soccage”, in which residents paid rent to the owner(s). Since the settlers did not themselves own any land, they were essentially tenant farmers whose produce was presumably also the collective property of the corporation. Although the charter does not state it explicitly, in the absence of an encompassing cash economy, the settlers’ rent would have been paid at least partially in the form of agricultural output. Presumably then such collective output would have become the collective property of the shareholders. I should note, though, that it is only in the testimony of John Smith (rather than in any of the company’s charters) that I see an explicit reference to Jamestown’s practice of collective food production and distribution in the earlier years.

It was only in the company’s fourth charter (of 1618), referred to as “Instructions to George Yeardley” (Article XLVII of the “Great Charter”), that settlers were offered actual property ownership (fifty acres upon completion of a three-year occupancy), apparently as an inducement to new settlers as a result of the colony having fallen into disrepute (as implied in the 1612 Third Charter).

There are some sources who claim that the later Plymouth Colony was dramatically different from Jamestown, being founded by nothing more than a group of disaffected individuals seeking freedom from the Church of England, who somehow got to North America under their own power. This is utterly preposterous; the settlement of colonies in North America at the time was a phenomenally expensive undertaking, comparable to the sending of a manned vehicle to the Moon today. The financing of such a venture could have been undertaken only by a corporation with considerable assistance from its government.

Plymouth Colony was financed by a sister company of the Virginia Company of London, namely the Virginia Company of Plymouth, which by 1620 had been reorganized and renamed the Plymouth Council for New England, which drafted the Plymouth Charter, whose text I am unable to find. Whatever it contained, the Plymouth settlers discarded it on the basis of the fact that they had not arrived at their intended destination, and instead drafted their own Mayflower Compact, which is nothing more than a couple of paragraphs conveying a general intent to stick together and abide by whatever laws the colony might eventually establish. This is how a group of religious idealists managed to live under their own rule in the absence of a company charter.

Unfortunately I cannot find any record of any written charters from the 1620s until the First Charter of Massachusetts (of 1629), which I cannot find online, but that charter was written by another company (the Massachusetts Bay Company) and it governed a different group of settlers (the Massachusetts Bay Colony) traveling to a different location, and so it does not apply to Plymouth Colony.

Considering that the residents of Plymouth were ardent religious fanatics, it is not hard to imagine that they may have governed themselves in a communal (i.e. communistic) manner, similar to that of similar, later American theocratic dictatorships (e.g. the Amana Colonies), whose communistic ideologies are well documented by those who lived in them.

So while the residents of Jamestown, living under the dictates of a company charter, might not have agreed with the communal arrangements (particularly the sharing of food), it is likely that the residents of Plymouth initially inflicted communism upon themselves. This is reinforced by Bradford’s text, in which he lays the fault for Plymouth’s early communistic arrangement squarely at the feet of the settlers themselves.

If you find it strange to imagine that our initial settlers lived under communistic arrangements, consider that there’s no reason to expect these people to have been free-market capitalists. The companies that mounted these expeditions probably had to look hard to find groups of people who were inclined to take a one-way trip to a totally unknown land filled with unimaginable hostilities. Small wonder, then, that the initial settlers were religious idealists who likely imagined that through divine intervention they could not possibly fail. It would be many generations before these settlers’ distant descendants would conceive of the United States.

Broad-based capitalism requires significant government infrastructure. Ironically, our capitalist system relies entirely upon protection from government (even Libertarians don’t seriously discuss privatizing our military). But in initial settlements, there is no such infrastructure.

Imagine a modern-day colonization of Mars. The settlers’ situation there would be far more extreme than that of those in Jamestown and Plymouth; their survival would depend entirely upon physical infrastructure supplied exclusively by the corporation. There are no surrounding cultures into which they might escape if dissatisfied enough to leave. Would the corporation declare ownership of territory on behalf of its sponsoring government? Who would defend that claim? Unless he was a billionaire himself, how could a settler purchase land acquired by a corporation at a cost of tens or hundreds of millions per acre? What is the bargaining power of a settler who couldn’t survive even one second without the company-supplied life-support system?

Interesting questions, indeed.