Plymouth tried common property in 1621 and nearly starved before 1623

Every November, schoolchildren across America cut out paper hats and make turkeys out of their own hands, and a lesson is delivered about gratitude and friendship. It is a lovely lesson. It also leaves out the single most interesting economic fact about the colony that gave us the holiday: the Pilgrims tried an experiment in common property, it did not work, and the man who ran the colony wrote down exactly why.

That man was William Bradford, and what he wrote is one of the great primary sources of American history. It is also one of the most inconvenient for anyone who thinks the answer to scarcity is to share everything and hope. So let us do what we should do with any important document: read what it says, and then ask what it proves and what it does not.

The document and its author

Of Plymouth Plantation is the history of the Plymouth colony written by William Bradford, who was elected governor of the colony many times and served in that office for most of its first three decades. Bradford wrote it between 1630 and 1651. The manuscript was lost to public view for a long time, turned up in England in the nineteenth century, and was returned to Massachusetts in 1897. It is the principal source for what happened to the Pilgrims, and Bradford was there for all of it.

The text uses seventeenth-century spelling. The passages below are given in the modernized spelling that is common in printed editions, and I have kept them short; for the complete text, consult a reliable edition in a library. Where I am not certain of the exact wording, I paraphrase and say so.

The setting: a contract with investors

First, how the colony was financed. The Pilgrims, a group of English Protestants who had left England for the Netherlands and then decided to settle in America, did not have the money for an expedition of their own. They struck a deal with a group of London investors, the Merchant Adventurers, led in the negotiation by a merchant named Thomas Weston. The arrangement was a joint-stock venture. Settlers and investors held shares; the colony would send back fish, furs and timber to repay the investors; and for the first seven years, the contract provided that the colonists' labour and the colony's produce would be held in a common stock, with the land and houses to be divided among the shareholders at the end of the term.

Understand what this is. It was not an ideological experiment in the modern sense. The Pilgrims did not begin with a theory of communal property. The contract with the investors imposed it, as a way of keeping the venture's accounts as a single pool until the debts were settled. That is important for fairness: when we discuss what went wrong, we are discussing an arrangement that was partly a financial structure and partly a way of life, and the two cannot be separated.

The Mayflower reached Cape Cod in November 1620, and the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth. In that first winter, disease and exposure killed about half of the people who had made the voyage. The survivors were weak, and the first spring and summer depended on whatever they could plant and on help from the Wampanoag, including the English-speaking Squanto, Tisquantum, who taught them how to plant corn. The harvest of autumn 1621 was a success, and the celebration that followed is the event we remember as the first Thanksgiving.

What Bradford wrote about the common store

Now to the passage that matters. In his account of the year 1623, Bradford looks back at the early arrangement and explains why it was abandoned. He begins by noting that the colony had been suffering from want, and that a better way had to be found. He then describes what the colonists did: after much debate, the governor, with the advice of the leading men, allowed each family to plant corn for itself, and assigned to every family a parcel of land.

His judgment of the result is the line that people quote:

"This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious"

He goes on to say that much more corn was planted than would otherwise have been, and that the women, who before had claimed weakness and inability when asked to work in the fields for other men's families, now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to plant corn.

Read that carefully. Bradford's claim is not that the common arrangement was cruel. It is that it was a poor motivator. Before the change, he says, the young men resented working for the benefit of other men's wives and children, without any recompense, and the strong and able felt it unjust that they should have no more share of the produce than the weak who contributed less. Even the husbands, he says, did not like to see their wives treated as servants of other men.

Then comes the passage that is the center of the historical argument. Bradford reflects on what the experience showed. His view was that the idea of removing private property and bringing in community in a commonwealth was a conceit of certain ancient and later philosophers, and that experience showed its vanity. He noted that the arrangement had been tried for some years, and among godly and sober men, which made the failure all the more telling. And he added, of the philosophers' idea, "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."

Pause on the last phrase. For a Puritan governor, the point was theological as well as practical: human beings are fallen and respond to incentives, and a system that assumes otherwise is arrogant. Whether or not one shares his theology, the empirical report is clear. Under the common system, people did not work as hard. Under the family-plot system, they did.

The numbered argument

Let me lay out what Bradford's record shows, in order.

One. The colony was hungry under the common store. Bradford's account of the early years records shortages and hardship, and it is explicit that the change of 1623 came after a period of want.

Two. Incentive was the problem, in his judgment. His explanation is not a lack of skill or of land but a reluctance to work hard for a share that was the same whether you worked hard or not.

Three. The remedy was property. Each family was given its own parcel and was allowed to keep what it produced. In practical terms, the colony recognized that the person who bears the cost of an effort should enjoy the reward.

Four. The result was more food. More corn was planted, and the hunger that had stalked the colony eased.

Five. The lesson was drawn by the person with the most at stake. Bradford was not a modern economist with a thesis to sell. He was a governor who was trying to keep a colony alive and who changed course because the first approach was failing.

Jamestown: the same lesson, two years earlier

The Plymouth story echoes an earlier one. At Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, the colonists also operated under a joint-stock company, and the early years were lethal. The winter of 1609 to 1610 is remembered as the Starving Time, when most of the colonists died.

Captain John Smith, who led the colony for a time, issued a rule in 1609. He told the colonists that he that would not work should not eat, and that they must obey it as a law. The principle was that every man would be required to contribute to the common effort, and that idleness would be met by the withholding of food. Smith left Virginia in late 1609, and the Starving Time followed. Jamestown later moved toward private allotments of land, and its fortunes improved, aided by the rise of tobacco as a cash crop.

The rule that "he that will not work shall not eat" is a very old principle. It is in Scripture, and it has been the working rule of every successful community. A conservative need not take any particular position on the details to see the point: a system that severs the link between effort and reward invites the free rider, and the free rider drains the rest.

The strongest objection: the historians' caveats

Now the other side, and there is a serious one. Some historians have argued that the "Pilgrims learned the lesson of socialism" story is too neat. They point out several things.

First, the common-stock arrangement was imposed by the investors' contract, not freely chosen as a social theory; so the failure, if it was one, was a failure of a financial structure and not of a philosophy. Second, the colony faced many hardships that had nothing to do with property: a late arrival in the season, a brutal first winter, the shock of disease, and a harsh and unfamiliar environment. Third, in the 1621 to 1623 period, new arrivals strained the food supply. Another ship, the Fortune, reached Plymouth in November 1621 with additional settlers and very few supplies, so the colony had many more mouths to feed than it had planned for. Fourth, a drought in the summer of 1623 threatened the crop, and Bradford himself records a day of prayer and the rain that followed. Fifth, the investors' terms were harsh and kept changing, and the colony remained in debt to them for years, and in 1627 it divided its cattle among households, one of the early steps toward private holdings.

These are fair points, and a careful reader should hold them in mind. Here is how I would answer.

One. No single factor explains everything, and I do not claim one does. The weather, the disease and the new arrivals all mattered. My claim is narrower: Bradford himself, a participant, judged that the incentive structure was part of the problem, and the change in 1623 was followed by a significant improvement. That is his testimony, and it is the testimony of a man who had no ideological stake.

Two. The investors' contract explains the origin of the arrangement, not its performance. Whatever the reason it was adopted, the colonists lived under it, and the people who lived under it reported on how it worked. Their conclusion was that it did not work well. The fact that the arrangement was imposed by contract does not make the result any less informative.

Three. The drought cuts both ways. If the 1623 harvest had to survive a drought and yet was good enough to end the hunger, that strengthens the claim that the change in planting arrangements mattered. A new system that works in bad weather is a stronger system.

Four. The pattern recurs. Jamestown, as above, ran a similar common arrangement and had its own crisis. Later colonies that gave settlers land of their own grew faster. When the same lesson is learned in several places, it is hard to dismiss it as an accident of one colony.

I will add a note of honesty. Historians continue to debate the weight of each factor, and anyone claiming that this one source settles the whole question of socialism is claiming too much. What it does is something more modest and more useful. It shows a group of devout, motivated people, who had every reason to make a communal system work, finding by experience that the plan was a poor fit for human nature and adjusting.

What it means for us

The point is not that cooperation is a bad thing. The Pilgrims cooperated enormously, in a covenant they made aboard the Mayflower and in the work of raising houses and defending the settlement. The point is that voluntary cooperation among free people who keep the fruits of their effort is a different thing from a system where the reward is separated from the work and spread by command.

For the broader record of what happens when governments try to enforce the second arrangement across a whole economy, see Venezuela was once Latin America's success story, and then came socialism, cuba's ration book and more than sixty years of promises at the bodega and eight socialism myths tested against the countries that actually tried it. For the economic reasoning that explains why incentives and prices matter so much, profit is a signal, not a sin, and what a loss tells a company is a good companion. And six myths about robber barons, sweatshops and the age of capitalism shows how the same reasoning applies to the American economy that followed.

Measure it against the Founders

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew the Plymouth story. It was part of the heritage of New England, and John Adams was a descendant of that tradition. The Constitution's protection of property is consistent with the lesson Bradford drew. The Fifth Amendment says that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." James Madison, in an essay on property written in 1792, argued that a man has a property in his opinions and in the free use of his faculties, as well as in his land and goods. The idea was that property is not a favour granted by the government but a right that the government is instituted to protect.

That is the American inheritance: a nation that began in hunger found that when people are allowed to keep the fruit of their labour, they plant more corn.

The case in brief

1. The Pilgrims began under a contract with London investors that held the colony's produce in a common stock, and the early years included serious want.
2. Governor Bradford's own history records that in 1623 each family was given its own parcel to plant, that this "made all hands very industrious," and that much more corn was planted.
3. Bradford drew the lesson that removing property and bringing in community had not made the colonists happy and flourishing, and Jamestown, under Captain John Smith's rule that those who would not work would not eat, told a similar story.
4. Historians rightly add drought, new arrivals and the investors' harsh terms, but those factors do not erase the testimony of the man in charge or the pattern repeated elsewhere.
5. The American tradition of protecting property, in the Fifth Amendment and elsewhere, rests on this lesson of experience.

What you can do: find a printed edition of Of Plymouth Plantation at your library, read the passage on the year 1623 for yourself, and share it with a teacher or parent who is preparing a Thanksgiving lesson.