The Pilgrims Tried Common Property and Went Hungry Until Bradford Changed It

Every November someone tells a story about the Pilgrims, and every November someone else stands up to say that the first story is a myth. It is the only annual tradition in which the turkey gets the least abuse. I would like to do something more useful than pick a side in a seasonal quarrel. Let me set out what actually happened at Plymouth Colony in its first years, what the man who ran it said about it in his own words, and what the story does and does not prove.

The short version: a small band of English settlers, sailing for a patron's money, agreed to hold their land and labor in common. They came close to dying, and many did. Within three years the governor, William Bradford, changed the system and assigned land to each family to farm for itself. The harvest improved. Bradford wrote it down, and the passage has been quoted ever since. The argument is whether that story proves what conservatives say it proves. I think it proves a good deal, and I think it proves less than the most enthusiastic tellers claim. I will show you both limits.

Terms

Common property. Land, tools and the products of labor owned collectively, with output going into a common store and drawn out by need or by rule. In this post, that is what "communal" means.

Socialism. The word did not exist in 1620, and I will not pretend that Plymouth was a modern socialist state. I use it, as the site's category does, in its general sense: an economic order in which the means of production are held in common and distribution is decided by a central authority instead of by the producers' own exchange. Plymouth in its early years matches the first part of that definition, and in a small way the second.

Incentive. The reward a person expects for his effort. The claim in this post is about incentives, and it is the oldest argument in economics: people work harder and plan better when they keep the fruits of their work.

The setting: Mayflower, Compact and winter

The Pilgrims were English Separatists who had left the Church of England, spent years in the Netherlands, and decided to cross the Atlantic to live as a congregation under their own covenant. In September 1620 the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England with 102 passengers. In November they sighted Cape Cod, far north of the Virginia territory their patent covered.

Before anyone went ashore, forty-one men signed the Mayflower Compact on November 11, 1620, by the old calendar, aboard the ship in what is now Provincetown Harbor. In modernized spelling, they agreed to "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic" for their "better ordering and preservation," and to enact "just and equal laws" for the general good of the colony, to which they promised "all due submission and obedience." This is a founding document of self-government, written by people with no king in the room, and it deserves its place beside the documents discussed in The Northwest Ordinance Banned Slavery From a Territory Bigger Than France. It was a compact among equals, made voluntarily.

Then came the winter. The settlers lived mostly aboard the ship while they built shelters ashore. Sickness struck, probably a mix of scurvy and respiratory illness aggravated by exposure and poor food. By spring, about half the company was dead. Bradford himself lost his wife, Dorothy, who drowned in the harbor in December; no one who was there left an account of how. That is the story of the first winter, and nobody can blame an economic system for it. People died of cold, disease and a late arrival. No system of property would have prevented it.

Squanto, Massasoit and the first harvest

The colony survived the spring because of its relationship with the people who lived there. In March 1621 an Abenaki man named Samoset walked into the settlement and greeted them in English. He was followed by Tisquantum, called Squanto, a member of the Patuxet people, whose village had stood on the site of Plymouth before an epidemic killed its inhabitants a few years earlier. Squanto had been taken to Europe and had learned English. He became an interpreter and, according to Bradford, directed the settlers how to set their corn and where to take fish.

In the spring of 1621, Governor John Carver and the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit made a treaty of peace and mutual aid that held for decades. Carver died soon after, and Bradford was chosen governor, an office he would hold, with interruptions, for most of the next three decades. In the autumn, after a harvest, the colonists held a celebration with Massasoit and about ninety of his people, as described in a contemporary account. We keep that feast as the first Thanksgiving, though no one at the time called it that.

I tell this part of the story with some care because it complicates the lesson. The Plymouth settlers were not saved by economics alone. They were saved by friendship, by hard work, and by a native people who chose to help. Any account of the colony that leaves out Massasoit and Squanto is bad history. But the story of the colony's economy also continues, and so does the argument.

The contract: seven years in common

The colony was paid for by a group of London investors, the Merchant Adventurers, headed by a businessman named Thomas Weston. The terms were set out in a contract. The settlers would go to America and work. The investors would put up money for ships and supplies. Everything the colony produced, and all the land and houses, would be held in common stock for seven years. At the end of the seven years, the assets would be divided between the planters and the investors. Shares were set at ten pounds each, and a settler's labor counted as a share.

In the first years that is how Plymouth was run. Everything went into a common store, and was drawn out by the governor's allocation. Crops were planted and harvested in common. Nobody owned a plot.

What Bradford wrote

Bradford began writing his history, now called Of Plymouth Plantation, around 1630, and kept at it for years. It is the main source for the colony's early life, and it is honest about the colony's failures. Here is what he says about the common system, in modernized spelling. The wording is close to his own, but check it against a reliable edition before quoting it.

He says the arrangement "was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." The young and able men, he says, "did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense." The strong man, or the man of ability, "had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could," and this "was thought injustice." He reports that the older and more respected men resented being put on a level with the young, and that married women resented working for other men, which they thought a kind of slavery.

Then he describes what changed. In 1623, after a poor season, the leadership decided to let each family plant for itself. Bradford says they "assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number," for present use, though they did not make a division for inheritance. The result, he says, "had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." The people were content. Even the women went into the field with their children, he adds, who before would have pleaded weakness and been excused.

And he draws the conclusion. The experience of the common course, "tried sundry years and that amongst 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."

That is the passage everyone quotes, and it has the unusual distinction of being a government report that admits the plan failed. Notice that it is a contemporary account by the governor who made the decision. He is not a later pamphleteer. He was there.

The argument, in numbered premises

Here is the case, stated as I would put it.

1. The colony was organized around common property in its first years. That follows from the contract with the investors and from Bradford's account.
2. Under that system, the colony had shortages and resentment. Bradford says so in plain terms, naming the discontent of the young men, the older men and the women, and the "confusion" that retarded work.
3. In 1623, the governor assigned land to families, and production rose. Bradford says more corn was planted, and that hunger eased. Later in that same chapter Bradford says that God gave them plenty and that the face of things was changed.
4. The mechanism is incentive. When a man works a field whose crop is his own family's, he plants more, tends it better and wastes less. When the crop goes into a common store, the link between effort and reward is cut, and the natural tendency is to let someone else carry the load. Bradford saw this and said it. Economists have named it many times since.
5. The lesson generalizes, with care. A colony of a hundred godly and sober people with a shared religion and a strong sense of duty is a favorable case for common property. If it failed there, it is unlikely to succeed in a country of three hundred million strangers.

I want to be careful about premise five. It is an inference. The case does not prove that every collective arrangement must fail, because families, congregations, partnerships and co-ops operate on shared property all the time. What it suggests is that scale and incentive matter, and that a system which cuts the link between work and reward will have to compensate with some other force, such as coercion, to keep production up. You can see the force of that in the larger and darker experiments of the twentieth century, which this site's other socialism posts examine.

The best reply from the skeptics

Here is the objection, at its strongest, as some historians have put it.

First, the common arrangement was not a social philosophy. It was a term in a business contract imposed by investors who wanted to protect their stake. The settlers did not choose it as an ideal. When the contract ended, or was bought out, the colony changed. The story is about the investors' contract, not about socialism.

Second, the early deaths were mostly disease, a late start and a poor food supply, not property rules. To credit the 1623 change with ending hunger ignores that the colony had been learning the local conditions, had better relations with its neighbors, and had received new settlers and supplies.

Third, Bradford was a believer in a moral argument and wrote his history with a purpose, to teach later generations. Historians should use his account with care and should not treat the end of common stock as a controlled experiment.

Fourth, a more careful reading shows the colony did not go from "socialism" to "capitalism." The assignment of land in 1623 was for planting only, not for inheritance, and the final division of property came in 1627, when a group of Plymouth men took over the investors' claims by agreement, and land and cattle were divided among the households.

The answer to the skeptics

These are fair points, and I take most of them.

The contract point is correct, and it strengthens the argument. If the colonists had chosen common property out of conviction, the story would be one about an idea. Since they inherited it from a contract, the story is about what happens when people live under such a system and then see the results. And note what the colonists did when they saw the results: they changed the rules. They changed them without a revolution or a decree from afar. They did it because the governor and the people could see what was happening and had the power to act. That is the better part of the lesson. It is a story about a self-governing community learning from its own experience.

The disease point is also correct for the first winter, and I have said so. But the first winter is not what Bradford is describing when he talks about the common course. He is describing the following seasons, where the cause of the shortfall was not sickness but the work habits and resentments that the arrangement produced. He was a witness to that, and nobody else was in a better position to say.

On Bradford's bias, historians are right to read him critically, and a good reader does. But the passage is not the only evidence. The pattern of assignment in 1623, the increased planting, and the later division of land and livestock in 1627 are all consistent with it. The simplest explanation for why the colony kept moving toward private holdings is that private holdings worked.

On the fourth point, the colony did not become a free market overnight, and I do not claim it did. A Puritan community had many rules about conduct and trade. What changed was one thing, the link between a family's labor and a family's harvest, and it is enough to make the point.

There is one more comparison worth making. Jamestown, the English colony in Virginia, went through its own terrible winter in 1609 and 1610, the "starving time," when most of the settlers died. A few years later, under Sir Thomas Dale, Jamestown moved toward private three-acre plots for settlers, a change that some historians and commentators credit with improving its fortunes. Two colonies, a thousand miles apart, learned the same lesson in the same decade. That does not settle the question, but it is a pattern, and patterns are what historians look for.

What the story is not

Let me end with the limits, because a good argument states them.

It is not proof that regulation or taxation are wrong. It is not an argument against charity, which the Pilgrims practiced faithfully. It is not a claim that the Pilgrims were libertarians, which they were not. It is not a claim that the native people were bystanders. And it is not a story about a perfect founding. It is a story about a small community that tried something, saw the result, and changed course because it could.

What it does show is that incentives are real, and that the attempt to abolish them has a long record of disappointment. That is a modest claim, and it has the great merit of being true.

If you want to see how the same principle played out on the large scale, Two Railroads Across America and the One James J. Hill Built Without Land Grants compares a railroad built on private risk with the subsidized ones, Henry Ford's Five-Dollar Day and the Assembly Line That Built a Middle Class and Andrew Carnegie Went From Bobbin Boy to Steel King and Then Gave It Away show incentive-driven work in industry, and The Cherry Tree, the Flat Earth and Other History Myths Traced to Their Source corrects the legend about how the Pilgrims dressed.

The case in brief

1. The Plymouth colonists held land and labor in common under their contract with London investors, and early on they had shortages and resentment.
2. Governor Bradford, writing in his own history, said the arrangement bred confusion and discontent, and that assigning land to each family in 1623 made everyone industrious.
3. The skeptics are right that the common system came from a contract and that disease, not property, explains the first winter, but the later seasons and the 1627 division point the same way.
4. The lesson is about incentive and about a self-governing community correcting itself, and it reaches no further than the evidence.

What you can do: read Bradford's chapter on the year 1623 in a reliable edition of Of Plymouth Plantation, and read the Mayflower Compact aloud with your family at Thanksgiving.