Episode Details

In early Maryland, the money in a man's pocket was a leaf. Tobacco was the colony's currency — wages, debts, fines, and the minister's salary all reckoned in pounds of cured leaf. A refuge founded for conscience had to pay for itself, and tobacco was how. But the crop was hungry for two things above all: land, and labor.

This is the story of the world the refuge was actually made of. The headright system that turned every imported human into fifty acres and concentrated the colony's land in the hands of the great planters. The indentured servants — three-quarters of all who came — young, poor, and bound for years, sold a cheerful future by the recruiter George Alsop and dying in hard numbers of the Chesapeake fevers. And the shift, across the century, from servants who went free to Africans held for life: the 1664 law that wrote slavery into Maryland's statute book — durante vita, for the duration of life — made hereditary, and drawn along a line of race.

A colony of conscience and a colony of bondage, the same place, at the same time. Both are the founding. Both are in the record, signed by the same hands.