Friday, October 29, 2010

Day 1: Saturday-Learning About Society

Hi everyone,
Today is my first day in Virginia!!! I still miss all of you back a home though. Cousin Brandon is good and he was showing me around. So, anyways today I learned about society here. So you know how at home we live in a big group together as a family, but here the families are weaker and there aren’t many families because there are more men than women here in Jamestown. Also people here do not live as a democracy, they have a social hierarchy. At the top are the large plantation owners who own these massive pieces of land where the grow tobacco. Then there are the small farmers who make up most of the population here. Brandon is considered to be a small farmer. Then there are these people who are called the landless whites. You may be wonder what there are, well the name says it all, they are whites who do not have land. They might not have land because they used to be indentured servants and their masters took all the land. Then the indentured servants are next in the hierarchy. They are the people whose trip was paid by someone else and so they had to work on the plantations to pay off their debt and eventually they would be freed and gain land. Here I have also discovered that they have massive use of slaves because of their large plantations. Here the slaves are at the bottom of the social hierarchy and treated as if they are nonhuman. Here they even have laws called the Barbados Code to rule the slaves. It is so different here because they don’t live as we do, by majority rules, and it is so weird because not everyone is equal. If they were to come to the north I’m sure that they would consider us weird. Well I have to go now because tomorrow is going to be another adventure!

Love,
Erica

1 comment:

  1. I like how you mention that the families are weak in the south because there are more men than women. That is absolutely true, but I don't think many people realize that the reason for less families is because of that population difference. It can go unnoticed, and I am impressed that you picked it up and recognized the root cause of the situation!

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