Myne Owne Ground Summary

In T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes’s Myne Owne Ground, race changed the fundamental of the colony.

In Myne Owne Ground, the authors argue that it was not inevitable that black men and women were made subordinate to white colonists in colonial Virginia because in the early days there was more about wealth, economic standing, and religion than the color of one’s skin. For example, when a white man, Richard Ackworth, ask John Johnson to give testimony in a suit which Ackworth had filed against another Whiteman (Myne Owne Ground, 16). They were unwilling to allow a black man to testify in legal proceedings involving whites at first, but when they learned that John had been baptized and understood the meaning of an oat, they accepted his statement.

There are other factors that far more important than color of one’s skin. “Property, even a few cows or pigs, provided legal and social identity in this society” (Myne Owne Ground, 17). Therefore, Anthony Johnson and other successful free Black men have a better status and social identity than those White men serving their term as indenture servants. The testimony from Virginia Court Record of a white woman, Katherine Watkind, and John Long, a Negro, supports that there were no extreme discrimination between colors yet. Katherine Watkind claims that neighbor’s slave rapped her in the wood. However, the witnesses, a group of white and black men, say that Katherine initiates this event “soe she tooke him about the necke and kissed him” (Reading the American Past, 46). It seems like Black slaves and white servants are united as a group. They probably come to drink and enjoy their social life together behind their master. However, this kind of bonding is what the colonial elites fear the most –might overturn their master. Black and White Virginians on the eastern shore experience relative equality for much of the seventeenth century because it was a multiracial conservational with “blurred and constantly shifting “ racial boundaries, and that whites and blacks

First types of relationship of, all free colonists (even elite) act as client to someone. For instance, the royal governor or powerful Englishman merchant from England might be the patron to the great/successful planter in the colonist. Second types of relationship, it involves family members and close friends. This type of relationship is completely difference from patron-client relationship because family and friends usually provides love, comfort and security. Therefore, when family and friends trade, they are not “primarily economic in character” (Myne Owne Ground, 34). Racial identity is very important for this type of relationship. For human transaction, free blacks usually seek out for other free blacks. Common ethnic background and skin color increases the cohesiveness of the Northampton free black community. Last types of relationship, “the Northampton free blacks formed relationship with white indenture servants, poor to middling white freemen, and local Indians” (Myne Owne Ground, 35). Transactions between members of these groups are casual and temporary. In Myne Owne Ground, Breen and Innes argue that there was a great deal of cohesion among the colonial elite on eastern shore, but none among the small planters because these elites was attacked by the group of poor,