Virginia's Headright System: 50 Acres a Passenger and a Slavery Subsidy

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By 1618 the Virginia Company's Jamestown venture had found no gold or silver and was near bankruptcy. John Rolfe's sweet Orinoco tobacco saved it, but the crop was labor intensive and exhausted the soil, so planters needed constant new land and many more hands. The company's answer was the headright: 50 acres for each person whose passage a settler paid. Surviving early settlers received two headrights, self-paying immigrants one, and a household head earned another 50 acres for every family member, servant or passenger he sponsored. Passage cost about six pounds, roughly a year's wages for an unskilled English laborer, so the poor crossed as indentured servants working five to seven years. Claimants obtained a certificate from the governor or county court, picked land along a river, paid a surveyor using a compass and Gunter's chain, and took the survey to the colony's secretary for a patent.

The servants themselves received no land, only freedom dues such as clothes, tools or corn, while the 50 acres their crossing generated went to the sponsor. As willing English laborers grew scarce, the system shifted to enslaved Africans: until 1699 an enslaved person brought to Virginia earned the importer the same 50-acre headright. After the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624, the Privy Council ordered headrights issued even for passengers who died at sea. Fraud spread, certificates traded on a secondary market, and the model was copied in Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas before the new states abandoned it after the Revolution.

• Gunter's chain was 66 feet long with 100 links, and 10 square chains equaled one acre.
• By the 1670s more than 400 enslaved people were being used as headrights in Virginia, and the number surged in the 1680s and 1690s.
• In 1638 George Menefie transported 23 enslaved people and received a patent for 3,000 acres.
• In the 1660s and 1670s headrights were issued at about four times the rate of actual population growth.
• Ship captains and sponsors both claimed headrights for the same passenger, and fee-paid clerks sometimes issued certificates for fictitious people.