Note: This is the fourth part of a serialized history of the United States called Author and Finisher. You can hear the first episode and find out why I called it that here and hear the second and third episodes here and here.
A prophecy of doom loomed over the Powhatans. For decades, this Indian tribe – one of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of northeastern North America – had been conquering their neighbors, including the Paspaheghs, Chickahominies, and Pamunkeys. By 1607, they were more powerful than ever, ruling an empire containing more than thirty subject tribes spanning the eastern half of what is now Virginia. Their leader’s name was Wahunsenecawh, but he is usually referred to as Powhatan, the name given to all the empire’s rulers. He had one hundred wives and used them to build his political power by creating kinship ties with subject people. But the Powhatans rose under the shadow of troubling words. Their priests warned that someday people were going to cross the water to the east – now called the Chesapeake Bay – and turn the tables on them, destroying their empire. The Powhatans were determined to keep the priests from being right.
The priests were on to something. Maybe they were inspired by the coming of some hapless interlopers. In 1570, Spaniards from the Jesuit religious order established a mission near the mouth of the James River to bring Christianity to the Indians. The Indians resented their presence and soon made martyrs of them.
But another people from the east soon followed: the English. Far from home, they faced a host of challenging questions. What valuable products could come from Virginia? Who would do the work? Could the rich and the poor get along? Could they survive in an unfamiliar environment? The Powhatan response to this second wave of invaders and the ways the English answered these questions would determine whether the pessimistic prophets would prove right.
By the late sixteenth century, North America was the part of the New World that interested the English. They had some history there. In 1497, an English expedition under John Cabot had landed on the continent. North America was more directly across the Atlantic than Central or South America. And it was unoccupied by Spain.
One place the English chose to devote their efforts was the continent’s upper south. They were full of optimism. Much of what they thought about the region was based on deductive reasoning and speculation. They believed that all places along a particular line of latitude had the same climate. Southern latitude meant plenty of sun, and sun, they thought, not only brought forth abundant harvests of valuable crops like olives, sugar, and grapes but also formed gold and silver and made livestock prolifically give birth to sturdy offspring.
But America also made them afraid. England was free from extreme heat and cold. The southern parts of North America were apparently quite different. Running a finger from there along the lines of latitude leading back to the known world showed that it was as far south as Spain and North Africa – suggesting that it was a place of constant blasting heat. Heat, they thought, upset the bodily fluids that they called the “humors.” Humors were adjusted to particular climates, and throwing them off would devastate one’s health. They also believed climate determined national character. The English avoided extremes, just like their climate. The heat would make them like the Spanish: deceitful and quick to anger.
Hope proved more powerful than fear, but early English attempts to settle near the Chesapeake Bay suggested that fear was a reasonable response to America. Neither a single rich lord nor the English government had the money and ships to found colonies on its own. In the 1580s, England addressed the problem by sponsoring private colonization ventures funded by pooled wealth. These companies won charters from the monarch, making England the enforcer of their company regulations and land claims.
In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to settle one hundred men on Roanoke Island along the northeast coast of what is now North Carolina. The settlers named all of northeastern North America “Virginia” in honor of their queen, Elizabeth, said to be a virgin. Sandbars made it difficult to get supplies in and any valuable products out. The sandy soil refused to nurture crops – and the colonists were not very diligent farmers anyway. They demanded food from the neighboring Indians, which led to conflict. Most of the colonists soon left or were killed by Indians. The English tried again with men, women, and children in 1587 – but by 1590 they had disappeared, leaving behind only the cryptic word “Croatan” gouged into a tree.
The English still felt drawn to Virginia. They hoped to smack Spain. To the English, Spain not only competed for wealth and power around the globe but also practiced a false religion by remaining Roman Catholic while England turned Protestant during the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth unleashed private ship captains to raid Spanish treasure ships coming from America, a move that spread knowledge about the New World among the English. The English hoped to get a cut of America before the Spanish did. The English also hoped to find across it a water route west to the Pacific Ocean. And they were influenced by promoters, two of whom were named Richard Hakluyt. The promoters encouraged the English to see America as a home for settlers. Settlement would open a safety valve to let out the unemployed, make new consumers of English goods, and provide raw materials. “I tell thee golde is more plentifull there than copper is with us. . . . ,” remarks a character in the 1605 play Eastward Ho! “Why man all their dripping pans and their chamber pottes are pure golde.”
English entrepreneurs began preparing for another go at Virginia. In 1606, King James I chartered two settlement companies in exchange for a fifth of all the precious metal they found. One was the Plymouth Company, which launched a short-lived colony in what is now Maine. The other was the London Company. Its agreement with the king formed a loosely organized venture free to operate in southeastern North America. Its plan was to find and export goods that were rare in England, such as iron, fur, pitch, tar, and precious metals.
As the year ended, the London Company began its venture by dispatching 104 settlers – all men – to the Chesapeake Bay, a region just north of the Roanoke colony offering better harbors. Artisans and laborers contracted to work for the company for seven years. Men with military training acted as mercenaries. They included John Smith, whose exotic resume included jobs from the Low Countries to the Mediterranean working for the Austrians, the Dutch, the French – and pirates. And there were gentlemen made adventurous by having older brothers who would claim most of the inheritance.
After four months at sea, the settlers entered the James River and founded Jamestown in May 1607. It did not go well. The English struggled to make anything valuable. The seven men picked by the London Company to lead often held elections among themselves to pick a new president. They lacked shared goals. Some settlers pursued projects that might shower them with glory: discovering gold, finding out what happened to Roanoke, dominating the Indians, and discovering a water route to the Pacific. But in 1608, John Smith explored what is now eastern Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania and found neither a continent-spanning river nor gold. None of the other glamour projects worked out either. Smith also led a more practical group that built fortifications and housing and sought food by growing it themselves or by stealing or buying it from the Indians.
No one worked very hard in Jamestown. England had been an academy of laziness. The gentlemen – a far larger component of Virginia’s population than of England’s – were insulated from learning toil by their family’s wealth. Others were corrupted by England’s slow economy. High unemployment accustomed them to not working, while the solutions to the problem imposed by custom and Parliament – tight regulation of the economy to ration what work there was, meaning, for example, that all plowing had to be done by skilled plowmen – taught them not to work hard. In May 1611, a new governor stepped off the boat and caught the settlers bowling. Early on, the settlers were organized as one enterprise. Under this system, every man received the same rewards for his labor, so free riders grew like weeds.
Virginia’s environment was as bad as the English had feared. The English arrived in the midst of a drought that not only hindered farming but degraded water quality. Summer air, steamy as a romance novel, encouraged disease, especially near water. Wastewater oozed into swamps and the eastern Chesapeake Bay, where it sat and bred microbes that caused dysentery and typhus. Mosquitoes multiplied in the heat then buzzed off to bite the English, sowing parasites that caused malaria, which brought weakness and even death. Settlers got no breaks from the weather. Despite the heat, Virginia did not offer the consolations of a truly tropical climate. The terrors of summer were followed by cold winters.
The English began to be in want. They lacked clothing for such a volatile climate. Food ran short. Malnutrition, salty water, and disease wrecked their health. The economy got a lift after a year when John Smith climbed to the top of the greasy pole. “He that will not worke,” he decreed, “shall not eate.” Smith put the colonists to work at essential tasks: farming, logging, and trading for corn from the Indians. His leadership helped to spare Jamestown, but company officials saw him as too heavy-handed. In 1609 they drove him from power.
By the end of Smith’s brief time in charge, Jamestown showed signs of life. Settlers had raised a church and a defensive wall and founded two satellite settlements. They tended a few dozen acres of crops, kept pigs and chickens on an island five miles away, and manufactured tar and glass as well as ashes for soap making.
But these developments did not stop Virginia from preying on them like a lion on a flock of lambs. Colonists called their first summers in Virginia “seasoning” because they imposed one of the greatest tests their bodies would ever face. Exposed to heat-fueled diseases like typhoid, they would either die or become immune. Early on, death was the result about 80 percent of the time, some colonists estimated. Another drag on their health was their ramshackle houses. Early on, many lived out in the open or in tents. Eventually, they fashioned lumber into a room or two and a loft, sealed the cracks with mud, and let the dirt serve for a floor. Most lacked even a chamber pot, so inhabitants found a place outdoors to serve as their toilet. Cramped, in constant contact with heat, cold, and insects, and surrounded by disease-spawning pools of human waste, Virginians were ideal landing spots for disease. By the beginning of 1608, 66 of the original 104 settlers had died. Only a quarter of the children born in colonial Virginia had both birth parents by age eighteen. The majority of early Virginians died by the age of fifty. A fifty-three-year-old was referred to in court records as “ancient, poor, and decrepit.” Surgeons were able to charge high prices because of the colony’s conditions. Some sick people were so desperate for care that they sold themselves out as servants for a year to pay.
Another source of death was Indian war. The English and the Indians saw one another as useful or dangerous but not as people with whom they had affinities. Each side’s view of the other had the potential to spark violence. The English view of the Indians drew on three influences: the reports of Spanish colonizers off to the south, their countrymen’s brief visits to North America, including Roanoke Island, and their recent experience of ruling Ireland, where they had pushed the Irish off much of the land to make way for English transplants. Up sprang an image of the Indians in English minds: majestic yet primitive. The English believed the Indians were rich, organizationally savvy enough to build large cities and complex political systems, and culturally accomplished. But they also thought they were either innocent or sexually licentious, barbarously willing to live in squalor with little between them and the elements, and prone to violence – even cannibalism – because they served evil gods, servants of Satan. Judging from the Spanish conquests to the south, they would be easy to defeat in battle. The right response to them was to impose civilization by force but keep most of the English population away lest they be corrupted.
The English provoked the Natives. They encroached on their land. They turned up their noses at the new cultures they encountered. Indian women did the farming – the opposite of the English custom – and the English read this as male laziness and exploitation. The English covered most their skin and the Indians little, which the English read as a sign of a degraded culture. The English used open-range livestock raising methods by letting their horses, pigs, and cattle roam freely in search of food. The stock ate Indian crops, trampled the bottomlands along the streams, allowing mud to foul fishing areas, and passed deadly diseases to the deer the Indians hunted.
The Powhatans had high hopes for the English. The English could be military allies in the Powhatans’ quest to defend their empire from enemies to the west and from subject people yearning to break free. The Powhatans also soon recognized that the metal tools and weapons of the English were superior to theirs and hoped to get them to trade.
The two sides began a diplomatic dance. In 1607, the Powhatans captured a foraging party consisting of Smith and two companions and forced him to appear before Powhatan, “a tall well proportioned man, with a sower looke,” according to one English observer. Smith was led to a place where warriors brandishing clubs awaited him. It appeared his head was about to be bashed in. Then Powhatan gave him a reprieve. To the Powhatans, this meant Smith had been reborn as their subject. Smith saw things differently. He recast the incident as a grandiose story in which his life was spared because Powhatan’s eleven-year-old daughter Pocahontas placed herself between Smith and the executioners. Powhatan was also put through a submission ritual. In 1609, Smith and other English gave him gifts and held him down while a crown was placed on his head, which was supposed to mean that he was now an English subject king. The Powhatans and the English also began making various kinds of trades. The Powhatans gave the English corn in exchange for cloth, copper, kettles, swords, hatchets, beads, and guns. The two groups also exchanged boys who would learn their hosts’ language and culture.
The two sides also turned to force to get their way. Within two weeks of the arrival of the English, the Powhatans began attacking Jamestown and settlers who went out to work, explore, or found new settlements. Powhatan often used clever duplicity by sending the Paspahegh, a subject people located close to Jamestown, to make these raids then pretending the Paspahegh had acted on their own. Sometimes, Indians dispatched the English with extreme violence. On one occasion, the Powhatans cut off a captive’s fingers, stripped the skin from his head, ripped out his guts, then burned him. Meanwhile, Smith raided the Powhatans to force them to feed the English, sometimes taking hostages to twist the Powhatans’ arms.
The colonists’ incompetence was nearly their undoing in winter 1609-1610. Settlers called it the “starving time.” Laziness, drought, and Powhatan attacks on hunters and foragers spawned a food shortage. The English turned to foods they would have considered abominations at any other time: dogs, cats, rats, mice, and corpses. Centuries later, archeologists found a memento of desperation: the skeleton of a fourteen-year-old girl with a leg bone scored by a knife and a skull that seemed to have been pried open, signs that her corpse had been devoured. The most voracious settler murdered his pregnant wife and ate her – then became another casualty of the winter when he was executed for his grisly deed. Some settlers gave up and went to live with the Indians. The deaths and desertions reduced Virginia’s settler population from several hundred to just sixty by spring.
The remnant wanted out. In June 1610, the colonists boarded a ship, let the wind fill the sails, and headed for home. But before they could reach the open sea, reinforcements intercepted them and forced them to stay. Its pulse dwindling, Jamestown felt the defibrillator’s jolt.
Settlers and leaders began a long rehabilitation. Although Virginia’s financial backers refused to allow giving up, they recognized even before the starving time that they needed to make big changes. They decided to forsake failed ventures and focus on farming. In 1609, they convinced the king to recharter their enterprise, which would now be known as the Virginia Company. The new charter would shut down the power struggles by centralizing control. In place of the slipshod money pool, the charter formed a corporation with capital contributed by shareholders who would be compensated with money and land in seven years and receive the right to vote on company policy, which included electing the council that chose the governor. Governors would be given a free hand. They treated the colonists like soldiers, determining when they would work and eat and imposing the death penalty for not only theft and rape but also swearing, adultery, lying, missing church three times, shirking work, or deserting to live with the Indians. Executions were not necessarily quick and painless. Methods included burning at the stake and being chained to a tree until starvation. The new charter also set boundaries around Virginia’s land grant: a strip four hundred miles wide centered on the James River and extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The rechartered company promoted the colony by offering wealthy settlers land in the future.
The Virginia Company briefly made peace with the Powhatans – but first it intensified the conflict. In 1610, English raiders began killing women, children, and captives and torching villages. That August, when Powhatan refused to return some runaway English settlers, the English destroyed a Paspahegh and a Chickahominy village, killing dozens, including captive children whom they tossed from their boats and shot while they struggled in the water. Each side egged the other on, responding to violence with retaliation. Between 1609 and 1614, 350 English and 250 Indians died in the fighting. Indian war, along with hunger and disease were reasons that the English only had 351 living settlers in Virginia by 1616 despite sending 2,000 of them over the previous decade. Then the English achieved a breakthrough by capturing Pocahontas. In captivity, she married English settler John Rolfe and became a Christian. Not only sick of war but now with a daughter in a sticky situation, Powhatan agreed to peace in 1614.
Meanwhile, the problem of making money lived on. The population struggled to gain altitude. Part of the problem was the predominance of men. The lack of women deterred many men from wanting to come and limited the making of babies who could naturally grow the colony. By 1612, the Virginia Company was struggling to raise capital. Oranges, silkworms, grapes, and tobacco all had failed. Virginia’s major exports included timber and ash, but those products did not quicken investors’ hearts.
But then the land began to pass from the company to the settlers. This change began in 1609, when at least some settlers received garden plots. In 1614, common settlers began to be free to go home. To keep them in, some of them were given land of their own to work. And then in 1616 the company had to distribute its profits to keep the charter. Having none, it doled out land instead: fifty acres for every share one held. At the same time, it also rewarded every wealthy settler with fifty acres and began offering promoters fifty acres for every settler they brought over. Having one’s own land aroused lazy settlers to hustle.
Beginning in 1618, land distribution was joined by broader reform under treasurers Thomas Smith and Edwyn Sandys. The company improved the promotion of the colony. One strategy was distributing a pamphlet promising settlers that Virginia was a land of prosperity, freedom, and good health where settlers would find help with getting started and a thriving society nourishing schools and churches. The company made the colony a more appealing place to go by granting even more land. It guaranteed land to people who at that point were not receiving it or could not be sure they would receive it by granting it to those who finished their labor contracts and to skilled workers, such as carpenters or shipwrights. The company increased investment and immigration, drawing mainly English but also people from all over Europe, including Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany.
By the time the company’s reforms began, it was so desperate for settlers it tapped vulnerable parts of the English population. The company imported hundreds of poor children. One source was the City of London, which ordered church wardens to tell poor families to send their children age twelve and over to Virginia – or lose their access to relief. Meanwhile, Virginia Company investors feared that men without families would not stick around or look to the colony’s long-term interests. The answer, they concluded, was to form a joint-stock company to import women, mainly orphans in their late teens or early twenties. Dozens of women came to Virginia this way. Receiving one of these brides cost money, so the women tended to at least get wealthy husbands out of the scheme.
The colony’s reign of iron had scared settlers away, so the company also sought profits by lightening up. It removed the harsh legal code and established a two-house lawmaking body Virginians called the “generall Assemblie.” One house was a governor’s council picked by the Virginia Company to look out for its interests. The other was a body of settlers elected by their peers to represent their interests. Members were called “burgesses,” so it became known as the House of Burgesses. By the eighteenth century, each county got two representatives. All males who were not enslaved or indentured could vote for the House of Burgesses. In 1619, Virginians held their first election for this body.
Around this time, Virginia began to benefit from a momentous botanical discovery: Tobacco could be the path to riches after all. Christopher Columbus observed Natives smoking tobacco on his first voyage to the New World in 1492. Within 150 years, the plant spread around the world. From France to the Philippines, people smoked it, chewed it, or snorted it as snuff. The English began growing it decades before the settlement of Jamestown. James I tried to dissuade his subjects from smoking, calling it “a custome Lothsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse,” but the English refused to go cold turkey. Many thought it cured disease. But they would not smoke the tobacco native to Virginia, which they found smelly and bitter. Then, a few years after the low point of the starving time, John Rolfe brought in tobacco from Trinidad and crossed it with Virginia tobacco. Still, the product needed polishing. In 1616, Virginia exported a mere 1,250 pounds. Settlers in Virginia, aided by other settlers experimenting with it in Bermuda, kept at it, breeding better strains until the smoke smelled sweet. The redeeming quality of Virginia’s stifling summers was that, unlike England’s more bearable warm seasons, they were perfect for tobacco. In 1621, Virginia exports topped 100,000 pounds. In 1625 they reached almost 400,000 pounds. For the next three centuries tobacco was the foundation of Virginia’s economy.
But the Virginia Company would not have time to reap the benefits. It had frittered away nearly twenty years, and a final disaster did it in. On March 22, 1622, the Powhatans launched a massive assault on the English. By then, Pocahontas had been dead for five years, having succumbed to disease on a visit to England. During the placid years after her death, the English and Indians had many peaceful encounters. They traded, and Indians often ate and spent the night at colonists’ homes.
But all the while, the Powhatans resented the English. The English took large tracts of land to raise tobacco. They tried to spread their culture, including Christianity. The English had been too distracted by survival and moneymaking to pursue their ambition of converting the Indians, but Sandys decided they had procrastinated long enough and invited Indians to live in their towns, where they would learn the faith. The English even tried to get the Powhatans living in English houses. An English settler paid to build what he saw as decent homes for chiefs he thought lived in vile dens. Powhatan frustration bubbled and swirled, headed toward the boiling point. In 1618, Powhatan died, and his brother Opechancanough took over the empire. He sought to push the English into the sea. He hatched a plan to have Powhatans infiltrate the English settlements by posing as traders. Then they would rise up at a prearranged time.
The attack might have been even more damaging had some Indians who had been won to Christianity not had mercy and warned the English. Still, most English were surprised. Some Powhatans struck in the midst of a peaceful breakfast with settlers. They destroyed homes; pillaged crops, killed horses, pigs, and cattle to take retribution for their lost crops; and, above all, slaughtered people, sometimes stuffing bread in their mouths to send a message: The English must stop eating up our land. They singled out English who had put the most pressure on them to change their ways. The attackers mutilated English bodies and took parts as souvenirs. In one day the Powhatans killed 347 English – a third of the colony’s population. Hundreds more died over the next two years from ongoing violence plus disease and food shortages spawned by the war. The English saw the hand of the devil behind the attack and counterattacked with religious zeal, striking all Virginia Indians, not just Powhatans. They undermined the Native economy by destroying crops and fishing canoes. The struggle was so desperate that even treachery did not seem out of bounds. In May 1623, the English made peace with some of their adversaries, the Patawomekes – then slipped them poisoned wine at the conclusion of the proceedings. The toxin took two hundred lives, and the English killed fifty more besides. Within three years of the attack, the English had killed far more Indians than the Powhatans had killed on that bloody March 22. Peace finally came after ten years. The war allowed the English to grab even more land.
By then, the Virginia Company was long gone. By the mid-1620s, the economy had yet to take off. Tobacco succeeded, but as yet it was not profitable enough to counteract the company’s failures to develop profitable products. The company was out of investment capital. And it burned through colonists like fire in a dry forest. Thousands had died from hunger, disease, and war. The colony’s population was only 1,200 – even though 8,000 people had emigrated to Virginia in the last seventeen years. For this and the company’s bankruptcy angry investors pressured the king into ordering an investigation on the grounds that the company had been failing to ensure that it was adequately supplying settlers it imported to work company land. A royal commission found that it was so. In response, shortly before he died James sued the company for its charter and won. In 1625, the new king, Charles I, took direct control, with the power to choose the governor and council. Virginia became a royal colony.
Charles also oversaw the founding of a second colony on the Chesapeake Bay: Maryland, named for his wife. The Reformation set the scene for Maryland’s conception. After England’s turn to Protestantism in the sixteenth century, about 1 percent of the nation remained with the old Catholic Church. The authorities eyed them uneasily. Seen as potential subversives, the Catholics faced persecution. They were required to worship in secret, and many of their priests were deported or imprisoned.
The Catholics were fortunate that their ranks included George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who hoped to found a refuge for his brethren and had the king’s ear. Baltimore won a charter granting him a twelve-million-acre nugget of land north of Virginia in exchange for a fifth of any gold or silver he found.
Before Baltimore could bring his dream to life, he died, but the land passed to his son Cecilius. Cecilius Calvert tried to restore medieval Europe in the New World. In addition to protecting Catholicism, he would install the feudal system. The charter allowed him to be a feudal lord, requiring all landowners to pay him quitrents, overseeing the courts, and granting manors to lords who would share his rights on their own properties.
The first settlers arrived in 1634, bought land from the Yoacomaco Indians, and went to work growing corn and tobacco, which soon became the pillar of the colony’s economy.
Calvert’s colony succeeded – but not in the way that he had hoped. It drew tens of thousands of settlers within a century and imitated Virginia’s tobacco-growing success, but Calvert found realizing his vision for how the colony would succeed no easier than had the Virginia Company. Maryland was a haven for Catholics – but not a very stout one. Religious toleration attracted not only Catholics but also large numbers of Puritans, the most zealous Protestants. Protestants and Catholics clashed. The majority of the gentry were Catholics, but the more numerous humble settlers were Protestants. The authorities mollified this majority by requiring Catholic practice to be done in secret. The English Civil War between the forces of Charles I and the forces of Parliament exacerbated tensions. In the mid-1640s, pro-Parliamentary Protestants ransacked properties of leading Catholics and arrested priests. Maryland continued boiling even after 1649, when the war ended in England. Like Virginia, it had a legislature comprising an elected representative body and an appointed council. Shortly after the war, a Parliamentary commission deprived Catholics of the vote and placed all the positions in the council in the hands of Puritans. In 1655, at the Battle of the Severn, Protestants defeated forces of the colony’s governor – representing the interests of the Calverts, who appointed him – then capitalized on their victory by depriving Catholic elites and members of the Jesuit religious order of much of their property. Calvert won back control of his colony in 1657 and restored some toleration to Catholics, but in 1692, the colony’s Assembly passed a law requiring tax support for the Anglican Church and denying Catholics the ability to serve in the Assembly. By the mid-eighteenth century, Maryland was far more Catholic than England or its other North American colonies, but that was not saying much. Only one in ten Marylanders was Catholic.
Meanwhile, the feudal system also failed. The colony needed to draw settlers, so Calvert granted land to large and small landowners apart from the manor system. The colony had so much land that one could easily get it without becoming a manorial lord or the vassal of one. The size of the colony also made it impossible for manor courts to handle all the cases brought before them, so much of their power went to counties. Becoming a Maryland manorial lord ended up less ideal than it sounded. After two decades most of them had not succeeded. They had sold out, fled the Protestant horde, or, if they kept their land, done little better than large landowners who had not received such great largesse. And the colonists resisted Cecilius Calvert and his descendants, driving them from power in 1688 and rendering their power permanently neutralized when they regained the colony in 1715.
Meanwhile, the Virginia Company’s reforms finally paid off, even though it was not around to feast on their fruits. Just before Charles seized the colony, larger numbers of settlers began to head for Virginia. It turned out that the sun actually did make gold – when laundered through tobacco plants – and the Virginia Company had made it easier to gain a place of one’s own to grow them. Once the crown took control of Virginia, land ceased to be free for all who came, but it was still available through purchase or a grant from the crown. The Virginia Company lost its colony just as a wave of population growth began.
Virginia’s population grew not only because of increasing supply but also because changes in the colony brought to an end its days as a bottomless pit, where immigration could not raise the population. Virginians improved at reproducing themselves because of the increasing numbers of women. The colony also began to get healthier. Life expectancy began rising in the 1640s. The English developed immunity to Virginia’s diseases. Immigrants began settling on higher ground, farther from the noxious water. They also started growing apples, which allowed them to give up water and drink cider. By midcentury, seasoning killed only about 10 percent of its initiates, according to one colonist. By 1690, Virginia’s life expectancy equaled England’s, and by the eighteenth century its population became self-sustaining.
The rising tide of settlers threatened the Powhatans. Seeking another crack at eliminating the English, Opechancanough led his people to war. Explaining the war from the Powhatan perspective, a captured Indian said, “the English took all their land from them, and would drive them out of the country.” The Powhatans struck on April 18, 1644, killing four hundred settlers in twenty-four hours. But, like the war that had ended just a dozen years earlier, initial triumph boomeranged. The brutality of the assault inflamed hatred in the Virginians that galvanized them to resist. This war was Opechancanough’s last. He soon died – having lived to around one hundred – and in 1646 the war ended with even more Powhatan territory in English hands.
The English used their swelling landholdings to grow more and more tobacco. Tobacco exports from the Chesapeake region – Virginia and newborn Maryland – were up to one million pounds in 1640, two-and-a-half times what they had been fifteen years before. By 1690, they were up to 25 million pounds.
Tobacco was a demanding product. In December and January, workers planted seeds in mounds of earth. In April and May, the best plants were transplanted to where they would mature. During the heart of the growing season, workers purged weeds and worms and kept the plants on task by slicing off suckers and the plant’s top part, which would otherwise flower. Harvest came in September. Tobacco had to be carefully cured by drying it enough to prevent rotting but not so much that it lost its suppleness and turned crumbly. Then the leaves had to be removed from the stalks and packed into barrels. If all went well, the full barrels, weighing up to a thousand pounds each, were on their way across the Atlantic by Christmas.
Tobacco growers needed people to do all this work. They tried enslaving local Indians, but their closeness to home made escape easy, and they died quickly in close proximity to English diseases.
Another labor source was Africans. In 1619, Virginians imported Africans for the first time, purchasing twenty from a Dutch crew that had plundered them from a Portuguese ship carrying them to Mexico. It is not clear whether these first Africans were slaves bound to lifelong labor or servants, but soon Africans were being enslaved. To early Virginians, African slaves were a bad investment. Slaveowners paid the high cost of buying a person for life – twice what it cost to acquire a servant – but slaves often did not live long enough to justify that investment. For decades, African slavery was only a minor labor source in the Chesapeake. In 1625, Virginia had only twenty-three residents of African descent. By 1650, there were only three hundred slaves in Virginia and Maryland – 2 percent of the population.
For decades, tobacco growers relied on English indentured – that is, contracted – servants as their main labor source. Although immigrants to the Chesapeake included aristocrats as well as less well-off farmers and artisans wealthy enough to pay their own way, during the first century of Chesapeake settlement, 70 to 85 percent of the settlers to the region were indentured servants, mainly men but some women. For the cost of the servant’s food, clothing, housing, and passage across the Atlantic, tobacco growers got to own a person for four to seven years. They could use the servant’s labor – men in the fields, women in the home – or they could sell them, use them to pay debts, and even gamble with them.
Servants’ lives were full of dangers and indignities. In Virginia’s early decades, the majority never tasted freedom because disease and overwork killed them within five years of their arrival. Their odds of winning a court case were usually bad because most judges were planters – the richest settlers. Female servants who had a child – even if it was a child fathered by their master – had to serve an extra two years to compensate the owner for the medical costs and lost time of childbirth.
Even though Virginia was not seen as an appealing place to live, two forces moved servants to America. One was hope that suffering would lead to a better life. Servants were either unskilled manual laborers or workers trained in a trade but down on their luck. They were trying to escape civil war, falling wages, and unemployment by going to a land full of possibilities. Maybe the gamble would pay off and they would live long enough to taste freedom. Men who survived would receive what were called “freedom dues”: tools, a set of clothes, and maybe fifty acres. Women got a better chance to marry money than back home.
The other force was raw power. Men, women, and children – one as young as four – were sold by kidnappers, employers, or even parish leaders. Others were sent after being convicted of vagrancy or crime or captured in the civil war of the 1640s. And some agreed to go only because smooth talkers filled their ears with lies or got them so drunk they signed on to a labor agreement.
After 1660, England’s economy improved while its population growth slowed, reducing the number of people willing to endure servanthood. The result was that the later cohort of servants were more vulnerable. Early servants tended to be males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Later servants were still mainly male but included more women. The proportion under age sixteen also rose from 5 percent to 40. And they were more likely to be orphans, prisoners of war, vagrants, or convicts.
Rich or poor, immigrants had to suffer to get to Virginia. The voyage took two to three months. Many people got sick from the filthiness of the ships. Meals were skimpy, and the food that was doled out – including “stinckinge beere,” according to one witness – afforded diners no pleasure.
By enticing and forcing people to make the ocean crossing, the English decisively won the demographic war against the Powhatans. Between the time tobacco growing took off and 1670, 70,000 English came to Virginia – more than in any other half-century in the place’s history. By 1642, Virginia’s population had risen to eight thousand. In the 1670s, it crossed 40,000. Meanwhile, weakened by war and disease, the Algonquian-speaking tribes of what is now eastern Virginia and North Carolina dwindled from 24,000 in 1607 to 2,000 in 1669. By 1700, it was almost impossible to find Indians east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.
The wave of mid-seventeenth century immigrants tended to come from the southwestern part of England, and they brought with them speech patterns from there. Part of their speech’s distinctiveness came from the meaning they gave words. Virginians used phrases such as “I be,” “It don’t,” and “She ain’t.” In no other part of the colonies would one encounter the term “yonder,” used to refer to something in the distance or the words “howdy,” “bandanna,” and “innards.” Their speech pattern also had its own pronunciation. They added and silenced consonants. Floor was “flo,” chimney was “chimbly,” “you all” became “y’awl,” and “this” and “that” was “dis” and “dat.” They lengthened certain words: half to “ha-alf” and I’m to “Aah’m.” Historian David Hackett Fischer says, “Virginia’s speech was a soft, slow, melodious drawl that came not from the nose but the throat.” Virginians pronounced words in ways not suggested by the way they looked. Botetourt became “Boat’a’tote,” and Fauquier became “Fawkeer.”
During the early decades of royal government, many who endured stinking beer and other miseries of the Atlantic crossing found their suffering worthwhile. Land was plentiful. Once Virginians’ health began to improve, many began living long enough to become landowners. Getting into tobacco growing was not expensive. Humble immigrants had a good chance of getting rich. Some who started as small farmers without servants or even as indentured servants joined the upper class.
A few decades went by. Virginia became a victim of its own success. For individual indentured servants, rising survival rates were, of course, a happy change, but for indentured servants as a whole – and for Virginia’s other tobacco growers – they were a diabolical promoter of competition, helping to drive the number of growers so high that tobacco harvests began to far exceed what the market would soak up. Further pressing down on what tobacco growers could make was the Navigation Act of 1660, which required that tobacco be exported only to England or its colonies and slapped a high duty on it when it crossed into England. In 1673, England supplemented it with a tax on exporting tobacco to other colonies, which made it harder to seek higher prices in the Netherlands by shipping through other parts of the empire. Making profit by selling to the Netherlands became even more difficult in the early 1670s when England and the Netherlands went to war. Between 1640 and 1672, the price of tobacco plunged 75 percent. Social mobility stiffened. After 1640, no servant moved into the House of Burgesses or council. In response to the rising value of land, the wealthy acquired much of the farmland along the rivers, the highways of early Virginia. After 1660, falling prices and rising population made landownership a long shot for those who served out their indenture. Freedmen accommodated falling prospects by choosing from a menu of unattractive options: tenant, sharecropper, wage worker, or homeless wanderer.
Even the most successful freedmen, those who acquired land, were struggling. They usually got land only a desperate person would want because it was infertile, on the frontier where Indian raiding parties could easily swoop in, or far from markets. Adding to their pain was that taxes were high, and they were high not for their benefit but as one source, along with fees, duties, and privileges, of lavish compensation to officials, who always came from the ranks of the wealthy: the governor, councilors, Burgesses, secretary, clerks of the Assembly, revenue officers, sheriff, and even those who assisted Assembly meetings by tending the doors and beating a drum to summon the assemblymen. One governor, writing to his wife, thanked God for “such an honorable and proffitable imployment.” Profitable indeed. In the 1660s and 1670s, governors made more than £1,000 a year – three hundred to four hundred times what a small farmer made. Taxes on small farmers were up to 10 percent, which they often found painful to pay. Taxes, atop high food prices and low tobacco prices often forced small farmers to sell out to the rich.
Large landowners tightened their grip to protect their interests during the midcentury decades. They, too, were bothered by low prices, but they also feared what would happen if freedmen would not work: that they would become rabble-rousers. They needed workers, but they also needed to keep the workers from becoming restive freedmen. If they could have, they would have enslaved the indentured servants, but they quailed at taking this step: It could lead to rebellion, no one would come from England if they ended up enslaved – and their government probably wouldn’t allow it. Instead, they turned to the Assembly and the courts, which tended to cater to their interests because voters favored wealthy men for the Burgesses and the crown chose wealthy men for the courts and the council. The Burgesses and the courts therefore tried to keep servants longer by lengthening the time that those who came over without a contract had to work and increasing the penalty for running away – already an addition of twice the length of time the servant was gone onto the labor contract. In 1670, to prevent trouble from the freedmen who did not own or at least rent land, the Burgesses withdrew their right to vote.
By the 1660s and 1670s, servants and freedmen were hot with anger against Virginia’s elite. They channeled their anger not at the wealthy but at the Indians. The freedmen were concentrated along the frontier – though today these are places fairly near the coast like Surry County, in southeast Virginia, between Richmond and Norfolk – where they often skirmished with Indians.
The tensions between the poor and the mighty and the poor and the Indians became tangled into one conflict in summer 1675, when Thomas Mathews, a planter living along the Potomac River, refused to pay a debt to some Doeg Indians. Angered, they grabbed some hogs instead. A herder on the plantation resisted, and the Doegs struck him dead. Seeking the killers, the Virginia militia marched into Maryland. They found some Indians and took their revenge by slaying fourteen of them – but they turned out to be peaceful Susquehannocks, not Doegs. The aggrieved Susquehannocks took revenge. War broke out. In winter 1675-1676, the Susquehannocks killed dozens of Virginians and overran sixty plantations.
When spring came, Virginians split over what to do. One faction, containing the colony’s most powerful men, was led by Gov. William Berkeley, an Oxford-educated knight who appeared in a portrait mustachioed, wearing a flowing wig, and looking over his left shoulder with his left wrist resting on his hip in imitation of a dapper pose struck by Charles I. Berkeley’s supporters wanted a measured response. Berkeley feared that anything more would hurt friendly tribes, driving them into the arms of Virginia’s enemies, a dangerous prospect because the Susquehannocks had ties to tribes fighting English colonies farther north. It also would allow him to keep Virginia’s side of the 1646 peace agreement: that it would not take any more frontier land. He also feared his own colonists. Forming masses of them into an army might give rebellion a boost. The colony would take a defensive position instead. In early 1676, Berkeley called off another retaliatory campaign. Instead, he gave his support to a measure passed in March by the House of Burgesses: Build several forts on the frontier, station five hundred soldiers in them, and require any retaliatory attacks to have the governor’s permission – which meant the attackers would always get away.
A second faction, the restive frontier freedmen, wanted much more, and the previous winter’s raids sent their numbers skyward. As they saw it, the forts and soldiers would cost them money but achieve nothing. The soldiers were to come from closer to the coast, not the frontier, and the forts would be located on land monopolized by the wealthy, driving up its value. Nathaniel Bacon, a rich twenty-nine-year-old member of the council sporting a moustache-topped goatee, won the loyalty of the aggrieved masses. He and they wanted not just a strike on the Susquehannocks but a war against, as Bacon put it, “all Indians in generall.” He sought command of a campaign, but Berkeley said no. Bacon shrugged and took command of the would-be Indian fighters anyway.
Berkeley tried to hold his ground without blowing the colony up. He yanked Bacon from the council for defying his policy but also called elections to allow Virginians to blow off some steam.
Bacon’s force of more than one hundred volunteers lengthened Virginia’s enemies list, exactly as Berkeley had feared. Bacon found allies among the Occaneechees, who, along with two other tribes, raided the Susquehannocks along what is now the Virginia-North Carolina border, killing many people and grabbing large numbers of beaver pelts. Right away, Bacon fell out with his allies, killing more than one hundred of them, largely women and children, and destroying their town in order to seize their furs. Soon after, voters added to Berkeley’s woes by striding to the polls and electing Bacon to the House of Burgesses to represent Henrico County and reinforcing him with a majority of like-minded Burgesses.
A showdown with the governor followed. In June, Bacon cruised into Jamestown to represent his county. Berkeley was waiting for him in a foul mood. He had Bacon arrested for treason and brought before him. “Now,” he said, “I behold the greatest rebell that ever was in Virginia!” Then he softened a bit. “Sir,” he continued, “doe you continue to be a gentleman and may I take your word? If soe, you are at liberty upon your owne parrol.” Suddenly, both men reversed their positions. Bacon – having recently received some advice from his father – fell to his knees in repentance then handed Berkeley a letter of apology. Berkeley restored Bacon to the council and agreed to put him in command of the colony’s Indian fighting.
Soon, however, everyone reverted to form, and the chaos continued. Berkeley dragged his feet when it came to officially granting Bacon a command. Bacon concluded that he had been played for a fool and on June 23 marched five hundred men to the statehouse. Berkeley strode outside and drew his sword. “Here,” he said, “shoot me, foregod, fair mark, shoot!” Bacon asked the governor to put away his sword then issued his demand: “I came for a commission against the heathen who dayly and inhumanely murder us and spill our brethens blood, and noe care is taken to prevent it. God damne my blood, I came for a commission, and a commission I will have before I goe!” His men then pointed their guns at the windows. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, the assemblymen voted Bacon his commission.
Soon, the Indian war widened to a civil war. Bacon’s forces confiscated horses, guns, and ammunition that had been stockpiled in Gloucester County, a little north of Jamestown. Berkeley rallied forces for a campaign to bring Bacon to heel. Bacon marched on Jamestown, forcing Berkeley to flee across Chesapeake to the Eastern Shore and announced a plan to not only dispossess all Virginia’s Indians but also plunder the governor’s wealthy allies, a move which won him many wealthy supporters. Soon, Bacon announced that he would free the slaves and servants of Berkeley supporters, which won him even more fighters. Bacon then turned to raiding the Pamunkeys in eastern Virginia. In early September, Berkeley’s forces retook Jamestown. Bacon returned with an army swelled to 1,300 men and besieged it for eleven days. On September 19, his army took the town and burned it then spent the ensuing weeks grabbing the property of Berkeley supporters.
But those weeks, it turned out, were Bacon’s zenith. Virginia’s lethal climate caught Bacon, slaying him with a double-dose of typhus and dysentery on October 26. Without Bacon’s leadership, the rebels fell apart. Over the winter, Berkeley’s forces put down the rebellion, executing about two dozen of its leaders – but Berkeley was nevertheless stripped of his job for being unable to control his colony. He lamented, “How miserable that man is that Governs a People when six parts of Seaven at least are Poor Endebted Discontented and Armed.”
Despite the unrest, neither English nor Virginia authorities were willing or able to make meaningful reforms to let the pressure out. The crown soon sent a commission to Virginia to find out what had happened. Commissioners solicited Virginians’ grievances but refused to make the reforms Virginians sought because they feared losing government revenue and the loyalty of Virginia elites. The high cost of government went higher after Bacon’s Rebellion. The air was thick with signs of another rebellion. One thundercloud appeared in 1682, when wealthy Virginians in Gloucester County destroyed their own tobacco crops to drive up the price. But once they started cutting the resentful freedmen got out of control and cut much of the tobacco elsewhere.
A social transformation spared Virginia another Bacon’s Rebellion, but the cost of stability was freedom for tens of thousands of people. Beginning in the two decades before Bacon’s Rebellion and continuing in following decades, planters exchanged their servants for slaves. English and other Northern Europeans felt justified in doing this because they saw Africans as their moral, cultural, and intellectual inferiors. English interpretation of Africans’ dark skin fed their bigotry. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, at the time English settlement was beginning in America the color black meant: “Deeply stained with dirt; soiled. . . . Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister. . . . Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horrible, wicked. . . . Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment.” White, by contrast, was the ideal color: lovely and pure. Furthermore, at the time, no Europeans saw slavery as wrong. Up to then, slavery could be found across time and space. People were enslaved in large numbers not just in Virginia, but, writes historian Bernard Bailyn, “in the Middle East, in North and sub-Saharan Africa, in Iberian America, and among native tribes.”
Lack of moral inhibition was not the only reason Virginians turned to slavery. Exploiting people was profitable. Expanding lifespan made them a better investment, and a decline in the numbers of people willing to be indentured servants made them more necessary. Slavery also took off in Maryland. Between 1650 and 1700, Chesapeake planters reinforced their slaves from a negligible number to 13,000, more than one in eight members of the population. Soon, slaves did the majority of the work on the tobacco plantations. In following decades, Chesapeake planters kept on turning to slaves.
But relying on slave labor did not solve the instability problem. Planters saw slaves as more likely to rebel than servants, not less. The rising slave population frightened planters. The power rising numbers gave them was evident in their growing ability to hold onto African cultural practices: filed teeth, braided hair, drums, flesh decorated by mutilation, religions other than Christianity, and unfamiliar languages such as Igbo. And what if the black slaves and the white poor should get together and go over their common grievances?
Race relations in early Virginia were far from harmonious, but in the decades after 1619 there were sparks of fellow-feeling that might have blown into harmony or equality, and there were at least some protections for Africans built into law and custom. In 1646, a master asked his slave’s permission before selling him. Many slaves were freed after a short period of service. In bondage, slaves could acquire property – a flock of chickens, for instance. Some used that property to buy their freedom – or were freed because the owners wished it. Some owners gave their slaves supplies to make a start when they went free. Once they went free, Africans could own guns, testify in court, marry a woman of any race, and acquire land – all acts that offered a path to social and economic equality. Former slaves became church members, served on juries, obtained government benefits, acquired land and livestock, and entered interracial marriages.
No African climbed farther in early Virginia than a slave known as Antonio, who was brought to Virginia in 1621. In bondage, he married. After Antonio gave a dozen years of his life to his owner, he and his whole family went free. In freedom, Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson. In 1651, he acquired 250 acres. His sons also did well. One acquired 550 acres and another 100. Johnson and his sons also acquired their own slaves. When one of Johnson’s slaves ran away and a neighbor took the person in, Johnson sued the neighbors. A court ordered that Johnson receive his slave back – plus damages.
In these early decades of Virginia slavery, poor blacks and whites felt solidarity. They sometimes interacted as equals: eating at the same table, plotting escapes, sharing the experience of fieldwork.
But after 1660, the position of blacks in the Chesapeake region crumbled. Contempt for blacks increased because Virginia began to equate blacks and Indians. In 1670, Virginia made black unfree labor perpetual but allowed Indians to be held in bondage for only a limited number of years. Indians lost their protection in 1676, when Virginians were allowed to make permanent slaves of Indians if they took the Indians captive, and in 1682, when Virginia made permanent slaves of Indians bought from other Indians. These new laws increased the number of enslaved Indians in Virginia – though they were never a large part of the colony’s population. Still, once Virginians encountered more enslaved Indians and the differences between black and Indian unfree labor were erased, Virginians began to feel even more distaste toward blacks because they likened them to Indians, whom they already loathed.
The measures of 1676 and 1682 were not necessarily intended to diminish blacks, but other changes were. Planters battled the nightmare of rebellion by the lower classes by driving a wedge between blacks and poor whites and degrading the position of the slaves.
After 1660, the Chesapeake colonies imposed far heavier restrictions on Africans. In Virginia, in 1662, all the children of an enslaved woman were enslaved too. In 1667, converting to Christianity was eliminated as a path to automatic freedom. In 1691, owners who freed their slaves were also required to pay their passage from Virginia. Opportunities to buy freedom became scarce. Forming groups of five or more off the plantation was forbidden. A pass was required to leave the plantation. Slave marriages were allowed to be torn asunder by owners. Weapons and access to the courts were denied to slaves. Owners imposed harsher practices. Workdays stretched longer – Saturdays and Sundays were often added, the midday break was shortened or eliminated, night work was often imposed, and winter hours went up – consuming time that could have gone to raising crops to sell, and, anyway, in 1705 slaves were banned from holding property, although white servants continued to be allowed it. Slaveowners received government support in the form of a slave patrol and compensation if their slave was executed for a crime. Brutal punishments, such as hanging, whipping, branding, and amputation of toes and other body parts became more common and the most degrading punishments began to be used disproportionately to draw the color line. In 1705, it was made illegal to strip white servants naked and flog them – while allowing this punishment to be meted out to blacks and Indians.
Free blacks also faced new restrictions. They were banned from voting, giving testimony in court, weapons possession, serving in the militia, and acquiring white servants. They had to pay higher taxes. In 1680, Virginia ordered the flogging of any black person who struck a white person – without mandating the same punishment if the roles were reversed.
Meanwhile, the planters – the top 5 percent of white Virginians in the eighteenth century, about one hundred families – began to look like a real aristocracy. In Virginia’s early decades, the planters did not stand out much. The majority did not come from the aristocracy back in England. A few even started out as indentured servants or small farmers, but most showed up with a modest amount of money, enough to afford an indentured servant or two. They tended to have been businessmen before coming to America. In Virginia, nothing about these men inspired obedience. They were ill-educated, drank heavily, peppered their speech so liberally with profanity that they seemed to know only a few words, and lacked the aristocrat’s sense of how to boss people in a way that made them cower in fear. Their homes were wood structures resting directly on the ground, not a foundation, and containing just a few rooms. At least they had painted walls and a parlor. Little about these houses said the owner was anyone special.
Over time, they became a more impressive group. They were reinforced by the “cavaliers,” aristocratic supporters of the monarchy during the English Civil War who came in the mid-seventeenth century. These people were more impressive than those who formed the original upper class. They were wealthier, had better taste and more thorough educations, and were more informed about current affairs. They included the original Lees and the great-grandfather of George Washington, John Washington, who arrived in 1657.
After 1700, the upper class began to stand out not just for their money but as people who had an air of superiority. They started to decorate their lives with symbols of status. Their leisure was drinking, gambling, and horse racing. They dressed in fine clothes. They made plain that they were present at church – and too good to be there – by showing up late and leaving early.
Early on, the planters were unsure if they would stay permanently in Virginia, but eventually they decided to commit. As a result, Virginia’s architecture became much more imposing. Between 1725 and 1750, planters replaced their dumpy little houses with great mansions, including Lawrence Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Lee family’s Stratford Hall. These structures were built in the Georgian style, brick, not wood, with a dining room fit for guests and an entry hall big enough for a dance. Carved wood paneling, not paint, often decorated their walls. The homes were large enough to contain many rooms, offering abundant privacy. One of these homes was so massive it could be seen from six miles away. They were surrounded with a complex of lower structures, such as a smokehouse and kitchen. The message of these homes was that the owner rested at the top of the class hierarchy.
The Byrd family exemplified the rising aristocracy. Nothing stood out about William Byrd. The son of a goldsmith, he inherited a modest tract of land – 180 acres – soon after he arrived in the early 1670s. He soon set about building it up: trading furs and skins with Indians, becoming the chief collector of quitrents, growing tobacco – and marrying a rich widow. By the time he died, his work had paid off. He owned 26,000 acres. His son William Byrd II, born to wealth in 1674, had a far more outstanding background: taught Greek, Hebrew, and Latin; given a gentleman’s university education in London and the Netherlands; developer of a hoard of books that reached four thousand volumes. He built a fabulous home. One approached through gates suspended from posts bearing statues of eagles. The house itself was a symmetrical three-story brick structure with seven windows across the second floor, four chimneys, and a two-story wing connected by a breezeway. Inside were marble fireplaces and elegant English furniture.
And poor whites grew more contented. Favorable circumstances came to the aid of class solidarity after 1700. The growth of the poor white population slowed. Slaves bore an increasing burden of the drudge work. And tobacco prices rose. All these changes raised the incomes of poor whites. “The small man,” writes historian Edmund S. Morgan, “was not as small as he had been.”
But the elites also took action that promoted harmony. Racial discrimination allowed white Virginians to always have someone to look down upon. They also took other measures on behalf of the yeomen. They showed their inferiors what was called “condescension”: acts of exaggerated politeness such as doffing the hat or shaking hands, gestures appreciated by ordinary people because at least it showed that the mighty noticed them. They slashed taxes and increased freedom dues, including a grant of fifty acres to every servant who went free. They also launched Indian campaigns to open up more land. Much of the region’s population shifted west. In Virginia’s first century, it was located in the Tidewater, the area along the coast. After 1700, the population shifted much of its weight to the Piedmont, the area just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They included Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter. Virginians founded towns at the fall line, the place where the rivers ceased to be navigable by boats, including Richmond and Petersburg. By the 1740s, a few settlers – mainly people from Northern Ireland, the English-Scottish border, and Germany all of whom came south from Pennsylvania, but also some eastern Virginians – had moved even farther west, beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley and, farther south, the New River Valley. These people brought along only a few slaves.
Widely distributed land influenced Virginia politics. In 1699, suffrage was filed down to only owners of at least twenty-five acres and a house, excluding tenants. Nevertheless, by the early eighteenth century, the majority of Virginia males owned enough to vote. Sixty percent of whites owned small tracts of land. Once this happened the rich and the ordinary developed a symbiotic political relationship. The wealthy tried to win ordinary voters, and ordinary people left running for office up to the wealthy, partly because it was so expensive. The two sides catered to one another because the rich and the yeomen had come to see that their similarities outweighed their differences. They were both landholders – often in large tracts, even among those who were not rich – tobacco growers, slave owners, and favorable toward tax cuts. And they did not have widely divergent interests, for now that tobacco prices were up and black slaves did much of the work, the planters no longer needed to squeeze the white poor for their wealth. The laborers were either enslaved (the blacks) or too small in numbers to make much trouble (the one third of the white population that did not own land), and in any case the two groups were separated by Virginia’s racial caste system. Slavery recurs again and again in that list of reasons for class harmony. For that reason, Edmund Morgan calls it “a flying buttress to freedom” in Virginia.
The elections at which elites tried to win the votes of the yeomen were highly personal. Candidates or their wealthy friends held barbecues for prospective voters where they served beef, pork, and rum punch – all free of charge. These affairs were intended to show off the candidate’s wealth and generosity. Voters had to publicly announce their votes, and a record of the votes was kept live as the votes were cast. Candidates knew they were losing and might try to round up additional voters. And candidates personally thanked their voters. Said one: “I shall treasure that vote in my memory. It will be regarded as a feather in my cap forever.”
By the eighteenth century, Virginia achieved stability. It built more class solidarity than the English population by using whiteness to fuse rich and poor, and its white population was almost equally male and female, providing a firm base for population increase.
Anglican Christianity acted as another form of social cohesion. There were large numbers of Lutherans and Presbyterians in the mountains, but Anglicans were the majority and were linked to the authorities. Tax dollars supported the church. One had to attend services one week out of every four or pay a fine of five shillings or fifty pounds of tobacco. One was required by law to be an Anglican, but that law was repealed in 1744, and even before then Virginians allowed other denominations to practice. What Virginians really valued was religious harmony. Anglican clergy were often quite worldly. They tended to come from the upper class and liked to race horses, play cards, dance, bet on cock fights, and swig alcohol. Describing the qualities he prized in a clergyman, one minister said, “They should be such as will give up a small Matter rather than create Disturbance and Mischief.” Only those who were seen as threats to order were repressed. In the mid-seventeenth century, Puritans and Quakers were evicted. Puritans helped to bring about the beheading of the king during the English Civil War, and Virginians feared the loyalty of traveling Quaker ministers. And dozens of Baptist pastors were jailed in the 1760s and 1770s because they traveled to preach and refused to be licensed.
Anglican practices themselves imposed a great deal of order. Power was hierarchically organized. Bishops in England ordained the clergy after testing their knowledge and doctrine. Virginia was divided into parishes, sometimes as big as a county but usually smaller, possibly containing several churches or chapels. Over the parish was the minister and his vestry, consisting of twelve upper-class men. The vestry ran the church, picked the rector – the head clergyman – collected taxes to support the church and care for the needy, determined which poor people would receive relief, and brought suspected crimes to the commissioners of the county court. If a couple had a baby less than nine months after their wedding, they had to appear in church wearing white robes and holding wands. If an unmarried couple had a child out of wedlock, the woman would be flogged and the man forced to pay for the child’s upbringing. A woman who was found guilty of slandering another woman by charging that she got pregnant out of wedlock was sentenced to receive thirty lashes and make a public apology in church. Those who did not attend church regularly sometimes were required to pay to bridge a stream, that the way to church might be eased.
At church, order continued to be elevated. The service was liturgical, shaped by prescribed readings, prayers, and responses in the Book of Common Prayer, not the impulses of the pastor or congregation. Only clergy preached, and when they did they spoke from atop a raised pulpit at the bottom of which clerks read the Bible to the congregation. The message was that the Bible ruled the church. The sermon lasted only about twenty minutes and was stylishly written in complex, carefully constructed sentences, not delivered extemporaneously. The sermon was but one of the places in which excellence clearly mattered. Another was music. While some services had no singing, others featured organ playing and multi-part harmonies. The churches were at first simple wood structures, but by the early eighteenth century they began to be more suggestive of the glory of God, built of brick with vaulted ceilings. On the walls were the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments, authoritative statements of what Christians were to believe and how they were to live.
Anglicanism tended to shape the colony more by providing man’s structure than by kindling true love of God. Virginians were more likely to partake of the Eucharist than the English. On the other hand, the majority of those partaking in Virginia were elderly people at last getting serious about their faith as death approached. One Virginian said he planned to do what he pleased until he was old because this world seemed more enjoyable than heaven, confident, he said, that “a merciful God . . . would accept of a few days or weeks of sincere repenting.”
The Powhatan prophets had been right. Invaders had come from the east and destroyed their empire. In its stead the founders of Virginia and Maryland created thriving outposts of a mighty new empire. By the late seventeenth century, England made more money on the customs duties from Chesapeake tobacco than from any other colonial product. By 1750, there were more people in Virginia than any other English, Spanish, or French colony in North America: 260,000. Maryland, with 130,000 was also among the largest colonies on the continent. But much of the population growth of these colonies had come through addiction to slave labor; 150,000 people in these colonies – 40 percent of their population – were African slaves. The Chesapeake colonies had wealth, order, wide suffrage, and power, but deep in their foundation was a huge crack.
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