IT is impossible to perform for seventeenth-century Virginia what historical demographers have been doing for contemporary England and France and even for New England. The necessary data, if ever recorded, have been lost or destroyed, and only sporadic and inconclusive vital statistics from a few isolated locations survive. The records of headrights, which have been preserved, have limitations which I have discussed elsewhere.1 Nevertheless, records of other kinds survive, especially county court records from the second half of the century and reports from governors and other officers to their superiors in England. From a variety of sources, though we cannot reconstruct the population of seventeenth-century Virginia in detail, we can at least perceive some of the larger outlines and trends.
Much of the initial work was done forty years ago by Evarts Greene and Virginia Harrington in their monumental and indispensable collection of contemporary estimates and censuses for all the colonies.2 Since they made no attempt to interpret or evaluate what they presented and since there were gaps in their materials which can now be filled, it seems worthwhile to assemble the available information and to offer some educated guesses about what remains unavailable.
There are three points at which we can fix the total population of seventeenth-century Virginia with a fair degree of certainty: 1625, 1634, and 1699. For 1625, a list gives the name of every person in the colony, his location, and often his age and the date of his arrival. For most locations, the names of persons who have died in the preceding year are also given. The 1625 list is supported by another, taken a year earlier, which gives the names and locations of the living and of those who had died in the preceding ten months.3 In 1634, when the colony was divided into counties, Governor John Harvey reported the total number of inhabitants in each county.4 For 1699, a list tabulates the number of tithables and the number of untithables in each county. Tithables were the people supposed to be income-producing and for whom a poll tax or tithe was payable (how they were defined is, as we shall see, a complex matter).
All these lists are imperfect. For example, the 1625 list gives the dates of arrival of 740 persons (out of the total of 1, 210 living), of whom 697 had arrived before 1624; but at least 150 of the 697 are missing from the 1624 list.5 The 1625 list is also demonstrably incomplete. In the surviving records of the governor and council for January and February, 1625, the months when the list was being compiled, 66 persons are mentioned in such a way as to indicate that they were alive and in Virginia.6 Of these, only 55 are to be found in the list. Of the missing 11, 5 can be accounted for as transient sailors or shipmasters. But Francis Bolton, Edward Grundon or Grindon, William Cowse, William English, Christopher Barker, Gilbert Peppett, and John Rowe were clearly resident and not listed. It seems likely from these samples that the 1624 list is short by at least 20 percent and the 1625 list by about 10 percent. Since the 1634 and 1699 lists contain no names, it is impossible to check them in the same way, but from other surviving records (see below) it appears that the 1699 list omitted the entire population of Bruton Parish in York County and probably about 6 percent of the tithables in other counties. Nevertheless, whatever their deficiencies, the population counts for 1625, 1634, and 1699 are the frame of reference from which we must proceed and into which we must fit all estimates of population that we dare postulate for intervening years.
Although 1699 is the only year during the century in which we have an enumeration of both tithables and untithables,7 there are other years for which records of the total number of tithables survive. If we can estimate the proportion between tithables and total population in those years, we can derive a figure for total population. Surviving colony records provide us with the total number of tithables in 1662, 1674, 1682, 1698, and 1699. The colony records also list the number of tithables in seven out of ten counties in 1644 and seven out of fourteen counties in 1653.8 For these years we can estimate the missing tithables by drawing on surviving county records and by extrapolation. Accounts of public expenses in 1629 and 1632, with the amount to be levied per tithable in order to meet them, enable us to calculate the number of tithables for those years; and from legislation attempting to limit tobacco production (see below) we can calculate both tithables and total population in January, 1640.9 We also have Governor Edmund Andros’ precise statement in 1696 that sets the tithables for that year at 19,566.10 We thus have, or can calculate, the number of tithables in 1629, 1632, 1640, 1644, 1653, 1662, 1674, 1682, 1696, 1698, and 1699.
Before attempting to determine the proportion of tithables to total population in these years, we should ask how reliable the tithable figures are. The lists of tithables from which they originally derived were tax lists, and since dodging taxes is surely as ancient an art as collecting them, we should know what steps the government took to insure the integrity of its lists.
In every county, the master of every household was annually required to report the number of tithables in it. Failure to report a tithable was punishable by an act of 1658 with a treble tax and by an act of 1663 with forfeiture of the person concealed or a fine of 1,000 pounds of tobacco. A sheriff or clerk or collector who turned in a deficient list of tithables was also subject to fines. After 1670 the whole county list was supposed to be posted annually on the courthouse door. Since concealment meant a larger tax for everyone else in the community, there must have been a certain amount of local vigilance against delinquent masters and against officials who submitted a short count in order to pocket part of the proceeds.11 Nevertheless, some concealment was doubtless successful, especially of boys who had recently reached tithable age.
An additional problem in trying to assess the tithable lists is the discrepancy between colony records and county records. Where figures for a particular county in a particular year survive in both colony and county records, the two are seldom identical. Occasionally the figure in the county records is lower than that in the colony records, but in the majority of cases it is higher, sometimes by a substantial amount.12 Where the discrepancy is small, the reason probably lies in the fact that certain individuals (aged and impotent) were excused from public (colony) levies, but not from parish levies. Discrepancies may also represent numbers of people bankrupt or insolvent, from whom the levy could not be collected. The Northampton records list 20 persons in these categories in 1661.13 In a few cases it is clear that the colony figure is simply out of date, based on an earlier enumeration. Other discrepancies may represent an increase in the county’s population between the time when the levy was apportioned and the time when the county collected it.14 Whatever the reasons for the differences, the county figures, where available, are probably the more reliable. Although they survive only for a minority of counties, there are enough to enable us to make some rough adjustments in the population figures that we project from the colony lists of tithables.
There remains the problem of making those projections by determining the proportion of tithables to total population. That proportion can be ascertained with a fair degree of confidence at three points, 1625, 1640, and 1699. The different figures for these years will show, what we would expect, that the untithable portion of the population, consisting largely of women and children, rose as the century progressed. But because so many varying factors affected the rate of rise, it can hardly have been a steady one.
An important variable was the changing legal definition of who was tithable. Until 1649 the term apparently included only males over fifteen (who remained tithable throughout the colonial period), but in that year the assembly decreed that all imported male servants of whatever age were tithable. In 1658 a law, ambiguously phrased, seemed to add imported Negro and Indian females over 15; in 1662 this was emended to make plain that all imported Negroes, male or female, were tithable, but Indians, however procured, were tithable only when they were over fifteen. At the same time any women servants of whatever color who worked in the ground were made tithable. In 1672 a law prescribed that Virginia-born Negro women became tithable at the age of sixteen. In 1680 the laws were changed again to make imported Negro children tithable only after they reached the age of twelve and imported Christian servants tithable only after they reached fourteen. In 1705 the law was changed once more to make sixteen the age of tithability for all males and all Negro, mulatto, and Indian women.15
The changing definitions, combined with the changing but unknowable age and sex ratios and rates of birth, death, and immigration, make it highly problematic to estimate the multiplier by which we may transform tithables to total population in any given year. How to weigh each of the variables is an enterprise that I will leave to someone with greater numerical skill and greater powers of divination than I can muster. Instead, I will assume that the figure by which we must multiply tithables in order to obtain total population rose at a steady rate between the points at which it can be ascertained, i.e., 1625, 1640, and 1699. The results will be necessarily imperfect, but I hope a good deal closer to reality than the estimates of Virginia population on which historians have hitherto had to rely.16
The most precise ratio on which to hinge our calculations is that for 1699. The list of tithables and untithables reported to England in that year reveals that in different counties the total population varied from 1.86 to 3.54 times the number of tithables. The figure for the colony as a whole was 2.69 (see table 3). This figure is probably not seriously distorted by the fact that the number of tithables for 1699 needs increasing (according to surviving county records), because the number of untithables is probably also low. There would have been no immediate motive for undercounting women and children,17 but on the other hand there was no motive for being careful in the count either, and census counts tend to underrecord. Therefore I will assume that both tithable and untithable figures are low by the same amount and use 2.69 as the number by which to multiply tithables in order to arrive at total population for the colony at the end of the seventeenth century.
At the other end of our time span in 1625 the categories tithable and untithable did not exist, but it is possible to formulate a hypothetical group of tithables for that year by estimating the number of men who were over fifteen years old (the definition of tithable before 1649). The 1625 list gives the ages for 750 persons out of the 1,210 who were then living in the colony (see table 2). For some locations, the ages of all persons are given; for others, where a different man was probably taking the census, no ages are given. In a few places, ages are given for some and not for others. On the whole, it seems likely that age distribution was roughly the same among those whose ages we do not know as among those we do. Of the 634 males whose age is given, 558 were over fifteen. If we assume the same proportion among the 291 men of unknown age, then there were altogether about 814 men over fifteen. The multiplier for transforming this hypothetical group of tithables into the colony’s total of 1,210 inhabitants in 1625 is 1.49.
In the seventy-five years between 1625 and 1699, then, the number by which tithables must be multiplied in order to obtain total population rose from 1.49 to 2.69. We may pinpoint the progress of that rise in January, 1640. In that month, when the definition of tithable still embraced only men over 15, the Virginia House of Burgesses decided to limit tobacco production to 170 pounds per person and evidently intended “person” to mean untithables as well as tithables. The yield from 170 pounds per person was expected to be 1,300,000 pounds, thus implying a population of 7,647.18 In January, 1640, the assembly also calculated that a levy of 4 pounds per tithable throughout the colony would yield 18,584 pounds, thus implying 4,646 tithables.19 If the assembly’s figures were correct, the multiplier for transforming tithables to whole population had gone up to 1.65, a little below where it would have been (1.73) if it had risen steadily from 1625 to 1699. We shall assume that the multiplier rose steadily from 1.49 to 1.65 between 1625 and 1640 and from 1.65 to 2.69 between 1640 and 1699. If we do so, we obtain the other figures given in table 1 (I have omitted the year 1698 because of its proximity to 1699).
Since the enumeration of both tithables and (in 1625, 1634, and 1699) total population is almost certainly low, the figures thus obtained must also be low. In the bottom line of the table, I have adjusted them upward in the following ways. For 1625 I have added roughly 10 percent to the total for the reasons explained on p. 397. For 1674 and 1699 I have added 6 percent, and for 1682, 12 percent. These are the average amounts by which the enumerations of tithables in extant county records for these years differ from the figures for the same counties in the colony list. I have also added 900 persons to the 1699 list to make up for the absence from the list (for reasons unknown) of Bruton Parish, York County, which seems to have had about 350 tithables that year.20 For the other years there is no way of determining the deficiency, but I have arbitrarily added 6 percent, as the probable minimum by which the colony’s enumeration of tithables or total population is likely to have been low. I have rounded off the figures to emphasize that they are estimates.21
Although most of the figures are considerably lower than those that historians have previously accepted, they suggest a spectacular rate of growth, for they show Virginians quadrupling in number in the ten years from 1625 to 1634, almost tripling in the twenty years from 1634 to 1653, and almost tripling again in the thirty years from 1653 to 1682. Taken by themselves, however, the figures tell us little about the society that was growing so rapidly. They do not tell us how it grew, whether by immigration, natural increase, increased longevity, or by some combination of these or other factors. They do not tell us where it grew fastest, whether in one region or another, among one age group or another, among men or women, among blacks or whites. They do not tell us how many died while the number of living was rising so rapidly.
The dearth of vital statistics for seventeenth-century Virginia guarantees that the answers to such questions must remain even more uncertain than the estimates of total population. There are nevertheless enough hints in a variety of surviving sources to enable us to make a stab at a few of the answers.
The evidence has been presented in the text that mortality rates were extremely heavy in Virginia in the early years and probably continued to be so until sometime in the 1640s. It is likely that the big jump in population from 1644 to 1653 was due in some measure to a decline in mortality. If other factors remained constant, a decline in mortality would naturally result in a corresponding increase in population. In the long run, however, continued growth, indeed the continuation of any population at all, had to come from births and from immigration. Of the two, immigration probably continued to be the larger source of Virginia’s population during most of the century, perhaps throughout it. Records of immigration may have been kept from as early as 1643, but none survive.22
We can, however, gain some idea of the number of immigrants from the patents for land issued by the secretary of the colony, a nearly complete record of which survives. A man was entitled to fifty acres of land for every person, including himself, whom he transported to the colony. The “headright” thus earned could be sold, and it did not have to be used within a given time. The date of a land patent is therefore no clue to the date of arrival of the person or persons for whose passage it was issued. People were still getting land in the 1640s with the headrights of persons transported in the 1620s. Later in the century, when the population increased and land became more valuable, rights were probably exercised more promptly. On the other hand, the county courts and the secretary of the colony may have become increasingly indifferent to the validity of the claims men submitted to obtain the headright certificates that would entitle them to a land patent. According to Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, writing in 1697, several headrights were frequently issued for the same immigrant, and in the absence of any genuine claim, the clerk in the secretary’s office would manufacture one for anywhere from a shilling to five shillings.23 One must therefore treat with some suspicion the figures derived from these patents. On the basis of them T. J. Wertenbaker estimated that immigrants came to Virginia in the seventeenth century at an average of 1,500 to 2,000 a year. More recently, W. F. Craven has counted 82,000 headrights in the patents issued from 1635 to 1700, an average of about 1,250 a year.24
Another rough estimate of immigration can be derived from the records of quitrents claimed by the king. For every fifty acres of land that passed from the king’s Virginian domain into private ownership, an annual quitrent of a shilling was owed to the king. It was common knowledge that men reported fewer acres than they actually held. The rent rolls (of which none survives from the seventeenth century) were probably much more deficient than the lists of tithables. Moreover, when land was not occupied or when the owner died intestate, it could revert to the king and thus be removed from the rent rolls. Any estimate of immigration based on the amounts owed the king in quitrents is therefore likely to be low. In 1663 quitrents were owed on 973,794 acres, equivalent to 19,476 immigrants (at the headright rate of fifty acres per immigrant).25 By 1702 the figure was 2,164,232 acres exclusive of the Northern Neck (between the Rappahannock and the Potomac, which paid quitrents to Lord Fairfax).26 If we allow 400,000 acres for the Northern Neck, a minimum figure, we can calculate that at least 51,285 immigrants had arrived by 1702.
Estimates based on headrights or quitrents would thus place immigration to Virginia during the seventeenth century somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 (if we allow 18,000 before the 82,000 headrights counted by Professor Craven between 1635 and 1700). The annual average would have been roughly between 500 and 1,000. Whether immigration averaged 500 a year, 1,000 a year, or even 1,500, it was obviously very substantial.
Because immigration in the seventeenth century was predominantly male, it is unlikely that births contributed nearly as much to Virginia’s growth as did immigration. In the census of 1625 Virginia had a sex ratio of 333 men to 100 women, and miscellaneous evidence argues that immigration tended to sustain the imbalance. Among 2,010 passengers embarking from London for Virginia in 1635, female names constituted less than 14 percent of the total.27 A few passenger lists that have survived from later years show higher proportions, such as the 73 men and 37 women aboard the Unity in 1643.28 Indentures of servants bound for Virginia from Middlesex County, England, in 1683–84 show 145 men and 37 women.29 Among the records of Bristol are two books containing the names and destinations of some 10,000 servants embarking at that port for the colonies during the years from 1654 to 1679.30 These list 1,168 women and 3,534 men bound for Virginia. If the names of persons for whom headrights were awarded are reliable, they tell much the same story. In the patent book covering the years from 1644 to 1651, headrights were claimed for 3,240 men as against 879 women, or about 370 men to 100 women. Samplings of the headrights claimed in later decades of the century show about the same ratio, ranging between 330 and 410 men to 100 women.31
In spite of the small number of female immigrants, the colony’s birth rate may have been somewhat greater than the sex ratio would lead us to expect. According to the census of 1625, the population was concentrated in age between 16 and 35, years when women bear children (see table 2). Later on, too, most female immigrants were probably of childbearing age, because the majority came as servants. Moreover, the sex ratio in the colony itself may have been less unbalanced than the immigration figures suggest, because in the first part of the century at least, as we have already suggested, women were probably better able to survive the diseases of the country than were men.32
TABLE 2 Ages Given for 750 Persons out of 1,210 Living in January and February, 1625 (Figures in parentheses are percentages)
It is likely, then, that Virginia had a higher birth rate than the initial small numbers of women and the high death rate would suggest.33 We have no statistics to show that after the decline in mortality began, more female immigrants survived, more female children reached maturity, or that increased longevity enabled women to produce larger families. But there can be little doubt that the birth rate did rise. The increasing ratio of total population to tithables, from 1.49 in 1625 to 2.69 in 1699, indicates a growing number of women and children and consequently of births.
It is unlikely that women reached anything like a parity with men as long as immigration continued to be heavily masculine, but by the end of the century they may well have been sufficiently numerous to make the birth rate match the death rate. In the register of Charles Parish, York County, which appears to have been kept more regularly than any other that remains from the seventeenth century, 746 births were recorded in the period 1665–1700, as against 650 deaths.34 Although it is safe to assume that deaths were less conscientiously recorded than births, this looks like a population able to sustain itself. In only two five-year periods, 1675–79 and 1685–89, did the recorded deaths outnumber the recorded births.
In sum, Virginia’s extraordinary population growth in the seventeenth century was probably due primarily to immigration, but the addition to the population through births may have been greater than a low proportion of women in the population would suggest.
Tidewater Virginia, as all Virginians know, is naturally divided by its rivers and bays into five areas: the south side of the James River, and four peninsulas, “the Peninsula” between the James and the York, the “Middle Peninsula” between the York and the Rappahannock, the “Northern Neck” between the Rappanhannock and the Potomac, and the “Eastern Shore” of Chesapeake Bay. By the end of the seventeenth century, these areas had begun to emerge as distinctive, but during most of the century, because settlement was spreading along the navigable waterways, each river with the lands on either side of it formed more of a regional unit than any peninsula other than the Eastern Shore. Because five of the eight counties designated in 1634 spanned a river and only later were divided by it into two or more counties, and because each river was a separate customs district, both county and customs records are river-oriented. In tracing the growth of population in different parts of the colony, then, it is revealing to look beyond the county units and examine also the James, the York, the Rappahannock, the Potomac, and the Eastern Shore as regional units.
Table 3 shows the population distribution in seventeenth-century Virginia by counties (arranged roughly from south to north, with the two Eastern Shore counties last). The figure immediately following the name of each county is the date of its founding. The figures in italics (for 1624, 1625, 1634, and 1699) are total population; those in roman are tithables; those in parentheses are estimates obtained by extrapolation or figures taken from county records.35 The unestimated tithable figures have been taken from colony records, except those for 1662 and those for Norfolk and Lancaster in 1653, which survive only in county records. In using the table, it should be remembered that the county records frequently show a considerably higher number. The final column shows the ratio of total population to tithables in 1699. Each county that is indented was formed wholly or partly from the county above it on the list. Although there were no counties in 1624 and 1625, the locations of settlers are known, and they have been distributed according to the county boundaries of 1634.36
Table 4 contains the same information as table 3, arranged by region. The population statistics in table 4 may be compared with the figures in tables 5 and 6, which offer a rough index of relative productivity of the different regions. After 1662, Virginia collected a duty of two shillings per hogshead on tobacco exported.37 Surviving records of this duty for 1664, 1674, 1675, 1676, 1687 and 1698–99 tell the number of hogsheads exported from each of the rivers and from the Eastern Shore (see table 5).38 For the years from July 24, 1688, to July 24, 1689, and from October 25, 1704, to July 20, 1711, we have records not of the number of hogsheads but of the total revenue produced by three duties: 2 shillings per hogshead of tobacco, 6d. per immigrant, and 15d. per ton of shipping, the three of which were reckoned together in a single account (see table 6).39 While it is impossible to differentiate the exact proportion derived from each duty, the two shillings per hogshead duty probably accounted for about 80 percent of the total.40 But whether the proportion of hogsheads was somewhat smaller and the proportion of immigrants higher matters little, for both signify manpower and are hence clues to population distribution.41
TABLE 3 Population Growth by County (Figures in italics are total population; figures in roman are tithables; figures in parentheses are estimates)
TABLE 4 Population Distribution by Region (Figures for total population in italics, for tithables in roman; figures in parentheses are percentages)
TABLE 5 Number of Hogsheads Exported
TABLE 6 Proceeds from Duty of 2 Shillings per Hogshead, 15 Pence per Ton, and 6 Pence per Immigrant
From tables 4 through 6 a few clear trends emerge. The Eastern Shore retained 7 to 8 percent of the tithables and of the population throughout the century. The James River, which originally held the mass of the population, was gradually outweighed by the growth of settlement on the northern rivers. As late as 1653, the James River counties held more than 60 percent of the recorded tithables, but in the succeeding thirty years the number of tithables increased in this area by less than 1,000, while the York, Rappahannock, and Potomac regions gained over 6,000. In 1682 they held, together, over 8,500 tithables. After 1682 the distribution of population seems not to have changed appreciably, but the northern rivers maintained their dominant position, and in the early eighteenth century were producing the lion’s share of Virginia tobacco.42
More interesting than these obvious and perhaps expectable trends is the fact that the areas of most rapid growth, the York, Rappahannock, and Potomac counties, were also the areas with the heaviest concentration of tithables in relation to total population. The Rappahannock and Potomac had 30.3 percent of the colony’s tithables in 1699 but only 26.2 percent of the total population, whereas the James, with 34.7 percent of the tithables, had 39.6 percent of the total population. On the York one in every 2.56 persons was tithable, on the Rappahannock, one in 2.31 and on the Potomac, one in 2.35. But on the James only one in 3.07 persons was tithable, and on the Eastern Shore, one in 3.06. For the south bank of the James (below Charles City and Henrico, which still covered both sides in 1699) the proportion of tithables was even smaller, one in 3.27. The Southside counties held only 13.3 percent of the colony’s tithables, but 16.2 percent of the total population, while the Rappahannock held 17.6 percent of the tithables, but only 15 percent of the population.
It seems probable that the York, Rappahannock, and Potomac areas gained their high proportion of tithables by gaining the majority of immigrants. These northern areas attracted the colony’s wealthiest planters, especially newcomers arriving with substantial amounts of capital. They could afford to buy the tithable servants and slaves, who made up the majority of immigrants. That at least one of the northern counties was servant-rich is confirmed by the records of Lancaster, the only county in the area for which the size of households can be ascertained. Most surviving county records give only the annual total of tithables, but for a few years Lancaster in the Northern Neck and Surry on the south side of the James (as well as Accomack and Northampton on the Eastern Shore) give the names of the heads of households with the number of tithables that each is responsible for. Table 7 compares the number of households in Lancaster and Surry in 1699, showing the average number of tithables per household, the average number of untithables, the overall average household size, and a breakdown of households by the number of tithables each was listed for. It will be seen that Lancaster, with far fewer households than Surry, had far more tithables, and thus far more servants per household.43
There may be another hint in table 7 about Lancaster’s growth from immigrants. That is the seemingly incongruous fact that while Lancaster had a smaller proportion of untithables in its population, it had a larger number of untithables as well as tithables per household. Such a situation could have developed if Lancaster men acquired substantially larger numbers of slaves of both sexes than Surry men did. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century the importation of slaves, both male and female, rose; and any county that invested heavily in these expensive immigrants might have gained a significant pool of native-born black children by 1699. As will be shown, there was a closer balance between slave women and slave men than between servant women and servant men. The children born to slave women could have raised the number of untithables per household while their mothers added to the number of tithables.
TABLE 7 Lancaster and Surry in 1699
(Figures in parentheses are percentages)
Another reason for the smaller number of untithables per household in Surry than in Lancaster may be that the number of households in Surry was swelled—and the average number of untithables per household lowered—by unmarried freedmen moving in from other parts of Virginia after their terms of service were up. With nothing but three barrels of corn and a suit of freedom clothes to start with, an ex-servant would have had difficulty competing for either women or land in a county of affluent planters like Lancaster.44 He may have found a better chance south of the James to squat, sharecrop, or work for wages, to rent a house and land in partnership with another man or two, and eventually to acquire a plot of his own, a wife, and children.
Whether or not the population picture suggested by table 7 can be attributed to the migration of freedmen within the colony, to immigration, or to different rates of natural increase, it is clear that the majority of householders in Surry had no servants or slaves in 1699, and those who did have them had fewer than was the case in Lancaster. There were no big men in Surry to compare with Robert Carter, listed in Lancaster for 81 tithables in 1699. In Surry that year the largest household had 17 tithables.
In two counties, Northampton and Surry, it is possible to ascertain the number of black tithables for certain periods during the seventeenth century, in Northampton for most years from 1664 to 1677 and in Surry from 1674 to 1703. In Northampton, black tithables increased from 62 in 1664 to 75 in 1677, while total tithables increased from 438 to 469. Thus in 1664, 14 percent of the tithables were black and in 1677, 16 percent, a gain of only 2 percent in thirteen years. In Surry the figures begin just before Virginia began converting to slave labor, and they reflect the change even in a poor southside county. In Surry black tithables rose from 40 in 1674 to 67 in 1682 to 155 in 1699, while total tithables rose from 420 to 494 to 683. Thus 9.5 percent of Surry’s tithables were black in 1674, 13.6 percent in 1682, and 22.7 percent in 1699.45
From the black tithable figures for Northampton and Surry we may make some rough estimates of the black population of Virginia in 1674, 1682, and 1699, the years for which we have a figure for the total tithables in the colony. Because of deficiencies in the colony records explained in connection with table 1, we will add to the total tithable figures 6 percent for 1674 and 1699 and 12 percent for 1682 (thus estimating the total tithables of the colony as 14,196 in 1674, 16,981 in 1682, and 22,902 in 1699). In 1674 Northampton had 479 tithables, of whom 72 were black. If the rest of the colony had the same proportion, the total number of black tithables in Virginia would have been about 2,130 in 1674. If we extrapolate from the Surry returns for the same year, we get a figure for the colony as a whole of about 1,350 black tithables.
An estimate of how many black untithables there may have been must be even more tentative. In 1674 the only untithable blacks were those under sixteen who had been born in Virginia. But how many of these there were in the whole colony depended on the size and sex ratio of the black population in each county. Surry, with only 40 black tithables in 1674 and fewer women than men, may not have had many native-born black children. Northampton, which in 1664 already had 62 black tithables and an almost even sex ratio, may have acquired a greater number of native-born black children by 1674. But if so, they had apparently not yet reached the age of sixteen, since there was no rise in Northampton’s black tithables as a result of the act of 1672 which made native-born black females tithable at that age. Northampton’s adult sex ratio for blacks continued to be about even during the years for which records survive (28 male, 29 female, and 5 unknown in 1664; 31 male, 28 female, and 13 unknown in 1674; 36 male, 38 female, and I unknown in 1677). Surry’s black sex ratio remained uneven throughout the century (18 male, 10 female, and 12 unknown in 1674; 36 male, 28 female, and 3 unknown in 1682; 104 male, 47 female, and 4 unknown in 1699).
Since we do not have data to establish a ratio between tithable and untithable blacks, I shall assume that Virginia’s black untithables in 1674 amounted to 15 percent of the colony’s black population, which seems a generous number (see footnote 46). Then if the proportion of blacks in the colony as a whole was the same as their proportion in Northampton, the total black population of Virginia in 1674 could have been about 2,510. Or, if we extrapolate from Surry figures, the total black population could have been 1,550.
If we extrapolate in the same way from Surry figures for 1682, the total black population in that year would have been about 2,650. It seems probable, however, that the percentage of black untithables in the colony had risen as a result of the law of 1680 which defined black untithables as imported children under twelve (Virginia-born black children under sixteen presumably remained untithable also). If, as seems likely, the new law reflected an increase of children, perhaps to 20 percent, the total black population in 1682 would have been about 2,760.46
Similar extrapolation from Surry figures for 1699 gives us a total black population of about 5,975 if we use 15 percent as the proportion of untithables in the black population, and about 6,240 if we use 20 percent.
Because of the disparity in number and in sex ratio between the black tithables of Surry and Northampton and because the composition of the population varied so widely from county to county in Virginia, it may well be that the figures derived from Northampton and Surry are unrepresentative. And since the over-all ratio of total population to tithables was about the same in Virginia as in Maryland, it may be that the over-all percentage of blacks in the population was about the same. In that case, we might more safely extrapolate from Maryland figures than from those for Northampton and Surry. If blacks constituted 15.5 percent of Virginia’s population in 1704, as slaves did in Maryland,47 then Virginia, with a total population of about 75,600,48 would have had a black population of about 11,718 in 1704. We may subtract from this figure a recorded number of 1,892 slaves imported from June, 1699, through June, 1704,49 and arrive at a black population of 9,826, or roughly 10,000.
However obtained, these estimates for 1699 are considerably below the figure (16,390) given in the Historical Statistics of the United States for the year 1700, but closer to the estimate of 6,000 offered by Bruce and the “somewhat larger but not greatly in excess of six thousand” obtained by Craven.50 All are conjectural. Perhaps the safest conclusion to draw from the few statistics that survive from the seventeenth century would be that the black population of Virginia in 1674 was not less than 1,000 and not much more than 3,000. By the end of the century the number was not much less than 6,000 and not much more than 10,000, but about to expand rapidly.
In Northampton from 1664 to 1677 and in Surry from 1674 to 1703, surviving lists give the names not only of household heads but also of the tithables in their households. Although these are scarcely substitutes for vital statistics and tell us nothing about sex ratios (except for blacks), life expectancy, age structure, age at marriage, and the other usual data of demography, they can tell us a little about social and geographic mobility.
To extract the information from them is an arduous process, and it is attempted here only for Northampton.51 Although Northampton, located on the Eastern Shore, may have been out of the main currents of Virginia life, its household structure, so far as we can compare it with other counties, was not idiosyncratic (see table in chapter 11). The Northampton tithable lists are extant for ten of the fourteen years from 1664 to 1677, those for 1669, 1670, 1672, and 1673 being missing. In order to compare the names on the various lists it was necessary to standardize the spellings, which vary a great deal from list to list. Once the “linkages” had been made between a name on one list and the same name, spelled differently, on other lists, it was possible by computer to trace each individual from one list to the next and thereby to tabulate changes of an individual’s status and location from household to household, and also to determine the duration of households, and their growth and decline in numbers of tithables. Some of the results have been given in the text, but it seems worthwhile to support these with a more detailed analysis.
First, a few over-all figures. The total number of persons named on the ten lists is 1,043. Of these, 205 appear only as householders (heads of households), and 578 appear only as non-householders. The remaining 260 appear as householders in some years and non-householders in others. Of those who changed status 246 appear at some time as non-householders and later as householders; 88 appear at some time as householders and later as non-householders; 74 shuttled back and forth more than once from one status to the other (and thus are included both among the 88 and the 246).
Table 8 shows the annual distribution of tithables among households, together with the total number of tithables, the total number of households, and the average number of tithables per household. It will be seen that the average number of tithables per household declined over the period covered, and that the decline is mainly, though not entirely, the result of an increase in the number of households with only one tithable—in other words, an increase of households that contained no worker (slave, male servant, or grown son) except the head of the house.52
Some impression of the transience of the population can be gained from table 9, giving the number of lists on which people appeared. It should be noted that since the ten lists cover fourteen years, the number of years a person appears on the surviving lists does not necessarily correspond exactly with the number of years he may have remained in the county. Moreover, persons appearing on more than one list were not necessarily in the county continuously: 134 persons are listed more than once but not in consecutive lists.
TABLE 8 Size of Northampton Households, 1664–77,
(In number of tithables)
TABLE 9 Duration of Stay in Northampton County
Tables 10 and 11 offer other ways of looking at the transience or continuity of the county’s population. Table 10 gives the number of tithable persons who were present in each of the first four lists and also present ten years later, together with the percentages they formed of the total tithables. For example, 183 persons who were present in 1667 were also present in 1677. They constituted 41.7 percent of the total tithables in 1667 and 39 percent of the larger total in 1677.
Because of the tendency of people to disappear from the lists and then reappear later, a fairer indication of the degree of continuity may be the fact that 207 tithables in 1677 had also been on one of the first four lists (1664–67). In other words, 44.1 percent of 1677’s 469 tithables had been in the county ten to fourteen years before. Of the 207, 85 had been householders, and 82 of these (including 4 blacks) had retained that status. The other 122 (including 42 blacks) had been non-householders, and 73 of them (including 40 blacks) were still in that position, but 49 (including 2 blacks) had made it into the ranks of householders.
Table 11, using the tithable figures in a different way, registers the growth, decline, and continuity of households from year to year. The table shows a substantial body of households continuing at about the same size each year, but the number that decreased in size generally exceeded the number that increased. In this table the percentage of households decreasing, increasing, and at the same size is compared with the households of the preceding year, so that no figure could be given for the first year, 1664. It should be noted that the figures for 1671 are compared with those for 1668, and those for 1674 are compared with those for 1671, because the intervening years are missing.
TABLE 10 Tithable Persons Persisting for a Decade in Northampton
Since the most noticeable development during the years covered by the lists was the increase of households with a single tithable, it may be of interest to trace the rise of persons who started as non-householders. Of the 230 who eventually became householders, 121 remained as the sole tithable in the house they headed during the time they headed it (26 of the 121 reverted and ended as non-householders). But 60 at some point obtained another tithable (11 of the 60 ended as non-householders); 28 obtained 2 more (2 of the 28 ended as non-householders); 9 obtained 3 more; 8 obtained 4 more (2 of the 8 ended as non-householders); 2 obtained 5; 1 obtained 6; and 1 obtained 7 (the last two were sons of prominent men who set up households of their own during the period, and several others were apparently men of some means who had lived for a while in the household of another man before becoming householders themselves). Of 92 persons who first appear in the lists as the head of a house in which they were the only tithable, 21 at some point became non-householders; 42 clung to their position without increasing it; 20 gained another tithable; 7 gained 2 more; and 2 gained 3 more.
TABLE 11 Household Stability in Northampton
TABLE 12 Mobility of Non-Householder in Northampton
The number of Negro householders in these years was not large, but neither was it as small as might be expected. Of the 1,043 Persons named on any list, 101 were Negroes; and of these, 13 were or became householders, as compared with 45 percent of whites. But this comparison is distorted by the fact that Negro women were tithable while white women ordinarily were not. The 101 Negroes on the lists included 48 women, of whom 3 became householders (as widows). If we confine the comparison to men, 10 out of 53 Negroes named, or 19 percent, were or became householders.
Table 12 shows the percentages of non-householders moving and static each year. Tables 13 and 14 show the movements of individual non-householders. The top figure in each vertical column of tables 13 and 14 shows the number of people who made the maximum possible number of household changes for the length of time that they were non-householders (some were householders in other years and movement from non-householder to householder or vice versa is not recorded in these two tables). Thus, for example, in table 13 there are 16 white non-householders who appear on four lists in four different households, and so forth. The figures show that there was a large movement of white non-householders from household to household. Since most non-householders were probably servants, either indentured or hired, tables 12 and 13 suggest that each year many servants moved or were moved from one master to another.
TABLE 13 Mobility of White Non-Householders in Northampton
TABLE 14 Mobility of Black Non-Householders in Northampton
The figures for black non-householders in tables 12 and 14 should be treated as approximations. Blacks are much more difficult to identify than whites, because most are listed with no surname, and sometimes they are listed simply as Negro, Negro man, or Negro woman. In these cases they have been identified by inference from their location in preceding or succeeding years. The result may be to exaggerate the stability of the black population. It nevertheless seems highly probable that blacks moved from household to household much less than did white non-householders.
The figures in all these tables, not only for Northampton but for all Virginia, are probably less solid than they may appear to be to one who has not struggled with the records from which they are derived. I have striven to eliminate errors both in counting and in computation, but it is not unlikely that many remain. It should be remembered, moreover, that people in the seventeenth century had less respect for numbers than their modern counterparts. Figures derived from seventeenth-century sources are apt to be shaky at best, and those from seventeenth-century Virginia are shakier than most. What I hope can be discerned from all the tables is simply the broad outline of developments taking place in a society that was later to contribute so heavily to the making of the United States.
1 E. S. Morgan, “Headrights and Head Counts: A Review Article,” VMHB, LXXX (1972), 361–71.
2 Evarts B. Greene and Virginia Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), 134–55. Where not otherwise indicated, the lists of tithables and inhabitants in the whole colony have been taken from this volume. Lists of tithables for particular counties have been taken from the microfilms of county court records in the Virginia State Library at Richmond. In order to avoid excessive citations, I have not ordinarily cited the volume and page of county records, since the finding aids at the State Library make it possible to locate easily most of the lists of tithables. Though the lists were made in June of each year, they normally appear in the records, when they appear at all, at the time the county levy was laid, in October, November, or December.
3 The two lists are in the Colonial Office group, class I, piece 3, Public Record Office. (Hereafter Public Record Office documents will be cited in the standard abbreviated form: C.O. 1/3, etc.) Both are printed in John C. Hotten, The Original Lists of Persons of Quality … and Others Who Went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600–1700, (London, 1874), 169–95, 201–65. The 1615 list is also printed in Annie L. Jester and Martha W. Hiden, Adventurers of Purse and Person, 1601–1625 (Princeton, 1956), 5–69. The 1625 list is analyzed in Irene W. D. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic History,” WMQ, 3rd ser., XXX (1973), 65–92. The figures she has obtained from the list are not quite the same as mine. For example, she counts at one point 1,218 persons living, but reduces this to 1,216 on the grounds that Edward Bennett and Daniel Gookin were probably not present. I believe she has overcounted, however, by failing to notice that six persons (William Hampton, Joan Hampton, Oliver Jenkins, Joan Jenkins, John Washborne, and William Stafford) are listed twice. My own count is 1,210, and this includes at least one possible duplication, namely, Thomas Spillman. Since a person of that name is listed once as having arrived in 1616 and in another place as having arrived in 1623, I have assumed that there were two Thomas Spillmans. Mrs. Hecht’s count of the ages of men and women also differs from mine (see table 2). She finds 63 men over 39 while I can find only 53, and she finds no women over 39, while I count 8.
4 C.O. 1/8, f.155; VMHB, VIII (1900–1901), 302.
5 In comparing the two lists I have not included women, whose names could have changed by marriage between 1624 and 1625, but I have made allowance for the vagaries of seventeenth-century spelling and have assumed, for example, that George Bailife is George Bayley, William Cooksey is William Coxe, and Pharrow Phlinton is Farrar Flinton.
6 H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1924), 43–47.
7 There is also a list of tithables and untithables for 1701, the only other year during the colonial period for which such a list exists. It is similar to the 1699 list, and for some counties identical. For the sake of simplicity, I will confine attention to the 1699 list, which is located in C.O. 5/1312, f.135. This single sheet is apparently all that survives of a much more detailed enumeration. The instructions for making the enumeration, in C.O. 5/1310, f.177, call for a record of the names of the master and mistress of the household; free Christian men and women, free Christian boys and girls, Christian men and women servants, men and women slaves, and boy and girl slaves. If such an enumeration for any county should turn up, it would make possible a much closer analysis of Virginia’s population structure at the end of the century than can now be attempted.
8 The list for 1662 is in Clarendon Mss. 82, Bodleian Library, Oxford; that for 1674 is in Blathwayt Papers, XVII, Colonial Williamsburg; that for 1644 is in Hening, I, 287–88. These three are the only ones not given in Greene and Harrington, American Population, J 34–55.
9 Hening, I, 142–43, 196–97, 224–25, 228; WMQ, 2nd ser., IV (1924), 159–62.
10 C.O. 5/1309, f.33. Andros also stated that in the preceding four years the number had been “above 19,000 and never came to 20,000.” We also have estimates by Philip Ludwell in 1679 that the total number of tithables was “not 14,000” and by Governor Thomas Culpeper in 1681 that it was “about 14,000.” Coventry Papers, LXXVIII, 444; C.O. 1/47, f.260.
11 Hening, I, 376, 455; II, 83, 187, 412; Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (1697), 53.
12 The widest discrepancies occur in 1682, when we find the following figures:
|
Colony List |
County List |
||
|
Henrico |
471 |
477 |
|
|
Surry |
486 |
494 |
|
|
Norfolk |
604 |
850 |
|
|
York |
1041 |
1041 |
|
|
Lancaster |
421 |
531 |
|
|
Middlesex |
546 |
611 |
|
|
Northumberland |
624 |
774 |
|
|
Stafford |
407 |
499 |
|
|
Accomack |
583 |
Ö28 |
In the case of Stafford it came out in the House of Burgesses three years later that the list presented to the colony was 92 persons short, and Stafford was required to make up the difference at the next levy. (See the journal for this meeting of the House, pp. 29, 48, in the Effingham Papers.) But nothing was said about the other counties.
13 Northampton VIII, 102–4.
14 This is suggested by the fact that in several instances the county records themselves record two widely differing tithable figures, one being the number actually in the county and the other being the number on which the assembly calculated the county’s contribution to public (colony) expenses. In Norfolk in 1660 the county’s contribution to the public was calculated at 19,600 pounds of tobacco on the basis of 56 per poll for 350 tithables, but the 19,600 was actually divided among 402 tithables then in the county. In 1662 the corresponding figures were 400 tithables in the public calculation and 488 actually in the county. But in 1664 the figures were 589 and 590. Norfolk IV, 268, 355, 412. There are similar disparities in several other counties.
15 Hening, I, 361, 454; II, 84, 170, 296, 479–80; III, 258. The provisions of the 1705 law may have been enacted earlier. They are substantially the same as those of a Maryland law of 1692 (Archives of Maryland, XIII [Baltimore, 1894], 538–39), and it is unlikely that the Virginia assembly would have given such an advantage in taxes to Maryland planters over Virginia planters. Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton in 1697 also defined tithables in the same way as the 1705 law (Present State of Virginia, 53).
16 The multiplier that has usually been used for converting tithables to total population for the whole colonial period has been that furnished by Governor William Gooch in 1730: “The Rule for computing the number of Inhabitants is by the List of Tithables on which the publick Tobacco Taxes are laid; These are all white male Persons above sixteen years of age, and all Blacke male and Female above the same Age. Of these there are now about 51,000 and of them about 30,000 may be reckoned Blacks. Accounting therefore the white women married and unmarried and the white and black children under sixteen years to be treble the number of the white tithables, the number of souls in Virginia will amount to 114,000 at leas. i.e. take 30,000 out of 51,000 and there remains 21,000. Treble the number makes 63,000, to which add the 51,000 and that makes 114,000.” Gooch to Board of Trade, July 23, 1730, C.O. 5/1322, f.71; Greene and Harrington, American Population, 145n. (Gooch, like other Virginians, is ambiguous about the exact age when a person became tithable, that is, whether it was at sixteen or over sixteen. The law said at sixteen.) No formula based on the relative proportion of blacks and whites in the eighteenth century can be of any use for the seventeenth century. It is impossible from the lists of tithables to determine the proportion of blacks to whites during any part of the seventeenth century except in Surry and Northampton counties (see below).
17 But Virginians, like other peoples, may have been reluctant to give the numbers of their families, for fear of a later capitation tax. Governor Spotswood maintained that such was the case in 1712. R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, Virginia Historical Society, Collections, n.s. (Richmond, 1882–85), I, 165–66.
18 WMQ, 2nd ser., IV (1924), 31. That the limitation was per person, not per tithable, is indicated by a supplementary act (ibid., 156–57) allowing planters with wives and children in England to include them in calculating the allowed crop.
19 Ibid., 160.
20 C.O. 5/1312, ff.134, 135.
21 For the detailed figures on which this table is based, see table 3 and notes 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, and 42.
22 Hening, I, 27; II, 135.
23 Present State of Virginia, 16–18. Instances of more than one head- right issued for the transportation of a single individual are discernible in both the patent books (Virginia State Library) and the county court records long before 1697. Fraud or failure to verify claims is also suggested by the fact that many patents simply give the number of persons transported without specifying their names.
24 Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton, 1922), 35; W. F. Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971), 10–17. For a more extended discussion of the land patents as an index of immigration, see my review cited in note 1. For a discussion of the relation of immigration to tobacco prices, see Russell R. Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” Maryland Historical Magazine, LXVIII (1973), 323- 29.
25 William Byrd I, Letter Book, Virginia Historical Society; VMHB, III (1895–96), 42–47; LI (1943). I73–85.
26 C.O. 5/1313, f.196.
27 Hotten, Original Lists, 35–145.
28 Additional Mss. 5489, f.85, British Museum.
29 Middlesex County Record Office, London.
30 N. D. Harding, W. D. Bowman, and R. Hargreaves-Mawdesley, Bristol and America: A Record of the First Settlers in the Colonies of North America, 1654–1685 (London, n.d.). I have not counted persons with ambiguous names like “Francis” or persons bound for “Virginia or Maryland” and “Virginia or Barbados.”
31 Patent books, Virginia State Library. Again, I have not counted persons whose names do not clearly indicate sex. W. B. Blanton found 17,350 women and 75,884 men in “a prolonged search of the patent books and other records of the times” (presumably not limited to immigrants), a ratio of 440 men to 100 women. “Epidemics, Real and Imaginary, and Other Factors Influencing Seventeenth-Century Virginia’s Population,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXXI (1957), 454–62, at p. 462.
32 See above, chap. 8.
33 The greater capacity of women to survive a heavy death rate is also suggested by the sex ratio in West Indian slave populations. Though slaves were imported in a ratio of sixty men to forty women, the sex ratio of slaves in all the English islands in the late seventeenth century was about even, because the men died more rapidly. See Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713) (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 314–17. Richard Ligon observed that in an epidemic in the 1640s ten men died for every woman. Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 21.
34 Photostat in Virginia State Library. The only other seventeenth-century register that appears at all regular is that of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County (Sally N. Robins, ed., The Parish Register of Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia, from 1653 to 1812 [Richmond, 1897]). The seventeenth-century portions of it seem to have been kept with any regularity only during the years 1678–87. In that period the recorded births greatly exceeded the recorded deaths. Russell R. Menard, in an unpublished paper, “Immigrants and Their Increase: The Process of Population Growth in Early Colonial Maryland,” has calculated from a study of wills that the Maryland population became capable of sustaining itself without immigration by the end of the seventeenth century. I am indebted to Dr. Menard for a copy of his paper.
35 The sources for table 3 are indicated in notes 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10. The 1644 estimate for Nansemond (then known as Upper Norfolk) is based on the fact that in 1645 the sum of 38,414 pounds of tobacco was to be raised by a levy of 31 pounds per tithable in Upper Norfolk and Isle of Wight and 28 pounds per tithable in Lower Norfolk (later known as Norfolk). See Norfolk I, 286. Lower Norfolk had 305 tithables and thus raised 8,540 pounds. This left 29,874 to be raised by the 31-pound levy in Isle of Wight and Upper Norfolk. Isle of Wight had 463 tithables in 1644 and thus raised about 14,353. This left 15,521 to be raised by Upper Norfolk. At 31 pounds per tithable, this would have required 501 tithables.
The other estimated figures for 1644 and 1653 are extrapolations from the numbers reported in other years. The total figure for 1644 is not far from the estimates given by the assembly in a letter to the king in October, 1644, stating that there were 4,000 planters of tobacco. Ms. Clarendon 24, f.52, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The low figure of 738 for York in 1699 arises from the fact that it does not include Bruton Parish (see above). Some of the other irregularities in the growth and decline of particular counties may be explained by the formation of new counties from old ones; but some, like the sharp drop in Surry from 1653 to 1674, are difficult to account for.
36 It is impossible to be certain of the exact location of many settlements, and my assignments differ a little from earlier ones. It should be noted that the boundaries of the corporations existing in the early years were not necessarily the same as those of later counties that carried the same name.
37 Hening, I,491, 523; II, 130–32.
38 For 1664: Clarendon Mss. 82, Bodleian Library, Oxford; for 1674: Coventry Papers, LXXVI, 319, ACLS British Mss. Project, reel 63, Library of Congress; for 1675 and 1676; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659–1693 (Richmond, 1914), 501; for 1687: Blathwayt Papers, BL89, Huntington Library; for 1698–99: VMHB, XXIV (1916), 304, 403. The early records give only the name of the collector, but the river for which each was responsible can be inferred from a variety of evidence, and directly, for 1676, from Calendar of Treasury Books, V, 347, and for 1687 from Lord Howard of Effingham’s letters to the Commissioners of Customs, Aug. 1, 1686, and to the Lords of Trade, Feb. 22, 1686/7, Effingham Papers.
39 The records for 1688–89 are from a volume of William Byrd 1 that was on deposit in the Virginia Historical Society in 1850 but is no longer there. It contained the accounts from 1688 to 1704. From it the Virginia Historical Register, III (1850), 187, printed the first and last entries. The records for 1704 to 1711 are in C.O. 5/1317, ff.25–30. One report out of nine is missing for Rappahannock and three out of nine for the Eastern Shore, so the figures for these areas are a little low.
40 This was the case in 1698–99, when we have a breakdown of the amount received from the two shillings per hogshead and from the other two duties. VMHB, XXIV (1916), 304, 403.
41 None of these figures should be used as an index of Virginia’s total tobacco exports. Those for the seventeenth century are too isolated to show what the average annual crop may have been, for tobacco harvests varied enormously from year to year. Moreover, the amounts packed in a hogshead varied almost as much as the harvests, in spite of legislation regulating the dimensions. The number of pounds in a hogshead tended to increase throughout the century, because regardless of weight four hogsheads were accounted a ton in the freight charges (H.C.A. 13/71, deposition of John Jeffreys, June 5, 1656), and regardless of weight each hogshead was subject to the two shillings duty. Records of shipments of 534 hogsheads by Thomas Stegge in 1666 and 1669 show a range in weight from 352 to 670 pounds, with an average of 456 (Letter Book of William Byrd I, 1683–91, Virginia Historical Society). There were numerous allegations that the number of hogsheads which paid the duty was considerably smaller than the number shipped (C.O. 1/20, f.11), and that a good deal was shipped in bulk, fitted in by the sailors in the spaces between hogsheads. The figures are therefore too fragmentary to be more than a rough index of the differing productivity of the different areas.
42 The James was to recover its preeminence later in the century. By the early 1760s the tonnage of shipping entering and clearing in the James surpassed that in all other districts put together. Add. Mss. 38,335, f.210, British Museum.
43 The same was true throughout the period when figures are available. For example, in 1675, when 140 of Surry’s 245 households had only one tithable, the number for Lancaster was 46 out of 146. The figures in table 7, except those for untithables, are taken from county records (Lancaster VII, 92–95; Surry V, 189–94) and thus differ from those in table 3, taken from colony records.
44 See chap. 11.
45 All these figures are from county records, not colony records, and thus differ from the figures in table 3. The Surry lists start in 1668, but give the names only of householders until 1674. Beginning in that year they give the names of most other tithables as well, and after 1677 they give the names of all tithables. It is possible from later lists and other county records to identify 12 Negroes not named as such in the 1674 list. These have been included in the number (40) for that year.
46 Gregory King placed 27.6 percent of the population of England and Wales at under eleven years old (D. V. Glass, “Two Papers on Gregory King,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History [London, 1965], 159–220, at p. 214). It is likely that the black population of Virginia at this time was heavily weighted toward persons over twelve, but it is clear that the slavers brought in and sold small children as well as adults. By the law of 1680 a master had to register the age of a black child in the county court within three months of arrival; and the court records regularly show such registrations. For example, in Norfolk IX there are 13 registrations between March, 1687, and July, 1691, with ages varying from four to twelve. It seems likely that children under twelve, either immigrant or native-born, would have amounted to no more than 20 percent of the total black population in 1682. But the figure is merely a guess.
47 Russell Menard, in “Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1974), has shown that the tables in Archives of Maryland, XXV (Baltimore, 1905), 255–56, which make the black population about 12.8 percent of the total, have omitted black children in most counties. He calculates slaves as 5,609 out of a total Maryland population of 36,213 in 1704, or 15.5 percent. I am indebted to Dr. Menard for showing me this section of his dissertation.
48 The total listed number of tithables in that year was 26,928. If we add 6 percent for undercounting in the list, the number is 28,544. The ratio of total population to tithables in 1701 had gone down from 2.69 to 2.65, probably as a result of the importation of large numbers of Negro tithables. The importation was continuing, and in order to arrive at total population we should multiply by a figure no larger than 2.65. This would give us a total of about 75,600, which may still be too large.
49 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, D.C.. 1930–35), IV, 67, 172–73.
50 U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), 756; Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1895), II, 108; Craven, White, Red, and Black, 103.
51 The Surry lists (see note 45) have been analyzed, in different ways, in Kevin P. Kelly, “Economic and Social Development of Seventeenth-Century Surry County, Virginia” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 1972). The Northampton lists are in Northampton VIII, 197–98; X, 14–15, 28–29, 41–42, 54–55. 114–15. 272–73; XII, 73–75, 148–49, 189–91.
52 The total number of households in table 8 includes households headed by a widow (of which in most years there were three or four), but widows are not included in the number of tithables.