IT would not have been surprising if slavery had developed swiftly in Virginia during the booming 1620s, when tobacco prices were high enough to inspire the same overpowering greed that moved the Spaniards on Hispaniola. Two decades later Englishmen in Barbados turned to slavery in as short a time, in order to exploit the island’s newly discovered capacity for producing sugar. But in Virginia, although the tobacco barons of the 1620s bought and sold and beat their servants in a manner that shocked other Englishmen, they did not reduce them to slavery, as we understand the term. And Virginians did not import shiploads of African slaves to solve their labor problem until half a century more had passed. Perhaps if the boom had continued, they would have; but when it collapsed, they relaxed a little in their pursuit of riches and began to think about making the best of life in the new land.
Making the best of life in America meant making their part of America as English as possible, and in the decades after 1630 they worked at it. Although they did not share the broad vision of freedom that had moved Raleigh and Hakluyt and other backers of Virginia, they did want the liberty and security that went with “the rights of Englishmen.” From the time of Sir Thomas Dale and the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall through the subversion of Sir Edwin Sandys’ good intentions during the boom years, most Virginians had enjoyed fewer civil and political rights than they would have had in England. Now, for a period of thirty years or more, they busied themselves with building a society that would give them a greater freedom than most could have hoped for in their native land. It was a crude society, peopled by crude men, but it was less crude and less cruel than that presided over by the labor barons of the 1620s. Only by taking a close look at it can we perceive how much like England the Virginians made it—and how unlike it nevertheless remained. Only so will we perceive how it could nurture freedom and yet invite slavery, as new forces emerged to exert new pressures toward the paradoxical union.
It took more than a decade for Virginians to admit to themselves that the boom was indeed over. Tobacco prices, after ranging from one to three shillings a pound during most of the 1620s, fell to as little as a penny a pound in 1630.1 The reaction of Virginians was to order that the boom return. The legislative assembly, composed of the governor’s council and the popularly elected House of Burgesses, continued to meet, albeit unrecognized by the king, after the shift to royal government. In 1629 it tried, ineffectually, to raise prices by limiting tobacco production. In 1632 it took a simpler course and simply forbade anyone to buy English goods at a rate of less than one-pound of tobacco for every sixpence that the goods cost in England.2 Although the order was renewed the following year (and the price raised) such an edict could not have been widely enforced.3 During the decade tobacco did recover, at least to sixpence a pound, but not for long. When it hit threepence in 1638 and stayed there the next year, the planters again called for controls.
By this time they had divided their settlements into counties, each presided over by a commander, with whom a group of commissioners sat in a county court that exercised extensive jurisdiction, civil and criminal.4 Equipped with this new arm of government, the assembly tried once again to legislate the boom back into existence. The king had been demanding a limitation of the tobacco crop ever since he had taken over direction of the colony from the company. Like Sir Edwin Sandys, he thought that Virginia should be able to produce something more than smoke, and that the way to achieve the goal was to restrict tobacco production. The king wanted to confine production to an amount that he would undertake to market through a royal commission (thus collecting profits as well as customs duties from the undesirable weed). In 1638 his commissioners offered to take 1,600,000 pounds at sixpence a pound. On behalf of the planters, the assembly declined the offer, but the next year ordered on its own initiative a more drastic limitation, 170 pounds per person, which was calculated to produce only 1,300,000 pounds. At the same time the assembly decreed that it should be sold at no less than a shilling a pound.5
This was the last serious effort to recover the boom. For two years the county courts tried conscientiously to enforce the law, but by June, 1642, the scheme had to be abandoned, partly because the authorities in England had disapproved, but also because the planters themselves had seen that it was not working.6 That summer everyone planted tobacco freely, and the next year it sold at 2.4 pence per pound (20 shillings the hundredweight). It never rose much above that during the rest of the century.7 The days of getting-rich-quick by growing tobacco were over.
Yet Englishmen deprived of the dream of easy riches in Virginia continued to come there. From about 1,300 people in 1625 the colony grew to about 2,600 in 1629 and to roughly 8,000 in 1640. For the first four or five years of the 1640s as the Civil Wars in England began and the so-called Great Migration ended, the Virginia population remained about level and may have dropped a little as a result of an Indian massacre in 1644 and of migration to Maryland. But by 1653 the colony held more than 14,000 and continued to grow rapidly, reaching about 25,000 by 1660.8
How was the country able to sustain this rapidly expanding population when for so many years a much smaller number had lived so close to starvation? Virginia’s newcomers were no more assiduous about planting corn than their predecessors had been, and no less addicted to growing tobacco despite the low price it fetched. Although there were no more famines, scarcity several times drove up the cost of a barrel of corn (5 bushels) to over 100 pounds of tobacco, a figure that Virginians came to regard as a maximum.9 A law requiring every man to plant two acres of corn had to be reenacted several times before 1660, and during the 1650s people were still being presented to the courts for delinquency either in planting or tending corn.10 Nevertheless, increased corn production was undoubtedly a factor in Virginia’s ability to feed her growing population. Equally important, however, was the fact that the pasture farming introduced by earlier immigrants had at last begun to pay off.
It had occurred to the settlers at least as early as 1624 that they might protect their domestic animals from Indians and wolves by erecting a six-mile palisade between the headwaters of two creeks in the neighborhood of present-day Williamsburg.11 The palisade would cut off from the mainland a large segment of the peninsula between the James and the York rivers. During the boom everyone was too busy growing tobacco to attempt the job, but in 1634 they got it done. Thereafter, as soon as the wolves in the area had been exterminated, there was a safe cattle range as large, they bragged, as the English county of Kent.12 Elsewhere, too, by fighting back the Indians and by placing bounties on wolves, the settlers succeeded in building up their herds. While the climate of Virginia continued to be perilous for human beings, it was great for cattle and swine; and once the breeding numbers passed a certain point, they multiplied a good deal more rapidly than people did and provided meat and milk to sustain Virginia’s growth. Virginia swine were said to be particularly flavorful, comparable to Westphalian.13
Besides neat cattle and swine, the settlers kept a few goats and fewer sheep. Horses were at first a rarity. In the beginning the settlers tried to keep their livestock continually under attendance. Owners of large herds employed cowkeepers to look after them; many families kept dogs to help with the job; and both cattle and swine were sometimes penned up at night.14 Milch cows may have continued to be thus guarded. But in 1643 Virginians passed a fencing law that in effect gave livestock the run of the land. A man had to place a sufficient fence around his crops, at least four and a half feet high, with the lowest rail close enough to the ground to keep hogs from getting under it. Unless he had such a fence in good repair, he had no chance of recovering damages if someone else’s hogs or cattle got into his field and destroyed his crop. The burden of proof was on the planter to show that his fence was sufficient. The law was a boon to the burgeoning animals and probably no less so to the settlers’ corn crops.15
It would be wrong to assume from the fencing act that Virginians were divided into planters and cattlemen. During these decades every planter was also a cattleman, and cattle constituted a large proportion of the worldly goods of both affluent and ordinary men. The inventories of the smallest estates recorded for probate usually list a cow or two. In Norfolk County, for example, in 1656, one Peter Marks left only a bed, a gun, a chest, three pewter dishes, a pot, a kettle, and two cows—a list that might be considered the basic equipment for keeping house in Virginia.16 In York County we find in 1646 an estate worth 1,380 pounds of tobacco, of which a cow, a calf, and a young bull account for 850 pounds; or in 1647 an estate worth 700 pounds, of which a cow and yearling heifer account for 550 pounds.17 In large estates the proportions were frequently similar. When Cornelius Lloyd, a commissioner of Norfolk County, died in 1654, his possessions, other than debts owed him, were appraised at 40,361 pounds of tobacco, of which 87 head of cattle accounted for 25,540 pounds.18 Cesar Puggett, of the same county, left an estate in 1645 valued at 24,215 pounds, of which 42 cattle accounted for 17,500.19 When Edmund Scarburgh leased a plantation on the Eastern Shore to William Brenton of Boston, he included 109 head of cattle and “a parcel of hogs.”20 In 1647 Norfolk County had 360 tithables, that is, men over fifteen, and 546 cows three years or more old.21 And in Northampton County the clerk of the court recorded cattle marks for 236 persons between 1665 and 1669, a time during which the number of households in the county did not exceed 177.22
Virginians had recognized that their growing herds might be a way to wealth as well as to health and survival, and so they proved to be. The spectacular increase of cattle when they were sufficiently cared for, in a land where the range was limited only by wolves and Indians, presented the possibility of high returns on a small investment. Even though the actual increase was seldom equal to the potential, the certainty of a very large increase was taken for granted. In 1638 a jury found that the heirs and assigns of Abraham Peirsey owed the heirs and assigns of Samuel Argali fifty head of cattle for two entrusted to Peirsey in 1621.23 This was unrealistic and unfair, but such a rate of increase was not impossible. If we may believe the author of A Perfect Description of Virginia, Benjamin Symmes’s free school owned forty head of cattle in 1649. They came from eight with which Symmes had endowed the school when he started it fourteen years earlier.24 In 1651 Simon Foscutt of Northampton obtained from William Whittington a ten-year-old cow for which he agreed to deliver two cows between three and seven years old, with calves by their sides, five years later. At prevailing prices the ten-year-old cow would have been worth around 500 pounds of tobacco, and a young cow with a calf by her side around 600 pounds. Whittington made similar bargains with two other people, and in one case he was able to demand two for one in a little over three years.25
Virginians found a market for surplus cattle in exporting to other colonies, especially Barbados,26 and in supplying the tobacco ships that waited long periods in Virginia rivers to gather cargo. Because immigration kept both the domestic and export markets growing, the rapid increase in cattle brought no slump in prices. And since cattle for the most part sustained themselves by foraging in the woods and marshes,27 the periodic scarcity and high cost of corn did not affect their value either. During the 1640s and 1650s prices of cattle showed no marked fluctuation.28
Although virtually everybody in Virginia raised cattle, corn, and tobacco, a few men specialized in the industrial trades that enabled the colony to carry on business. Shipwrights built small vessels and repaired ships that came from abroad to collect tobacco; coopers made the hogsheads (barrels) in which tobacco was packed for shipment; and carpenters built tobacco sheds and houses for the expanding population.29 But there were never enough artisans to fill all the colony’s needs. To get around the shortage, wealthy Virginians sometimes imported craftsmen as servants and hired them out to others. A variety of skilled men (including tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, and even physicians) thus crossed the ocean, but either too few came or too few stuck to their trades after serving out their indentures. The number of “unfixed” guns in inventories and complaints of the difficulty in getting them repaired testify to the shortage and the high cost of ironwork, as does the law forbidding people to burn dilapidated houses for the sake of obtaining nails.30 One of the colony’s largest needs was for shoes, which wore out rapidly in the rough new clearings; and with so many cattle Virginia had the raw materials for making them. But attempts to set up tanneries and cobbler shops proved unsuccessful.31
Raising tobacco, even at twenty shillings the hundredweight, was still too lucrative a way of spending one’s time to allow serious competition from other pursuits. Tobacco occupied a man nine months of the year, what with sowing, transplanting, weeding, topping, worming, striking, and curing. The remainder of the year he cleared land, fenced, and cut boards for casks. But the tasks, if demanding, were lightened by what the settlers had learned from the Indians’ easy manner of agriculture. They did not attempt to use their livestock for dunging the fields or for pulling plows. They did not even attempt to establish permanent fields, cleared of roots and stumps, where they could drive a plow. Instead, they adapted their tobacco farming to the Indians’ primitive but labor-saving system: clear a field by girdling the trees, plant it to tobacco for three or four years, to wheat or corn for a few more, and then clear another stretch and let the first recover its fertility by reverting to forest.32 It was a mode that continued to horrify those who measured the merit of a farmer by the neatness of his fields, and it did require a lot of land. But in a country where land was more plentiful than labor it made sense. With a place to live, a couple of acres in corn, a couple in tobacco, a few cattle and swine, and firewood everywhere, a man needed to buy only clothes and tools (hoes and axes and if possible a gun). By the 1640s he could produce 1,500 pounds of tobacco in a year (men were sometimes hired by the year for that much or more), probably twice what a man could grow in the 1620s.33 Between his cattle and his tobacco he could count on coming out ahead.
Having found a way to stay alive and even to live more comfortably than most men did in England, Virginians during the second quarter of the seventeenth century at last began to look upon their raw new land as a home rather than a temporary stopping place. And they tried to re-create for themselves the security they associated with home in England, where life was bounded by time-honored social, legal, and political restraints and freedoms.
At the highest level in England those restraints had operated against the king, barring him from arbitrary interference with the lives of his subjects. And the subjects who were most careful to restrain him were those who themselves controlled the counties where they lived. The big men of England exercised a rather larger influence in the everyday lives of their neighbors than the king did. Virginia’s big men were a good bit smaller than England’s, but they aspired to the same local influence and the same autonomy for their colony as the English nobility enjoyed in their counties. In Virginia English freedom meant, paradoxically, to be as free as possible from interference by England.
Since Virginia’s tobacco barons were not to the manner born, they could scarcely expect that the king would defer to the likes of them as he did to his nobility.34 Still, they had the advantage of distance, and three thousand miles of ocean might prove an even more effective bulwark of local autonomy than their lordly counterparts in England gained from rank. They had already experienced the power that distance gave them in circumventing the orders sent by the Virginia Company. And even before the king took control of Virginia’s government, they took steps to secure their position. Meeting in the last assembly under the company, the governor’s council and the House of Burgesses affirmed that the governor (who would henceforth be appointed by the king) should have no power to levy taxes without the consent of the assembly. At the same time they sent a letter to the Privy Council, requesting the continuation of the assembly under the new government and advising the king of the need also to rely on local talent for a proper management of the colony.35
The assembly’s worries about the shift to royal government centered on the governor whom the king might.send, especially if he were someone not familiar with Virginia or not prepared to stay there. Governors sent from England, their letter claimed, “for the first yeare are rawe in experience and for the most part in Ill disposition of health through the change of the Clymate, the seconde yeare they beginn to understand the affaires of the Country, and the thirde provide for their retorne.” Moreover, any instructions sent from England, though they might seem good at that distance, were likely to prove. otherwise when they came to be carried out. In fact, no “main project” should be undertaken without prior approval of the governor’s council, men who knew the country and knew what would work and what would not.36
Between the lines the assemblymen were saying that Virginians would find ways of defeating any English policy toward them that they did not approve. And they soon showed that they could defeat projects sponsored by the king as easily as those sponsored by the company. Although Charles I pointedly refrained from continuing the assembly when he took over the government of Virginia, royal governors found that they could not get along without it or without the council. Actually, the council had been officially continued, and to it the king, like the company, appointed the most successful and powerful men in the colony. As the number of such men grew, however, they could not all be given places on the council, and yet it was necessary to take them into account. The assembly offered the easiest way to do it. Though without instructions to do so, governors called the assembly together on several occasions in the 1620s and 1630s to deal with problems of defense and other local matters. They handled these effectively, but they also exhibited the usual independence of representative assemblies. When the governor asked them to comply with the king’s wish for a contract to market their tobacco, they turned him down, as we have seen. In 1632 they took the occasion of their meeting to affirm their own exclusive authority to tax the colony.37 It was plain that they intended to exercise that authority whether the king recognized it or not. To be an Englishman was to be ruled only by laws that the country’s best men had approved in Parliament; the assembly was Virginia’s parliament, and its members were Virginia’s best men.
Even though the best might be none too good, they enjoyed a wider popular constituency than any member of the House of Commons in England could boast. There were no legal restrictions on voting in Virginia until 1670. It went without saying that neither women nor children could vote, and it seems unlikely that servants were allowed to. But a man who had finished his term of service, whether he had set up his own household or not, could cast his vote for a representative in the House of Burgesses. It did not follow that he cast it for men like himself. The best men were better than he, and the very best did not need his vote, because they were on the council. Whether appointed by the king or elected by the people, they would not be bashful about telling a royal governor what he could or could not do in Virginia.
The governor who had to contend with Virginia’s best men during the 1630s was John Harvey. No newcomer to Virginia, he had been a member of the royal commission sent to investigate the colony in 1623 and knew the people he would encounter when he arrived in 1630. During the next four or five years he made every effort to win them away from tobacco. At the same time he made peace with the Indians, assisted the Catholic colonists who in 1633 planted the colony of Maryland across the Potomac, and called into question some of the shady deals that council members had engaged in during the 1620s. None of these measures won him friends among the men who had been running Virginia. Many of the magnates of the 1620s were dead by this time, but Samuel Mathews, William Peirce, and Dr. John Pott were very much alive, and new potentates were rising in the place of the Yeardleys and Peirseys, aided frequently by judicious marriages to the widows of their predecessors. They showed their power by seizing Governor Harvey in 1635 and shipping him back to England. When he won vindication and returned in triumph to send his persecutors to England for trial, they there defended themselves so persuasively that in 1639 Harvey was dismissed from office in disgrace.38
Virginia’s next two governors were more closely attuned to the facts of political life in Virginia. Francis Wyatt—the old company governor—arrived with royal instructions that finally recognized the assembly and confirmed its claim to legislative authority.39 Wyatt was already identified with Virginia’s ruling class. He had long been one of them; and his successor in 1641, Sir William Berkeley, quickly became one and proved as ardent a defender of Virginia’s autonomy as anyone could ask of a man who retained his loyalty to the king.
Berkeley’s loyalty to the king was unquestioned. His brother John, the first Baron Berkeley, was a favorite at court; and Sir William himself was also an accomplished courtier, a man of ready wit and sophisticated taste. He nevertheless showed his commitment to Virginia by building at Green Spring, near Jamestown, the most substantial house that Virginians had yet seen in their country.
Berkeley won the hearts of Virginians at once. And during his years as governor he repeatedly gave them cause to be grateful for his appointment. Twice he crossed the ocean to seek help for the colony in England. On his first trip in 1644 he found that the king needed help more than Virginia did; and he stayed for a year to fight against the Roundhead forces that had carried the gentry’s contest with the king from Parliament to the battlefield. But he returned to Virginia to champion the cause of the colony, no matter who challenged it.
During the Civil Wars, king and Parliament were so occupied with one another in England that neither gave much attention to what was happening in the New World. All talk of a tobacco contract was forgotten now, and the Virginians elevated England’s salutary neglect into a matter of principle by asserting their right to a free trade and by affirming it as “the libertye of the Collony and a right of deare esteeme to free borne persons … that noe lawe should bee established within the kingdome of England concerninge us without the consent of a grand Assembly here.” When a rumor was spread in 1647 that Parliament had violated this right by forbidding foreigners to trade with English colonies, the assembly dismissed it as “a forgerye of avaritious persons [i.e., the London merchants] whose sickle hath bin ever long in our harvest allreadye.”40 The assembly invited Dutch merchants to bring their “wares and merchandizes” to Virginia and “to trade or traffique for the commoditys of the collony in any shipp or shipps of their owne.”41 The Dutch responded so warmly that the Virginians once again enjoyed something like prosperity. Though their tobacco never again brought the bonanza prices of the 1620s, the abundance of Dutch traders resulted in a pretty steady price of twenty shillings the hundred pounds during most of the 1640s and 1650s.
Throughout the fight between royal and Parliamentary forces Berkeley remained a staunch partisan of the king, but he was an equally staunch partisan of Virginia and an enthusiastic supporter of the colony’s development of the Dutch trade.42 When Parliament beheaded Charles I in 1649 and established the Commonwealth to replace the monarch, Berkeley and his coterie proclaimed the succession of the king’s son as Charles II and warned any potential rebels against taking the occasion of the king’s execution to challenge the authority of the king’s government in Virginia. Berkeley had only to point to his record and to remind Virginians that Parliamentary control could mean the return of “the same poverty wherein the Dutch found and relieved us.”43 And indeed it could have; for in spite of the Virginia assembly’s brave words, Parliament was more than willing to listen to the London merchants, and in 1651, at the merchants’ behest, it did forbid the Dutch trade. Not all of Berkeley’s supporters placed as high a value as he on loyalty to the king. But they all shared his preference for keeping Virginia’s trade free; and so in 1652, when Parliament finally sent commissioners with an armed force to secure the colony’s allegiance to the Commonwealth, there was no great enthusiasm for complying. When Berkeley capitulated, he dictated terms that gave the Virginians virtual autonomy.
The new governor installed by the commissioners, Richard Bennett, had been in the colony since the 1620s, when he came to take over the estate of his brother Edward, one of the original tobacco barons of the boom years. He was imbued with the same views as other Virginians, and he made no effort to enforce the act that Parliament had passed making Dutch trade in Virginia illegal. His own power was in any case somewhat less than Berkeley had enjoyed. The Parliamentary commission, in replacing Berkeley, had underwritten the authority of the Virginia assembly, enabling the members even to choose the colony’s future governors and councillors. The governors they chose were men of their own kind, like Bennett, and Samuel Mathews, Jr., whose father had married Abraham Peirsey’s widow and died the richest man in Virginia (as Peirsey had been before him). In 1660, just before Charles II recovered his throne in England, the assembly decided that Berkeley, who had remained in Virginia, should again have the job; and they summoned him back to the post, which he retained for the next sixteen years (during which he married the widow of Peirsey’s grandson).44
The men who governed Virginia in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s, whether under king or Commonwealth, showed themselves to be only a little less ruthless than those who dominated the colony in the boom period. They continued to sit in judgment on disputes in which they themselves were involved; and their servants frequently had to bring suit in order to obtain freedom when the term of indenture was up.45 They demanded handsome support and deference from their inferiors and usually got it. The expenses incurred by the representatives who sat in the House of Burgesses were paid by the people of the counties they represented, and in many cases the amounts can be found in the county court records. A few weeks’ attendance generally brought more than an ordinary man was likely to make in a year. Among other expenses that the burgesses of Norfolk County charged to their constituents were 150 pounds of tobacco for a fiddler in 1653 and 500 pounds for a trumpeter in 1660. Charges for such items as “an anchor of drink” or “2 cases of strong waters” suggest that the Virginians’ capacity for sack and strong waters had not decreased and that a legislator considered it his prerogative to be paid for as much as he could drink while doing the public’s business.46
Though their standard of living remained high, the authority of the men who governed became somewhat diluted, partly because there were a great many more of them as time went on and they were by no means united in their political views and interests. Furthermore, with the expansion of population through several counties, local institutions modeled on English ones began to assume a larger importance in day-to-day life and imposed a familiar network of remembered relationships, of which deference to wealth and birth and success was only a part.
These developments were accelerated after 1644, when the Indians, now vastly outnumbered, launched a last desperate attempt to recover their patrimony. In a surprise attack they killed an estimated five hundred people, but Governor Berkeley himself led the colonists against them and reduced the remaining Pamunkeys and the constituent tribes of their dominion to a tributary status. The way was thus opened for English expansion, and in the next ten years five new counties were formed, each with a county court to maintain order and mediate disputes between neighbors.47
In establishing counties and county courts, the Virginians were taking one step toward re-creating the security of English society. By dividing their counties into parishes, each with a vestry and a number of churchwardens, they took another. Not every parish was able to obtain or support a minister of its own. Sometimes two or three parishes shared one in rotation. On the whole, Virginians were much less concerned with the world to come than were the settlers of New England. Although the rise of Puritanism in England was reflected in both political and ecclesiastical disputes in Virginia, the most ardently puritanical settlers were driven out by Governor Berkeley or else left voluntarily, many of them for Maryland.48 But the frontier environment tended in Virginia, as it did so often in American history, to invigorate transplanted institutions and especially those concerned with moral behavior. The settlers had stretched themselves out along Virginia’s network of rivers over areas much larger than the usual English parish. Without proximity to promote a sense of community that would make them feel at home, they tried to bind themselves together by imposing on each other a strict standard of behavior. Without being Puritans in any theological or ecclesiastical sense, they looked a little puritanical in the way they dealt with offenses against conventional morality.
Anyone could report moral offenses to the churchwardens, who were charged with preserving the good behavior of church members. If an accusation seemed justified, the churchwardens presented the offenders to the county court; and the court tried, judged, and sentenced them. Thus the county court in Virginia took the place not only of the English county’s quarter session court but also of the English ecclesiastical court and sometimes even of the vestry, which was charged with the care and running of the church. Since the vestrymen and the commissioners who sat on the county court were often identical, and since the same clerk sometimes transcribed the business of both in the same book, it is often difficult to distinguish in the early records between a meeting of the vestry and a meeting of the court. It was the court, however, that prescribed the punishment of delinquents brought before them by the churchwardens. The courts, for example, prescribed penances for couples who appeared with children too soon after marriage, requiring them in the traditional manner to appear at church the next Sunday dressed in white robes and carrying white wands. As in England, they prescribed whipping for the unmarried woman who produced a child, while her lover usually got off with doing penance and paying for the child’s support. That the Virginians were not quite Puritans is apparent from the fact that they seldom punished adultery more severely than ordinary fornication.49 But they joined the New Englanders in trying to prevent as well as punish both. If a man and woman were suspected of “incontinency,” they were forbidden to go near each other.50
The courts sometimes punished a man for habitual drunkenness. One addict, for example, was required to stand at the church door with a pot tied about his neck.51 Since the justices often held their meetings at a tavern, where liquor was readily available, they occasionally had to rebuke drunken behavior during their sessions (even on the part of those sitting on the bench).52 But they took an indulgent view of the social drinking that acquainted a man with his neighbors, even though it might lead him to brawl with them. A meeting of the court was an occasion not only for settling disputes but for lifting a glass at the tavern before or after court time. How heavily the taverns were patronized is suggested by the fact that in 1648 eighty men in the parish of Elizabeth River in Norfolk County owed money to William Shipp, who kept the tavern there.53 At the time the whole county contained only 334 men over fifteen.54
Those who gathered at the tavern were also expected to gather every Sunday, with the rest of the parish, at church. Wherever a minister was on hand to preside, the courts insisted that men observe this ancient fellowship, which assumed a new importance in binding the far-flung planters together. Working or traveling or “goeing a fishing” on Sunday instead of going to church brought fines or perhaps a requirement to build a bridge across a creek that would ease the route to church for others. And when the sheriff discovered that church was a good place to serve writs, he was forbidden to do so—too many people stayed home for fear of receiving a summons.55
Drinking and worshiping with one’s fellow men were but two threads in the web of community that the settlers were building. The commissioners recognized the fragility of the web and did everything they could to bolster the mutual respect that made it possible for people to live peaceably together. They came down especially hard on any kind of slander. Argall Yeardley, son of Sir George, had come of age in 1642 and had been forthwith made commander of Northampton County. When Thomas Parks scoffed that Yeardley’s father “was but a Taylor that Lept off a shopp board in Burchin Lane” and that his mother “was but a middwife not to the honour-Cittizens but to bye blowes,” Parks got thirty lashes.56 Yeardley was a big man, to be sure, but slander, whether of the high or low, called for punishment. It was almost as dangerous to accuse another person of adultery as it was to commit it. John Dennis had to sit in the stocks and ask forgiveness of Goodwife Williams because he called her “a whore and a base whore” after she had called him “knave and base knave.”57 These were ordinary people, and so were Francis Millicent and Mary Jolly, a servant. Millicent spread some stories about Jolly, who was apparently sick abed, saying that “if she were not with child, she was lately with child.” The court decided that Millicent had “unjustly and wrongfully scandalized and defamed Mary Jolly, servant to Mr. John Neale.” In the usual phrasing of Virginia courts, it was “therefore thought Fitt and soe ordered by this Court that the said Francis Millicent shall be whipt and have thirty lashes and to aske the said Mary Jolly forgivenes publiquely in the Congregation the first Sabbath that she is able to come to Church and the said Millicent to pay the charges of the suite.”58
The courts had to spend a good deal of their time in protecting the reputation of Virginia’s women, mainly from each other. When the Northampton commissioners heard “that about 3 weeks since Alice Robins said that Mary Hudson was as badd as any salte Bitch,” Alice Robins and her husband Sampson both got twenty lashes.59 Mary Rayman had to do penance and beg forgiveness of Anne Johnson for saying that Anne was “naught” with her “black shaggy dog.”60 Eady Hanting had to apologize merely for saying:
that Matthew Haywards wife did live as brave a life as any Weoman in Virginia for she Could lie abead every morninge till hir husband went a milkinge and came Back againe and washt the dishes and skimd the milk and then Mr. Edward Floide would come in and say my Deare will you walke and soe she went abroad and left the Children Crienge that hir husband was faine to Come home and leafe his worke to quiett the Children.”61
Eady Hanting, who spoke these words, was one of the more impulsive members of the parish of Elizabeth River in Lower Norfolk. Shortly after this episode she married Thomas Tooker, but not soon enough. The churchwardens presented her and her husband for fornication before marriage; and when she came to stand before the congregation in her white sheet and was admonished by the minister “for her fowle Crime Committed” she “like a most obstant and graceless person cutt and mangled the sheet wherein she did penance.” She got twenty lashes for that.62
The courts also protected the inhabitants from defamation that might injure their economic standing in the community. When George Hawkins accused James the Scot, servant to Saville Gaskins, of stealing bacon and could not prove it, the court awarded James 200 pounds of tobacco for the damage to his reputation.63 An imputation of dishonesty might lead to loss of business if the accusation were not publicly disproved in court. Accordingly, when Amy Cot-tell called the merchant John Lownes a rogue and charged him with presenting a false bill, he brought suit. Although Governor Berkeley himself had called the man a villain some years earlier, Amy was obliged to apologize, saying, “I am heartily sorry and do desire this to be published I have done him great wrong.” She also had to pay him 400 pounds of tobacco for his expenses in bringing the suit.64 Similarly, Richard Lemon, a merchant, had to pay John Stringer, a carpenter, 300 pounds for calling him “a cheating fellow.”65
The creation of a sense of community in Virginia was complicated by the fact that the English colonists, even while getting a footing in the New World, had to absorb a substantial minority of foreigners. The records show Portuguese, Spanish, French, Turks, Dutch, and Negroes.66 Many of them can be identified, for they were frequently designated as Andrew the Spaniard or Cursory the Turk. Or the name itself may be indicative. One Frenchman in Norfolk was invariably known as “James the La Balle.” He was officially made a denizen in 1658 and became a churchwarden.67 We can watch the gradual transformation of foreign names that appear frequently in the records. But for some reason Dutch names were Anglicized almost at once; the Dutch seem to have absorbed the Virginia version of English ways rapidly and unobtrusively. Often we learn only by chance that someone named William Westerhouse or Jenkin Price is Dutch.68
A more conspicuous set of non-English immigrants were the Negroes. They were nevertheless few in number, probably no more than five hundred by 1650. Whether they were brought by traders directly from Africa or by way of the West Indies is not clear. Many had names like Anthony or Ferdinando that suggest a Spanish or Portuguese connection. Whatever their origin, they already occupied an anomalous position. Some were undoubtedly slaves in our sense of the term, that is, they and their offspring were treated as the property of other men; and it seems probable that all Negroes, or nearly all, arrived in the colony as slaves.69 But some were free or became free; some were servants or became servants.70 And all, servant, slave, or free, enjoyed rights that were later denied all Negroes in Virginia. There is no evidence during the period before 1660 that they were subjected to a more severe discipline than other servants. Some slaves were allowed to earn money of their own and to buy their freedom with it.71 They bought and sold and raised cattle of their own.72 In one case in 1646 the sale of a slave from one master to another was made to depend upon the slave’s consent.73 Another slave was able to purchase the freedom of his daughters and apprenticed them to a white master until they should reach majority.74 Two Negroes who showed an unwillingness to work were given an indenture guaranteeing their freedom in return for four years’ work and 1,700 pounds of tobacco.75 And this is not the only sign in the records that rewards were thought more effective than coercion as a means of extracting labor. In 1645 Edwin Connaway, clerk of the Northampton court, in a remarkable deposition declared:
That being at the house of Capt. Taylor, about the Tenth day of July last past the said Capt. Taylor in the morning went into the quartering house and this deponent coming forth of the dwelling house did see Capt. Taylor and Anthony the negro goeing into the Corne Feild and when they returned from the said Corne Feild, the said negro told this deponent saying now Mr. Taylor and I have devided our Corne And 1 am very glad of it now I know myne owne, hee finds fault with mee that I doe not worke but now I know myne owne ground I will worke when I please and play when I please, And the said Capt. Taylor asked the said Negro saying are you content with what you have And the Negro answered saying I am very well content with what I have or words to that effect.76
While racial feelings undoubtedly affected the position of Negroes, there is more than a little evidence that Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments. In 1649 William Watts, a white man, and Mary, a Negro servant, were required to do penance for fornication, like any other couple, by standing in the church at Elizabeth River with the customary white sheet and white wand; and in 1654 the churchwardens of the upper parish in Northampton presented both a white couple and a Negro couple for fornication.77
There are several cases where masters set up conditions in their wills whereby Negro slaves would become free or could purchase their freedom. And the terms indicate an expectation that they would become regular members of the free community. Argali Yeardley provided that a Negro boy, then aged three, should be free at the age of twenty-four and be given two cows. The boy’s godfather was made a witness to the agreement.78 Richard Vaughan provided that each of his three Negro girls should “bee brought upp in the feare of god and to bee taught to reade and make her owne cloaths.” When they came of age, they were each to get two cows with calf, and two suits of clothes, two blankets, a rug, a bed, four barrels of corn, and a breeding sow; together they were to have a plantation of 444 acres with a new house 25 feet by 20 feet.79
The success of these early efforts at integration is nowhere more dramatically shown than in the behavior of Anthony Longo, a free Negro who had learned not only the merits of industry and thrift but also the truculent attitude to authority which so many Englishmen carried wherever they went and which the courts had so often to put down. One John Neene was sent by Major Walker, a commissioner of the court, to serve a warrant or subpoena on Longo in connection with a case in which Neene needed Longo’s testimony. Neene reported his experience in these words:
Sayth that comeinge to Tony Llongo his house with a warrent of Major Walkers your Deponent asked him whether hee would goe alonge to Mr. Walkers with mee. his answere was what shall I goe to Mr. Walkers for: goe about your business you idle Rascall: Upon those slightinge tearmes, I told him I had a warrant for him, sayeinge, will you goe with that, hee made mee answer, shitt of your warrant have I (said hee) nothinge to doe but goe to Mr. Walker, goe about your business you idle Rascall as did likewise his wife, with such noyse that I could hardly heare my owne words, reading the warrant to them, which when I had done readeinge, the said Tony stroke att mee, and gave mee some blowes, soe perseavinge it was to little purpose to staye with him, I went to Mr. Littleton’s house and requested Daniel Baker to goe to Tony Longos with mee only to testifie that I had a warrant from Mr. Walker for his appearance before him; Daniel Baker att my request went with mee which when wee came, I desired him to read it to him which he did his answers were that hee would not goe, hee must gather his corne, Nowe it beinge about the sun settinge (or somethinge after) I told him wee might goe to night and neither hinder himselfe much, nor mee, But his answer was thats a goode one nowe I have bine att worke shall goe to Mr. Walkers I your said deponent requested him to goe alonge with mee And as I could not make my debt appear I would give him for his payment 20 lb of tobacco. Well said hee I cannot goe, why when shall I attend you said your deponent tomorrowe or next daye, or next weeake Ile goe with you att any time his answer was in generall, well, well, Ile goe when my corne is in whereupon I bad him goodnight, and left him, and on the morneinge returned the warrant. All which to the best of my remembrance were his very words (or to same effect).80
The commissioners understandably punished Longo for contempt of court.81 But it was the kind of contempt that Englishmen often showed to authority, and it was combined with an assiduity in pursuit of calling that English moralists were doing their best to inculcate more widely at home. As England had absorbed people of every nationality over the centuries and turned them into Englishmen, Virginia’s Englishmen were absorbing their own share of foreigners, including Negroes, and molding a New World community on the English model, a pasture-farming empire stretched out and magnified, altered by the nature of the terrain and the universal preoccupation with tobacco but still recognizably English. Yet this empire upon closer examination will be found more different from England than at first appears.
1 On tobacco prices in the 1630s see the article by Russell R. Menard cited in note 7.
2 Hening, I, 141–42, 152, 162–64, 188–89.
3 Ibid., 203–7, 209–12.
4 Ibid., 224; W. F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), 166–72. The only counties for which continuous records survive for the period before 1660 are Lower Norfolk and Northampton. Hence this chapter depends heavily on information derived from these two counties.
5 George L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York, 1908), 117–75; Hening, I, 224–26; WMQ, 2nd ser., IV (1924), 17–31, 146–47. The act also provided for improving quality: all inferior tobacco and half the good produced in 1639 were to be burned, and henceforth all tobacco was to be stripped of stems and smoothed before it was sold. The price was supposed to rise to 2 shillings a pound in 1641, but this provision was given up before it went into effect (Northampton II, 125). The assembly in 1641 also changed the limitation from 170 pounds to 1,000 plants. But 1,000 plants, stripped of stems, would probably have made no more than 170 pounds. In the eighteenth century the ordinary calculation was six or eight plants to the pound. See Journal of William Hugh Grove, 1732, Alderman Library, Charlottesville.
6 VMHB, II (1894–95), 287. For examples of enforcement in 1640 see Norfolk I, 47, 53, 74. By May, 1641, the court in Northampton County was settling cases at the rate of 16 shillings for 30 pounds (Northampton I, 86). And the Norfolk court in January, 1642, ordered payment of a debt at the rate of eightpence a pound with the stipulation that if the tobacco paid could not be sold in England for that much, the debtor was to satisfy the deficiency at the next return of shipping with 8 percent interest (Norfolk I, 115). Later there were charges that the act was passed by debtors to defraud creditors. Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, 10.
7 Norfolk I, 203. The price had dropped to a penny a pound in 1644, according to a letter from the assembly to the king (Ms. Clarendon 24, f.52, Bodleian Library, Oxford). But this was probably because of a temporary lack of shipping, brought on by the Civil Wars in England. That 20 shillings per 100 pounds was the usual rate for most of the 1640s and 1650s appears from various transactions in county court records: Norfolk III, 128–30a, 206; Northampton II, 387–88; IV, 50, 62; V, 143a. After 1655 prices began to drop: Norfolk III, 222; IV, 66, 234. It should be understood that no reliable or regular series of annual prices current can be constructed for seventeenth-century Virginia. But Russell R. Menard has assembled much of the available data in “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–1660,” forthcoming in VMHB. See also chapter 10, note 29.
9 Northampton III, 242; York II, 61, 130; Hening, I, 347.
10 Hening, I, 152, 166, 190, 246, 344, 419; Norfolk I, 358; II, 10, 122, 206; IV, 167.
11 WMQ, 2nd ser., VI (1926), 118; VIII (1928), 164; C.O. 1/4, ff.21–22.
12 VMHB, II (1894–95), 51–52; VIII (1900–1901), 157; C.O. 1/4, ff.21–22, 28; C.O. 1/8, ff.74–75; “Aspinwall Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th ser., IX (1871), 110.
13 “A Letter from Mr. John Clayton,” in Force, Tracts, III, No. 12, p. 36; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy S. Berkeley, eds., “Another Account of Virginia by the Reverend John Clayton,” VMHB, LXXVI (1968), 415–40, at 419.
14 The use both of cowkeepers and of dogs is apparent from numerous cases in the county court records; for example, Norfolk I, 52, 204, 256, 281; II, 117a; Northampton I, 61; II, 51, 386; IV, 20. See also “Letter from Mr. John Clayton,” p. 38. On the rise of cattle raising in Virginia, see Wesley N. Laing, “Cattle in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” VMHB, LXVII (1959), 143–64.
15 Hening, I, 244, 332, 458. There had been earlier laws requiring men to fence their planting land (ibid., 176, 199), but the 1643 law seems to have been the first to assign responsibility for damage to crops. On the manner of building fences in Virginia, see Berkeley, “Another Account… by John Clayton,” 426.
16 Norfolk IV, 10.
17 York II, 156, 294.
18 Norfolk III, 168, 184a.
19 Norfolk I, 242–43.
20 Northampton IV, 153.
21 Norfolk II, 56.
22 Northampton IV, 228ff.
23 VMHB, XI (1903–4), 285–87.
24 Force, Tracts, II, No. 8, p. 15; Neill, Virginia Carolorum, 112–13.
25 Northampton IV, 149a, 150.
26 John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, Force, Tracts, III, No. 14, p. 19; A Description of the Province of New Albion, Force, Tracts, II, No. 7, p. 5; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 37, 58, 113; Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford, 1926), 283–84. It is impossible to establish the volume of this trade. For a later period C.O. 1/44, ff.246–66 shows 13 ships clearing from Barbados for Virginia in 1678. C.O. 33/13 contains Barbados shipping returns 1679–1704. The ships entering from and clearing for Virginia constitute only a small percentage of the total. Nevertheless, it would seem to have been a highly profitable trade. Ligon says (p. 113) that an ox worth £5 in Virginia could be sold in Barbados for £25. Maurice Thompson, an English merchant, bought 100 Virginia oxen for transport to Barbados in 1647. Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York, 1972), 84. The Virginia county court records contain numerous references to Barbados, arising from commerce between the colonies. Governor Andros in 1696, answering queries from the Board of Trade, said that Virginia exported to “New York Barbados and the islands and New England.” C.O. 5/1309, No. 16. And the Virginia council, answering similar queries in 1708, said that Barbados was then the only other colony with which Virginia carried on trade of any size. H. R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1925–66), III, 193.
27 Nathaniel Shrigley, A True Relation of Virginia and Maryland (London, 1669), Force, Tracts, III, No. 7, p. 5.
28 The available prices are mainly from several hundred inventories in wills in the Norfolk, Northampton, and York county records. Thus they do not usually represent actual sales. Prices naturally varied according to the age and condition of the animals, but the range of variation remained much the same during these two decades. A mature cow was worth from 300 to 600 pounds of tobacco, a cow with calf about 100 pounds more, a yearling from 100 to 200, a bull from 200 to 400, a steer from 200 to 600, with valuations only occasionally rising a little above or falling a little below these levels.
29 Lumber, in spite of Virginia’s remaining forests, was considered valuable enough for planters to bring lawsuits against anyone cutting timber on their land. Norfolk I, 264; II, 33a; Northampton IV, 91, 104; V, 71–72a; XII, 154.
30 Hening, I, 291 (cf. ibid., I, 326–27); Norfolk III, 12, 21a; Executive Journals, I, 183.
31 Perfect Description, Force, Tracts, II, No. 8, 15; Northampton V, 123. Artisans are frequently identified as such in the records, as, for example, Peter Porter, carpenter; Thomas Cooper, joiner; William Dunford, boat-wright. On industrial enterprises in one county see Susie M. Ames, Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1940), 109–46. To encourage industry, the House of Burgesses at various times tried to place embargoes on wool, hides, and old iron, but the shortage of craftsmen continued. Hening, I, 174, 199, 307, 314, 488, 515.
32 Williams, Virginia Richly Valued, Force, Tracts, III, No. 11, p. 48; “Letter from Mr. John Clayton,” Force, Tracts, III, No. 12, p. 21; Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (1697), Hunter D. Farish, ed. (Williamsburg, 1940; Charlottesville, 1964), 8–9. This continued to be the practice in Virginia through most of the colonial period. See William Tatham, An Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture and Commerce of Tobacco (London, 1800), 6–11. At the end of the eighteenth century, partly as a result of the influence of English agricultural reformers, Virginians began to chide themselves for their slovenly methods. There grew up a notion that these methods had “exhausted” the soil, a notion accepted by historians (Avery Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 [Urbana, Ill., 1925]). Actually the Virginians, like many other American colonists, were practicing a “long-fallow” system. They had enough land to be able to allow a large part of it to grow back into forest, a process that took twenty or thirty years after its abandonment. Robert Beverley noted in 1705 that “Wood grows at every Man’s Door so fast, that after it has been cut down, it will in Seven Years time, grow up again from Seed, to substantial Fire-Wood; and in Eighteen or Twenty Years ’twill come to be very good Board-Timber” (History and Present State of Virginia, 125–26). And Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton in 1697 observed that “As fast as the Ground is worn out with tobacco and Corn, it runs up again in Underwoods, and in many Places of the Country, that which has been clear’d is thicker in Woods than it was before the clearing” (Present State of Virginia, 8–9). Edmund Ruffin, in denouncing the Virginia practice at the opening of the nineteenth century, stated that “After twenty or thirty years, according to the convenience of the owner, the same land would be again cleared, and put under similar scourging tillage” (An Essay on Calcareous Manures, J. C. Sitterson, ed. [Cambridge, Mass., 1961], p. 17). Ruffin thought that it did not recover its original fertility, but one of the most ardent Virginia agronomists, Thomas Jefferson, disagreed. Although he acknowledged that tobacco and Indian corn quickly brought diminishing returns, he maintained “that the James river lowgrounds with the cultivation of small grain, will never be exhausted; because we know that under that cultivation we must now and then take them down with Indian corn, or they become, as they were originally, too rich to bring wheat.” Edwin M. Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, 1766–1824: With Relevant Extracts from His Other Writings (Philadelphia, 1944), 192. For an analysis of tobacco production in one tidewater Maryland county, see Edward C. Papenfuse, Jr., “Planter Behavior and Economic Opportunity in a Staple Economy,” Agricultural History, XLVI (1972), 297–311. Papenfuse shows that Maryland plantations in this county were able to sustain production during the eighteenth century with no evidence of a decline in output per acre.
33 It has proved impossible to find any records of actual production that would reveal the average output per man of labor devoted to tobacco. L. C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1932) I, 218–19, has cited most of the estimates of contemporary observers. They range from 1,000 to 4,000 pounds, but the last figure is clearly an exaggeration. The amount undoubtedly varied with the quality of land used, the length of time it had been in use, the time spent in weeding and worming, the type of tobacco grown, and, most of all, with the weather. There were no improvements in technology to increase productivity during the colonial period, though it may be that the hours of work were increased as time went on, especially after the transition to slave labor in the eighteenth century. Although in 1644 the assembly in a message to the king said that 1,000 pounds per man was “the uttmost that can be imagined to bee planted in good and seasonable years” (Ms. Clarendon 24, Bodleian Library), the assembly was seeking to minimize. The fact that planters would sometimes pay 1,500 or more for a year’s labor argues that some at least expected to make more than that. For examples see Northampton IV, 30; V, 37a, 116a. A law passed in 1658 required the father of an illegitimate child to pay to the mother’s master or mistress 1,500 pounds of tobacco or one year’s service. Hening, I, 438.
34 Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in Smith, Seventeenth-Century America, 90–118, esp. 93–96.
35 RVC, IV, 581; Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1619–1658/59. 26–27. 16–17.
36 Ibid.
37 Hening, I, 171.
38 Harvey’s administration and his quarrel with his council have been the subject of several varying interpretations: Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts (Princeton, 1914), 60–84; Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625–1660, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet, No. 7 (Williamsburg, 1957), 10–29; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), I, 122–46; Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure,” 94–98; J. Mills Thornton, “The Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey,” VMHB, LXXVI (1968), 11–26.
39 VMHB, XI (1903–4), 50–54.
40 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1619–1658/59, 74; VMHB, XXIII (1914–15), 244–47. The pungency of language in this declaration suggests that Berkeley himself may have been the author of it.
41 Hening, I, 258; cf. ibid., 540.
42 William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), 6–7. Berkeley himself apparently engaged in the trade. See York II, 93.
43 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1619–1658/59, 76.
44 Hening, I, 362–73; Washburn, Virginia under Charles I and Cromwell, 39–62; Morton, Colonial Virginia, I, 174–87; Craven, Southern Colonies, 262–69.
45 For examples: Northampton IV, 215a; X, 39, 52, 55; Norfolk I, 8, 9, 85, 88, 305; II, 52a, 147a; III, 213a, 221; IV, 20, 40, 46, 55, 226; Lancaster IV, 257.
46 Norfolk I, 74; III, 62a; IV, 269.
47 Washburn, Virginia under Charles I and Cromwell, 29–39; W. F. Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Char lottesville, 1971), 55–58. The counties, besides Northumberland (1645), were Lancaster, Gloucester, Westmoreland, New Kent, and Rappahannock.
48 Virginia was founded at a time when Puritan tendencies were strong within the Church of England. Puritanism and subsequently Quakerism seem to have been strongest in the region south of the James River. But the Quakers secured a following in several counties, sometimes among fairly prominent families. Evidence of Puritanism or Quakerism will be found in Surry II, 86; Norfolk II, 74–75, 120–22, 129, 131; IV, 302, 360, 374, 380, 386, 392, 396; Henrico I, 116, 140–41, 193–94; II (transcript), 41–42; Hening, II, 198. See also Babette M. Levy, “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, LXX (1960), 69–348; Jon Butler, ed., “Two Letters from Virginia Puritans,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, LXXXIV (1972), 99–109; WMQ, 1st ser. XI (1902–3), 29–33.
49 Norfolk I, 65, 86, 177, 279, 305, 306, 312; II, 106a, 113a. For an example of adultery treated as fornication, see Norfolk I, 183.
50 Northampton IV, 89a; Norfolk I, 146, 191, 230, 296; II, 10; IV, 7, 78; York II, 414.
51 Northampton III, 159a.
52 Hening, II, 384; Lancaster IV, 389.
53 Norfolk II, 65–66.
54 Ibid., 93. Elizabeth River Parish had 165 tithables in 1645 (Norfolk I, 291). Thus nearly half the men in the parish were indebted to the tavern keeper.
55 York II, 386; Hening, I, 457.
56 Northampton II, 313, 351.
57 Northampton I, 157–58.
58 Northampton I, 86–87.
59 Northampton I, 117.
60 Northampton III, 227, 229.
61 Norfolk I, 42.
62 Ibid., 64, 86, 93.
63 Norfolk IV, 7.
64 Norfolk II, 201; IV, 220.
65 Northampton IV, 144. John Stringer, carpenter, was apparently no relation to the physician of the same name mentioned below.
66 Norfolk 1, 105; II, 50 135, 142; IV, 225, 244, 356; Northampton III, 116–19; IV, 147.
67 Norfolk IV, 180, 235.
68 Northampton IX (no paging), session of April, 1658.
69 The status of Virginia’s first Negroes has been widely debated. Oscar and Mary Handlin surveyed the previous discussions of the subject and gave their own view, that the first Virginia Negroes were not held in slavery, in “The Origins of the Southern Labor System,” WMQ, 3rd ser., VII (1950), 199–222. The fullest recent appraisal, by Winthrop Jordan in White over Black (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1968), 71–82, and also in his “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery,” Journal of Southern History, XXVIII (1962), 18–30, concludes that some were enslaved and some were not. The evidence is too fragmentary to prove that any Negroes were imported as servants on the same terms as white servants, but the evidence is sufficient to show that Negroes were held as slaves in the 1640s and 1650s. See for example Northampton III, 139, where in 1648 a deed is recorded for a “Negro woman and all her increase (which for future tyme shall bee borne of her body).” For other clear examples of slaves in the 1640s and 1650s see Northampton II, 324; III, 120, 180a; IV, 124, 151, 165a; V, 17a, 86–87, 94a; York I, 96; II, 63, 390.
70 Northampton III, 150, 152, 205; IV, 226.
71 Northampton IV, 118a; IX, session of Jan. 30, 1659/60; Surry I, 349.
72 Northampton III, 83; IV, 114; V, 38a.
73 Northampton IV, 81a.
74 Northampton III, 82a; IV, 82.
75 Northampton V, 25a, 27, 54, 60a.
76 Northampton II, 457.
77 Norfolk II, 113a; V, 55. See also Northampton X, 30; Minutes of Council, 477; Hening, I, 551.
78 Northampton V, 117a–119a.
79 Northampton V, 102. See also ibid., 57a, 100a; York I, 233; Henrico I, 139; II (transcript), 64.
80 Northampton V, 60a.
81 Ibid., 54a.