WHEN and why Virginians began to live longer is almost as much a mystery as why they had died so rapidly. Concrete if indirect evidence of the rise in longevity comes from the rise in population after 1644. It had taken thirty-seven years to achieve the roughly 8,000 people present in that year. In the next nine years the number grew to more than 14,000; and in the nine years after that it reached a probable 25,600.1 While it is not impossible that an increase in immigration contributed to the accelerated increase in population during these years, there is no clear evidence of it; nothing, for instance, like the letters of the 1630s remarking on the large numbers of arrivals in Virginia.2 The population, to be sure, continued to be composed primarily of immigrants. Although the New England colonies were able to grow without many new arrivals after 1640, Virginia and Maryland, like the sugar islands of the West Indies, would have expired without a steady flow of new workers. But the sharp increase in Virginia’s population after 1644 probably came not from a corresponding rise in the number of annual arrivals but from the fact that the newcomers had begun to live longer. They did not live as long, perhaps, as they would have if they had stayed in England, and certainly not as long as they would have if they had gone to New England, but they did live longer than their predecessors. More of them were surviving their “seasoning,” living out their terms of service, and taking a place in the community.
The decline in mortality was not sudden. Seventeenth-century Virginia never became a health resort. In the 1680s royal governors fresh from England still fled to New York to escape the summer fevers, and seasoning still left many newcomers looking like skeletons. A visiting physician in 1684 noted that “their fingers stand stifly bent, the hands of some hang as if they were loose at the wrists from the arms … and at length those that seemeingly recover are oft troubled with a sort of a gout.”3 On top of the regular summertime fevers there came winter epidemics. An especially severe one of some unrecognized disease in 1686–87 and 1687–88 carried away large numbers (though probably not one-third of the tithables, as Governor Howard estimated).4 In 1693 measles and in 1696 smallpox took a toll.5 But these epidemics serve to underline the decline in deaths from the seasoning sicknesses of summer. In two parishes where records of deaths survive, the dates show that summer was no longer the deadliest time in Virginia. In Charles Parish, York County, 54 percent of the deaths recorded in the years 1665–1700 occurred in the five months from November through March. And in Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, 57 percent of the deaths, 1678–1706, occurred in these months.6 If Virginia’s earlier high mortality was the product of diseases prevalent in the summer, those diseases had apparently declined in intensity, at least by comparison with winter diseases.
Another straw in the wind, suggesting an over-all decline in disease in the second half of the century, is the decreasing number of persons identified as physicians or chirurgeons in the county court records. The Norfolk records mention fourteen in the years from 1661 to 1700, as against sixteen for a population perhaps half the size or less during the shorter period from 1637 (when the records begin) to 1660. Moreover, lawsuits involving physicians were far fewer than in the earlier period.
More direct evidence of improved health comes from people who observed it. In 1648 a writer signing himself “Beauchamp Plantagenet” said that formerly five out of six immigrants had died in seasoning but now it was only one in nine.7 By 1656, John Hammond, who had spent twenty-one years in the country, was able to affirm Virginia to be “wholesome, healthy and fruitfull” because the colonists had improved their food and drink “and therefore enjoy better healths.”8 And Governor Berkeley, reporting to the Privy Council’s Committee on Foreign Plantations in 1671, offered the opinion that all new plantations were unhealthful for “an age or two” but that Virginia had now passed this stage: “there is not often unseasoned hands (as wee terme them) that dye now whereas heretofore not one of five escaped the first yeare.”9 Thirty-five years later William Byrd, the robust founder of a famous Virginia family, complained to a British correspondent about Virginia’s continuing evil reputation for disease. He admitted that “the many Rivers, and the vast quantity of water all over the country incline people now and then to agues, especially at the time of year when people eat fruit without any other measure than the bigness of their bellys.” But in general he thought that Virginians were no less healthy than other people.10
One reason for the decline in mortality may have been the very fruit to which Byrd attributed the country’s agues, for a disease often mentioned as afflicting Virginians, especially new arrivals, was scurvy.11 Though it is impossible to tell whether the diagnosis was accurate, it may be that the development of orchards and the availability of fresh fruit furnished the settlers with a supply of badly needed vitamins.
Fruit may have helped in another way too, by contributing to a change in drinking habits. Early Virginians were notoriously fond of anything with alcohol in it, but in the absence of beer or cider they were normally obliged to drink water. The water table in tidewater Virginia was doubtless high and wells therefore shallow and easily contaminated. As long as Virginians drank from them, they would be exposed to a great variety of bacilli, including those responsible for typhoid fever. We are told that Virginians in the early years moved about a great deal in search of land that would make a bigger crop of tobacco, a practice that would have discouraged the laborious construction of deep wells in locations more favorable to health than to tobacco culture. Moving about also kept men from planting orchards. A remonstrance by several prominent Virginians, dated 1638, argues for a tobacco contract with English merchants on the grounds that “hereby wee shalbe enabled to build Comodious Habitations and Townes Whereas now the gredines after great quantities of Tobacco causeth them after 5 or 6 yeares continually to remove and therefore neither build good Houses, fence their grounds or plant any Orchards etc.”12
The last point is perhaps important. By midcentury we find increasing mention of orchards in the deeds and leases recorded in county courts; and John Hammond asserted that while during the boom years the settlers had neglected to plant orchards, by 1656 “Orchards innumerable were planted and preserved.”13 The settlers had finally settled down and were therefore getting something better than water to drink. The purpose of an orchard was not so much to get fruit to eat as to get cider to drink. Cider and other fermented beverages would have been much less lethal than contaminated water.
Still another factor contributing to survival may have been an improvement in the conditions of transportation to the colony. The Virginia assembly in 1662 ordered masters of ships to provide adequate clothing and four months’ provisions for every passenger carried from England.14 Though there was no method of enforcing the order, it or other measures may have improved shipboard conditions that had brought immigrants to Virginia half dead from undernourishment and exposure. And the newcomers may have had a better chance of survival because of a change in the time of arrival of ships. In the 1630s, despite pleas from the colonists, ships were still reaching Virginia in the summer months.15 By the 1660s they were arriving in the fall or early winter (as they did for the rest of the colonial period), thereby avoiding the danger from seasoning (and from the worm that ate ships’ hulls in the lower reaches of Virginia’s rivers during the summer).16 The immigrants had time to recover from the voyage and were consequently better able to withstand the killing summer.
The decline in mortality did not much alter the patterns of life that Virginians had built during the deadly years. The credit system continued to operate through promissory notes. Orphans’ courts continued to look after the fatherless. Widows continued to be sought after. And everyone who could afford to continued to import servants. The lengthening life span, however, did create rising expectations. With death no longer staring them so closely in the face, more and more of the incoming servants could count on making it through their term of servitude to set up a place of their own in a society that was now in a position to offer them increasing security. John Hammond, in his account of Virginia and Maryland published in 1656, perhaps painted too idyllic a picture, but there was reason for his remark “that never any servants of late times have gone thither, but in their Letters to their Friends commend and approve of the place, and rather invite than disswade their acquaintance from comming thither.”17 And why not? With the mortality diminished, Virginia looked like the best poor man’s country in the world. A whole continent lay behind it; it had plenty of room for everyone.
But everyone, unfortunately, wanted to make tobacco. As more and more of the newcomers stayed alive, Virginia’s annual tobacco harvest rose; and (as had happened before and would happen again) there was a limit to how much the rest of the world would buy at the prices formerly given. Crops of half a million pounds had ended the boom prices of the 1620s. By 1663 the official count of tobacco reaching the port of London alone was over seven million pounds, in 1669 nine million, in 1672 ten and a half million; and the planter had to sell for half or less of what he had generally got in the 1640s and 1650s.18
It was not difficult to see that Virginia was too dependent on tobacco. Thoughtful men had said so from the beginning; and Virginians, in whom a nascent local patriotism was beginning to stir, felt ashamed of their colony’s continuing failure to live up to expectations by producing something more useful. It was surely not the fault of the land. The colony could boast of what amounted to the largest harbor in the world, with its great rivers that allowed oceangoing vessels to sail deep into the interior. It had rich soil, abundant timber, and an infinite expanse of unexplored territory. Such a land should become a rich dominion, the source of all kinds of wholesome commodities, the seat of great cities.19 But instead of gathering together in cities and towns like the civilized men of England, the inhabitants still spread out over the countryside. Instead of attempting to discover and develop the true riches that the country could surely be made to yield, they still produced nothing but tobacco.
Virginia houses continued to stand—and fall—as symbols of the colony’s failure. Civilization to Englishmen still meant living in durable houses, and some of Virginia’s big men did build of brick. But everyone else still lived in the rotting wooden affairs that lay about the landscape like so many landlocked ships. A heavy storm would knock them down or fire devour them in an instant. But no matter—sift the ashes for nails and put up more—wood was cheap. To some Virginians this seemed a sorry way to live. They wanted the place to look more like England, more civil, more like a promised land that was fulfilling its promise. The reason it did not, they thought, was because of tobacco.
Everybody blamed tobacco, and no one mentioned that Virginians had been far more miserable in the years before they discovered it than they had ever been since. Although during the boom years they had defeated every move to limit the tobacco crop and promote the production of other commodities, we have seen that after the price collapsed they themselves tried to limit the crop. The impetus for their efforts had come from a drop in tobacco prices, but the purpose of limitation then and later was not merely to raise prices but also to encourage new products. Limitation would give men time for other lucrative activities; and the anticipated higher price of tobacco would furnish the capital needed for starting more wholesome enterprises. The argument was so appealing that Virginians fell for it again and again. Each scheme was abandoned before its promoters thought it had had a fair trial, so the next scheme always had a reservoir of hope to build on. In the later 1650s as population and production figures headed up and tobacco prices headed down, the stage was set for the most ambitious effort of the century to save Virginia from tobacco and the evils that accompanied it. And a man to direct the rescue was already on the scene.
Sir William Berkeley was energetic and talented, and he brought to his task a thorough familiarity with the country. He had watched Virginia grow, under his direction, into a relatively stable community. After he was deposed from office by Parliament, he stayed at his plantation in the colony and enjoyed the prosperity that Dutch shipping continued to bring, despite parliamentary prohibitions. But he was one of those not satisfied with the colony’s continued dependence on tobacco. He wanted Virginia to become the brightest jewel in the restored king’s crown; and when the assembly summoned him back to office, at a time when the colonists’ health had improved, he was filled with visions of also improving the colony’s economy.20
To the north the New Englanders had achieved a much more balanced economy than Virginia, but Berkeley had no wish to learn from Puritans. He retained his scorn and hatred for the Roundheads who had killed his king; and he despised the New Englanders, who continued to embody their seditious tenets after 1660.21 When answering some queries about Virginia in 1671, he gave his opinion that the colony’s Anglican ministers were well paid but that he would be happy to see them paid even better “if they would pray oftener and preach less.” Preaching was a Puritan specialty, and he did not like it even from the mouths of men whose orthodoxy was assured. And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”22 He would tolerate no doctrines that nourished sedition in his colony.
And yet Berkeley’s plans for Virginia sound a little like New England with the Puritanism left out. The settlers must gather in towns, where they could better protect themselves from savage enemies without and from the savage nature that lurked within them all. Only towns and cities could nourish the arts and skills that distinguished civil men from barbarians. Surrounded by paying customers, artisans would no longer be tempted to relinquish their skilled callings to earn a living by tobacco. They would build ships so that the colony could develop its own commerce. They would smelt and forge iron from the mines that would be discovered. They would spin and weave cloth from the wool and linen that the farmers outside the towns would produce. For the farmers too would give up their addiction to tobacco and cease to be dependent on the vagaries of the tobacco market. They would expand corn and wheat production for export to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Economically, if not ideologically, Berkeley was ready to try the Yankees’ game, and with a fair chance of winning. After all, Virginia enjoyed a central position in North America, close to the West Indies, and close (it was then supposed) to the rich Spanish settlements on the Pacific. Virginia should be the center of England’s New World empire.23
Berkeley hoped to renovate the economy through government action, with the help of the king and of a few public-spirited gentlemen like himself. He was convinced that in the long run his scheme would serve not only the best interests of the colony and the mother country but of every individual bent on profit. Indeed, no one denied it. He was so confident of the colony and of himself, so sure that England must see the problem as he did, that he took himself there in 1661 to place the case before the king and secure the capital to get things going.
In England he found it no problem to persuade the royal advisers that Virginia should be producing something more than tobacco. Instructions to Virginia’s royal governors had repeatedly called upon them to set the people building towns and growing other crops. Moreover, Berkeley’s drive to diversify production in Virginia coincided with a renewed English interest in expanding the mother country’s own economy. In spite of the exodus to the New World, England still harbored a larger population than she could employ. But England’s self-appointed economists were now moving to the view that surplus people could be an asset instead of a liability, a means to increase the products the country could manufacture for sale abroad.24
With such parallel sentiments developing in England, Berkeley expected to find encouragement for his own plans for Virginia. But he quickly found that encouragement was limited to kind words. Neither the king nor his advisers nor the English merchants who marketed Virginia tobacco were willing to invest capital in diversifying Virginia’s exports. The funds would have to come from the Virginians themselves, which meant that in the end they would have to come from the crop that the new enterprises were supposed to replace. But how could that happen with Virginia already depressed by the low price of tobacco and with her lucrative Dutch trade outlawed by a new navigation act? At the prompting of the king and the merchants, Parliament in 1660 had required that henceforth all tobacco from the colonies be shipped to England, where the king could collect a duty on it and the merchants a profit.
England’s interest in having towns in Virginia was not quite the same as that felt by Virginians. England expected the towns to become export centers for shipping tobacco more swiftly and surely. English merchants would benefit by a reduced turnaround time in loading tobacco ships from a central location; and the customs revenue would benefit by the reduction of clandestine sales to foreign ships from the scattered private wharves of the planters. King, Parliament, and merchants were all more interested in the certain profits of taxing and selling Virginia tobacco than in uncertain profits from the uncertain staples that they continually enjoined the Virginians to produce.25
Berkeley was saddened by the king’s want of confidence in Virginia and angered by Parliament’s prohibition of tobacco shipments to foreign markets. His own confidence in the colony was undiminished, however, and he returned to see what he could do on the spot, hopeful that if he could show results he would be able to persuade the king and his advisers to do more. He carried with him royal instructions that repeated the usual injunctions to Virginia governors, but made more specific, probably at his own request. A town was to be built on each river. The governor and each of his council should build houses in them. The people should plant mulberries and grow silk. They should produce flax, hemp, pitch, and potash.26
In Virginia Berkeley found among some of the wealthy planters who sat on his council the same indifference to the colony’s future and the same addiction to tobacco that he had encountered in England. The burgesses, however, were convinced of the benefits of his plan and agreed in particular that the colony must have a genuine town or city, for “without one we could not long be civill rich or happy, that it was the first stepp to our security from our Indian Enemies and the onely meanes to bring in those Commodities all wise men had so long expected from us.”27 The assembly accordingly voted that, in order to make Jamestown a real city, every county should be responsible for putting up a real house there, “built with brick,” and a slate or tile roof. The buildings would be laid out in whatever pattern Berkeley might think convenient. Even before Berkeley’s return the assembly also took steps to implement his diversification program by establishing bounties for various products made in Virginia: fifty pounds of tobacco per ton for every boat or ship built; three pounds of tobacco for every yard of linen cloth; five pounds of tobacco for every yard of woolen cloth; fifty pounds of tobacco for every pound of silk made. They revived a former law requiring every landholder to plant mulberry trees. They required every county to erect a tanhouse at public expense and forbade the exportation of hides, wool, and iron in order to encourage manufactures. A few years later they required every county to set up a loom at public expense.28
The costs of the program were not small. The record of expenditures by the assembly is available only for its first year of operation, 1663. In that year, though the program was just getting started, the assembly paid bounties amounting to 10,700 pounds of tobacco on 32¼ pounds of silk, 177 yards of woolen cloth, and four vessels totaling 164 tons. This was modest enough, but the bill for surveying the new town at Jamestown, for starting a statehouse and eleven other houses, plus the bill for bricks and lime, amounted to 251,400 pounds. The total cost of the new program was over 262,000 pounds, nearly half the public expenses for the year and equal to more than 22 pounds for every tithable person in the colony.29
Berkeley himself, never bashful about claiming public funds, collected 80,000 pounds for building eight houses and 30,000 for the statehouse “to be built.”30 The amount was about the same (£500) as he was investing annually of his own funds in wages for workmen, whom he had engaged to make silk, flax, hemp, and potash. Within two years, he assured Thomas Povey, (secretary of the Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Plantations), he expected to send a ship loaded entirely with flax, hemp, and potash produced by his own men. Meanwhile he begged the English government to send over agents whom the king trusted, to view the colony so that they could assure His Majesty of its promise. Berkeley also pleaded for flax and hemp seed and skilled men to grow them and to work their fibers. He needed men skilled in silk culture too.31
There is no evidence that skilled men were sent to Berkeley or that he got off his shipload of flax, hemp, and potash in two years’ time. Nor did he get the financial backing he needed for diversification from Virginians who might have helped push the scheme to success. With the restoration of the monarchy and of a degree of stability in England, these men had become afflicted with the old tendency to look upon Virginia as a place of short sojourning, where a man could seek a present crop and a hasty return. Though an ordinary man could scarcely make enough to stay out of debt on the low tobacco prices of the 1660s and 1670s, a man with the capital or credit to deal on a large scale could find opportunities to make substantial profits by buying and selling at the right time and by working his men a little harder. And with England back on an even keel, it might be more attractive to invest the profits there rather than risking them again in Virginia. The biggest men in Virginia were all too prone, Governor Berkeley observed in 1663, to keep “looking back on England with hopes that the selling of what they have here will make them live plentifully there and many have not been deceived in that opinion, which has been a stopp to the growth of this Country, for on it they expend no more then what is usefull to them in order to their return for England.”32
In spite of his inability to tap private capital, Berkeley did not lose faith in his project. In 1666, when Governor Nicolls of New York mentioned that the people there were starting to grow flax and make linen, Berkeley assured him that if they persevered, every woman in New York would be able to earn more in a year than three men planting tobacco in Virginia.33 In 1668 he collected 300 pounds of Virginia silk to send the king, as a token of what the colony could achieve, even without the skilled men he had asked for. Frustrated in his efforts to get such men from England, he was prepared to go to France himself and bring some back, if the king would give him permission.34 Berkeley during the 1660s had not confined his energy to promoting textiles. He had boosted corn production and had gone into trade with the West Indies, like the hated New Englanders. In 1667 he was able to write to Governor Nicolls, “I am now turning an absolute corne merchant and am sending great quantities to the Barbados.”35
In addition to promoting diversification, he had made a major effort to limit Virginia’s tobacco crop. In the absence of outside capital, it was essential to Berkeley’s scheme—and to every other attempt to reform Virginia’s economy—that the production of tobacco be limited. Two ways of achieving the goal were considered. The more drastic one, which would probably have effected an immediate rise in tobacco prices as well as turning the planters to other tasks, was a total cessation of tobacco planting for a year. Another way would have been to prohibit planting after a certain date every year. In either case it would have been necessary for Virginia, Maryland, and possibly North Carolina (as yet a mere outpost of Virginia but with a separate government) to agree on whatever was done. For Virginia alone to reduce production would have benefited only her neighbors.36
The Virginia assembly had shown its commitment to the diversification program in the provisions for bounties and for the building of towns. When it came to a cessation or reduction of planting, the members were equally prepared to further the scheme and so were the members of the Maryland assembly. Most of the members of both assemblies were merchant planters with large investments in tobacco. Probably many of them had substantial amounts on hand, unsold. They would be happy to hold it for the expected price rise and could probably wait out the interval without much spoilage, because by the 1660s Virginians had so improved their curing and packing practices that hogsheads could be stored longer without rotting. But as they considered the matter, they had to reckon with the effect on the small planter and on the growing numbers of freedmen (as servants who had served their terms and become freemen were frequently called). For men living close to the edge of poverty, with no stocks of tobacco or anything else on hand, a year without planting might be too strong medicine. For that reason many favored the second alternative of prohibiting planting after a certain date. For three years, while Berkeley exercised his not inconsiderable talents for diplomacy, the colonies argued about which alternative to take; but in 1666, when a huge amount of tobacco was left unsold, all three colonies agreed to halt planting from February 1, 1667, to February 1, 1668.37
For three American colonies to agree about anything in the seventeenth century was a rare triumph. Unfortunately the assemblies had not counted on the fact that other men had a larger stake in the proceeds of their constituents’ labor than they did. Because the people of Virginia and Maryland contributed so heavily to the income of the British government, of Lord Baltimore, and of British tobacco merchants, they were not free to perform this kind of economic experiment, even though its object was precisely the diversification that had been enjoined upon them ever since the founding of their colonies. The assemblies might have been forewarned by the action of the Privy Council three years earlier in rejecting a petition asking that the king himself interdict tobacco planting in Virginia and Maryland for a year.38 A cessation would interrupt, or at least sharply reduce, the flow of customs duties from tobacco into the royal treasury; and if the diversification scheme succeeded, though perhaps the empire would benefit in the long run, the short-run loss to the treasury would not be insignificant. Tobacco duties from Virginia and Maryland accounted for perhaps 25 percent of England’s customs revenue and 5 percent of the government’s total income in the 1660s.39 The duty levied by Lord Baltimore on tobacco exported from Maryland probably constituted a larger share of his income. In 1667 Baltimore relieved the Privy Council of the need for turning down the intercolonial agreement that Berkeley had worked so hard to achieve. Baltimore vetoed Maryland’s participation, thereby, as Berkeley said, robbing Virginia and Maryland alike “of all future hopes of the advancement of our commodity.”40
Baltimore offered a number of reasons (not including the loss to himself) for rejecting the cessation. He was not persuaded that the state of the trade was so bad as to require so drastic a measure. Industrious planters in Virginia and Maryland, as he heard it, “live in much greater plenty and gain estates much sooner than those of their quality in England.” But he recognized that not everyone was prosperous, for he went on to argue that a cessation would ruin the poor and enrich the rich. He was not surprised, he said, “that the Councill and major part of the Assemblies of both Colonies (which consist of the ablest Planters) should agree to such Cessations, or that the Merchants here should desire the same, it being in truth the way to make them rich in one year.” Like the merchant planters in Virginia, the merchants in England had the tobacco already on hand to benefit from the cessation; but the small man, as Baltimore pointed out, would be prevented from his only means of livelihood.41
Baltimore may have been shedding crocodile tears. He had discovered a personal reason why he and the king should be particularly concerned for the welfare of the men who did the actual labor in Virginia’s and Maryland’s tobacco fields. He had heard from Maryland that a cessation might result in rebellion by the growing mass of poor planters, and a rebellion might reduce the volume of tobacco production—and hence the revenue—even more drastically than a prohibition of planting. The size of the revenue from Virginia and Maryland depended on keeping as many colonists as possible working in the fields.
As this became increasingly clear to the king and his advisers, the possibility of limitation and diversification, of transforming Virginia into something other than a collection of tobacco plantations, grew correspondingly smaller. Perhaps with the assistance of the ethical imperatives of Puritanism something resembling Berkeley’s dream for Virginia could have been achieved. Certainly the New Englanders, though without the handicap of a soil and climate well suited to tobacco, did achieve something like it. But given the Virginians’ attitudes toward servants, work, and time, it would have been difficult at best to sustain a program like Berkeley’s, a program that required short-term losses (from reduction of the tobacco crop and from artificial support of new enterprises) for the sake of a possible long-term gain. The temptations to corruption that the program presented in a society where corruption in government office was already familiar were apparent in the large sums received by individuals, including Berkeley himself, for building houses which, according to one complaint, “fell down again before they were finished.”42 But corruption in the carrying out of the scheme was only symptomatic of the forces working against it. It was caught in the competition of the king, Lord Baltimore, and the tobacco merchants on the one hand and successful large planters on the other, to squeeze as much profit as possible, as quickly as possible, out of Virginia’s servants and small planters. The patterns of raw exploitation established in the boom time of the 1620s had subsided but not disappeared in the decades of settling down that followed. As mortality dropped and population rose, new possibilities for exploitation appeared; and Virginia became a land of opportunity, not for the men who survived their seasoning and continued to work in the fields, but for kings and lords and other men who knew how to put the power of government to work for them.
2 W. F. Craven has attempted to estimate the volume of immigration during the seventeenth century from the number of headrights claimed annually in land patents. On this basis he finds the heaviest immigration in the quarter century after 1650. White, Red and Black. But because of the long and irregular lag between the arrival of an immigrant and the claiming of a headright for him, the annual volume of land patented bears no direct relation to the annual volume of immigration. See my “Headrights and Head Counts.”
3 John Clayton _____, April 24, 1684. Sloane Mss. 1008, ff.334–35, British Museum.
4 To William Blathwayt, March 21, 1686/7. Blathwayt Papers, XIV, Colonial Williamsburg. On May 10, 1688, Governor Howard proclaimed a day of fasting for what he then called “the greatest mortality that hath been knowne.” Effingham Papers, microfilm in the Library of Congress. Most of the lists of tithables in the counties for which records survive do show a dip in these years, but not as large as the governor’s words suggest.
5 C.O. 5/1307, f.48; CO. 5/1308, ff.58, 60.
6 The number of deaths in Charles Parish was 589, in Christ Church Parish 228. Charles Parish Register (photostat), Virginia State Library; Sally N. Robins, ed., The Parish Register of Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia, from 1653 to 1812 (Richmond, 1897), 31–54. Cf. Kelly, “Economic and Social Development of Surry County,” 33.
7 A Description of the Province of New Albion, Force, Tracts, II, No. 7, p. 5.
8 Leah and Rachel, Force, Tracts, III, No. 14, p. 10.
9 C.O. 1/26, f.198; Hening, II, 515.
10 Byrd to Sir Hans Sloane, April 20, 1706, Sloane Mss. 4040, ff.151–52, British Museum.
11 For example, Hamor, True Discourse, 19; Northampton IX, 193–96. It is impossible to tell whether the word was used customarily to designate the disease to which we ordinarily confine the word today or in its other usage, more common then, to indicate skin disease.
12 C.O. 1/9, ff.248–49.
13 Force, Tracts, III, No. 14, p. 9.
14 Hening, II, 129.
15 David Peter de Vries, “Voyages from Holland to America A.D.1632 to 1644,” New-York Historical Society, Collections, 2nd ser., III (1857), 77.
16 This is evident from letters in the 1660s. (For example, Thomas Ludwell to Richard Nicolls, April 28, 1667. Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library; Berkeley to Council for Foreign Plantations, 1666. C.O. 1/20, f.11.) But the pattern of arrivals in the fall and winter and departures by May or June probably was fixed earlier, in the 1640s or 1650s.
17 Force, Tracts, III, No. 14, p. 12.
18 Stanley Gray and V. J. Wyckoff, “The International Tobacco Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Southern Economic Journal, VII (1940), 20–21; WMQ, 1st ser., VIII (1899–1900), 263; William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), 5; see chap. 10, notes 10 and 29.
19 This is the burden of many tracts published in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s. See Force, Tracts, II, Nos. 7, 8; III, Nos. 11, 13, 14, 15.
20 Berkeley developed his views most explicitly in Discourse and View of Virginia. The best secondary accounts of his efforts to reform the colony’s economy are: Sister Joan de Lourdes Leonard, “Operation Checkmate: The Birth and Death of a Virginia Blueprint for Progress, 1660–1676,” WMQ, 3rd ser., XXIV (1967), 44–74; and John C. Rainbolt, “The Virginia Vision: A Political History of the Efforts to Diversify the Economy of the Old Dominion, 1650–1706” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1966), 85–203.
21 Berkeley to Richard Nicolls, May 20, 1666; May 4, 1667; April 26, 1668. Add. Mss. 28,218, ff.14–17, British Museum; Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library. Berkeley to Henry Coventry, April 1, 1676. Coventry Papers, Longleat House (microfilm in Library of Congress), LXXVI, 68.
22 Hening, II, 517.
23 The plans are detailed in Berkeley’s Discourse and View of Virginia, which says nothing, however, about building towns, a project in which Berkeley took an active role.
24 Peter Chamberlen, The Poore Mans Advocate (London, 1649); Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1670); Thomas Firmin, Some Proposals for Imploying of the Poor (London, 1672); Andrew Yarranton, England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (London, 1677); The Trade of England Revived (London, 1681); Walter Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland (London, 1691); John Bellers, Proposals for Raising a Colledge of Industry (London, 1695).
25 See again Leonard, “Operation Checkmate.”
26 VMHB, III, (1895–96), 15–20; C.O. 1/16, f.182.
27 Berkeley to [Thomas Povey?], March 30, 1663. Egerton Mss. 2395, ff.362–64, British Museum.
28 Hening, II, 120–23, 172–76, 238–39.
29 Clarendon Mss. 82, f.275, Bodleian Library, Oxford. According to Francis Moryson, the taxes levied for the program caused hundreds of Virginians to move to Maryland. Letter to the Earl of Clarendon, 1665. Ms. Clarendon 83, Bodleian Library.
30 Clarendon Mss. 82, f.275.
31 Egerton Mss. 2395, ff.362–64.
32 Ibid.
33 July 30, 1666. Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library.
34 C.O. 1/23, ff.41–43.
35 Jan. 22, 1666/7. Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library.
36 Virginians had always been resentful of the king’s grant of Maryland to Lord Baltimore. Even in their earlier major effort to control production in 1640 and 1641, they had felt the need for Baltimore’s cooperation, which he had been reluctant to give. See P.C. 2/52, ff.68oa–68od (P.R.O.).
37 C.O. 1/20, f.338 and passim.
38 C.O. 1/18, f.323; cf. CO. 1/16, ff.145, 160, 161; Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1895), I, 389.
39 England’s total revenue, 1660–67, was £10,291,436, or an average of £1,470,201 for the seven years. William A. Shaw, ed., Calendar of Treasury Books, 1660–1667 (London, 1904), xxxiv. The revenue from customs averaged £310,079. Ibid., xxviii–xxix. In 1663, the only one of these years for which figures are available for tobacco imports, 7,371,100 pounds were imported at London alone. Assuming a reexport of one-third, the import duty would have amounted to about £46,000. Figures for the outports are not available, but in 1672, when London imported 10,539,000 pounds, the outports imported 7,020,000, or 67 percent of the amount imported at London. (Gray and Wyckoff, “International Tobacco Trade,” 20–21.) If the proportions were the same in 1663, the total would have been about £77,000, or roughly 5 percent of total revenue and nearly 25 percent of total customs revenue. Sir John Knight in 1673 estimated royal revenue from Virginia at £150,000. C.O. 1/30, ff.197–98. This was apparently an exaggeration, but the 1672 imports must have brought in close to £110,000.
40 C.O. 1/21, ff.109–12.
41 C.O. 1/21, ff.260–70.
42 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 102.